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The Definition of Art

The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated.

There is also disagreement, at a second-order level, about how to classify definitions of art. [ 1 ] For present purposes, contemporary definitions can be classified with respect to the dimensions of art they emphasize. One distinctively modern, conventionalist, sort of definition focuses on art’s institutional features, emphasizing the way art changes over time, modern works that appear to break radically with all traditional art, the relational properties of artworks that depend on works’ relations to art history, art genres, etc. – more broadly, on the undeniable heterogeneity of the class of artworks. The more traditional, less conventionalist sort of definition defended in contemporary philosophy makes use of a broader, more traditional concept of aesthetic properties that includes more than art-relational ones, and puts more emphasis on art’s pan-cultural and trans-historical characteristics – in sum, on commonalities across the class of artworks. Hybrid definitions aim to do justice to both the traditional aesthetic dimension as well as to the institutional and art-historical dimensions of art, while privileging neither.

1. Constraints on Definitions of Art

2.1 some examples, 3.1 skepticisms inspired by views of concepts, history, marxism, feminism, 3.2 some descendants of skepticism, 4.1 conventionalist definitions: institutional and historical, 4.2 institutional definitions, 4.3 historical definitions.

4.4 Functional (mainly aesthetic) definitions

4.5 Hybrid (Disjunctive) Definitions

4.6 Evolutionary Approaches

5. Conclusion

Other internet resources, related entries.

Any definition of art has to square with the following uncontroversial facts: (i) entities (artifacts or performances) intentionally endowed by their makers with a significant degree of aesthetic interest, often greatly surpassing that of most everyday objects, first appeared hundreds of thousands of years ago and exist in virtually every known human culture (Davies 2012); (ii) such entities are partially comprehensible to cultural outsiders – they are neither opaque nor completely transparent; (iii) such entities sometimes have non-aesthetic – ceremonial or religious or propagandistic – functions, and sometimes do not; (iv) such entities might conceivably be produced by non-human species, terrestrial or otherwise; and it seems at least in principle possible that they be extraspecifically recognizable as such; (v) traditionally, artworks are intentionally endowed by their makers with properties, often sensory, having a significant degree of aesthetic interest, usually surpassing that of most everyday objects; (vi) art’s normative dimension – the high value placed on making and consuming art – appears to be essential to it, and artworks can have considerable moral and political as well as aesthetic power; (vii) the arts are always changing, just as the rest of culture is: as artists experiment creatively, new genres, art-forms, and styles develop; standards of taste and sensibilities evolve; understandings of aesthetic properties, aesthetic experience, and the nature of art evolve; (viii) there are institutions in some but not all cultures which involve a focus on artifacts and performances that have a high degree of aesthetic interest but lack any practical, ceremonial, or religious use; (ix) entities seemingly lacking aesthetic interest, and entities having a high degree of aesthetic interest, are not infrequently grouped together as artworks by such institutions; (x) lots of things besides artworks – for example, natural entities (sunsets, landscapes, flowers, shadows), human beings, and abstract entities (theories, proofs, mathematical entities) – have interesting aesthetic properties.

Of these facts, those having to do with art’s contingent cultural and historical features are emphasized by some definitions of art. Other definitions of art give priority to explaining those facts that reflect art’s universality and continuity with other aesthetic phenomena. Still other definitions attempt to explain both art’s contingent characteristics and its more abiding ones while giving priority to neither.

Two general constraints on definitions are particularly relevant to definitions of art. First, given that accepting that something is inexplicable is generally a philosophical last resort, and granting the importance of extensional adequacy, list-like or enumerative definitions are if possible to be avoided. Enumerative definitions, lacking principles that explain why what is on the list is on the list, don’t, notoriously, apply to definienda that evolve, and provide no clue to the next or general case (Tarski’s definition of truth, for example, is standardly criticized as unenlightening because it rests on a list-like definition of primitive denotation; see Field 1972; Devitt 2001; Davidson 2005). Corollary: when everything else is equal (and it is controversial whether and when that condition is satisfied in the case of definitions of art), non-disjunctive definitions are preferable to disjunctive ones. Second, given that most classes outside of mathematics are vague, and that the existence of borderline cases is characteristic of vague classes, definitions that take the class of artworks to have borderline cases are preferable to definitions that don’t (Davies 1991 and 2006; Stecker 2005).

Whether any definition of art does account for these facts and satisfy these constraints, or could account for these facts and satisfy these constraints, are key questions for aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

2. Definitions From the History of Philosophy

Classical definitions, at least as they are portrayed in contemporary discussions of the definition of art, take artworks to be characterized by a single type of property. The standard candidates are representational properties, expressive properties, and formal properties. So there are representational or mimetic definitions, expressive definitions, and formalist definitions, which hold that artworks are characterized by their possession of, respectively, representational, expressive, and formal properties. It is not difficult to find fault with these simple definitions. For example, possessing representational, expressive, and formal properties cannot be sufficient conditions, since, obviously, instructional manuals are representations, but not typically artworks, human faces and gestures have expressive properties without being works of art, and both natural objects and artifacts produced solely for homely utilitarian purposes have formal properties but are not artworks.

The ease of these dismissals, though, serves as a reminder of the fact that classical definitions of art are significantly less philosophically self-contained or freestanding than are most contemporary definitions of art. Each classical definition stands in close and complicated relationships to its system’s other complexly interwoven parts – epistemology, ontology, value theory, philosophy of mind, etc. Relatedly, great philosophers characteristically analyze the key theoretical components of their definitions of art in distinctive and subtle ways. For these reasons, understanding such definitions in isolation from the systems or corpuses of which they are parts is difficult, and brief summaries are invariably somewhat misleading. Nevertheless, some representative examples of historically influential definitions of art offered by major figures in the history of philosophy should be mentioned.

Plato holds in the Republic and elsewhere that the arts are representational, or mimetic (sometimes translated “imitative”). Artworks are ontologically dependent on, imitations of, and therefore inferior to, ordinary physical objects. Physical objects in turn are ontologically dependent on, and imitations of, and hence inferior to, what is most real, the non-physical unchanging Forms. Grasped perceptually, artworks present only an appearance of an appearance of the Forms, which are grasped by reason alone. Consequently, artistic experience cannot yield knowledge. Nor do the makers of artworks work from knowledge. Because artworks engage an unstable, lower part of the soul, art should be subservient to moral realities, which, along with truth, are more metaphysically fundamental and, properly understood, more humanly important than, beauty. The arts are not, for Plato, the primary sphere in which beauty operates. The Platonic conception of beauty is extremely wide and metaphysical: there is a Form of Beauty, which can only be known non-perceptually, but it is more closely related to the erotic than to the arts. (See Janaway 1998, the entry on Plato’s aesthetics , and the entry on Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry .)

Kant has a definition of art, and of fine art; the latter, which Kant calls the art of genius, is “a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication” (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment , Guyer translation, section 44, 46).) When fully unpacked, the definition has representational, formalist and expressivist elements, and focuses as much on the creative activity of the artistic genius (who, according to Kant, possesses an “innate mental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art”) as on the artworks produced by that activity. Kant’s aesthetic theory is, for architectonic reasons, not focused on art. Art for Kant falls under the broader topic of aesthetic judgment, which covers judgments of the beautiful, judgments of the sublime, and teleological judgments of natural organisms and of nature itself. So Kant’s definition of art is a relatively small part of his theory of aesthetic judgment. And Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment is itself situated in a hugely ambitious theoretical structure that, famously, aims, to account for, and work out the interconnections between, scientific knowledge, morality, and religious faith. (See the entry on Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology and the general entry on Immanuel Kant .)

Hegel’s account of art incorporates his view of beauty; he defines beauty as the sensuous/perceptual appearance or expression of absolute truth. The best artworks convey, by sensory/perceptual means, the deepest metaphysical truth. The deepest metaphysical truth, according to Hegel, is that the universe is the concrete realization of what is conceptual or rational. That is, what is conceptual or rational is real, and is the imminent force that animates and propels the self-consciously developing universe. The universe is the concrete realization of what is conceptual or rational, and the rational or conceptual is superior to the sensory. So, as the mind and its products alone are capable of truth, artistic beauty is metaphysically superior to natural beauty (Hegel, Lectures , [1886, 4]). A central and defining feature of beautiful works of art is that, through the medium of sensation, each one presents the most fundamental values of its civilization. [ 2 ] Art, therefore, as a cultural expression, operates in the same sphere as religion and philosophy, and expresses the same content as they. But art “reveals to consciousness the deepest interests of humanity” in a different manner than do religion and philosophy, because art alone, of the three, works by sensuous means. So, given the superiority of the conceptual to the non-conceptual, and the fact that art’s medium for expressing/presenting culture’s deepest values is the sensual or perceptual, art’s medium is limited and inferior in comparison with the medium that religion uses to express the same content, viz., mental imagery. Art and religion in turn are, in this respect, inferior to philosophy, which employs a conceptual medium to present its content. Art initially predominates, in each civilization, as the supreme mode of cultural expression, followed, successively, by religion and philosophy. Similarly, because the broadly “logical” relations between art, religion and philosophy determine the actual structure of art, religion, and philosophy, and because cultural ideas about what is intrinsically valuable develop from sensuous to non-sensuous conceptions, history is divided into periods that reflect the teleological development from the sensuous to the conceptual. Art in general, too, develops in accord with the historical growth of non-sensuous or conceptual conceptions from sensuous conceptions, and each individual art-form develops historically in the same way (Hegel, Lectures ; Wicks 1993, see also the entries on Hegel and on Hegel’s Aesthetics ).

For treatments of other influential definitions of art, inseparable from the complex philosophical systems or corpuses in which they occur, see, for example, the entries on 18th Century German Aesthetics , Arthur Schopenhauer , Friedrich Nietzsche , and Dewey’s Aesthetics .

3. Skepticism about Definitions of Art

Skeptical doubts about the possibility and value of a definition of art have figured importantly in the discussion in aesthetics since the 1950s, and though their influence has subsided somewhat, uneasiness about the definitional project persists. (See section 4, below, and also Kivy 1997, Brand 2000, and Walton 2007).

A common family of arguments, inspired by Wittgenstein’s famous remarks about games (Wittgenstein 1953), has it that the phenomena of art are, by their nature, too diverse to admit of the unification that a satisfactory definition strives for, or that a definition of art, were there to be such a thing, would exert a stifling influence on artistic creativity. One expression of this impulse is Weitz’s Open Concept Argument: any concept is open if a case can be imagined which would call for some sort of decision on our part to extend the use of the concept to cover it, or to close the concept and invent a new one to deal with the new case; all open concepts are indefinable; and there are cases calling for a decision about whether to extend or close the concept of art. Hence art is indefinable (Weitz 1956). Against this it is claimed that change does not, in general, rule out the preservation of identity over time, that decisions about concept-expansion may be principled rather than capricious, and that nothing bars a definition of art from incorporating a novelty requirement.

A second sort of argument, less common today than in the heyday of a certain form of extreme Wittgensteinianism, urges that the concepts that make up the stuff of most definitions of art (expressiveness, form) are embedded in general philosophical theories which incorporate traditional metaphysics and epistemology. But since traditional metaphysics and epistemology are prime instances of language gone on conceptually confused holiday, definitions of art share in the conceptual confusions of traditional philosophy (Tilghman 1984).

A third sort of argument, more historically inflected than the first, takes off from an influential study by the historian of philosophy Paul Kristeller, in which he argued that the modern system of the five major arts [painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music] which underlies all modern aesthetics … is of comparatively recent origin and did not assume definite shape before the eighteenth century, although it had many ingredients which go back to classical, mediaeval, and Renaissance thought (Kristeller 1951). Since that list of five arts is somewhat arbitrary, and since even those five do not share a single common nature, but rather are united, at best, only by several overlapping features, and since the number of art forms has increased since the eighteenth century, Kristeller’s work may be taken to suggest that our concept of art differs from that of the eighteenth century. As a matter of historical fact, there simply is no stable definiendum for a definition of art to capture.

