Previously, the topic I had in mind was “the ambiguity of the boundary between art and non-art.” However, I soon realized that this theme was far too broad for me to fully address. In order to narrow it down, I read through various books on aesthetics and philosophy. In the process, I began to question the very purpose of writing this paper. Although I managed to narrow the topic down to something like “the ambiguity of the boundary between art and non-art in auditory arts” or “aesthetic differences arising from the essential differences between hearing and sight,” I still could not clarify the purpose of such a study. If I were to proceed with those topics, the paper would amount to little more than a case report. Thus, I went back to the fundamental question: why did I want to study the ambiguity of the boundary between art and non-art in the first place?

The initial spark came from a post I saw on Instagram. It reported that Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian had sold at auction for $120,000. The comments were scathing. People said that contemporary art was garbage, that they could easily do the same, and sarcastically suggested they should tape their used socks to a wall and sell them. On the other hand, a few defended the work as satire on the contemporary art world, ridiculing the critics as ignorant, which only sparked heated arguments. When I first saw the post and the comments, I couldn’t understand them. To dismiss a work outright simply because it was not immediately intuitive, without even making the effort to understand it, seemed pitiful. My next thought was: why is contemporary art so difficult for people to accept? Yet I wondered—was it really because people found the art incomprehensible that they ridiculed it?

What triggered people in that post was not the banana itself, nor the duct tape, but rather the monetary value of the work. $120,000. For an ordinary salaried worker in Korea, it would take about five years of saving diligently to amass that amount. And that is a conservative estimate—more realistically, it would take eight to ten years. And yet here was a banana, something one could see anywhere, that had “earned” that sum. Faced with such a price tag, audiences begin to scrutinize the artistic value of the work in order to justify its economic value. If the work is judged to possess significant artistic merit, then its economic worth can be accepted, and they need not feel deprived. But on the surface, the work was nothing more than a banana taped to a wall. So rather than attempting to understand its artistic value, the public claims a contradiction in its economic value—believing that its artistic value simply does not justify such a price.

Why then do people not make the effort to understand challenging art? First of all, this question itself contains a problem. From the artist’s perspective, it seems as if people refuse to understand the work, but in fact, it may be that they simply cannot. For example, imagine a mathematician receives great awards and a massive prize for proving the proposition “1 + 1 = 2.” Those studying or working in mathematics could examine the proof and recognize its brilliance. But a layperson would likely say, “Isn’t that obvious?” It is not that they refuse to understand; rather, they cannot conceive that there could be anything more to such a statement. Perhaps the analogy is imperfect, but I believe the same holds true for art. In contemporary art, where conceptual art dominates, the public does not imagine that a work lacking obvious technical prowess might nonetheless contain something more.

This phenomenon occurs worldwide, but in the society I belong to—Korea—it appears even more pronounced. I believe the root of this problem lies in art education in Korea. By art education, I mean not only what is taught in schools or academies, but also education within the family, and education in a historical and cultural context. Korea has grown in a unique way historically, politically, economically, and culturally. This rapid development brought much progress, but also meant that many things were received in a compressed and abbreviated form. This paper will therefore focus on the problems of art education in Korea, developed in light of the thoughts of philosophers and the research of prior scholars. Once I outline the framework, I will decide how far the discussion can extend. For now, I intend to focus particularly on the problems that arise within the historical context and within educational practice.

At this stage, the only major area of aesthetics I have left to study in the broader flow is the “institutional theory of art.” Once I complete that research, I will summarize it in a post. After that, I plan to move on to studying various research materials on art education, as well as the specific issues that arise within Korea.