what is work of art essay

Essay on Art

500 words essay on art.

Each morning we see the sunshine outside and relax while some draw it to feel relaxed. Thus, you see that art is everywhere and anywhere if we look closely. In other words, everything in life is artwork. The essay on art will help us go through the importance of art and its meaning for a better understanding.

What is Art?

For as long as humanity has existed, art has been part of our lives. For many years, people have been creating and enjoying art. It expresses emotions or expression of life. It is one such creation that enables interpretation of any kind.

It is a skill that applies to music, painting, poetry, dance and more. Moreover, nature is no less than art. For instance, if nature creates something unique, it is also art. Artists use their artwork for passing along their feelings.

Thus, art and artists bring value to society and have been doing so throughout history. Art gives us an innovative way to view the world or society around us. Most important thing is that it lets us interpret it on our own individual experiences and associations.

Art is similar to live which has many definitions and examples. What is constant is that art is not perfect or does not revolve around perfection. It is something that continues growing and developing to express emotions, thoughts and human capacities.

Importance of Art

Art comes in many different forms which include audios, visuals and more. Audios comprise songs, music, poems and more whereas visuals include painting, photography, movies and more.

You will notice that we consume a lot of audio art in the form of music, songs and more. It is because they help us to relax our mind. Moreover, it also has the ability to change our mood and brighten it up.

After that, it also motivates us and strengthens our emotions. Poetries are audio arts that help the author express their feelings in writings. We also have music that requires musical instruments to create a piece of art.

Other than that, visual arts help artists communicate with the viewer. It also allows the viewer to interpret the art in their own way. Thus, it invokes a variety of emotions among us. Thus, you see how essential art is for humankind.

Without art, the world would be a dull place. Take the recent pandemic, for example, it was not the sports or news which kept us entertained but the artists. Their work of arts in the form of shows, songs, music and more added meaning to our boring lives.

Therefore, art adds happiness and colours to our lives and save us from the boring monotony of daily life.

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Conclusion of the Essay on Art

All in all, art is universal and can be found everywhere. It is not only for people who exercise work art but for those who consume it. If there were no art, we wouldn’t have been able to see the beauty in things. In other words, art helps us feel relaxed and forget about our problems.

FAQ of Essay on Art

Question 1: How can art help us?

Answer 1: Art can help us in a lot of ways. It can stimulate the release of dopamine in your bodies. This will in turn lower the feelings of depression and increase the feeling of confidence. Moreover, it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Question 2: What is the importance of art?

Answer 2: Art is essential as it covers all the developmental domains in child development. Moreover, it helps in physical development and enhancing gross and motor skills. For example, playing with dough can fine-tune your muscle control in your fingers.

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2 What is a Work of Art?

Richard Hudson-Miles and Andrew Broadey

Introduction

George Dickie’s (1974) “What is Art? An Institutional Analysis” begins by surveying historical attempts to define art according to necessary and sufficient conditions. As such, it would seem to serve as a useful point of departure to the subject of this chapter. However, reading this essay today, with knowledge of the various challenges to classificatory logic of art history mounted by social and cultural theory, one tends to weary at this endless, perhaps hopeless task. In turn, critical neologisms such as “postmodern” (Jameson 1991; Owens [1980] 2002), “expanded field” (Krauss 1979), “post-medium” (Krauss 2000), “relational” (Bourriaud 2002), “alter-modern” (Bourriaud 2009), and “post-conceptual” (Osborne 2017) have all been introduced as theoretical attempts to supplement, redefine, or differentiate the art historical canon and its attendant taxonomies, periodisations, and categorisations. Dickie himself acknowledges that by the mid-1950s many philosophers had begrudgingly conceded that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for a work of art. Instead, like Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), one of the most important analytic philosophers, famously suggested about definitions of games ([1953] 2009, 65–66), perhaps we can aim for no more than a series of suggested “family resemblances” which unify some, but never all, of a maddeningly heterogeneous field of artistic practices? A quick survey of the diversity of contemporary art would certainly affirm such conclusions. Nevertheless, this task remains an ongoing concern of philosophical aesthetics, from which one could roughly delineate six approaches, each of which is problematic in its own way. This chapter will introduce each of these approaches, testing them against the irreducible complexity of contemporary artworks. Given this, the chapter might fall short of offering easy answers to the question “What is a Work of Art”?

