What is art?

What is art?

The definition of art is quite controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined is a matter of controversy, and, the philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated. This has raised a host of sceptical reactions about the need for defining art.

Scepticisim about definitions

Skepticism about the possibility and value of a definition of art has been an important part of the discussion in aesthetics since the 1950s on, and though its influence has subsided, uneasiness about the definitional project persists.

A common family of arguments, inspired by Wittgenstein’s famous remarks about games, 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. 

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.

A third 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.  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.

A fourth argument against defining art, with a normative tinge that is psychologistic rather than socio-political, 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

But these do not preclude the need for ‘guiding-specifying’ definitions anyway. According to Thomas Adajian, in the history of philosophy, the definition of art is divided into two: Traditional and Contemporary.

Traditional Definitions

Traditional definitions, at least as commonly 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. Thus, 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.

We shall highlight two personages here: Plato and Kant

First, Plato holds in the Republic and elsewhere that the arts are representational, or mimetic (sometimes translated “imitative”). Artworks are ontologically dependent on, and inferior to, ordinary physical objects, which in turn are ontologically dependent on, and inferior to, what is most real, the non-physical Forms. Grasped perceptually, artworks present only an appearance of an appearance of what is really real. 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 hence more humanly important than beauty. Beauty is not, for Plato, the distinctive province of the arts, and in fact his conception of beauty is extremely wide and metaphysical: there is a Form of Beauty, of which we can have non-perceptual knowledge, but it is more closely related to the erotic than to the arts.

Second, although Kant has a definition of art, he is for systematic reasons far less concerned with it than with aesthetic judgment. Kant defines art as “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”. The definition, when fully unpacked, has representational, formalist and expressivist elements. Located conceptually in a much broader discussion of aesthetic judgment and teleology, the definition is one relatively small piece of a hugely ambitious philosophical structure that attempts, famously, to account for, and work out the relationships between, scientific knowledge, morality, and religious faith.

Contemporary Definitions

Here, definitions of art attempt to make sense of two different sorts of facts: art has important historically contingent cultural features, and it also, arguably, has trans-historical, trans-cultural characteristics that point in the direction of a relatively stable aesthetic core. Under contemporary definitions, we have conventionalist and functionalist definitions. Conventionalist definitions take art’s cultural features to be explanatorily fundamental, and attempt 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. Non-conventionalist or “functionalist” definitions reverse this explanatory order, taking a concept like the aesthetic (or some allied concept like the formal, or the expressive) as basic, and aim to account for the phenomena by working that concept harder, perhaps extending it to non-perceptual properties.

Conventionalist definitions

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 come in two varieties, institutional and historical.

Institutional: Institutionalist conventionalism, or institutionalism is a synchronic view, which typically holds 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. 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 art-world has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation 

Historical: Historical conventionalism is a diachronic view which holds that artworks necessarily stand in an art-historical relation to some set of earlier artworks. 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, but, cccording 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 pre-existing or prior artworks are or were correctly regarded.

Functional Definitions

Functional 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. Monroe Beardsley for example avers 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.”

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 non-aesthetic properties as envisaged in the insight.

My Position

From the foregoing, something is clear in Plato’s thoughts. And that is, that art approximates the perfect, the beautiful and the good. This is true because every art work is a product of the human agent, and the human agent is fraught with the possibility of error. Error is undeniable with regard to human beings insofar as human beings are spatio-temporally limited. From these thoughts too, it is clear that the perfect, beautiful, and good are ideals which every art work attempts to approximate, whether we perfectly attain this is not the question of aesthetics. Aesthetics is a science of oughtness and this confers a subtle legitimacy in Plato’s thoughts and makes me find it appealing.