A fourth sort of argument suggests that a definition of art stating individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a thing to be an artwork, is likely to be discoverable only if cognitive science makes it plausible to think that humans categorize things in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. But, the argument continues, cognitive science actually supports the view that the structure of concepts mirrors the way humans categorize things – which is with respect to their similarity to prototypes (or exemplars), and not in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. So the quest for a definition of art that states individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions is misguided and not likely to succeed (Dean 2003). Against this it has been urged that psychological theories of concepts like the prototype theory and its relatives can provide at best an account of how people in fact classify things, but not an account of correct classifications of extra-psychological phenomena, and that, even if relevant, prototype theory and other psychological theories of concepts are at present too controversial to draw substantive philosophical morals from (Rey 1983; Adajian 2005).

A fifth argument against defining art, with a normative tinge that is psychologistic rather than sociopolitical, takes the fact that there is no philosophical consensus about the definition of art as reason to hold that no unitary concept of art exists. Concepts of art, like all concepts, after all, should be used for the purpose(s) they best serve. But not all concepts of art serve all purposes equally well. So not all art concepts should be used for the same purposes. Art should be defined only if there is a unitary concept of art that serves all of art’s various purposes – historical, conventional, aesthetic, appreciative, communicative, and so on. So, since there is no purpose-independent use of the concept of art, art should not be defined (Mag Uidhir and Magnus 2011; cf. Meskin 2008). In response, it is noted that some account of what makes various concepts of art concepts of art is still required; this leaves open the possibility of some degree of unity beneath the apparent multiplicity. The fact (if it is one) that different concepts of art are used for different purposes does not itself imply that they are not connected in ordered, to-some-degree systematic ways. The relation between (say) the historical concept of art and the appreciative concept of art is not an accidental, unsystematic relation, like that between river banks and savings banks, but is something like the relation between Socrates’ healthiness and the healthiness of Socrates’ diet. That is, it is not evident that there exist a mere arbitrary heap or disjunction of art concepts, constituting an unsystematic patchwork. Perhaps there is a single concept of art with different facets that interlock in an ordered way, or else a multiplicity of concepts that constitute a unity because one is at the core, and the others depend asymmetrically on it. (The last is an instance of core-dependent homonymy; see the entry on Aristotle , section on Essentialism and Homonymy.) Multiplicity alone doesn’t entail pluralism.

A sixth, broadly Marxian sort of objection rejects the project of defining art as an unwitting (and confused) expression of a harmful ideology. On this view, the search for a definition of art presupposes, wrongly, that the concept of the aesthetic is a creditable one. But since the concept of the aesthetic necessarily involves the equally bankrupt concept of disinterestedness, its use advances the illusion that what is most real about things can and should be grasped or contemplated without attending to the social and economic conditions of their production. Definitions of art, consequently, spuriously confer ontological dignity and respectability on social phenomena that probably in fact call more properly for rigorous social criticism and change. Their real function is ideological, not philosophical (Eagleton 1990).

Seventh, the members of a complex of skeptically-flavored arguments, from feminist philosophy of art, begin with premises to the effect that art and art-related concepts and practices have been systematically skewed by sex or gender. Such premises are supported by a variety of considerations. (a) The artworks the Western artistic canon recognizes as great are dominated by male-centered perspectives and stereotypes, and almost all the artists the canon recognizes as great are men – unsurprisingly, given economic, social, and institutional impediments that prevented women from making art at all. Moreover, the concept of genius developed historically in such a way as to exclude women artists (Battersby, 1989, Korsmeyer 2004). (b) The fine arts’ focus on purely aesthetic, non-utilitarian value resulted in the marginalization as mere “crafts” of items of considerable aesthetic interest made and used by women for domestic practical purposes. Moreover, because all aesthetic judgments are situated and particular, there can be no such thing as disinterested taste. If there is no such thing as disinterested taste, then it is hard to see how there could be universal standards of aesthetic excellence. The non-existence of universal standards of aesthetic excellence undermines the idea of an artistic canon (and with it the project of defining art). Art as historically constituted, and art-related practices and concepts, then, reflect views and practices that presuppose and perpetuate the subordination of women. The data that definitions of art are supposed to explain are biased, corrupt and incomplete. As a consequence, present definitions of art, incorporating or presupposing as they do a framework that incorporates a history of systematically biased, hierarchical, fragmentary, and mistaken understandings of art and art-related phenomena and concepts, may be so androcentric as to be untenable. Some theorists have suggested that different genders have systematically unique artistic styles, methods, or modes of appreciating and valuing art. If so, then a separate canon and gynocentric definitions of art are indicated (Battersby 1989, Frueh 1991). In any case, in the face of these facts, the project of defining art in anything like the traditional way is to be regarded with suspicion (Brand 2000).

An eighth skeptically-flavored argument concludes that, insofar as almost all contemporary definitions foreground the nature of art works , rather than the individual arts to which (most? all?) artworks belong, they are philosophically unproductive (Lopes 2014). [ 3 ] The grounds for this conclusion concern disagreements among standard definitions as to the artistic status of entities whose status is for theoretical reasons unclear – e.g., things like ordinary bottleracks (Duchamp’s Bottlerack ) and silence (John Cage’s 4′33″ ). If these hard cases are artworks, what makes them so, given their apparent lack of any of the traditional properties of artworks? Are, they, at best, marginal cases? On the other hand, if they are not artworks, then why have generations of experts – art historians, critics, and collectors – classified them as such? And to whom else should one look to determine the true nature of art? (There are, it is claimed, few or no empirical studies of art full stop, though empirical studies of the individual arts abound.) Such disputes inevitably end in stalemate, it is claimed. Stalemate results because (a) standard artwork-focused definitions of art endorse different criteria of theory choice, and (b) on the basis of their preferred criteria, appeal to incompatible intuitions about the status of such theoretically-vexed cases. In consequence, disagreements between standard definitions of art that foreground artworks are unresolvable. To avoid this stalemate, an alternative definitional strategy that foregrounds the arts rather than individual artworks, is indicated. (See section 4.5.)

Philosophers influenced by the moderate Wittgensteinian strictures discussed above have offered family resemblance accounts of art, which, as they purport to be non-definitions, may be usefully considered at this point. Two species of family resemblance views will be considered: the resemblance-to-a-paradigm version, and the cluster version.

On the resemblance-to-a-paradigm version, something is, or is identifiable as, an artwork if it resembles, in the right way, certain paradigm artworks, which possess most although not necessarily all of art’s typical features. (The “is identifiable” qualification is intended to make the family resemblance view something more epistemological than a definition, although it is unclear that this really avoids a commitment to constitutive claims about art’s nature.) Against this view: since things do not resemble each other simpliciter , but only in at least one respect or other, the account is either far too inclusive, since everything resembles everything else in some respect or other, or, if the variety of resemblance is specified, tantamount to a definition, since resemblance in that respect will be either a necessary or sufficient condition for being an artwork. The family resemblance view raises questions, moreover, about the membership and unity of the class of paradigm artworks. If the account lacks an explanation of why some items and not others go on the list of paradigm works, it seems explanatorily deficient. But if it includes a principle that governs membership on the list, or if expertise is required to constitute the list, then the principle, or whatever properties the experts’ judgments track, seem to be doing the philosophical work.

The cluster version of the family resemblance view has been defended by a number of philosophers (Bond 1975, Dissanayake 1990, Dutton 2006, Gaut 2000). The view typically provides a list of properties, no one of which is a necessary condition for being a work of art, but which are jointly sufficient for being a work of art, and which is such that at least one proper subset thereof is sufficient for being a work of art. Lists offered vary, but overlap considerably. Here is one, due to Gaut: (1) possessing positive aesthetic properties; (2) being expressive of emotion; (3) being intellectually challenging; (4) being formally complex and coherent; (5) having the capacity to convey complex meanings; (6) exhibiting an individual point of view; (7) being original; (8) being an artifact or performance which is the product of a high degree of skill; (9) belonging to an established artistic form; (10) being the product of an intention to make a work of art (Gaut 2000). The cluster account has been criticized on several grounds. First, given its logical structure, it is in fact equivalent to a long, complicated, but finite, disjunction, which makes it difficult to see why it isn’t a definition (Davies 2006). Second, if the list of properties is incomplete, as some cluster theorists hold, then some justification or principle would be needed for extending it. Third, the inclusion of the ninth property on the list, belonging to an established art form , seems to regenerate (or duck), rather than answer, the definitional question. Finally, it is worth noting that, although cluster theorists stress what they take to be the motley heterogeneity of the class of artworks, they tend with surprising regularity to tacitly give the aesthetic a special, perhaps unifying, status among the properties they put forward as merely disjunctive. One cluster theorist, for example, gives a list very similar to the one discussed above (it includes representational properties, expressiveness, creativity, exhibiting a high degree of skill, belonging to an established artform), but omits aesthetic properties on the grounds that it is the combination of the other items on the list which, combined in the experience of the work of art, are precisely the aesthetic qualities of the work (Dutton 2006). Gaut, whose list is cited above, includes aesthetic properties as a separate item on the list, but construes them very narrowly; the difference between these ways of formulating the cluster view appears to be mainly nominal. And an earlier cluster theorist defines artworks as all and only those things that belong to any instantiation of an artform, offers a list of seven properties all of which together are intended to capture the core of what it is to be an artform, though none is either necessary or sufficient, and then claims that having aesthetic value (of the same sort as mountains, sunsets, mathematical theorems) is “what art is for ” (Bond 1975).

4. Contemporary Definitions

Definitions of art attempt to make sense of two different sorts of facts: art has important historically contingent cultural features, as well as trans-historical, pan-cultural characteristics that point in the direction of a relatively stable aesthetic core. (Theorists who regard art as an invention of eighteenth-century Europe will, of course, regard this way of putting the matter as tendentious, on the grounds that entities produced outside that culturally distinctive institution do not fall under the extension of “art” and hence are irrelevant to the art-defining project (Shiner 2001). Whether the concept of art is precise enough to justify this much confidence about what falls under its extension claim is unclear.) Conventionalist definitions take art’s contingent cultural features to be explanatorily fundamental, and aim to capture the phenomena – revolutionary modern art, the traditional close connection of art with the aesthetic, the possibility of autonomous art traditions, etc. – in social/historical terms. Classically-flavored or traditional definitions (also sometimes called “functionalist”) definitions reverse this explanatory order. Such classically-flavored definitions take traditional concepts like the aesthetic (or allied concepts like the formal, or the expressive) as basic, and aim to account for the phenomena by making those concepts harder – for example, by endorsing a concept of the aesthetic rich enough to include non-perceptual properties, or by attempting an integration of those concepts (e.g., Eldridge, section 4.4 below) .

Conventionalist definitions deny that art has essential connection to aesthetic properties, or to formal properties, or to expressive properties, or to any type of property taken by traditional definitions to be essential to art. Conventionalist definitions have been strongly influenced by the emergence, in the twentieth century, of artworks that seem to differ radically from all previous artworks. Avant-garde works like Marcel Duchamp’s “ready-mades” – ordinary unaltered objects like snow-shovels ( In Advance of the Broken Arm ) and bottle-racks – conceptual works like Robert Barry’s All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking – 1:36 PM; June 15, 1969 , and John Cage’s 4′33″ , have seemed to many philosophers to lack or even, somehow, repudiate, the traditional properties of art: intended aesthetic interest, artifactuality, even perceivability. Conventionalist definitions have also been strongly influenced by the work of a number of historically-minded philosophers, who have documented the rise and development of modern ideas of the fine arts, the individual arts, the work of art, and the aesthetic (Kristeller, Shiner, Carroll, Goehr, Kivy).

Conventionalist definitions come in two varieties, institutional and historical. Institutionalist conventionalism, or institutionalism, a synchronic view, typically hold that to be a work of art is to be an artifact of a kind created, by an artist, to be presented to an artworld public (Dickie 1984). Historical conventionalism, a diachronic view, holds that artworks necessarily stand in an art-historical relation to some set of earlier artworks.

The groundwork for institutional definitions was laid by Arthur Danto, better known to non-philosophers as the long-time influential art critic for the Nation . Danto coined the term “artworld”, by which he meant “an atmosphere of art theory.” Danto’s definition has been glossed as follows: something is a work of art if and only if (i) it has a subject (ii) about which it projects some attitude or point of view (has a style) (iii) by means of rhetorical ellipsis (usually metaphorical) which ellipsis engages audience participation in filling in what is missing, and (iv) where the work in question and the interpretations thereof require an art historical context (Danto, Carroll). Clause (iv) is what makes the definition institutionalist. The view has been criticized for entailing that art criticism written in a highly rhetorical style is art, lacking but requiring an independent account of what makes a context art historical , and for not applying to music.

