Painting Animals

One of my art teachers recently bought a painting from a monkey. I'm sure several of you have seen or heard of Mr Bailey the painting monkey. Many web pages and youtube videos claim that this monkey can create masterpeices, or otherwise works of art. Well I am not too certain where the line is drawn on what is and what isn't art, In fact, I'm not even sure that photography is art, in the same sense as painting is, because photography does not create anything, it only captures an image. (This is not to say there is no skill needed for great photography) However, I am quite certain that a monkey smearing different color paints all over the wall is not and cannot rightfully be called art, Monkey have been smearing their own feces and semen all over walls for ever and no one has ever thought that this was art, or at all beautiful.




However, My teacher did not intend to buy a painting from a monkey. She wanted to buy a painting by an elephant. Where the monkey just smears paint on the canvas, or the wall, or a persons face, Elephants have painted actual pictures, of flowers, of elephants from the back and the side. It seems that it might be possible that an elephant can see something and then draw it with a brush. So is this art? Is the elephant actually creating something, or has it just been trained to paint a certain picture? I don't know, but I think even if it were trained that is art from the trainer. Much better than the smears my teacher ended up with.



So why did my teacher buy a monkey painting instead of an elephant painting?
Well, the elephant died.



Can you imagine that? a dead elephant?

What the hell do you do with a dead elephant?! And you thought it was bad to clean up the mountains of crap all day long, now to find out you get to work and you have to move the whole damned elephant! Holy crap but that would suck!