I was joking.

You've convinced yourself that your earliest reactions to earlier forms of art are what determine whether something is art. Now you reject your most recent reactions and claim that newer forms aren't art at all because they are unfamiliar to you. Can't you see that if this were what determined whether anything were art, we'd all be repeating the first forms again and again forever and rejecting any kind of variation?

Artists are constantly trying to find new qualities and properties for you to consider. They want you to react in completely different ways, and constantly break boundaries. They can't always do this using traditional mediums and methods. In fact, what you now think of as traditional was once ground-breaking. The transition from cave to canvas must have been startling to some ancient purists, no doubt.

In my mind, anything can be called art. There is no universal essence or boundary for what can be called art. People keep trying to enforce boundaries on the term and arguing against things that lack the sufficient art-ness to be called art. I feel that you can submit anything for consideration as art and the audience is free to react to it in any way. There's no point in arguing against whether the thing in question is art or not. We can just say that the art is no good or doesn't work or doesn't mean anything to us.

Art can be meaningful, beautiful, grotesque, wonderful, awe-inspiring, thought provoking or none of these things. If anything outside of the canvas be painted onto the canvas and called art, what's stopping the "artist" from skipping the canvas altogether and submitting the object or concept on its own for our consideration? Like found poetry, art can be incidental, a mistake, a discovery. A found object can be art. Serendipity is as valid as creativity.

You might think this makes the term too vague. But to me, the term art is more about communicating how you want others to consider something. "Look at what I have done as art, and from that perspective, react to it as art."

No need to take offense to someone calling things art.

P.S.: I've seen Duchamp's fountain used so many times in this type of discussion that it's officially a cliche to me. I'm also guilty of doing it. Since nobody will see this reply, I'm sure I'll be using it again one day.