The most prominent and influential institutionalism is that of George Dickie. Dickie’s institutionalism has evolved over time. According to an early version, a work of art is an artifact upon which some person(s) acting on behalf of the artworld has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation (Dickie 1974). Dickie’s more recent version consists of an interlocking set of five definitions: (1) An artist is a person who participates with understanding in the making of a work of art. (2) A work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public. (3) A public is a set of persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to understand an object which is presented to them. (4) The artworld is the totality of all artworld systems. (5) An artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public (Dickie 1984). Both versions have been widely criticized. Philosophers have objected that art created outside any institution seems possible, although the definition rules it out, and that the artworld, like any institution, seems capable of error. It has also been urged that the definition’s obvious circularity is vicious, and that, given the inter-definition of the key concepts (artwork, artworld system, artist, artworld public) it lacks any informative way of distinguishing art institutions systems from other, structurally similar, social institutions (D. Davies 2004, pp. 248–249, notes that both the artworld and the “commerceworld” seem to fall under that definition). Early on, Dickie claimed that anyone who sees herself as a member of the artworld is a member of the artworld: if this is true, then unless there are constraints on the kinds of things the artworld can put forward as artworks or candidate artworks, any entity can be an artwork (though not all are), which appears overly expansive. Finally, Matravers has helpfully distinguished strong and weak institutionalism. Strong institutionalism holds that there is some reason that is always the reason the art institution has for saying that something is a work of art. Weak institutionalism holds that, for every work of art, there is some reason or other that the institution has for saying that it is a work of art (Matravers 2000). Weak institutionalism, in particular, raises questions about art’s unity: if absolutely nothing unifies the reasons that the artworld gives for conferring art-hood on things, then the unity of the class of artworks is vanishingly small. Conventionalist views, with their emphasis on art’s heterogeneity, swallow this implication. From the perspective of traditional definitions, doings so underplays art’s substantial if incomplete unity, while leaving it a puzzle why art would be worth caring about.

Some recent versions of institutionalism depart from Dickie’s by accepting the burden, which Dickie rejected, of providing a substantive, non-circular account of what it is to be an art institution or an artworld. One, due to David Davies, does so by building in Nelson Goodman’s account of aesthetic symbolic functions. Another, due to Abell, combines Searle’s account of social institutions with Gaut’s characterization of art-making properties, and builds an account of artistic value on that coupling.

Davies’ neo-institutionalism holds that making an artwork requires articulating an artistic statement, which requires specifying artistic properties, which in turn requires the manipulation of an artistic vehicle. Goodman’s “symptoms of the aesthetic” are utilized to clarify the conditions under which a practice of making is a practice of artistic making: on Goodman’s view, a symbol functions aesthetically when it is syntactically dense, semantically dense, relatively replete, and characterized by multiple and complex reference (D. Davies 2004; Goodman 1968; see the entry on Goodman’s aesthetics ). Manipulating an artistic vehicle is in turn possible only if the artist consciously operates with reference to shared understandings embodied in the practices of a community of receivers. So art’s nature is institutional in the broad sense (or, perhaps better, socio-cultural). By way of criticism, Davies’ neo-institutionalism may be questioned on the grounds that, since all pictorial symbols are syntactically dense, semantically dense, relatively replete, and often exemplify the properties they represent, it seems to entail that every colored picture, including those in any catalog of industrial products, is an artwork (Abell 2012).

Abell’s institutional definition adapts Searle’s view of social kinds: what it is for some social kind, F , to be F is for it to be collectively believed to be F (Abell 2012; Searle 1995, 2010; and see the entry on social institutions ). On Abell’s view, more specifically, an institution’s type is determined by the valued function(s) that it was collectively believed at its inception to promote. The valued functions collective belief in which make an institution an art institution are those spelled out by Gaut in his cluster account (see section 3.1, above). That is, something is an art institution if and only if it is an institution whose existence is due to its being perceived to perform certain functions, which functions form a significant subset of the following: promoting positive aesthetic qualities; promoting the expression of emotion; facilitating the posing of intellectual challenges, and the rest of Gaut’s list. Plugging in Gaut’s list yields the final definition: something is an artwork if and only if it is the product of an art institution (as just defined) and it directly effects the effectiveness with which that institution performs the perceived functions to which its existence is due. One worry is whether Searle’s account of institutions is up to the task required of it. Some institutional social kinds have the following trait: something can fail to be a token of that kind even if there is collective agreement that it counts as a token of that kind. Suppose someone gives a big cocktail party, to which everyone in Paris is invited, and things get so out of hand that the casualty rate is greater than the Battle of Austerlitz. Even if everyone thinks the event was a cocktail party, it is possible (contrary to Searle) that they are mistaken: it may have been a war or battle. It’s not clear that art isn’t like this. If so, then the fact that an institution is collectively believed to be an art institution doesn’t suffice to make it so (Khalidi 2013; see also the entry on social institutions ). [ 4 ] A second worry: if its failure to specify which subsets of the ten cluster properties suffice to make something an artwork significantly flaws Gaut’s cluster account, then failure to specify which subsets of Gaut’s ten properties suffice to make something an art institution significantly flaws Abell’s institutionalism.

Historical definitions hold that what characterizes artworks is standing in some specified art-historical relation to some specified earlier artworks, and disavow any commitment to a trans-historical concept of art, or the “artish.” Historical definitions come in several varieties. All of them are, or resemble, inductive definitions: they claim that certain entities belong unconditionally to the class of artworks, while others do so because they stand in the appropriate relations thereto. According to the best known version, Levinson’s intentional-historical definition, an artwork is a thing that has been seriously intended for regard in any way preexisting or prior artworks are or were correctly regarded (Levinson 1990). A second version, historical narrativism, comes in several varieties. On one, a sufficient but not necessary condition for the identification of a candidate as a work of art is the construction of a true historical narrative according to which the candidate was created by an artist in an artistic context with a recognized and live artistic motivation, and as a result of being so created, it resembles at least one acknowledged artwork (Carroll 1993). On another, more ambitious and overtly nominalistic version of historical narrativism, something is an artwork if and only if (1) there are internal historical relations between it and already established artworks; (2) these relations are correctly identified in a narrative; and (3) that narrative is accepted by the relevant experts. The experts do not detect that certain entities are artworks; rather, the fact that the experts assert that certain properties are significant in particular cases is constitutive of art (Stock 2003).

The similarity of these views to institutionalism is obvious, and the criticisms offered parallel those urged against institutionalism. First, historical definitions appear to require, but lack, any informative characterization of art traditions (art functions, artistic contexts, etc.) and hence any way of informatively distinguishing them (and likewise art functions, or artistic predecessors) from non -art traditions (non-art functions, non-artistic predecessors). Correlatively, non-Western art, or alien, autonomous art of any kind appears to pose a problem for historical views: any autonomous art tradition or artworks – terrestrial, extra-terrestrial, or merely possible – causally isolated from our art tradition, is either ruled out by the definition, which seems to be a reductio , or included, which concedes the existence of a supra-historical concept of art. So, too, there could be entities that for adventitious reasons are not correctly identified in historical narratives, although in actual fact they stand in relations to established artworks that make them correctly describable in narratives of the appropriate sort. Historical definitions entail that such entities aren’t artworks, but it seems at least as plausible to say that they are artworks that are not identified as such. Second, historical definitions also require, but do not provide, a satisfactory, informative account of the basis case – the first artworks, or ur-artworks, in the case of the intentional-historical definitions, or the first or central art-forms, in the case of historical functionalism. Third, nominalistic historical definitions seem to face a version of the Euthyphro dilemma. For either such definitions include substantive characterizations of what it is to be an expert, or they don’t. If, on one hand, they include no characterization of what it is to be an expert, and hence no explanation as to why the list of experts contains the people it does, then they imply that what makes things artworks is inexplicable. On the other hand, suppose such definitions provide a substantive account of what it is to be an expert, so that to be an expert is to possess some ability lacked by non-experts (taste, say) in virtue of the possession of which they are able to discern historical connections between established artworks and candidate artworks. Then the definition’s claim to be interestingly historical is questionable, because it makes art status a function of whatever ability it is that permits experts to discern the art-making properties.

Defenders of historical definitions have replies. First, as regards autonomous art traditions, it can be held that anything we would recognize as an art tradition or an artistic practice would display aesthetic concerns, because aesthetic concerns have been central from the start, and persisted centrally for thousands of years, in the Western art tradition. Hence it is an historical, not a conceptual truth that anything we recognize as an art practice will centrally involve the aesthetic; it is just that aesthetic concerns have always dominated our art tradition (Levinson 2002). The idea here is that if the reason that anything we’d take to be a Φ-tradition would have Ψ-concerns is that our Φ-tradition has focused on Ψ-concerns since its inception, then it is not essential to Φ-traditions that they have Ψ-concerns, and Φ is a purely historical concept . But this principle entails, implausibly, that every concept is purely historical. Suppose that we discovered a new civilization whose inhabitants could predict how the physical world works with great precision, on the basis of a substantial body of empirically acquired knowledge that they had accumulated over centuries. The reason we would credit them with having a scientific tradition might well be that our own scientific tradition has since its inception focused on explaining things. It does not seem to follow that science is a purely historical concept with no essential connection to explanatory aims. (Other theorists hold that it is historically necessary that art begins with the aesthetic, but deny that art’s nature is to be defined in terms of its historical unfolding (Davies 1997).) Second, as to the first artworks, or the central art-forms or functions, some theorists hold that an account of them can only take the form of an enumeration. Stecker takes this approach: he says that the account of what makes something a central art form at a given time is, at its core, institutional, and that the central artforms can only be listed (Stecker 1997 and 2005). Whether relocating the list at a different, albeit deeper, level in the definition renders the definition sufficiently informative is an open question. Third, as to the Euthyphro -style dilemma, it might be held that the categorial distinction between artworks and “mere real things” (Danto 1981) explains the distinction between experts and non-experts. Experts are able, it is said, to create new categories of art. When created, new categories bring with them new universes of discourse. New universes of discourse in turn make reasons available that otherwise would not be available. Hence, on this view, it is both the case that the experts’ say-so alone suffices to make mere real things into artworks, and also true that experts’ conferrals of art-status have reasons (McFee 2011).

4.4 Traditional (mainly aesthetic) definitions

Traditional definitions take some function(s) or intended function(s) to be definitive of artworks. Here only aesthetic definitions, which connect art essentially with the aesthetic – aesthetic judgments, experience, or properties – will be considered. Different aesthetic definitions incorporate different views of aesthetic properties and judgments. See the entry on aesthetic judgment .

As noted above, some philosophers lean heavily on a distinction between aesthetic properties and artistic properties, taking the former to be perceptually striking qualities that can be directly perceived in works, without knowledge of their origin and purpose, and the latter to be relational properties that works possess in virtue of their relations to art history, art genres, etc. It is also, of course, possible to hold a less restrictive view of aesthetic properties, on which aesthetic properties need not be perceptual; on this broader view, it is unnecessary to deny what it seems pointless to deny, that abstracta like mathematical entities and scientific laws possess aesthetic properties.)

Monroe Beardsley’s definition holds that an artwork is “either an arrangement of conditions intended to be capable of affording an experience with marked aesthetic character or (incidentally) an arrangement belonging to a class or type of arrangements that is typically intended to have this capacity” (Beardsley 1982, 299). (For more on Beardsley, see the entry on Beardsley’s aesthetics .) Beardsley’s conception of aesthetic experience is Deweyan: aesthetic experiences are experiences that are complete, unified, intense experiences of the way things appear to us, and are, moreover, experiences which are controlled by the things experienced (see the entry on Dewey’s aesthetics ). Zangwill’s aesthetic definition of art says that something is a work of art if and only if someone had an insight that certain aesthetic properties would be determined by certain nonaesthetic properties, and for this reason the thing was intentionally endowed with the aesthetic properties in virtue of the nonaesthetic properties as envisaged in the insight (Zangwill 1995a,b). Aesthetic properties for Zangwill are those judgments that are the subject of “verdictive aesthetic judgments” (judgements of beauty and ugliness) and “substantive aesthetic judgements” (e.g., of daintiness, elegance, delicacy, etc.). The latter are ways of being beautiful or ugly; aesthetic in virtue of a special close relation to verdictive judgments, which are subjectively universal. Other aesthetic definitions build in different accounts of the aesthetic. Eldridge’s aesthetic definition holds that the satisfying appropriateness to one another of a thing’s form and content is the aesthetic quality possession of which is necessary and sufficient for a thing’s being art (Eldridge 1985). Or one might define aesthetic properties as those having an evaluative component, whose perception involves the perception of certain formal base properties, such as shape and color (De Clercq 2002), and construct an aesthetic definition incorporating that view.