Before proceeding, it is necessary to clarify the more expansive connotations “art” had in Ancient Greece. Indeed, Herbert Read’s (1893–1968) Education through Art (1961, 1-2) insists that most of the problems with modern art education stem from a misreading of the concept of “art” in Plato. In his time, “techne” [ τέχνη ], and its Latin equivalent ars , referred to all forms of human sensuous production, including crafts, social sciences, even skilled labour. Paul Oskar Kristeller (1951) has convincingly demonstrated that the modern sense of “art” was invented in the eighteenth century. Here, the Beaux-Arts tradition ossified five practices (painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry) under the signifier “art.” The rise of a European art market during this period instigated a new need to distinguish artworks from other commodities. Concepts such as “genius,” the “masterpiece,” and a romantic image of the artist, became increasingly important as mechanisms for justifying the uniqueness, desirability, and inflated price tags of “Fine Art” (Shiner 2001, 99–130), especially painting, which remains the most commercial of artforms. Consequences of this were the separation between artisan and artist, and the conceptual narrowing of “Fine Art” to simply painting and sculpture. Conceptual art practices of the twentieth century made significant efforts to broaden the signification of “art” once again, pushing it into what Rosalind Krauss has called “the expanded field” (Krauss 1979). Politically, such practices aimed to create forms of art which were deliberately unclassifiable, immaterial, and non-commodifiable, thus resistant to cooption by the market or gallery systems.

Representational Theories of Art

The words “representation” or “imitation” generally signify philosophical theories of art which, if not directly, can be traced back to the work of Plato (424/423–348/347 BCE) and Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Following Plato, such theories suggest art is essentially mimetic, meaning its primary objective is to represent an exterior and more authentic reality. Such theories remained influential during the Renaissance, only fading during the nineteenth century, and persisting in “commonsense” attempts to engage with art today. There is significantly more to the philosophy of artistic representation than Plato and Aristotle, though the classificatory logic of Kristeller’s (1951) “modern system of art” could also be traced back to the work of these two philosophers. Aristotle’s Poetics (335 BCE), in particular, outlines a taxonomic subdivision of the arts and their essential characteristics that remains influential today, especially in literary theory. However, given the limited scope of this introduction, this section will focus mainly on Plato.

As Maria S. Kardaun (2014) argues, the connotative distinction between art as “imitation” or “representation” depends on how one reads Plato. Like techne , mimesis carried expansive connotations in Ancient Greece, including “reflecting,” “expressing,” “mirroring,” and “copying,” alongside “representing” and “imitating.” Therefore, the sophistication of Plato’s art theory, which is sometimes too readily collapsed into his ultimate proscription and censorship of the arts, can be missed with careless reading (Kardaun 2014, 151–2). The persistent, but simplistic and inaccurate (150), reading is based on the famously dismissive Book X of The Republic (380 BCE). [1] From here, the conclusion is usually that Plato rejects all art as “mere imitation” of ideal Forms—abstract but entirely pure concepts such as beauty, virtue, and truth, which precede, yet inform experience. The Forms are knowable only by gods, or perhaps the philosopher-kings Plato envisaged ruling in The Republic . Art can index but never equal them due to the imperfection of human beings. Given that art often represents existing worldly objects and actions which themselves are mere imitations of ideal Forms, it follows that mimetic art represents a thrice-removed simulacrum (a copy of a copy of the Forms), and consequently one of the lowest orders of knowledge.

Yet, despite their imperfections, both art and life strive towards the pure perfection of the Forms. For example, throughout Book V of The Republic , Plato argues that the harmony of the perfectly ordered republican state approximates the “cardinal virtues” of wisdom, courage, discipline, and justice so closely that it soothes the spirit in a manner that transcends even the best works of art. Similarly, despite its apparently low ontological status, Plato suggests the best art can be used as an educational tool, albeit in strictly censored form (bk. III, 376e2–402a4). However, the problematic characteristic of art for Plato is that it stirs our emotions; its affectivity causes us to act in ways that are not rational. Artists rely on divine inspiration, not logic. The audience of a play is seduced by the drama, or the crowd at a musical performance gets entranced by its rhythms. Art is powerful, corrupting, therefore dangerous. This is the primary reason for his infamous proscription of art from the ideal republic (bk. X, 605c–608b).

