Brushing

This experiment is to take an everyday activity and turn it into ritualistic art.
I chose brushing my teeth.
For this I had to buy an everyday toothbrush, I normally use an electric but that would hurt doing it this long. The experiment went pretty well, very boring and I cut it short since my gums started to hurt. So nope, no full two hours, about an hour and a half. Plus I was drooling pretty bad during it so I had to keep wiping my mouth.
I did have someone else photograph me so i had an audience for this one. It did change how i did things, I had to try not to talk to her and tried to appear as if I was into what I was doing. This got easier once I got really bored. For this process an audience is not wanted, I got pretty self conscious and was trying to "act the part" when the camera was about to go off. I also skipped alot of pictures since we had almost 90 and a lot of them had me laughing or wiping drool, things that have little to do with the subject matter.
SO...
My performance is not art because art is an expression of an idea or concept and unless this is an experiment in monotony or some larger statement on grooming habits it really doesn't say much of anything. I doubt any two critics would come up with any substantial relative ideas without some mission statement being attached to it. I really think art should be able to stand on its own without further explanation.
Art is... Well I started to delve into it before but Art is an expression of an Idea through a chosen medium. Not the most popular of definitions but i have a hard time calling a lot of "modern art" art. If you take Michaelangelo's David for example you can look at the form and technique of the nude and appreciate it for its raw difficulty, its lifelikeness, and its proportions. You can look at its differently formed right and left arms and with little foreknowledge understand what he was trying to say about Gods place in art and science and its rightful place in humanity. It would stand on its own. You can add that it was one of the first Greco-roman style nudes done in centuries, you can talk about how its stance is natural and how this goes back to old styles while improving on them but it doesn't require a whole lot of extra explanation. Performance art seems to me that it either needs three pages of extra info to tell you what it meant or it makes its point like a political cartoon, with a sledgehammer.
The difference between life and art is... Art is a single statement whereas life is dozens of confused ideas and priorities. You can try and limit life to one statement for a given amount of time but you cannot force it for very long or do art exclusively. Pretty much like the argument that you can fool some people for all the time or all people some of the time. So you can create art for a while or you can somewhat make art for a long time but not create pure art for a long time. I think art should is best kept an abstraction from life that helps you reflect better upon life when they are mixed the message of art is mixed with the mundane of life.