Views which combine features of institutional and aesthetic definitions also exist. Iseminger, for example, builds a definition on an account of appreciation, on which to appreciate a thing’s being F is to find experiencing its being F to be valuable in itself, and an account of aesthetic communication (which it is the function of the artworld to promote) (Iseminger 2004).

Aesthetic definitions have been criticized for being both too narrow and too broad. They are held to be too narrow because they are unable to cover influential modern works like Duchamp’s ready-mades and conceptual works like Robert Barry’s All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking – 1:36 PM; June 15, 1969 , which appear to lack aesthetic properties. (Duchamp famously asserted that his urinal, Fountain , was selected for its lack of aesthetic features.) Aesthetic definitions are held to be too broad because beautifully designed automobiles, neatly manicured lawns, and products of commercial design are often created with the intention of being objects of aesthetic appreciation, but are not artworks. Moreover, aesthetic views have been held to have trouble making sense of bad art (see Dickie 2001; Davies 2006, p. 37). Finally, more radical doubts about aesthetic definitions center on the intelligibility and usefulness of the aesthetic. Beardsley’s view, for example, has been criticized by Dickie, who has also offered influential criticisms of the idea of an aesthetic attitude (Dickie 1965, Cohen 1973, Kivy 1975).

To these criticisms several responses have been offered. First, the less restrictive conception of aesthetic properties mentioned above, on which they may be based on non-perceptual formal properties, can be deployed. On this view, conceptual works would have aesthetic features, much the same way that mathematical entities are often claimed to (Shelley 2003, Carroll 2004). Second, a distinction may be drawn between time-sensitive properties, whose standard observation conditions include an essential reference to the temporal location of the observer, and non-time-sensitive properties, which do not. Higher-order aesthetic properties like drama, humor, and irony, which account for a significant part of the appeal of Duchamp’s and Cage’s works, on this view, would derive from time-sensitive properties (Zemach 1997). Third, it might be held that it is the creative act of presenting something that is in the relevant sense unfamiliar, into a new context, the artworld, which has aesthetic properties. Or, fourth, it might be held that (Zangwill’s “second-order” strategy) works like ready-mades lack aesthetic functions, but are parasitic upon, because meant to be considered in the context of, works that do have aesthetic functions, and therefore constitute marginal borderline cases of art that do not merit the theoretical primacy they are often given. Finally, it can be flatly denied that the ready-mades were works of art (Beardsley 1982).

As to the over-inclusiveness of aesthetic definitions, a distinction might be drawn between primary and secondary functions. Or it may be maintained that some cars, lawns, and products of industrial design are on the art/non-art borderline, and so don’t constitute clear and decisive counter-examples. Or, if the claim that aesthetic theories fail to account for bad art depends on holding that some works have absolutely no aesthetic value whatsoever, as opposed to some non-zero amount, however infinitesimal, it may be wondered what justifies that assumption.

Hybrid definitions characteristically disjoin at least one institutional component with at least one aesthetic component, aiming thereby to accommodate both more traditional art and avant-garde art that appears to lack any significant aesthetic dimension. (Such definitions could also be classified as institutional, on the grounds that they make provenance sufficient for being a work of art.) Hence they inherit a feature of conventionalist definitions: in appealing to art institutions, artworlds, arts, art functions, and so on, they either include substantive accounts of what it is to be an art institution/world/genre/-form/function, or are uninformatively circular.

One such disjunctive definition, Longworth and Scarantino’s, adapts Gaut’s list of ten clustering properties, where that list (see 3.5 above) includes institutional properties (e.g., belonging to an established art form) and traditional ones (e.g., possessing positive aesthetic properties); see also Longworth and Scarantino 2010. The core idea is that art is defined by a disjunction of minimally sufficient and disjunctively necessary conditions; to say that a disjunct is a minimally sufficient constitutive condition for art-hood, is to say that every proper subset of it is insufficient for art-hood. An account of what it is for a concept to have disjunctive defining conditions is also supplied. The definition of art itself is as follows: ∃ Z ∃ Y (Art iff ( Z ∨ Y )), where (a) Z and Y , formed from properties on Gaut’s cluster list, are either non-empty conjunctions or non-empty disjunctions of conjunctions or individual properties; (b) there is some indeterminacy over exactly which disjuncts are sufficient; (c) Z does not entail Y and Y does not entail Z ; (d) Z does not entail Art and Y does not entail Art. Instantiation of either Z or Y suffices for art-hood; something can be art only if at least one of Z , Y is instantiated; and the third condition is included to prevent the definition from collapsing into a classical one. The account of what it is for concept C to have disjunctive defining conditions is as follows: C iff ( Z ∨ Y ), where (i) Z and Y are non-empty conjunctions or non-empty disjunctions of conjunctions or individual properties; (ii) Z does not entail Y and Y does not entail Z ; (iii) Z does not entail C and Y does not entail C . A worry concerns condition (iii): as written, it seems to render the account of disjunctive defining conditions self-contradictory. For if Z and Y are each minimally sufficient for C , it is impossible that Z does not entail C and that Y does not entail C . If so, then nothing can satisfy the conditions said to be necessary and sufficient for a concept to have disjunctive defining conditions.

A second disjunctive hybrid definition, with an historical cast, Robert Stecker’s historical functionalism, holds that an item is an artwork at time t , where t is not earlier than the time at which the item is made, if and only if it is in one of the central art forms at t and is made with the intention of fulfilling a function art has at t or it is an artifact that achieves excellence in achieving such a function (Stecker 2005). A question for Stecker’s view is whether or not it provides an adequate account of what it is for a function to be an art function, and whether, consequently, it can accommodate anti-aesthetic or non-aesthetic art. The grounds given for thinking that it can are that, while art’s original functions were aesthetic, those functions, and the intentions with which art is made, can change in unforeseeable ways. Moreover, aesthetic properties are not always preeminent in art’s predecessor concepts (Stecker 2000). A worry is that if the operative assumption is that if x belongs to a predecessor tradition of T then x belongs to T , the possibility is not ruled out that if, for example, the tradition of magic is a predecessor tradition of the scientific tradition, then entities that belong to the magic tradition but lacking any of the standard hallmarks of science are scientific entities.

A third hybrid definition, also disjunctive, is the cladistic definition defended by Stephen Davies. who holds that something is art (a) if it shows excellence of skill and achievement in realizing significant aesthetic goals, and either doing so is its primary, identifying function or doing so makes a vital contribution to the realization of its primary, identifying function, or (b) if it falls under an art genre or art form established and publicly recognized within an art tradition, or (c) if it is intended by its maker/presenter to be art and its maker/presenter does what is necessary and appropriate to realizing that intention (Davies 2015). (In biology, a clade is a segment in the tree of life: a group of organisms and the common ancestor they share.) Artworlds are to be characterized in terms of their origins: they begin with prehistoric art ancestors, and grow into artworlds. Hence all artworks occupy a line of descent from their prehistoric art ancestors; that line of descent comprises an art tradition that grows into an artworld. So the definition is bottom-up and resolutely anthropocentric. A worry: the view seems to entail that art traditions can undergo any changes whatsoever and remain art traditions, since, no matter how distant, every occupant of the right line of descent is part of the art tradition. This seems to amount to saying that as long as they remain traditions at all, art traditions cannot die. Whether art is immortal in this sense seems open to question. A second worry is that the requirement that every art tradition and artworld stand in some line of descent from prehistoric humanoids makes it in principle impossible for any nonhuman species to make art, as long as that species fails to occupy the right location in the tree of life. While the epistemological challenges that identifying artworks made by nonhumans might pose could be considerable, this consequence of the cladistic definition’s emphasis on lineage rather than traits raises a concern about excessively insularity.

A fourth hybrid definition is the “buck-passing” view of Lopes, which attempts an escape from the stalemate between artwork-focused definitions over avant-garde anti-aesthetic cases by adopting a strategy that shifts the focus of the definition of art away from artworks. The strategy is to recenter philosophical efforts on different problems, which require attention anyway: (a) the problem of giving an account of each individual art, and (b) the problem of defining what it is to be an art, the latter by giving an account of the larger class of normative/appreciative kinds to which the arts (and some non-arts) belong. For, given definitions of the individual arts, and a definition of what it is to be an art, if every artwork belongs to at least one art (if it belongs to no existing art, then it pioneers a new art), then a definition of artwork falls out: x is a work of art if and only if x is a work of K , where K is an art (Lopes 2014). When fully spelled out, the definition is disjunctive: x is a work of art if and only if x is a work belonging to art 1 or x is a work belonging to art 2 or x is a work belonging to art 3 …. Most of the explanatory work is done by the theories of the individual arts, since, given the assumption that every artwork belongs to at least one art, possession of theories of the individual arts would be necessary and sufficient for settling the artistic or non-artistic status of any hard case, once it is determined what art a given work belongs to. As to what makes a practice an art, Lopes’ preferred answer seems to be institutionalism of a Dickiean variety: an art is an institution in which artists (persons who participate with understanding in the making of artworks) make artworks to be presented to an artworld public (Lopes 2014, Dickie 1984). Thus, on this view, it is arbitrary which activities are artworld systems: there is no deeper answer to the question of what makes music an art than that it has the right institutional structure. [ 5 ] So it is arbitrary which activities are arts. Two worries. First, the key claim that every work of art belonging to no extant art pioneers a new art may be defended on the grounds that any reason to say that a work belonging to no extant artform is an artwork is a reason to say that it pioneers a new artform. In response, it is noted that the question of whether or not a thing belongs to an art arises only when, and because, there is a prior reason for thinking that the thing is an artwork. So it seems that what it is to be an artwork is prior, in some sense, to what it is to be an art. Second, on the buck-passing theory’s institutional theory of the arts, which activities are arts is arbitrary. This raises a version of the question that was raised about the cladistic definition’s ability to account for the existence of art outside our (Hominin) tradition. Suppose the connection between a practice’s traits and its status as an art are wholly contingent. Then the fact that a practice in another culture that although not part of our tradition had most of the traits of one of our own arts would be no reason to think that practice was an art, and no reason to think that the objects belonging to it were artworks. But it seems doubtful that we are really so in the dark when it comes to determining whether practices in alien cultures or traditions are arts.

4.6 Evolutionary Approaches;

The bearing of evolutionary considerations on the explanation and understanding of art is emphasized by some theorists. Some do so indirectly, and in bottom-up manner, by focusing on the neural mechanisms of perception or aesthetic experience. An approach that is broader and more pertinent to the definition of art is pursued by the ethologist Ellen Dissanayake. On the basis of studies of the performance arts, especially music, and the static arts (including, notably, petroglyphs), Dissanyake hypothesizes the existence of a distinctively human capacity she terms “making special” or “artifying” (Dissanayke 2018, 2013). The activity of making-special – i.e., making the ordinary “ extra -ordinary” – is practiced by all people at all times, and is aesthetically or proto-aesthetically motivated (Dissanayake 2013). It underlies art, ritual, and play; has “antecedents and counterparts in ritualized and play behaviors in nonhuman animals”; and can be manifested in pre-verbal, non-verbal, cross-modal, participative, and affiliative contexts. (Dissanayake 2018, 2013) Making-special involves capacities that are primarily emotional, not narrowly cognitive. It originates in patterns of ancestral mother-infant interaction, according to the hypothesis. These patterns (characterized cross-culturally by emphasis on vocal movement, emphatic contour, glissando, and dynamic variation) emerged in humans in the Pleistocene. Since the mother-infant relationship promotes infant survival and maternal reproductive success, the types of interactions that power that relationship continue to influence human behavior and cognition. Making-special in mother-infant interaction can be operationalized by five aesthetic or proto-aesthetic operations: formalization , which includes “shaping, composing, simplifying or forming a pattern or comprehensible whole,” rather than leaving the “ordinary” thing as it is naturally; repetition of elements, “often in a regularized, even rhythmic manner” different from the ordinary disposition of those elements; exaggeration of motifs; elaboration or dynamic variation of motivs; and manipulation of the perceiver's expectations (e.g., peek-a-boo) (Dissanayake 2013). These operations are characteristic of all artificers, across media, whether making-special/artifying artifacts, events, places, utterances, sounds, movements, or ideas. So artists, and mothers with infants, are focused on the same things: “attracting attention from an audiences, sustaining interest, and evoking and manipulating emotion” (Dissanayake 2018). Infants’ receptivity to exactly these operations suggests, then, that humans are born with aesthetic or proto-aesthetic capacities. The “elements that made possible successful ancestral mother-infant interaction comprise the biological seedbed from which individuals and cultures could later go on to create their arts”; mother-infant interactions “prepare infants to be artists in the broadest sense of the term” (Dissanayake 2018). One worry is whether the concept of making-special is so broad that it includes everything humans find interesting, not just the artistic and the aesthetic (Davies 2012). If so, the theory may provide the underpinnings or genus of, while being insufficient for, a definition of art. (See also the discussion of aesthetics and evolution in the entry aesthetics and cognitive science .

