What Is Art?

I'm intrigued by that famous quote from Picasso who, upon seeing the 15-20,000 year old paintings in the caves at Altamira, declared, "after Altamira, all is decadence".

I'm also intrigued by the fact that Picasso had a good training in painting representational art and saw the camera as a threat to this representational skill.

The problem with attempting to create art, whether with a camera or a paint brush, is the problem of conveying and reproducing that personal, emotional experience that one had when either photographing or painting the subject.

In my view, that requires a degree of skill which is one of the synonyms for the word 'art', in the dictionary. Art with no skill is surely just random activity. Take enough photographs and you will eventually get lucky. Throw enough blobs of paint at a canvas, and you might eventually create a Jackson Pollock.

Do enough processing in Photoshop and you might eventually turn a sow's ear into a silk purse . But at least that processing in Photoshop is not random. That's a skill, isn't it?