I visited the Tate Modern for the first time. When I saw Fountain, the famous urinal that was delivered as art, there was a tour guide in the room explaining why all the onlookers surrounded a urinal with a signature on it.

Back in 1917, this kind of art would be baseless and off putting by most people. It is almost as shocking as the more recent The Comedian, i.e. the banana stuck to the wall. It still invoked shock and interest to me.

Lesser known, there was “ringn ’66’” by Barry Flanagan. It’s a ring of sand on the ground.

I’m not really sure how I feel about these pieces – are they in my mind, worthy of being “art”? They seem to be attention-grabbing pieces, but they have also provoked thought about how we define art.

We can all have preferences. Not all of us have to want to buy this art or have it in our living rooms.

Art’s purpose is to evokes emotions

If art is to make us feel something or communicate an idea, these certainly do that. Every major art movement has had its own critics: the impressionists were not good enough and showcased work deemed as unfinished, and pop-art was not originally viewed as art, but instead some off-base, cheesy advertisements.

While the urinal and the ring of sand had not evoked awe, inspiration, but mild confusion for me, these are still acceptable reactions to the art. If art is to make us react and uncover what we did not know was there, it surely did for me.

Though, I’d say that the urinal was banking on my reaction considering the choice of the object. The pile of sand is still an enigma to me.

Photography is art despite its prevalence

I would have an easier time with photography though being in a museum. What I find odd is that although we all have cameras on our phones today, the prevalence of photos being taken in everyday life has not detracted from the sentiment that photography is art.

Yet, the manufactured items, like a urinal or a ring of sand, are also everyday objects. This is somewhat contradictory, especially when there are plenty of photographs I’ve seen – of skyscrapers photographed at 45 degree angles – that produce little to no real emotional reaction or connection.

Why would this not be an everyday documented item, and in my mind put into the same classification of objects in men’s washrooms and building site materials then?

Abstract art and its own challenges as art

My parents have visited art galleries and announced that their daughter could make the abstract art that sits on the walls. This results in me trying to quietly shout that they should stop saying this, and then my best attempts to not look like them and quickly usher them into a more traditional art room.

I’m sure other artists have simply avoided bringing their parents to museums for this particular reason – to not become the pariah of those fashionable art folks standing in corners.

While I might not like all abstract art, what I find intriguing is the ideas that came behind those squares, lines etc and these easily fit into the category of art for me.

What we accept is what we like

In the end, perhaps the only things that we label as being art are the ones we actually like. If we don’t really consider a urinal or a pile of sand on the ground to be sufficient of being art, that is simply an expression of our preferences.