Art is subjective

I have this love-hate relationship with "art"

I think it's not the thing itself I have an issue with. I love to look at art, read it, listen to it. All kinds. I love to make dolls and stitch things and write things. With me it's more the definition. I have been called a crafter and a storyteller rather than an artist. My "crafts" are not fine art, I'm told, and my writing is too colloquial and too down home...

I wonder what people would think if they knew Shakespeare's critics and contemporaries called him a writer for the unwashed masses...

Hey, I'm no Shakespeare, but just because I don't have a MFA doesn't mean I can't make things and ask people to pay money for them.

I recently read a comment on a blog, posted anonymously of course, where the commenter complained that she had spent years studying art, knew how to put something together "correctly" and yet people were putting crap up on Etsy and selling it...

So what, I wonder, gives her the right to decide what's crap?

Well, I guess the same thing that makes other people not buy her "art"

Really, it's because art is subjective. Sure, most people can agree that Michelangelo is art, but not everyone loves him. I once stood in front of Botticelli's Birth of Venus in the Uffizi museum in Florence, silently crying my eyes out at my perceived perfection, and had someone tell me they couldn't stand one more boring painting. They had museum burnout.

We had a complete difference of subjective opinion there.

So what makes art to you? Does it have to be studied? Spontaneous? Performance? Tell!