[stephencanon]

I love Benjamin's writing, but looking back after the better part of a century, I don't think that his theses hold up well; he would reject as Not Art much of the latter 20th century's output, which is an appealing position for a curmudgeon, but not a very practical one.

I've come to believe that the only useful notions of Art are either the Supreme Court definition ("I know it when I see it") or the wildly all-encompassing ones; "anything arranged or interpreted according to aesthetic principle," is more or less my working definition. Any other definition either ends up rejecting vast swathes of things that clearly are art or setting you up for reductio ad absurdum.

So yeah, I think it's art. Now we can move onto more interesting questions, like "who is the artist?"

Note: anyone interested in this stuff should absolutely read Benjamin!