There, I saved you from doing the calculation yourself. If you need it precise, it's 3 days, 3 hours and 50 minutes.
Now that that's out of the way: Did you ever realize how fuzzy the border between art and humor is? I mean, making a song that only consists of silence is a really good joke. I'd argue that also makes it good art. So, is being silent for four and a half minutes art? No, usually not. It's the context that makes it art. It's the fact that it's officially considered a symphony, that there's a score for it and that a full orchestra "played" it, the conductor indicating the timing and the musicians flipping the pages. Just like any good joke, it does not meet everyone's sense of humor, and just like any joke at all, it's only funny the first time. So being the first to come up with the concept is vital for it to work.
The reason people often say they don't understand art, or they think it's all just dumb or pretentious is that art is very often taken out of context. Often, that is very much on purpose. People like to feel superior to others, and it is really easy to tell yourself: "Oh, those stupid art people somehow convinced each other that this canvas with squiggles a child could have drawn is somehow worth something. Luckily, I can it for what it is, so I'm the smart person here." But is that really smart, or ist just lazy?
Understanding a piece of art is often very difficult. You need to understand all the context, which is often difficult to even get enough information about and then you need to think about it really hard. It's a process that can be incredibly rewarding if you actually manage to reach the point of understanding, but it's something that many people never experienced. It's like solving a puzzle. But where logic puzzles challenge your mind, understanding art challenges your capacity to feel.
I often claimed that all the works the culture industry pumps out is not art. That got me into quite a few arguments with people on the definition of art. I was wrong. Maybe these action movies, pop songs, romance novels and wall tattoos can be counted as art after all. Sticking to the puzzle analogy, they're just sudokus with only one number missing. Sure, you need some capacity to feel, but you don't need to put any work in at all. As long as you're not a dead-inside psychopath, you'll feel it. It's just too easy.
Now imagine almost everyone around you keeps happily filling in books upon books of these uselessly easy sudokus, while you are doing the normal ones. People make fun of you for taking so long for a single sudoku. People laugh at these so-called sudokus that obviously have to few numbers in them to solve. People accuse you of just writing in random numbers, to look smart for your other weird sudoku friends. And absolutely nobody gets why you're not having fun when they invite you to do sudokus with them.
That's what it feels like to understand art. And it suck.
