IS MODERN ART REALLY ART?

Dead animals, elephant dung, unmade beds and rice all seem like everyday objects but should we be calling them art?

When we were growing up we were taught that art was a beautiful painting - like Van Gogh's Sunflowers, or a perfect sculpture of a human - like Michelangelo's David, but we were never really taught that conceptual and contemporary art were 'proper' forms of art, even though it was established in the sixties. It made us think and challenge our own assumptions of what art should really look like.

People didn't understand the idea of cows cut in half (Damien Hirst), wire mesh lockers (Mona Hatoum), rubble (Richard Long) or rubbish (Tomoko Takahashi) being called art unless you could frame it nicely on your living room wall. The fact that this type of art didn't fit neatly into people's ideas of what art should be was the reason it was called 'conceptual'.

Damien Hirst, the creator of the work, was part of...

English artist Damien Hirst. Still image from the ...

Michelangelo - The Redeemer

Conceptual and contemporary art got a huge reaction out of people because they felt conned and marginally embarrassed when, for example, they looked at Martin Creed's light going on and off and 'didn't get it'. They didn't like the fact that they couldn't work out the true meaning of what the artist was trying to get across.

It also got a reaction for another reason which was the simplicity of some of the 'art'. I'm sure that when all the people who were working long hours every week looked at the well-paid artist Tracey Emin's unmade bed they were desperately screaming to themselves, "BUT I COULD DO THAT!" and thinking whether conceptual art is even worth looking at.

Maybe some of us are completely missing the point they are trying to get across. Maybe instead of drowning in the depression of how easy, and perhaps...