“I’m not part of the art world, but I studied art and I share some of its assumptions. I do believe the higher kind of art exists. It grips and fascinates me. There are few things I enjoy more than looking at art in museums and galleries. So all the time, like any committed gallery-goer, I’m confronted by the question: why is this object I’m gazing at art? And, conversely, why is something quite similar not art? Having reached that point, it’s impossible to avoid even trickier questions. Am I being shown things by the art world that might not be art after all? Can a piece of work be serious art even though it isn’t any good, while some other excellent piece of work fails to qualify as high art? One thing I feel confident about saying after years of looking at art is that I’m not automatically prepared to take the art world’s word for it, even if I conclude they are right about an artist or an art work. But how do I think I know? I’ll come back to that later.” This is paragraph four of a short essay by (graphic) design critic Rick Poynor. In the essay Poynor works through some positions that Devin Monnens and I explored while he was working on his MFA. Who gets to declare some work or experience to be “art”? We came away with at least four (five?) different people/stances/lenses who/which have the superpower to raise the status of something to the level of art. 1 the beholder. 2 the artist. 3 the curator… and I’m forgetting the other one (two?) at present. Poynor is a smart man, an astute observer, and his article is worth the read.