What Is Art and What Should It Be?

     As those who are familiar with the residents of Bloody Nib Manor are aware, we are pretty old-fashioned. We are not as much 1950s as we are 1880s in our outlook on life. We don't like new things because they are new. The only reason we like new things is because they are more useful than the old things. We have a hot water heater because it's more convenient than boiling water on the stove, and we use electric mixing machines instead of egg-beaters because it makes life easier and thus, gives us more time to write angry letters to the editor of the local news rag signed signed, "Angry in Dorsetshire."
     Being pretty much a cultural Philistine in matters of art, this writer does not claim to be an art expert. He only knows what he like, to use the old trope. Your faithful correspondent's taste in art ended with Bougerou. While the lovely Lady Nib in not to awfully fond of much modern and post-modern art, but she is more sophisticated than this writer.
     Recently your faithful correspondent heard a piece on NPR (National Public Radio, or as some call it National Peoples' Radio) in which the film maker John Waters was interview. The man is a silly man. and worse, he is a silly homosexual man. He is, in a sense, almost a caricature of of a "gay artist."
     In the interview Waters, without realizing it said two antithetical things. He said that the job of the artist (is movie-making an art?) is to offend the artists of the previous generation in order to "break barriers." But at the same time he said that the artist should, in  a sense conform to the norm while trying to undermine it by being part of it. As is not unusual among homosexual men, he is a conflicted man. One day he loves Marilyn Monroe because he thinks that she's the perfect tragic woman ( gays love tragic women) and the next he loves Rock Hudson because he's just an awful hunk.
     But to get back to the point. The question is: what is art and what is the purpose of art? The classical idea, going back to Aristotle, is the idea that art should show beauty and express beauty. It doesn't matter is the beauty is found in a woman, a man, a landscape or a war scene (and, yes, there can be beautiful war scenes; the effort of man against man can be a lovely thing, as can be a man working with a machine). But since the proclamation of "Art for art's sake" we, have been inundated with what is, in fact, forms of masturbation put on canvas with every "artist" thinking that his artistic orgasm is breaking the walls of the art that went before. And because of this nonsense we have had to put up with, well, a lot of ugly nonsense that nobody really wants to put up their living room wall and look at when the television is broken.
     The first image is a deKooning thing. The second is a Bougerou. Which would you prefer to spend time looking at on a winter's day? Which reflects beauty and which reflect something else?