Art for Art's sake?

On Saturday I went to the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. A few minor things have been gently gnawing at my vitals ever since and, as ever, it has taken a few days to grok (look up Robert Heinlein if this word is alien to you) the experience in totality.

Firstly I want to make it clear that this is not a "what is Art?" rant. Art is what you want it to be and must be prima facie subjective. You will, I am sure, not be too surprised to learn the next word is but...

I was left breathless by the room of architectural models. Those in ivory-coloured plastic, made by the laser-guided deposition of powder and fused into a solid in particular. The delicacy and beauty was inherent in the small scale - and since that was beyond human skill, were the computers running the lasers or the programmers the artists just as much as those originally conceiving the structures?

Outside the models, I found myself confronting many of the old dichotomies. Did a single line in purple paint convey a female leg better than the work of days to portray the same thing? Did a single shocking daub (and some did shock - both for the right and wrong reasons) have the same merit as a more intensive construct? Do I even have the right to use the word merit?

Inevitably I found myself thinking that at least some of the emperors had new clothes and that others were naked. Is that reactionary? Should I care?

A few pieces construed beauty in art from beauty in nature. There is another whole new question (or many questions perhaps?). Is Hockney's photographic print of a tree any the less art because it is of something intrinsically beautiful? To put it another way - does a portrayal of a butterfly have more merit because it's subject is in some way "better" than, say a portrayal of a decomposing animal? I am forced to think of Rodin and the ugliness built in at a superficial level to his sculpture and yet I am moved to tears by his "Caryatid fallen under her stone" precisely because of the suffering, humiliation and pain it projects so effortlessly.

Oh dear! I have to close on the words of that great sage, Alf Garnett.  I don't know if it is Art, but I know what I like.

Dum Spiro Spero