Against a Reductionist Conception of Art
What is art?
I think much of the confusion surrounding this question comes from the fact that we tend to collapse several different questions into one. We ask whether something is "art" when what we really mean is whether it's good art, whether it required skill, whether we admire the person (or the process) that made it, whether we believe that to be called an artist is some sort of honorific, or whether we think the work possesses something we find valuable.
These are all legitimate questions. But they aren't the same question. We want to, generally, define the category in a way that doesn't merely define it, but gatekeeps it by smuggling in our subjective and cultural values and assumptions.
But art seems to require, for the sake of both coherence and consistency, a much simpler, and ironically, more elegant definiton.
Art is the manifestation of artistic (or aesthetic) intent.
That definition is deliberately general and permissive. It has to be. It doesn't require that the resulting work be particualrly beautiful, technically impressive, original, commercially valuable, or even interesting. It doesn't require that every element of the work have been consciously planned. It doesn't require that the artist physically construct the artifact manually. And it most certainly doesn't require that I should personally like or value the result.
Those are questions of quality, taste, authorship, skill, and criticism. They are downstream from the categorical question.
The first question is simply:
Is this art?
If aesthetic intent has been manifested in an artifact, I think the answer is and has to be, yes. This reconciles and even anticipates the early critcisms of photography, digital art, and now AI art. Because the locus of criticisms are at the process level, when the ultimate refutation of these critiques revealed that the essence of art lives in manifest intent, independent of process.