Conventionalist definitions account well for modern art, but have difficulty accounting for art’s universality – especially the fact that there can be art disconnected from “our” (Western) institutions and traditions, and our species. They also struggle to account for the fact that the same aesthetic terms are routinely applied to artworks, natural objects, humans, and abstracta. Aesthetic definitions do better accounting for art’s traditional, universal features, but less well, at least according to their critics, with revolutionary modern art; their further defense requires an account of the aesthetic which can be extended in a principled way to conceptual and other radical art. (An aesthetic definition and a conventionalist one could simply be conjoined. But that would merely raise, without answering, the fundamental question of the unity or disunity of the class of artworks.) Which defect is the more serious one depends on which explananda are the more important. Arguments at this level are hard to come by, because positions are hard to motivate in ways that do not depend on prior conventionalist and functionalist sympathies. If list-like definitions are flawed because uninformative, then so are conventionalist definitions, whether institutional or historical. Of course, if the class of artworks, or of the arts, is a mere chaotic heap, lacking any genuine unity, then enumerative definitions cannot be faulted for being uninformative: they do all the explaining that it is possible to do, because they capture all the unity that there is to capture. In that case the worry articulated by one prominent aesthetician, who wrote earlier of the “bloated, unwieldy” concept of art which institutional definitions aim to capture, needs to be taken seriously, even if it turns out to be ungrounded: “It is not at all clear that these words – ‘What is art?’ – express anything like a single question, to which competing answers are given, or whether philosophers proposing answers are even engaged in the same debate…. The sheer variety of proposed definitions should give us pause. One cannot help wondering whether there is any sense in which they are attempts to … clarify the same cultural practices, or address the same issue” (Walton 2007).

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What is Art? - A research on the concept and perception of Art in the 21st Century

The concept of Art and Artist has had a continuous evolution and countless definitions throughout history. But, are there really common concepts to define and perceive them in ancient and classic art as well as in modern? This thesis focuses on the current (year 2017) perception of what is considered art and what is considered an artist by ordinary people, out of what art and philosophy books tell.

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The presented statement is part of the volume it covers a variety of responses from people who interact with art in different ways. The aim is to suggest to the participant of the contemporary world a new, personal perspective to rethink what is this area of our world that we label with art; thoughts with and without theoretical suggestions - reflections by the creators and reflections by the audience, teaching humility and uniqueness, perhaps - forming a fresh perspective on art.

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Most modern definitions of art fail to successfully address the issue of the ever-changing nature of art, and rarely even attempt to provide an account which would be valid in more than just the modern Western context. This article develops a new theory which preserves the advantages of its predecessors, solves or avoids their problems, and has a scope wide enough to account for art of different times and cultures. An object is art in a given context, it is argued, iff some person(s) culturally competent in this context afforded it the status of a candidate for appreciation for reasons considered good in this context. This weakly institutional view is supplemented by auxiliary definitions explaining the notions of cultural contexts, competence and good reasons for affording the status. The relativisation to contexts brings increased explanatory power and scope, and the ability to account for the diversity of art.

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Art is a creative phenomenon which changes constantly, not just insofar as it is being created continually, but also in the very meaning of ‘art.’ Finding a suitable definition of art is no easy task and it has been the subject of much inquiry throughout artistic expression. This paper suggests a crucial distinction between ‘art forms’ and ‘forms of art’ is necessary in order to better understand art. The latter of these corresponds to that which we would typically call art such as painting, singing, etc. The former corresponds to the form out of which these take shape, movement, speech, etc. With this distinction set out, it becomes clearer that art and the aesthetic is rooted in the properties of the ‘thing’ such as the color, shape, and the texture, rather than the product of creation itself. Thus, the future of art will bring a new aesthetic in which these properties become recognized as art and as such there will be an aesthetic of everyday life.

The traditional conception of art is about sensual beauty and refined taste; modern art on the other hand has introduced an entirely unexpected dimension to the visual arts, namely that of 'revelatory narrative'. Classical art aspires to present works which can be appreciated as sensually beautiful; modern art, when it succeeds, presents us instead with the unsettling narrative. This radical difference in artistic purpose is something relatively new, and not yet fully appreciated or understood.

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7 Definition of Art

Robert Stecker is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant.

Published: 02 September 2009
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The project of defining art most commonly consists in the attempt to find necessary conditions and sufficient conditions for the truth of the statement that an item is an artwork . That is, the goal is normally to find a principle for classifying all artworks together while distinguishing them from all non-artworks. Sometimes the goal is set higher. Some look for a ‘real’ definition: that is, one in terms of necessary conditions that are jointly sufficient for being an artwork. Sometimes the aim is to identify a metaphysical essence that all artworks have in common. This article surveys the main trends that mark the history of the project of defining art in the twentieth century before discussing the most important efforts in the past thirty years.

‘ Art ’ is most often used to refer to a set of forms, practices or institutions. However, when we ask: ‘Is that art?’ we are usually asking whether an individual item is a work of art. The project of defining art most commonly consists in the attempt to find necessary conditions and sufficient conditions for the truth of the statement that an item is an artwork . That is, the goal is normally to find a principle for classifying all artworks together while distinguishing them from all non-artworks. Sometimes the goal is set higher. Some look for a ‘real’ definition: that is, one in terms of necessary conditions that are jointly sufficient for being an artwork. Sometimes the aim is to identify a metaphysical essence that all artworks have in common.

A definition of art should be distinguished from a philosophical theory of art, which is invariably a broader project with vaguer boundaries. Such a theory may touch on many issues other that the issue of definition, or may even studiously avoid that issue in favour of others. A theory of art will typically concern itself centrally with questions of value, for example whether there is some unique value that only artworks offer. In any case, it will attempt to identify the valuable properties of art that are responsible for its great importance in most, if not all, cultures. It may give attention to cognitive issues, such as what one must know to understand an artwork, and what it is for an interpretation of a work to be good, acceptable, or true. A theory of art may be interested in other sorts of responses or attitudes to artworks, such as emotional responses. It may focus on the fictionality characteristic of so many works of art, or on their formal, representational, or expressive properties. It may deal with the social, historical, institutional, or intentional characteristics of art. A theory of art will address several of these issues, display the connections among them, and sometimes, but only sometimes, attempt to formulate a definition either of art or of artistic value, or both on the basis of some of these other artistic properties.

This chapter will survey the main trends that mark the history of the project of defining art in the twentieth century before discussing the most important efforts in the past thirty years.

1. Historical Background

Even before turning to the twentieth century, something should be said about the historical roots of the attempt to define art. It is sometimes supposed that the earliest definitions of art are to be found in the writings of ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. In fact, one will not find, in these writers, a definition of art, in the sense of an item belonging to the fine arts or of art in its current sense, if that departs from the concept of the fine arts. It is now widely accepted that the former concept was not fully in place until some time in the eighteenth century, and hence it seems implausible that the ancients would think in terms of, or try to define, art in that sense. What is true is that they wrote about such things as poetry, painting, music, and architecture, which came to be classified as fine arts, and saw some common threads among them. Plato was very interested in the fact that poetry, like painting, was a representation or imitation of various objects and features of the world, including human beings and their actions, and that it had a powerful effect on the emotions. Aristotle also emphasized the idea of poetry as imitation and characterized other arts, such as music, in those terms.

This way of thinking of the arts wielded enormous influence in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and so when the concept of the fine arts solidified the first definitions of art were cast in terms of representation, by such important figures as Hutcheson, Batteux, and Kant. It is not necessary to set out the exact content of all of these definitions here, since in the later period in which we are interested they were superseded by other approaches. Of those earlier definitions, Kant's is the one that has had truly lasting influence. Fine art, according to Kant, is one of two ‘aesthetic arts’, i.e. arts of representation where ‘the feeling of pleasure is what is immediately in view’. The end of agreeable art is pleasurable sensation. The pleasure afforded by the representations of fine art , in contrast, is ‘one of reflection’, which is to say that it arises from the exercise of our imaginative and cognitive powers. Fine art is ‘a mode of representation which is intrinsically final… and has the effect of advancing the culture of the mental powers in the interest of social communication’ (Kant 1952 : 165–6). There are elements in this conception that survive even after the idea that the essence of art is representation is abandoned. One is a series of contrasts between (fine) art, properly understood, and entertainment (agreeable art). Art makes more demands on the intellect but offers deeper satisfactions. Art is ‘intrinsically final’, i.e. appreciated for its own sake. Art has some essential connection with communication.

The struggle to replace the mimetic paradigm takes place in the nineteenth century. This occurs on many fronts, just as did the formation of the concept of the fine arts a century earlier. Artistic movements such as romanticism, impressionism, and art-for-art's-sake challenge ideals associated with mimeticism and direct attention to other aspects of art, such as the expression of the artist and the experience of the audience. Debates among critics in response to these movements raise questions about the boundaries of art. The invention of photography challenges the mimetic ideal in painting, at least if that is regarded as the increasingly accurate, life-like representation of what we see. The increasing prestige of purely instrumental music provides at least one clear example of non-representational art. For some, such music provides a new paradigm captured by Walter Pater's claim that all the arts aspire to the condition of music. In response to all this, new definitions of art appear, especially expression theories, formalist theories, and aesthetic theories.

What all these theories have in common with each other, as with mimeticism, is that they each identify a single valuable property or function of art, and assert that it is this property that qualifies something as art. Call these simple functionalist theories . Such theories dominate the attempt to define art right through the middle of the twentieth century. Although they now no longer dominate, they are still regularly put forward. Those cited at the end of the last paragraph have been the most important and influential examples of this type of theory. Each deserves attention in some detail.

2. Art as Expression

The ostensible difference between expression and representation is that, while the latter looks outward and attempts to re-present nature, society, and human form and action, the former looks inward in an attempt to convey moods, emotions, or attitudes. We seem to find instances of expressive art where representation is de-emphasized or absent. It is very common to think of instrumental music, or at least many pieces of music, in these terms. As the visual arts moved towards greater abstraction, they too often seem to de-emphasize, or abandon representation for the sake of expression. One can even extend this to literature, which pursued expressivist goals from the advent of romantic poetry through the invention of ‘stream of consciousness’ and other techniques to express interiority. So it might seem that one could find art without representation but not without expression. This might encourage the further thought, independently encouraged by various romantic and expressivist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that, even when expression and representation co-occur, the real business of art is expression.

Space permits the examination of only one specific proposal to define art in terms of expression. The definition comes from Collingwood's Principles of Art ( 1938 ). Collingwood defines art primarily as an activity: that of clarifying an emotion, by which he means identifying the emotion one is feeling not merely as a general type, such as anger or remorse, but with as much particularity as possible. Collingwood does not deny that one can rephrase this definition in terms of a work of art rather than an activity, but he believes that the work exists primarily in the minds of artist and audience, rather than in one of the more usual artistic media. However, he seems to think of the job of the medium as enabling the communication of the emotion to the audience who then have the same clarified emotion in their minds, which is to say, for Collingwood, the work of art itself.

