All long long time ago, artists drew pictures. They tried to make these pictures look like what people see when they look on into the world.

They got really really good at this, to the point where people could make pictures that looked almost exactly like the real world, and people were impressed and liked it.

Then some jackass invented the camera, and suddenly this amazing skill was pretty useless. If someone wanted a picture that looked like the real world they could get it quicker and easier with a camera. Hell, after a few decades they could take the pictures themselves and completely cut out the artist. “I want a picture of a pretty waterfall!”

Used to require you to find a super talented artist and pay him a lot of money to paint or draw it. But after the camera anyone could find a waterfall and take its picture. And then they could make thousands of those same pictures and sell them.

Modern Art taught us, anything can be art.

And that means that anyone can draw a red square and call it art.

But it better be a really awesome red square, because out there is someone that has trained for 2 decades to be an artist. He knows how to layer other colors under the red of the square so the color seems “off” and creates a sense of tension. He/she knows how to blend the paint into the canvas so the square doesn’t seem to be simply on the canvas, but it seems to emerge from it. He/she knows how add texture to his brush strokes, so that the simplicity of the red square is full of complex and intriguing cross hatch of lines.

Anyone can make a red square and hell you might get lucky and make something interesting by accident.

But you aren’t just trying to make a red square, you are trying to make a red square that stands above every other red square in the world, and if you can pull that off, you are an artist.