If you pull french on me you know the connotation of 'debile' in modern language.

If someone is called a 'debile' it implies 'debile mental' (mentally deficient ~ usually on purpose so no excuse). There is no direct translation that expresses the disdain, dismissal, contempt implied when using this term. 'Con' does not even come close when it comes to being an insult... :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

Could not stop myself. Worse: did not want to stop. I'm horrible. Never stop, this is how we learn.

See my earlier comment about standards in academia... It sometimes takes a generation of old "standards bearers" DYING OUT for old, arbitrary "standards" to die off! Van Gogh was either ahead of his time, or breaking the rules of "art" in his day (whatever they were!). If the prevailing class of art lovers doesn't like something about your art, or "defines" it a certain way, you are trapped.

I remember being told by a professor in 1975 that modern multi-track audio recording was neither a valid art form, nor an acceptable method of musical composition. The senile professor who told me that retired a few years later. His replacement soon installed a recording studio on campus... Thank God for the opportunities his music majors have today!

What was once scorned is now ubiquitous. Multi-track recording capability comes standard with every new iPhone and Mac, as GarageBand software. It's as much an art form as photography or sculpture.

All art involves technique. A painter uses technique with their brush, so much so that their brush technique is distinguishable. I think you are confused also on the hemispheres of the brain and what their functions are. The Left side is generally accepted as the Analytical Side, Language, Math, facts, Computations. Where as the Right Side is genrally accepted as the creative side Art, Imagination, Intuition, Feelings and also Motor Skills which would be technique(both hemispheres actually control Motor Skill but it is accepted that Artistic Motor Skill comes from the right). So Technique and art reside in the same side of the brain. But one can not function solely on its own. For example, the tune of music comes from the right side but the processing of the lyrics comes from the left. The thoughts and feelings of a poem come from the right but the words are processed in the left. I do not understand what your point is?

Anyone who dismisses Photography as not being art does not know what art is! By definition it is art!

Not really Marcel DuChamp pushed it to start with by turning a urinal a different way singing it and entering it into a show as a sculpture. Yes the ice cream machine functions in the same but it is without any meaning or context.

From an interview

"Rail: Are the painting machines a formalization of the artist’s practice? And by painting machines I’m including “SCUMAK no. 1” (1998) and “Painting Manufacture Unit (PMU)” (1999 – 2000). What exactly do you accomplish by making a machine that creates a work of art?

Paine: It’s always about asking what it means that this machine is making art. What occurs when there is a series of displacements, such as the artist’s practice onto the museum or gallery, or the displaced moment of a creative act, the displaced moment between creating the program and beginning the work? Each machine sets up a language of elements and rules by which those elements are utilized. I create the apparatus, I create the system, I create the controls, but then it’s almost like that is the beginning of a second part of the process which is really about potential. For instance, the same program will always create two entirely unique works due to natural processes. That’s because thermodynamics, room temperature, drying, and cooling events are all natural forces present and not within the machine’s control. So there is this collision between industry and nature, and control and the uncontrolled that I find interesting.

Rail: Where does the art reside?

Paine: It’s in the displaced contradiction that the origin of those natural forms comes from mechanistic processes. It’s in the dialogue between what is carefully prescribed and what is naturally happening, and it’s in the translation of geologic forces into the form of physical paintings."