Can a doodle be art?

So I'm - perhaps a little stupidly - about to embark on a 6 week experimental art e-course, having very very little 'artistic' experience and with quite a low sense of my own creativity or ability in the visual arts. The first assignment won't be posted until tomorrow, but I got my sketch book out tonight... and I didn't know what to do with it. Total fear of the blank page....

Then I decided just to start writing and drawing something, with no pressure or sense of having to be 'artistic'. I drew what I felt. A big scared face shouting out 'BLANK PAPER. AAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!'. It was the kind of drawing I do all the time. It was a doodle. My friends and I do these doodles at the back of our lecture room during research seminars (they generally are drawings of glasses of wine with 'I neeeeeeed vino!!' underneath or pictures of how we might escape the room, in search of wine). But a doodle is not art, right? Then I thought, well maybe if it is, I could start here. In a place I know very well. With a doodle.

Here are some examples of very cool doodlings that most definitely are art.










Via cariblogger and richworks