In the comments section, a myriad of folks were trying, presumably in an attempt to justify their wasted time, to explain in vain, externally, what the work had clearly failed to make them feel inside through the power of its formal evocation and beauty. Some tried with high-minded theory. Others threw around postmodern jargon. But none of them, not one, seemed to say what they truly felt.

All except one. Amidst all these self-justifiers defying all logic, there was one dude. A dude with a simple message an no 60-line essay. Only a pure, human, raw feeling. A feeling summed up in two words: “anti-art.”

And it hit me. Because let’s be honest. We’ve all been there. We’ve all watched or heard something that we’re supposed to admire, because a critic or a curator or a professor told us it was “genius.” But deep down? We felt nothing.

Or worse… we felt shame. Shame for not “getting it.” Shame for doubting it. Shame for needing beauty when the world only gives us statements.

Anti-art. Yes.

You don’t even need to ask, it is commonly accepted that art is the means of expression that man has found by mastering a discipline to such an extent that he is able to conjure up, even for the uninitiated, a certain beauty that reveals his emotions.

But then another dude replies, “What is art?”

He responds again with a request for self-justification to a visceral feeling.

For, although I have defined what can be called art, most people aren’t like that. Most people aren’t intellectuals. They don’t have the time, or desire, to debate aesthetics all day. They live through instinct, through memory, through common sense. And that’s not a weakness. That’s a gift. It’s what kept civilizations alive long before we had our modern Western nanny state, which, through comfort, would take away any instinct for self-preservation.

Answering the question “what is art” would be, for the average person, as silly as answering “what is a blue sky” or “what is morning.”

These are questions that answer themselves, because the words we are trying to define contain their essence within themselves. They carry their meaning, their truth, within themselves.

In truth, from the moment this question is asked, one should automatically be disqualified from the debate. Because real art, like a blue sky or a sunrise, doesn’t need to explain itself. It doesn’t beg to be justified. It hits. It moves. It elevates.You know it when it’s there. You feel it in your chest, in your throat, in your gut. And when it’s not there? No clever sentence in the world can fake its presence.

“All right, he’s a modernist academician,” “all right, it’s just cheap relativism,” and so on, and the debate should not continue in their direction.

Because deconstructionism relies on your participation. They want you to assist them in their quest to deconstruct age-old values. Surely because they are not strong enough to impose it themselves. Because beauty, the sacred, the timeless, is, by nature, timeless.

Creating beauty today is an act of resistance. And resistance is not destruction. It’s building something meaningful in the face of a system that wants to flatten everything.

Let the deconstructors deconstruct. Let the industries feed us noise. Let the theorists debate each other to death. But let us be proud to be human, sensitive, in search of greatness.

That is the key to civilization.