Cuchlann: A crafted chair can be beautifully wrought, but ultimately it is a tool.

…

Cuchlann: And as such, eventually even the most sensitive person will view it as a chair, to be sat upon.

…

Cuchlann: But art, with no use but to be art, to be “beautiful,” can never be written off as anything else.

I would say that an object made to serve some purpose or satisfy some need, such as a chair, can be art. That a chair is meant to be sat upon — isn’t that authorial intent? One can do with a beautifully-wrought chair what one will. Now, I’m not about to argue that “chairs are meant for sitting upon” isn’t an idea that’s well and truly ingrained in the lot of us, but, despite that, you have people like my grandmother, who will buy an antique chair and disallow anyone from sitting on it. The chair becomes an object of admiration. Isn’t “meant to be sat upon” just one possible “reading” of a chair — a reading high in social weight, but nothing more or less than a reading all the same, granted that all readings have literary/artistic value?

Then again, is this a case in which both our answers are perfectly valid? The question of what art is seems, ultimately, to resist the application of logic.

lelangir: silence
no meaning
i’m being sophist probably”

hmmm, I guess discursive theory is totalizing. It makes everything have meaning? perhaps?