The definition has well known problems. First, even if expressiveness, in some sense, is a widespread phenomenon in the arts, it is far too narrowly circumscribed by Collingwood. He prescribes a certain process by which a work of art must come about, whereas it is in fact a contingent matter whether works are created in the way he recognizes. Not unexpectedly, the definition rules out many items normally accepted as art works, including some of the greatest in the Western tradition, such as the plays of Shakespeare, which by Collingwood's lights are entertainment rather than art. The definition assumes that the emotion expressed in a work is always the artist's emotion, but it is not at all clear why a work cannot express, or be expressive of, an emotion not felt by the artist when creating the work. In recent years, the idea that art expresses an actual person's emotion has given way to the idea that art is expressive of emotion in virtue of possessing expressive properties, such as the property of being sad, joyful, or anxious, however such properties are analysed. Such properties can be perceived in the work, and their presence in a work does not require any specific process of creation.

Traditional expression theories like Collingwood's have been widely rejected, even if some still believe they point towards one of the central functions of art. However, the idea that art is expression, qualified by a number of additional conditions, lives on in work of Arthur Danto. Though properly regarded as an expression theory of art, I would claim that Danto's version of this theory arises within a sufficiently different intellectual and artistic context as to be best treated at a later stage of this discussion. So, putting it on hold for now, we turn to other simple functionalist conceptions of art.

3. Formalism

Developing alongside expression theories of art were formalist theories. If one stops thinking that art is all about representation, a natural further thought, if one is thinking in simple functionalist terms, is that what art is all about is form rather than representational content. This thought gained support from various developments in the arts during the time of high modernism, a long, exciting period roughly between 1880 and 1960. Though many artforms contain modernist masterpieces, the work of painters were the paradigm and inspiration for many of the most influential formalist theories. Cézanne in particular was the darling of the early formalists Clive Bell ( 1914 ) and Roger Fry ( 1920 ). Cézanne's paintings contain perfectly traditional representational subjects—landscape, portraiture, still life—but his innovations could be seen as formal, with virtually no concern, furthermore, to express anything inner other than Cézanne's eye making features of visual reality salient. These innovations involved the use of an wide-ranging palette, a handling of line, and an interest in the three-dimensional geometry of his subjects, which give his figures a ‘solidity’ not found in his impressionist predecessors, while at the same time ‘flattening’ the planes of the pictorial surface. Taking such formal features as the raison d'être for these paintings became the typical formalist strategy for understanding the increasingly abstract works of twentieth-century modernism, as well as for reconceiving the history of art. Like the other simple functionalist theories under discussion here, formalism is not just an attempt to define art. It is a philosophical theory of art in the sense indicated above. It also attempts to identify the value of art, and what needs to be understood in order to appreciate an artwork.

A formalist attempt to define art faces several initial tasks. They all have to do with figuring out how to deploy the notion of form in a definition. One can't just say: art is form or art is what has form, because everything has form in some sense. The first task is thus to identify a relevant sense of ‘form’ or, in other words, to identify which properties give a work form . Second, if objects other than artworks can have form in the relevant sense, one has to find something special about the way artworks possess such form.

The best known and most explicit formalist definition of art is Clive Bell's. According to Bell, art is what has significant form. Significant form is form that imbues what possesses it with a special sort of value that consists in the affect produced in those who perceive it. Bell calls the affect ‘the aesthetic emotion’, though, as Carol Gould ( 1994 ) has pointed out, this is probably a misnomer since what he has in mind is more likely a positive, pleasurable reaction to a perceptual experience. So Bell performs the second task mentioned above by claiming that what is special about form in art is that it is valuable in a special way.

However, until Bell dispatches the first of the tasks mentioned above, i.e. until we know what he means by form, his claims about significant form are unilluminating. Unfortunately, regarding this task, Bell is remarkably cavalier. Being concerned primarily with the visual arts, he sometimes suggests that the building blocks of form are line and colour combined in a certain way. But this is not adequate to his examples, which include: St Sophia, the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, and the masterpieces of Poussin. Perhaps even three-dimensional works such as buildings, bowls, and sculptures in some abstract sense are ‘built’ out of line and colour. A more straightforward way to itemize the formal properties of a bowl would be colour, three-dimensional shape, and the patterns, if any, that mark its surfaces. Notice that any three-dimensional object has formal properties so characterized, and those that have significant form are a subclass of those that have form. Essentially the same is true in the cases of buildings and sculptures, though these are typically far more complex in having many parts or sub-forms that interact with each other and with a wider environment. But a similar complexity can be found in many three-dimensional objects, both manufactured and natural.

In the case of pictures in general, and paintings in particular, which is the sort of visual art in which Bell was most interested, speaking of form as arising from line and colour is, if anything, more unilluminating because all sorts of its properties, including the representational properties so arise. Further, it gives no indication of the complexity of the concept as it applies to a two-dimensional medium capable of depicting three dimensions. The fact is that the form of a painting includes, but is hardly confined to, the two-dimensional array of lines and colour patches that mark its surface. As Malcom Budd ( 1995 ) has pointed out in one of the most sensitive treatments of the topic, it also includes the way objects, abstractly conceived, are laid out in the represented three-dimensional space of the work and the interaction of these two- and three-dimensional aspects.

If we can pin down the sense of form as it applies across the various art media, can we then go on to assert that something is an artwork just in case it has significant form? Bell's definition hinges on his ability to identify not just form, but significant form, and many have questioned whether he is able to do this in a noncircular fashion. His most explicit attempts on this score are plainly circular or empty, involving the interdefinition of two technical terms, significant form being what and only what produces the aesthetic emotion, and the aesthetic emotion being what is produced by and only by significant form. Others (Gould 1994 ), however, have claimed that a substantive understanding of when form is significant can be recovered from formalist descriptions of artworks purportedly in possession of it.

Even if Bell can successfully identify significant form, his definition is not satisfactory. It misfires in a number of respects that are typical of the simple functionalist approach. First, it rules out the possibility of bad art, since significant form is always something to be valued highly. Perhaps there can be degrees of it, but it is not something that can occur to a very small degree unless one can say that a work has negligible significant form. Second, it displays the common vice of picking out one important property for which we value art, while ignoring others at the cost of excluding not just bad works but many great works. Thus, someone who defines art as significant form has little use for artists like Breughel whose paintings, many of which teem with vast numbers of tiny human figures, give a rich sense of many aspects of human life but lack art's defining feature as Bell would understand it.

Perhaps there is a better way to deploy the notion of form or formal value in a definition of art. This is a possibility that, whatever its merits, has gone largely unexplored. Instead, those who remained attached to the simple functionalist model turned to an alternative approach using a more flexible concept, that of the aesthetic. So, rather than exploring hypothetical formalisms, we turn to this new approach.

4. Aesthetic Definitions

The concept of the aesthetic is both ambiguous and contested, but there are other chapters in this volume devoted to the explication of those issues, and so little will be said about them here. For our purposes, we can stipulate that the aesthetic refers in the first instance to intrinsically valuable experience that results from close attention to the sensuous features of an object or to an imaginary world it projects. Aesthetic properties of objects are those that have inherent value in virtue of the aesthetic experience they afford. Aesthetic interest is an interest in such experiences and properties. Aesthetic definitions—attempts to define art in terms of such experiences, properties, or interest—have been, with only a few exceptions, the definitions of choice among those pursuing the simple functionalist project during the last thirty years. The brief exposition above of definitions of art in terms of representational, expressive, and formal value suggests why this is the case. Each of the previous attempts to define art do so by picking out a valuable feature of art and claiming that all and only things that have that feature are artworks. One of the objections to each of the definitions was that they excluded some works of art, even some possessing considerable value, but not in virtue of the feature preferred by the definition. Hence such definitions are not extensionally adequate.

By contrast, aesthetic definitions seem, at first glance, to be free of this problem. Form and representation can both afford intrinsically valuable experience, and, typically, such experience does not exclude one aspect in favour of the other. The same is true for the experience afforded by the expressive properties of works. All such experience can be regarded under the umbrella of aesthetic experience.

Aesthetic definitions of art are numerous and new ones are constantly on offer. I mention here a few of the better known or better constructed definitions.

An artwork is something produced with the intention of giving it the capacity to satisfy aesthetic interest (Beardsley 1983 ).

A work of art is an artefact which under standard conditions provides its percipient with aesthetic experience (Schlesinger 1979 ).

An ‘artwork’ is any creative arrangement of one or more media whose principal function is to communicate a significant aesthetic object (Lind 1992 ).

Despite the fact that the notion of the aesthetic better serves the simple functionalist than the notions of representation, expression, or form, such definitions are still are far from satisfactory. To bring this out, consider two basic requirements on the definition of any kind (class, property, concept) K: (i) that it provide necessary conditions for belonging to (being, falling under) K, and (ii) that they provide sufficient conditions for belonging to (being, falling under) K. To be an artwork, is it necessary that it provide aesthetic experience or even that it be made with the intention that it satisfy an interest in such experience? Many have thought not. Those who deny it are impressed with art movements like Dadaism, conceptual art, and performance art. These movements are concerned, in one way or another, with conveying ideas seemingly stripped of aesthetic interest. Dadaist works, such as Duchamp's readymades, appear to be precisely aimed at questioning the necessary connection between art and the aesthetic by selecting objects with little or no aesthetic interest, such as urinals, snow shovels, and bottle racks. Some instances of performance art appear to be based on the premiss that political ideas can be conveyed more effectively without the veneer of aesthetic interest. Conceptual works seem to forgo or sideline sensory embodiment entirely.

Defenders of aesthetic definitions take two approaches to replying to this objection. Some (Beardsley 1983 ) attempt to deny that the apparent counter-examples are artworks, but this seems to be a losing battle as the number of ostensible counter-examples increase and gain critical and popular acceptance as artworks. What has recently come to be the more common tack in replying to the objection is to claim that the apparent counter-examples do have aesthetic properties (Lind 1992 ). The readymades, for example, have such properties on more than one level. Simply regarded as objects, they have features that to a greater or lesser degree reward contemplation. As artworks, they powerfully express Duchamp's ironic posture towards art.

Can we deploy the notion of the aesthetic to provide a sufficient condition for being an artwork? As the previous paragraph already begins to suggest, any object has the potential to be of aesthetic interest, and so providing aesthetic experience is hardly unique to art. Beardsley's definition rules out natural objects, since they are not made with the requisite intention, but it seems to rule in many artefacts that are not artworks, but are made with aesthetically pleasing features.

There are three ways in which a defender of aesthetic definitions of art might try to cope with the pervasiveness of the aesthetic outside of art per se . One way is to redefine what counts as art as any artefact with aesthetic interest. (Zangwill 2000 suggests this approach.) The problem with this move is that it just changes the subject from an attempt to figure out why we classify objects as art to a mere stipulation that something is art if it is an aesthetic object. A definition that includes doughnut boxes, ceiling fans, and toasters, even when not put forward as readymades, is simply not a definition of art in a sense others have attempted to capture. Second, one can attempt to rule out non-art artefacts by claiming that artworks have a ‘significant’ aesthetic interest that distinguishes them from the ‘mere’ aesthetic interest possessed by other artefacts (see Lind 1992 ). But this line is equally unlikely to succeed. The more one requires such ‘significance’, the less likely it is that all artworks will possess it, for we have seen that many recent works are not concerned primarily with creating a rich aesthetic experience. The last strategy is to claim that, despite intuitions to the contrary, aesthetic experience is something that is either uniquely or primarily provided by art. This strategy faces the daunting task of specifying an experience common to all artworks, and one that art uniquely or primarily provides, but without making essential reference to the concept of art. Though some, such as Beardsley ( 1969 ), have attempted such a specification, the consensus is that no proposal has been successful.