Whilst still figuring art as imitation, Aristotle’s Poetics pushes back against Plato’s disparaging critique of the mimetic arts. He even suggests that they can benefit society in the following ways. Firstly, he argues that art does not simply imitate reality but accentuates it. For Aristotle, the creative skills of the artist may teach us more about the nature of reality than reality itself. In Chapter 5, he argues that poetry can tell us more than the particulars of history through its expression of universals. Secondly, the emotion central to the experience of art can function as a form of cathartic release for the audience, possibly helping them purge negative feelings and overcome other problems (1449b).

Where imitation theories debate whether art is an accentuation of the world or its mere simulacrum, representational and neo-representational theories focus more on the communicative act. Art does not simply represent the world; it is a representation produced with a specific public in mind whom it speaks to, and in turn, who recognise its content and status as art. Reflecting on the development of such theories, Peter Kivy (1997, 55–83) argues that shift of emphasis means that their real philosophical heritage lies in the work of analytic philosopher John Locke’s (1632–1704) account of language. Book III of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding ([1689] 1979, 223–54) insists words primarily signify ideas, however imperfect, formed in the imagination of an individual (225); communication is then the successful transference of “ideas” from one imagination to another. As Kivy (1997, 58) points out, this Lockean position has been used to support a plethora of “cinematic” accounts of literary and visual art, which figure art as the successfully shared mental representation between artist and audience. Mental representation, in this sense, refers to those images engendered in the mind by poetic literary phrases and dramatic actions, as well as the colours, shapes, and forms of the plastic arts. Kivy raises two main objections to this cinematic model. Firstly, that it is more valid for representational painting than other art forms. Secondly, the term “representation” unhelpfully confuses semantics, consciousness, phenomenology, and presentation (64). Though literature is clearly not non-representational, literary artforms, such as novels, contain large tracts which communicate in ways that don’t involve images. Furthermore, a representational theory of art (literary or visual) tout court (71) denies the differences between the “spectator” of art (theater/public/passive) and its “reader” (modern novel/private/active), which a variety of late-twentieth century art theory (Rancière [2006] 2011, 2009b; Barthes [1971] 1977, 142–9; Mulvey 1975) would expose repeatedly. [2]

Painting of a wooden chair, with the perspective slightly off so that the seat and bottom legs look a little too large, and angled not quite correctly in relation to the back of the chair.

The narrowness of both representational and imitation theories of art is revealed when they are tested against actual artworks. To use a canonical example, it might be useful to ask what is the exact nature of the (Aristotelian) augmentation, (Lockean) “ideas,” or (Platonic) representations offered by Van Gogh’s Chair (1888)? Much art historical ink continues to be spilt arguing about precisely such questions. The Platonic reading would be that it simply imitates the haptic knowledge of an unknown carpenter of Arles, who themselves merely copied the ideal Form of the chair. Another common reading is that it communicates the simplicity and authenticity of the proletarian identity Van Gogh identified with. Using evidence from Van Gogh’s letters, Griselda Pollock and Fred Orton (1978, 58–60) claim these Arles interiors operate as “oblique self-portraits” projecting an ideal of simplicity which he equated with modern masculinity. Later, in J’accuse Van Gog h (Johnstone 1990), Pollock argued that the signature perspectival distortions of his pictorial space were not an attempt to represent anything, but simply accidental results of the technical incompetence of a self-taught amateur. Another reading, attempted by both Albert Lubin (1996, 167-8) and Harold Blum (1956), claims the stylistic differences between Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s chairs reveal latent repressed homoerotic feelings between the two “friends.” The obvious argument raised by these diverse symbolic readings is that if paintings can sustain such a variety of interpretation, then can it be justifiably argued that they represent any singular artistic vision of the producer?

These questions have been complicated by the emergence of non-representational and immaterial art practices in the late twentieth century. Joseph Kosuth’s (1965) One and Three Chairs , explicitly attempts to foreground questions of meaning and representation in art, and contribute to the further definition and categorisation of art. It is regarded as one of the first pieces of “Conceptual Art.” In Kosuth’s words, the “purest” definition of conceptual art would be that it is an enquiry into the concept of “art,” as it has come to mean (Kosuth [1969] 1991).

