I discovered a neat new application for my Android phone. It's called Camera Illusion and it does on the fly image processing on the current camera image. There are a number of render and distortion options, as well as options to put cute little frames around your pix, but the only one I really like is "pencil", though "sepia" is also cool. So is there art here and where is it. Being a programmer, I think that code can be art -- to take an idea and implement it definitely has an artistic facet, though non-programmers might not be able to appreciate it. But it also has, in this case, at least, a "tool" facet. It is something other people can use to express themselves, like the camera itself.
It seems to me that all art is something of a collaborative effort, to the extent that you use tools and materials generated by others. And you really have to. If you wove your own canvas, gathered or mined and ground your own paints, made your own brushes, mixed up your own gesso, turpentine, acrylics and whatnot, when would you actually use any of it? There would be little time or energy to use any of these things to produce what we call art -- the final product.
