If a piece of art makes you cry is it great art?

Alternatively just talk about Charlotte's web.

"hijacked" doesn't really come into it, I think -- there can be true and truly moving moments in crappy films, and cheap sentimentality can sometimes make the waterworks happen -- which doesn't mean that you won't recognize the cheapness.

No. It can do, but it probably means it has hit upon the magic manipulative button which may well involve sweeping strings and something tragic (cf Armageddon).

No. I use to cry whenever I watched episodes Star Trek Next Generation (I'm not joking). I suspect this is because I was unhappy, not because Star Trek is great art.

It could just be that it pushes the right buttons in YOU.

There was an episode of 'Six Feet Under' that featured a baby that died (cot death), at the same time that Federico's wife was expecting their child. Having to deal with the dead child meant that Federico's anxiousness about the birth of his kid was massively increased. And to make things worse there were complications surrounding the birth and the baby had to be resuscitated. It was several seconds (felt like a lifetime) before the baby started to breathe and let out a cry.

Now the birth of my son also had 'complications'. (Won't bore you with the details, but he's perfectly OK now.) And being a father, the death of the child earlier in the episode was obviously very moving. But it was nothing compared to the effect that the birth of Federico's child had on me. When I heard the sound of the baby crying the relief, and more pertinently, the memory of the relief that I felt after I found out my son was OK, had a massive physical effect on me. Great wracking sobs suddenly took over my body. I wept and wept for about 10 minutes afterwards. And the strength of this feeling took me completely by surprise.

I've cried listening to music before, and I've cried watching films, but no piece of art has ever had a stronger immediate impact on me. And, of course, that doesn't make it the greatest or most moving piece of art ever made, it's just about my personal response at that time.

armageddon is just tragic?

pete, you are a hard, hard man.

I sat totally dry-eyed through "An Affair to Remember" and started irrationally crying at the end of this dumb teen movie I saw tonight. I'm not even going to tell you which one. Seemingly cheap sentimentality can be a cover for something genuine, though it's sometimes hard to tell where one leaves off and the other begins.

Tragic enough to make me cry. I may be hard but I have a soft centre. (My belly).

I can make you cry.
On the other hand, I am a piece of work (oh, I meant art...).

But seriously folks, I do feel more attached to a movie/ piece of music if it makes me cry- I guess it makes me feel like I bonded with it - but I don't necessarily feel that means it is great art.

Are documentaries on depressing subjects great art?

i agrre with james, it is a personal thing and response is dictated by whatever is the 'easy button' to press at the time.
i cried last night actually, when i watched the girl on csi bury a gorillas body which had been skinned, beheaded and had its hands and feet cut off by international 'poachers'. it got to me because i am a total softy when it comes to animals. it certainly wasnt a great 'piece of art'.

James's post is excellent, but there is a cheap and easy way to produce tears. Dogs heroically dying to save a small child is not automatically great art, but you can be sure to wring some tears from an audience. It's no guide to artistic quality.

mind you, it depends on your definition of art doesnt it? i mean, i wouldnt call a tv show like csi, 'art'. yeah im kind of undermining my own post but you know what i mean.

i would call giving birth art though. in a weird and Very Painful way!

Perhaps the great art in the title is a bit of a red herring. I'm more interested in why some work which deals with the big emotional and intellectual ideas e.g the seventh seal rings hollow when others which you can dismiss as sentimental, manipulative nonsense are just so much more effective in bringing those ovwerwhelming feelings to the surface.

1. To adapt an idea from Pauline Kael: Those overwhelming feelings don't necessarily mean as much as you might convince yourself they do. If you cry at The Sound of Music or Love Story, the problem isn't (just) that these feelings are pre-programmed/artificial - most art relies on button-pushing to some degree. It's that the emotional responses are self-congratulatory - the work is inviting you to cry and then feel really smug afterwards because you're such a sensitive person. Just like the Really Obscure Injoke, the value of this depends on circumstances.

2. Even when this isn't the case, even when crying signifies a genuine response from you, it doesn't necessarily signify a particularly tense response. e.g. I cried through most of series 4 of Pokemon, and I do think it was genuinely moving, but it only added to my enjoyment of life in a small way. On the other hand, I didn't cry at the Crystal Onix episode in series 3, but this taught me a lot about the nature of the relationship between art and the artist - not in a didactic kind of way, but more intuitively, possibly most valuable for displaying that somewhere in the Pokemon marketing machine, there was someone who understood all this. I regard it as not only the superior artwork but also the more effective response.

I'll just say "not necessarily" to the original question. Or else car accidents and animal torture would be performance art.

Maybe it's art if the artist really set out to make people cry, and then everyone who ever encountered the art actually DID cry. (in an emotional way, not an ow-I've-been-teargassed way)