What I think about art...

In their statements, Lewitt tries to define art based on his opinions and Oldenburg lists out kinds of art he is interested in. I basically see their statements as a long list of characteristics of contemporary art.
Art is a self portraiture of a specific era. Through a piece of artwork, we can tell the tecnological level, culture and lifestyles of the time period the piece was created in. Through numerous revolutions (social, industrial, scientific, etc), art was developed by many artists with different methods and approaches. As a result, art we encounter today is now taking different position than the past artworks. Until the early 20th century, only forms of arts appreciated were painting, sculpture, and maybe architecture.
Since Duchamp's 'Fountain' in 1917, artists started to exercise new approaches to art; creating arts solely based on concept alone. For example, Kosuth's 'One and Three Chairs' is composed of a chair, a picture of a chair, and a definition of the chair from a dictionary. Everyone could have collected all three things but what made Kosuth's work 'art' was the concept behind it. Kosuth highlighted the relationships among the image, language, and referent.
However, their are still stereotypes of art being always beautiful among people. The contemporary art, to me, is alienating artists from today's non-artistic communities. For example in ancient Greece, there are sculptures of gods of Olympus. The idea behind the sculpture was to show people the power of the deities. Normal people at that time probably understood the concept with no effort and at the same time appreciate the skill of the sculptor.
I really like artists thinking outside the box and trying to develop art with different experimentation. However, it is now hard to talk art with people who don't go through training as regular artists do. If I were to make statements on art like Lewitt or Oldenburg, I would say 'Contemporary art is only understandable to those who created it. No one is supposed to find out the concept behind it unless they read the statements or ask the artists. If not, it isn't art.