A wooden chair, with a picture of the same chair on the wall next to it, and a dictionary definition of the word "chair" on the wall on the other side of the chair.

Here, Kosuth directly questioned Clement Greenberg’s (1909–94) then dominant account of the development of modernist art (discussed below) as a linear process gradually revealing “medium-specificity”—the essential characteristics common to artistic disciplines such as painting (flatness) or sculpture (three-dimensionality). Instead, Kosuth considered that the readymades attributed to Marcel Duchamp produced a new construction of art beyond enquiry within any given medium. Art now “questioned.” A shift from “modern art” to “conceptual art” had occurred, “one from appearance to conception.” Kosuth talked of “artistic propositions,” whose value derived from their capacity to analyse or question: “the artist, as an analyst is not directly concerned with the physical properties of things. He is only concerned with the way (1) in which art is capable of conceptual growth and (2) how his propositions are capable of logically following that growth” (Kosuth [1969] 1991). Kosuth’s own works attempted to follow this function of analytic proposal. One and Three Chairs (1965) presents an industrially produced chair alongside a photograph of the chair, and a dictionary definition for the word “chair.” Reception of the work takes the form of an enquiry into whether art imitates, communicates, represents, or augments, and also to whether meaning itself originates in the artist, audience, or the structures of language itself.

Throughout modernism, critics have consistently correlated form with aesthetic value mediated by judgments of taste. Clement Greenberg considered the aesthetic to be a test of whether a given practice qualified as art. His early text “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) was a defence of taste (high culture) against kitsch, or culture generated out of mass commodity production, such as Hollywood or magazines. Later texts, such as “Modernist Painting” (1960), theorised a developmental logic in the history of painting: a purification of the medium around the values of formalism. Greenberg’s position built upon modernist criticism leading back to the turn of the 20 th Century. Clive Bell (1881-1964) and Roger Fry (1866-1934) identified the realisation of formal relationships in the work of early modernists, such as Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse, with artistic insight and the reception of these works with aesthetic experience. Bell claimed what he termed “significant form” was the distinguishing factor in an artefact’s existence as art (Bell [1914] 2002). Significant form concerns particular compositions of line, colour, and shape that produce aesthetic emotion in the spectator. Roger Fry offers a further distinction, claiming art is a unity of formal elements held in a specific balanced relation that arouses aesthetic emotion (Fry [1909] 2002). A unity of elements is key for Fry. He considered that a work can be superficially ugly, displeasing, or lacking sensuous charm, but can arouse aesthetic emotion because of the unity of elements it conveys.

Each of these positions is rooted in Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) analysis of judgments of taste (Kant [1790] 2000). Kant claims aesthetic judgments concern moments when our rational faculties are set into a state of “free play,” resulting in the claim, “this is beautiful.” On this basis, when we feel aesthetic emotion, or appreciate the significance of the form of a work of art, our cognitive faculties engage the unorganised flux of sound, light, materials, etc. he calls the “manifold” in a state of free play rather than determining this flux as an array of entities in context. When we are able to say of such an object or situation “this is beautiful” we aren’t interested in what it is in itself or what it can do for us, we are rather encountering the manner in which our cognitive faculties can interact with environmental stimuli in a state of free play. For Kant this relation is the marker of the beautiful and the reason why judgments of taste are non-determinate but objective, as no concept is deployed (“this is a …”) but our cognitive faculties are activated in a manner that allows us to reasonably expect the assent of others (“it’s beautiful, isn’t it”). It follows that as objects of taste are an interface for our rational powers and we expect others to assent to our judgments of taste, [3] when we experience beauty, we recognise our participation in a community of sense . Finally, for Kant, art is distinguishable from other objects of beauty, such as natural forms, by virtue of its mediation by a genius capable of configuring forms in order to compel aesthetic judgment. Fry echoes this point in his emphasis on unity.

For Greenberg, art had to be a product of aesthetic judgment: “when no aesthetic value judgment, no verdict of taste, is there, then art isn’t there either” (1971). Greenberg considered modernism to be a self-critical tendency that brought judgments of taste to the fore. Practitioners pursued aesthetic value in their art; in doing so they recognised the constraints of specific media and adapted their work to those constraints. In “Modernist Painting” (1961), Greenberg emphasised a progressive reduction in tactile associations in the work of 20 th Century painters, which paved the way for abstract expressionist reduction of the pictorial field down to a colour space entered by eyesight alone. In the 1960s, Greenberg championed the flat spray-painted colour fields of Jules Olitski as exemplars of “high modernism,” because such works held out to the viewer the possibility of examining the grounds of visual experience: the projective, weightless and synchronous nature of sight.

