What do you consider as art in the context of photography?

How would you begin to describe the line (no matter how vague / blurry it is) between the work of an avid hobbyist and an artist? There are a couple of obvious "easy answers" to this discussion, namely the "everything is art" reduction, and the "only something extremely profound and world-changing is art, and you're unlikely to ever create it unless you happen to be one of the rare prodigies and devote your entire life to it" maxim. I'm not entirely sure either of those views is helpful, they're not providing anything constructive and practical that would facilitate progress.I recently read the essay How Art Can Be Good by Paul Graham. There were well-articulated arguments on e.g. work being understandable for an audience and biases/errors in judgement, but I'm not sure if I got any further in understanding "artness". Somehow I don't feel like there were some key takeaways I gained from reading the piece.I've also seen the fantastic Ira Glass short The GAP on the gap between your artistic taste and skills to produce. While it can be seen as a great source of motivation or perhaps encouragement towards perseverance, I also feel like it brings up more questions than it answers. How can you be sure you're at the gap? Could it be that actually your taste isn't particularly great yet either? Or if you follow the advice and persist through making heaps of work, what are the signs of making progress? Do you really some day just start to notice and believe your work is becoming great? If you do start to feel that way, what are the ways to reality-check that feeling, whether your feeling is justified or if you're overvaluing your work and being pretentious?This whole post is also in part inspired by having read A.B. Watson's fantastic blog, e.g. the great piece on Are you a photographer or just a camera operator.I'm obviously aware that there are no clear answers, but it would be great to have some discussion on this matter, and maybe find some more fine-grained questions to start asking myself.How could one approach the journey towards maybe some day attaining "artful" photographs? What kind of steps to take? via /r/photography http://ift.tt/2fe9PIZ