5. Anti-Essentialism

Although aesthetic definitions of art continue to have adherents, the dominant trend within this topic since the 1950s has been to reject simple functionalism in all of its forms. This rejection began with the more sweeping thought that the attempt to define art is misguided because necessary and sufficient conditions do not exist capable of supporting a real definition of art. The most influential proponents of this anti-essentialism were Morris Weitz ( 1956 ) and Paul Ziff ( 1953 ). Guided by Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, they claimed that it was atypical for ordinary language empirical concepts to operate on the basis of such conditions. Rather, as Weitz put it, most such concepts were ‘open-textured’, meaning that the criteria by which we apply the concept do not determine its application in every possible situation. While the concept of art is by no means unique in being opentextured for Weitz and Ziff, the concept still stands apart from many other empirical concepts in one respect. For many empirical concepts, open texture merely creates a theoretical possibility that situations may arise in which criteria no longer guide us, and a new decision is needed whether the concept applies. Weitz and Ziff conceived of art as requiring such decisions on a regular basis as new art movements continually create novel works. This novelty provides a constant source of counter-examples to simple functionalist definitions.

Instead of being classified by necessary and sufficient conditions, claimed Weitz and Ziff, works are classified as art in virtue of ‘family resemblances’, or sets of similarities based on multiple paradigms. So one work is art in virtue of one set of similarities to other works, while another is art in virtue of a different set of similarities. An alternative approach, also Wittgensteinian in spirit, is that art is a cluster concept (see Gaut 2000 ). This means that we can discern several different sets of properties the possession of any of which suffices for an object to achieve art status, but no one of which is by itself necessary for such status.

Each of these suggestions, while proposing that the concept of art is best captured by something other than a definition, in fact lays the ground for new approaches to defining art. The family resemblance view claims that the concept of art is formed by a network of similarities. But which ones accomplish this? If none are specified then the view is empty, since everything bears a similarity to everything else. In fact, Ziff suggested that the relevant domain of similarities will be social or functional in nature, though, in the case of the latter, not in the way simple functionalists had hoped for. As for the cluster concept view, if the set of conditions sufficient for being an artwork are finite and enumerable, it is already equivalent to a definition of art, viz. a disjunctive definition.

While attempting to demonstrate that art cannot be defined, anti-essentialism actually resulted in a whole new crop of definitions, most of which look completely different from their simple functionalist predecessors and rivals.

6. Danto and Dickie

In a highly influential article, Maurice Mandelbaum ( 1965 ) was among the first to point out that the appeal to family resemblance does not preclude, but rather invites, definition. It may be true that when we look at the resembling features within a literal family, we may find no one exhibited likeness that they all have in common. However, Mandelbaum observes, family resemblance is no more satisfactorily explicated in terms of an open-ended set of similarities differentially shared among the family's members; for people outside the family may also possess the exhibited features without these thereby bearing a family resemblance to the original set of people. Rather, what is needed to capture the idea of family resemblance is a non-exhibited relation, namely that of resemblance among those with a common ancestry . Without proposing a specific definition, Mandelbaum suggested that in attempting to define art we may fill in the gap left to us by the family resemblance view by appealing to some non-exhibited relational property—perhaps one involving intention, use, or origin.

Among the first to explore the possibility of defining art in these terms, and certainly the most influential proponents of this approach, were Arthur Danto and George Dickie. In part because both cast their thought about art in terms of ‘the artworld’, in part because Danto was not explicit about his proposed definition, for some time it was thought that they were advancing similar definitions of art. However, it is now understood that each was developing quite different theories, Danto's being historical and functional and Dickie's, radically afunctional and institutional.

In some early papers, Danto ( 1964 , 1973 ) outlines desiderata to which a definition of art must conform without yet setting forth a definition that satisfactorily meets the desiderata. The first point, illustrated by the readymades as well as by such works as Warhol's Brillo Boxes, is that art and non-art can be perceptually indistinguishable and so cannot be marked off from each other by ‘exhibited’ properties. (A corollary to this is that one artwork cannot always be distinguished from another by appeal to exhibited properties.) Second, an artwork always exists in an art historical context, and this is a crucial condition for it to be art. Art historical context relates a given work to the history of art. It also provides ‘an atmosphere of artistic theory’, art being ‘the kind of thing that depends for its existence on theories’ (Danto 1981 : 135). Third, ‘Nothing is an artwork without an interpretation which constitutes it as such’ (p. 135). Every work of art is about something, but, equally, invariably expresses an attitude of the artist towards the work's subject or ‘way of seeing’ the same. An interpretation, then, tells us what the work is about and how it is seen by its maker; further, it expresses the artist's intention on this score.

Danto's most important work in the philosophy of art, and his most sustained attempt to discern the essence of art, is his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace ( 1981 ), in which he elaborates on the considerations stated above and adds others. However, it was left to commentators to fashion an explicitly stated definition of art from this material. The best statement, and one endorsed by Danto, is provided by Noël Carroll ( 1993 : 80) as follows. X is a work of art if and only if ( a ) X has a subject ( b ) about which X projects an attitude or point of view ( c ) by means of rhetorical (usually metaphorical) ellipsis ( d ), which ellipsis requires audience participation to fill in what is missing (interpretation) ( e ), where both the work and the interpretation require an art-historical context.

To a considerable extent, this definition follows the pattern of traditional simple functionalist definitions of art. Basically, conditions ( a ) and ( b ) give to art the function of projecting a point of view or attitude of the artist about a subject, and this puts it in the broad class of attempts to define art in terms of expression. That this function is accomplished in a special way ( c ), and requires a certain response from the audience ( d ), are not uncommon features of expression theories. If anything sets Danto's definition apart from other simple functionalist proposals, it is the final condition, ( e ), which requires that a work and its interpretation stand in a historical relation to other artworks.

It is this last feature that has made Danto's definition influential, but it is not clear that it helps very much to save it from the fate of other simple functionalist definitions. Many believe that there are works of art that fail to meet all of the first four conditions. For example, aren't many works of music, architecture, or ceramics, and even some abstract or decorative works, which are arguably not about anything, nevertheless instances of works of art?

George Dickie's artworld is different from Danto's. Rather than consisting in historically related works, styles, and theories, it is an institution. In attempting to define art in terms of an institution, Dickie abandons the attempt to offer a definition not only in terms of exhibited features, but in terms of functions of any sort. Dickie originally conceived of this institution as one that exists to confer an official status, even if it does so through informal procedures. Increasingly, however, he came to view it differently, as one geared to the production of a class of artefacts and to their presentation to a public.

As might be guessed from his changing understanding of the institution of art, Dickie has proposed two distinct institutional definitions of art, the second being based on his own rejection of the first. Both, however, have received a great deal of attention and exercised considerable influence, so each deserves some discussion here. The first definition goes as follows:

Something is a work of art if and only if (1) it is an artifact, and (2) a set of aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of the Artworld. (Dickie 1974 : 34)

Notice that the status conferred that makes some artefact an artwork is the status not of being art (at least, not straightforwardly that), but of being a candidate for appreciation, and this status is conferred on a set of aspects of the item rather than on the item itself. Dickie's definition itself does not tell us who in the artworld typically confers status. One might think it would be people like critics, art gallery owners, or museum directors, because they are the ones who select and make salient to a broader public aspects of a work for appreciation. However, Dickie's commentary on the definition makes clear that he thinks artists are the exclusive agents of status conferral. Since conferring would seem to be an action, one might wonder what an artist does to bring it about. It can't just be making something with properties capable of being considered for appreciation. Stephen Davies ( 1991 : 85) has suggested that conferral consists in someone with the appropriate authority making, or putting forward, such an object.

For many, the crucial idea that makes this definition of art institutional is that being an artwork consists of possessing a status conferred on it by someone with the authority to do so. However, this is precisely the idea that Dickie eventually rejected. Rightly or wrongly, he came to view status conferral as implying a formal process, but felt that no such process need occur—nor, typically, does it occur—in bringing artworks into existence.

Dickie's second definition of art is part of a set of five definitions that present the ‘leanest possible description of the essential framework of art’:

An artist is a person who participates with understanding in making a work of art.

A work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public.

A public is a set of persons whose members are prepared in some degree to understand an object that is presented to them.

The artworld is the totality of all artworld systems.

An artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public. (Dickie 1984 : 80–1)

The basic idea here is that the status of being art is not something that is conferred by some agent's authority, but instead derives from a work being properly situated in a system of relations. Pre-eminent in this system is the relation of the work to the artist and to an artworld public. It is the work's being created by the artist against the ‘background of the artworld’ (Dickie 1984 : 12) that establishes it as an artefact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public, i.e. an artwork.

If we abstract from the particulars of Dickie's two definitions, one can discern a common strategy that gives rise to a set of common problems for his approach. In both definitions, Dickie set out a structure that is shared with other institutions or practices beyond the ‘artworld’. Conferral of status occurs in many settings, and even the conferral of the status of candidate of appreciation frequently occurs outside the artworld (whether or not it occurs within it). For example, an ‘official’ tourist brochure issued by a tourism board confers the status of candidate for appreciation on some particular place. So does official recognition that a building is ‘historical’. (Remember that Dickie self-consciously refuses to say what kind of appreciation is conferred by agents of the artworld.) Even advertising might be thought to confer such status, as is certainly its aim.

How does Dickie's first definition distinguish between these conferrals of candidacy for appreciation from art-making conferrals? Only by referring to the artworld, i.e. gesturing towards artforms and their making, distribution, and presentation, without explaining what marks these off from other status-conferring practices. Similarly, regarding the second definition, there are many artefact production and presentations systems outside the artworld. Wherever a product is produced for consumers, there is such a system. How does Dickie distinguish artworld systems from other artefact presentation systems? He does so only by naming the artworld systems ‘artworld systems’, i.e. by gesturing towards the relevant systems without explaining what marks them off.

This strategy gives rise to the problems of circularity and incompleteness (see Walton 1977 ; Levinson 1987 ; Davies 1991 ; Stecker 1986 , 1997 ). Dickie acknowledges that his definitions are circular, but denies that this is a problem. It is clearly a problem, however, when a definition is insufficiently informative to mark off the extension of what it is attempting to define. Because Dickie's definitions simply gesture towards the artworld without marking it off from similar systems, it is incomplete for lack of informativeness. Dickie ( 1989 ) replies that it is ultimately arbitrary whether or not a system is part of the artworld, but such a claim seems to be an admission that the definition cannot be completed.

7. Historical Approaches and the Revival of Functionalism

Others have proposed that the situation is not as hopeless as Dickie (inadvertently) suggests. Kendall Walton ( 1977 ) was among the first to suggest that the artworld systems that Dickie gestures towards might be defined historically. Walton's suggestion is that the artworld consists of a limited number of proto-systems plus other systems that develop historically from these in a certain manner ( 1977 : 98). Dickie ( 1984 : 76) has pointed out that this leaves unsettled the issue of why the proto-systems belong to the artworld in the first place, and has expressed the belief that no real explanation is possible. This assessment may again be over-hasty. One possible place to look for the set of original proto-systems would be the formation of the system of the fine arts in the eighteenth century, with poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music (possibly confined to vocal music) being the paradigmatic proto-artforms. Surely, there is an explanation of why these forms comprised an important category at this time. This explanation might refer to a common functional property, or, it might itself be historical. A residual problem with this approach is whether it accounts for all items classified as artworks. The view appears to imply that to be art it is necessary and sufficient that it belong to an artform or art system, and not everyone would accept both parts of that claim (Levinson 1979 ; Stecker 1997 ). The view, even rehabilitated along quasi-historical lines, may also fail to account for artworks and artforms from non-western and earlier western cultures that are conceptually but not historically linked in the right way to the eighteenth-century prototypes.

Stephen Davies is the most important defender of the institutional approach since Dickie. Davies does not actually offer a definition of art, but sketches lines along which it should develop. First, it should reinstate the idea that the artworld is structured according to roles defined by the authority they give to those who occupy them. Art status is conferred on works by artists in virtue of the authority of the role they occupy. Second, artworld institutions should be understood historically. Davies's discussions of the historical roots of art has come to focus more on individual artworks than on artworld systems. Consider very early artworks. Did such works exist in an institutional setting? If so, what gave rise to these institutions? Surely, it was even earlier works around which the institutions grew. Davies initially attempted to give an institutional analysis to cases like this as well as cases of isolated artists whose work is disconnected from art institutions as we know them (Davies 1991 ). His current view, however, is that the earliest art, the prototypes from which art and its institutions arose, are to be understood functionally. Such items are art because their aesthetic value is essential to their function. However, once art institutions become established, art can develop in ways that no longer require an aesthetic—or any other—function (Davies 1997 , 2000 ).