Diarmuid Costello (2007) notes that Greenbergian criticism and Kantian aesthetics appeared to be closely aligned in the moment of high modernism. He also claimed emergent postmodern critics, such as Rosalind E. Krauss and Hal Foster, believed that challenging its premises meant setting forth an anti-aesthetic rejection of Greenberg. Krauss’s structural analysis of modernism (1979) dismantled high modernist assumptions of art’s aesthetic nature, arguing that modernist artworks, such as the sculptures of Constantin Brancusi, existed in an oppositional relation to architecture and the landscape. This basis in opposition meant that modernist art was in fact a contextual construct. The function of Greenbergian modernism was to suppress the opposition, and naturalise Modernist art as context free, making it in Krauss’s words, “abstraction,” “placeless,” and “self-referential” (1979). With the advent of postmodernism in the late 1960s Krauss argued that minimalism, conceptualism and land art synthesised the terms of the opposition (for example sculpture and architecture) in practice, emphasising art’s contextual existence.

Brian O’Doherty makes the further claim that modernism had always depended on contextual factors to provide conditions conducive to its correct (aesthetic) reception in his analysis of the convention of the “white cube” gallery ([1977] 1986). White cube galleries are uniform, clean, white environments, designed to provide a purified environment of artistic display. O’Doherty’s point is that this design convention historically developed alongside modernism to provide a neutral context for the reception of modernist art. For O’Doherty, the social form of the gallery conditioned modes of contemplative reception that modernist painting necessitated. The gallery was the unremarked context that gave the work “space to breathe” ([1977] 1986). For Costello, the binary nature of this debate (aesthetic/anti-aesthetic) is a function of the critical narrowing of Kantian aesthetics in modernist theory down to an austere formalism. Instead, Costello claims Kant’s theorisation of the aesthetic is broad enough to encompass much of the practice Krauss included in the expanded field, because “it is above all the way in which artworks indirectly embody ideas in sensuous form, by bringing their “aesthetic attributes” together in a unified form that is the focus of judgments of artistic beauty” (Costello 2007). The sensuous embodiment of ideas is the qualification missed by Greenberg, Fry, and Bell. This enables us to conceive the aesthetic as a response that can range across forms of art and non-art in a way that is consistent with the emergence of the expanded field as an aesthetic mobilisation of non-art forms as art.

If we test this discussion against an example of art practice then we start to see that a particular attitude to the bounding of form appears to mediate the premises of Bell’s, Fry’s, and Greenberg’s positions. Significant form as criterion or modernist colour space as focus appears to rest on the certitude of its separation from social form. Further to this, we can see that the theorisation of the expanded field as somehow anti-aesthetic also misses the centrality of aesthetic experience to the reception of works operating beyond the bounds of medium specificity. Works by Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica explore form in ways that extend beyond the limits of conventional media and compel attention in a manner that is consistent with the expanded conception of formalism we have outlined. Oiticica was a member of the Rio de Janeiro based Neo-Concrete movement, and around 1960 developed a series of hanging “Spatial Reliefs” that expanded colour forms into architectural space.

A red panel hanging from the ceiling, with the edges folded in on itself in a few different angles.

Núcleos (Nuclei) (1960–6) consists of hanging geometric panels that occupy a cuboid field. The shapes comprising the work align dynamically at right angles; the central panels are coloured in a rich yellow and graduate to a deep orange at the periphery. The audience moves in and out of the panels as they navigate the gallery, so there is not any strict spatial division between the work and the social space it occupies. This work raises difficult questions for Bell’s position as the encounter with colour forms relates to the architectural structure of the gallery. The work appears to necessitate the collapse of the opposition between work and architecture, or aesthetic and non-aesthetic form. Oiticica’s panels assert the objecthood of colour and break open the static nature of contemplation, turning artistic reception into a dynamic participatory navigation of the work.

