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Oh, you have a word for it... That really sums it up, doesn't it?

We have a quite a few American tourists over here, and I haven't seen anyone freak out over our park full of nude statues. Do narrow-minded and prudish Americans stay at home, while the broad-minded and friendly ones visit Europe in the summer?

Just asking...

for anybody who doesn't know, or wasn't sure, which painting The Scream is, here...

Two words: Kon Tiki

Aaaahhh... The innocent days of high school, with excursions to the Technical Musum in Oslo. Where they had a fax machine. That could dial any landline for free so kids could say "Hi" to dad at work. But we tapet three sheets of paper together, hacked the line to dial the Information, got the school fax number and sent the longest fax I've ever seen.

Those were the days, indeed.

Click here.

Or perhaps Edvard Munch? After all, if we reason like SCO, it's a sound derivative :^)

The one that died in the closet left a pretty good opening to skull fuck. Though she looked kinda like the scream

If we were to discover that Edvard Munch's "The Scream" were not made with heart and love, but rather a smothering dread and intense claustrophobia, would that mean that it wasn't art? Of course not. Therefore love and heart aren't necessary. On the other hand there are plenty of people who claim that Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" isn't art simply because it's an image of a crucifix submerged in his (then pregnant) wife's urine. Interviews with him indicate that he wasn't attempting to be blasphemous -- the extra chemicals in his wife's urine due to her gravid condition produced a colour that Serrano found appealing. So, it's arguable that love and heart aren't sufficient. If they are neither necessary nor sufficient, they are simply not meaningful. It's just as appropriate to say that giraffes and bananas are needed for art.

And, incidentally, infant sacrifice has been with us for a long time. In Tunisia, around the time of the Roman Republic, the natives worshipped a pair of gods named Baal-Hamon and Tanit. They put their first born children in the arms of large statues of Baal-Hamon and lit a fire underneath the statue. When the metal heated up, the arms separated and the infant was dropped into the fire. There's a long standing connection between art and the divine -- in fact, many artists and philosophers use divinity, rather than heart and love, as the defining criterion for art.

Finally, if you use 'love and heart' as the defining criteria for art, then, since there's no empirical way of determining whether something possesses those antecedent qualities, there's no way of determining whether something is art. The only recourse is to admit everything into the realm of art. At this point, the term 'art' ceases to be meaningful since it's just a synonym for 'everything'.

Microsoft Background

If Microsoft can't get the rights to use this, they can simply replace the monitor with a mirror in front of anyone that has used one of their products for a good period of time, hadn't had a chance to save their work, then suffered a bsod.