In addition to attempts to historicize the institutional approach to defining art, a number of philosophers have explored other forms of historical definition. Jerrold Levinson has proposed that an historical relation holding among the intentions of artists and prior artworks is definitive of art (Levinson 1979 , 1989 , 1993 ); James Carney claims that the relation is one holding among historically evolving styles ( 1991 , 1994 ); while Noël Carroll, though not offering a definition, has put forward the suggestion that art is identified by historical narratives which link later works to earlier ones (Carroll 1994 ). Robert Stecker asserts that art is defined in terms of historically evolving functions ( 1997 ).

Levinson's proposal is one of the best worked out and most carefully defended. It is that ‘an artwork is a thing that has been seriously intended for regard-as-a-work-of-art, i.e., regard in any way pre-existing artworks are or were correctly regarded’ (Levinson 1989 : 21).

One wants to know more about what it is to intend a thing for regard-as-a-work-of-art, and why this core aspect of Levinson's definition does not make it as tightly circular as Dickie's. It turns out there can be two relevant types of intention. On the ‘intrinsic’ type, one intends a work for a complex of regards for features found in earlier artworks without having any specific artwork, genre, movement, or tradition in mind. One might intend it for regard for its form, expressiveness, verisimilitude, and so on. Alternatively, there is the ‘relational’ type of intention, in which one intends an object for regard as some particular artwork, genre, etc. is or was correctly regarded. When one fills in these possible regards, in theory, one eliminates the expression ‘as-a-work-of-art’, which is the basis of Levinson's defence against the charge of circularity.

As with some other historical accounts (such as Carney's and Carroll's), Levinson's main idea is that something is a work of art because of a relation it bears to earlier artworks, which are in turn art because of a relation they bear to still earlier works, and so on. Once this is clear, it becomes obvious that, as one moves back along the relational chain, one will come across artworks for which there are none earlier. These earliest artworks have come to be called ‘first art’. We need a separate account of what makes first artworks art, and a reason for thinking that this separate account won't serve to explain why all artworks are art, obviating the need for a historical approach. Davies now gives an essentially functional account of first art in his historicized institutional approach ( 1997 , 2000 ), and would claim that this won't explain why all artworks are art because, within an art institution, objects can acquire art status while lacking the original function of art.

Levinson prefers to avoid this straightforwardly functionalist approach to first art. For him, what makes something first art is that it is ‘the ultimate causal source and intentional reference of later activities we take as paradigmatically art’. Furthermore, first art aims at ‘many of the same effects and values, that later, paradigmatic art has enshrined’ (Levinson 1993 : 421). These remarks come close to a functional approach similar to that of Davies, but substitute causal and intentional relations to functions for direct reference to the functions themselves.

There are a number of objections to Levinson's definition. Against taking it as a sufficient condition for being art, various examples have been offered where the requisite intention is purportedly present, but the item in question is arguably not an artwork. In 1915, Duchamp attempted to transform the Woolworth Building into a readymade. He was not successful, but not for lack of an appropriate intention (Carney 1994 ). A forger of a Rembrandt self-portrait may intend that his work be regarded in many ways as the original is correctly regarded, without thereby creating another artwork (Sartwell 1990 : 157). There are also objections questioning whether the definition provides a necessary condition for being art. There can be objects that achieve functional success as art, in that they reward a complex set of intrinsic regards, but lack the required intention. They may spring from an artistic intention based on a misunderstanding of earlier works, or from a utilitarian intention that adventitiously results in an object with artistically valuable properties. For example, one might set out just to make a vessel that holds water and end up with a remarkably beautiful pot.

Levinson has replies to all of these counter-examples (see Levinson 1990 , 1993 ). Duchamp failed because he lacked the relevant ‘proprietary right’ to the building. The forger does not create an artwork because, though he intends the forgery to receive many of the regards correctly directed to the Rembrandt, they are not correctly directly to his own painting. Levinson seems to admit that there can be art that lacks the intentions he ordinarily requires for arthood, but holds that this points to further, less central, senses of art. All these replies, as well as the above remarks on first art, add new conditions to, and hence considerably complicate, Levinson's original definition. Sometimes, too many qualifications can kill a proposal. In this case, though, the patient is arguably still alive and attempting to recuperate.

Still, at a number of junctures it appears that Levinson might have achieved a simpler definition by appealing directly to functions or regards rather than intentions. Robert Stecker ( 1997 ) formulates a definition of art that appeals more directly to an historically evolving set of functions, without completely dispensing with a reference to artistic intentions. (For another such attempt, see Graves 1998 .) Stecker does not define art explicitly in terms of an historical relation linking the art of one time with the art of an earlier time. Rather, his definition proceeds by reference to time-relative artforms and functions. At any given time, art has a finite set of functions that range from genre-specific values to those widespread representational, expressive, formal, and aesthetic values enshrined in the simple functional definitions considered earlier. The functions of art at a given time are to be identified through an understanding of the artforms central to that time. However, that does not mean that items that don't belong to a central artform are never art. According to Stecker, almost anything can be art, but artefacts outside the central artforms have to meet a higher standard. This motivates a disjunctive definition of art: an item is an artwork at time t , where t is not earlier than the time at which the item is made, if and only if ( a ) it is in one of the central artforms at t and is made with the intention of fulfilling a function that art has at t , or ( b ) it is an artefact that achieves excellence in achieving such a function.

With this definition too there are various problems. The appearance of circularity is handled in much the same way as with Levinson's definition: by eliminating reference to art by enumerating central forms and functions. However, this requires that Stecker provide some account of these items. What makes something a central artform? How are genuine functions of art distinguished from accidental functions (e.g. using sculptures as a doorstops or paintings for insulation) and extrinsic functions (e.g. using art an investment)? Further, not every function is appropriate to every candidate artwork, so functions have to be coordinated with their appropriate forms. Finally, there are things that appear to fulfil functions of art to a high degree, but no one would call them artworks. Suppose there were a pill that induced a fine aesthetic experience. The pill is not a work of art even though it appears to fulfil a function of art with excellence. (For replies to these and other objections see Stecker 1997 : 51–65.)

Views like those of Davies, Levinson, and Stecker suggest that a consensus is developing about how art should be defined (see Stecker 2000 ; Matravers 2000 ). Though each at first appears to represent a different approach (institutional, intentional, functional), the similarities among these views are more striking than the differences. All accept Danto's view that art must be defined historically; and all, in the end, are committed to a definition that consists of a disjunction of sufficient conditions rather than a set of necessary conditions that are jointly sufficient (so-called real definitions). Further, unlike simple functionalist definitions, these definitions do not form the kernel of a larger, normatively aimed theory of art, but are compatible with many different theories. In particular, these definitions, like Dickie's definitions, distinguish an understanding of what art is from a conception of the value of art. In fact, the disjunctive character of recent definitions suggests not only that there is no one value or function essential to art, but that there is no essence of art at all.

Whatever the extent of this consensus, it excludes two parties to the debate. One comprises those who are still interested in pursuing a simple functionalist definition, typically in terms of aesthetic experience or properties (see Anderson 2000 ; Zangwill 2000 ). The other comprises those who are sceptical of the possibility of any definition of art (Tilghman 1984 ; Novitz 1996 ).

It is an interesting question just where future work in this area should direct its efforts (see Stecker 2000 ). On one side of the issue, those in the sceptical camp might do more to develop their arguments. On the other side of the issue, instead of developing more proposals of the sort we have just been considering, it would be worthwhile for the non-sceptical to step back to ask more basic questions. What is it that we are trying to define? Is it the concept of art, the property of being art, or a classificatory (or possibly evaluative) social practice, or something else? Suppose we say we are trying to define a concept. There is an interesting general literature on this question (Peacocke 1992 ; Fodor 1998 ) which it might be useful to bring to the issue of defining art. What should we hope to achieve with such a definition? The traditional goal was to identify the essence of art. If we follow recent definitions in abandoning that goal, what are we doing instead—describing or idealizing, for instance? Should we even continue to assume that we are looking for a single correct definition, or should we now accept the possibility that there can be several equally useful definitions of art, several equally good solutions to the same problem-—or perhaps several problems calling for different solutions?

See also : Value in Art ; Ontology of Art ; Aesthetics of Popular Art ; Aesthetic Experience .

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From Defining Art to Defining the Individual Arts: The Role of Theory in the Philosophies of Arts

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Aaron Meskin

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What is the definition of art? Not too long ago, this might have been properly said to be the central issue in philosophical aesthetics. Not anymore. 1 But philosophers of art are unlikely to give up on the pursuit of definition that easily. Most of us have invested far too much time and energy learning how to go about the game of definition and counterexample to simply let it go just like that. Might there not be some other questions of definition that could structure the field in this new century? What, after all, is a comic book? Or a film? Or a poem? Or a dance? Perhaps if we pursued definitions of the individual arts or art forms we might get somewhere. In this essay, I shall offer some sceptical thoughts about that pursuit—sceptical thoughts inspired by the paper that inadvertently triggered interest for more than five decades in the definition of art, namely, Morris Weitz’s ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’.

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The “Keystone” of the System: Schelling’s Philosophy of Art

R. G. Collingwood and a “Philosophical Methodology” of Aesthetics

Foundations of ArtScience: Formulating the Problem

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Meskin, A. (2008). From Defining Art to Defining the Individual Arts: The Role of Theory in the Philosophies of Arts. In: Stock, K., Thomson-Jones, K. (eds) New Waves in Aesthetics. New Waves in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230227453_7

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(PDF) Defining Art and its Future - ResearchGate
The research task was addressed by drawing on institutional and functional definitions of art that define the subject in terms of its relation to artistic tradition and its purposes.
The Definition of Art - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Definition of Art. First published Tue Oct 23, 2007; substantive revision Tue Jul 30, 2024. The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated.
Defining Art and Artworlds | The Journal of Aesthetics and ...
Most art is made by people with a well‐developed concept of art and who are familiar with its forms and genres as well as with the informal institutions of its presentation and reception. This is reflected in philosophers’ proposed definitions.
From Defining Art to Defining the Individual Arts: The Role ...
In the succeeding years, we were offered a range of sophisticated proposals for defining art—institutional definitions,3 aesthetic definitions,4 Danto’s neo-representational definition,5 disjunctive definitions,6 and intentional-historical definitions,7 to name some of the most prominent.
What is Art?: The Question of Definition Reloaded - ResearchGate
‘What is art?’ is one of the classic questions that philosophy has addressed over the ages, from the ancients to today.
Definitions of Art and Fine Art's Historical Origins | The ...
Philosophers attempting to define art (or engaging in the closely related project of developing a theory of art) seek a definition (or theory) that is cross‐culturally and transhistorically applicable.
What is Art? - A research on the concept and perception of ...
That is, an actual definition of art according to this investigation could be as follows: Art: Object or idea that appeals to feelings created as a expression of the inner sensations of an artist and his culture, free and creatively achieved.
Definition of Art | The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics ...
This article surveys the main trends that mark the history of the project of defining art in the twentieth century before discussing the most important efforts in the past thirty years. Keywords: artwork, defining art, metaphysical essence, twentieth century, non-artworks, real definition.
From Defining Art to Defining the Individual Arts: The Role ...
In this essay, I shall offer some sceptical thoughts about that pursuit—sceptical thoughts inspired by the paper that inadvertently triggered interest for more than five decades in the definition of art, namely, Morris Weitz’s ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’.
Defining Art and Artworlds - DAVIES - 2015 - The Journal of ...
Most art is made by people with a well-developed concept of art and who are familiar with its forms and genres as well as with the informal institutions of its presentation and reception. This is reflected in philosophers’ proposed definitions.

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The Definition of Art

1. Constraints on Definitions of Art

4.5 Hybrid (Disjunctive) Definitions

5. Conclusion

2. Definitions From the History of Philosophy

3. Skepticism about Definitions of Art

4. Contemporary Definitions

4.4 Traditional (mainly aesthetic) definitions

4.6 Evolutionary Approaches;

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What is Art? - A research on the concept and perception of Art in the 21st Century

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7 Definition of Art

1. Historical Background

2. Art as Expression

3. Formalism

4. Aesthetic Definitions

5. Anti-Essentialism

6. Danto and Dickie

7. Historical Approaches and the Revival of Functionalism

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From Defining Art to Defining the Individual Arts: The Role of Theory in the Philosophies of Arts

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