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CMV: Most attempts to dismiss a medium or work of art as "unartistic" only serve to validate it further, since it's challenging the detractor's expectations of what art is, ergo it is art

I think that a piece absolutely *can* be art by being unartistic or anti-art. But I think that is a function of the artist's intent, not of the detraction itself. For example, Duchamp's Fountain is art *because* it's a criticism of what could be displayed in art installations at the time and was clearly "not artistic", but it wasn't art *because* people said it wasn't artistic. To put it another way, if I said "this pair of earplugs on my desk is not art", I have not given the earplugs the essence of "art" because they've made me evaluate what I do and don't consider art. They're still just earplugs. Maybe earplugs could be art, if I put them in a display symbolizing my life, or if I arranged them just-so and gave them a title, or if I took a nice picture of them, or even just put a packet of earplugs on an empty display in a museum and waited to see if the janitor would clean them up. But all of those are artistic because I did something that communicated an intent to create a message; even if people disagree that they're art, I've still tried to say something. But simply saying something isn't art doesn't mean it is, if there really was no artistic intent whatsoever to begin with.