The backdrop to Krauss’s and O’Doherty’s interventions is the integration of artistic form into wider social practices of meaning making. Roland Barthes (1971) describes this shift as a movement from work to text (Barthes [1971] 1977). For Barthes, it is the limit or frame of the work that defines the pictorial field and an area of focus for aesthetic emotion. Consequently, he reconceives the work as part of a field of co-related elements whose interactions determine their significance. Rather than a play of pure forms in the artwork, contexts develop through an ongoing play of social forms, whose meaning and status is an object of negotiation. Following Costello, we can argue that when appreciated from the viewpoint of its sensuous manifestation according to a play of our cognitive faculties such semiosis of social form is in fact aesthetic.

If we define art according to its expressivity, we immediately have to contend with the diversity of practices people have considered expressive. For example, the colour harmonies of Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract compositions and Stuart Brisley’s visceral performances are obviously very different types of art practice, but both artists describe their work using the term “expression.” Reflecting this diversity, definitions of art as expression theorise art in terms of enlivenment, purgation, communication, spontaneity, and even transformation. We will navigate this diversity by considering positions developed by Leo Tolstoy and R.G. Collingwood, who focus narrowly on how an artwork might articulate conscious emotion, before considering broader positions advanced by Harold Rosenberg and Gilles Deleuze, for whom expression concerns acts of both individual and social transformation.

Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) claims art is the transmission of feeling ([1896] 1995). Many different expressions provoke feelings of different kinds in us, but the facility that for Tolstoy distinguishes art is a capacity to produce a unity of feeling between artist and audience. Upon making the work, the artist feels the emotions it expresses and upon receiving the work, each audience member feels this same emotion. We can recognise two assumptions that go unexplained in Tolstoy’s argument: art communicates, and art expresses. Further, he assumes what is subjective for the artist is objective for the audience. Tolstoy’s focus on communication leaves questions concerning the relation of expression to form and representation unanswered. We might also raise a further query around the necessity of premeditation that Tolstoy’s linkage of expression and universal communication seems to require, and the spontaneity that seems to accompany acts of artistic creation.

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) resolves some of these issues through his claim that art gives form to expressions that arise in the act of creation (Collingwood [1938] 2013). Art cannot be preconceived (planned and executed): to express is to become conscious of emotion in the act of creation. Similarly, to create is to give plastic reality to feelings that arise in the process of the laying down of forms. By relating artistic expression to creation in this way, Collingwood addresses the assumptions Tolstoy leaves unanswered, but by linking creation to formal arrangement he also limits the range of emotions art provokes to the kinds of aesthetic emotion we previously considered when we discussed Fry.

In contrast to Tolstoy and Collingwood’s narrow theorisations of expression, broader models accommodate unconscious expression and emotions that belong to states of subjective transformation. An early instance of such a model is Aristotle’s analysis of feelings of “fear and pity” ([335 BCE] 1996) experienced by audiences of Greek tragedies, which he identifies with catharsis, or the purging of stored feelings. Aristotle’s analysis makes a change in state or a moment of transformation in the artist or audience member a possible dimension of expression. Aristotle thinks appropriate levels of cathartic response indicate a capacity to engage positively in social life as they demonstrate an ability to interpret others and are hence a marker of virtue.

Abstract painting with roughly circular or oval shapes of red and white and black paint in between them.

Poet and critic Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) theorised abstract expressionist painting in a similar manner, terming it “action painting” (Rosenberg [1952] 2002). Rosenberg argued that painters, such as Lee Krasner, whose works combined improvisational gesture and “all-over” composition, gave symbolic form to emotions that arose in artistic acts of self-questioning, or self-transformation. This transformative potential lay, Rosenberg argued, at the intersection of psychic and plastic forces made to speak for each other in the artist’s address to the blank canvas. For Rosenberg the act of painting was a ritual of self-discovery; symbolic languages were invented through painterly improvisation engaging an array of conscious and unconscious emotion, resulting in moments of self-reinvention. In the words of Clyfford Still (1952), painting was an “unqualified act.”

A subsequent generation of artists viewed expression as action beyond the studio, in the social field. They considered Abstract Expressionism’s pictorial mediation of gesture as indirect when artists could work with the raw material of their practice: their own bodies. To witness Stuart Brisley repeatedly vomiting in a gallery, Gina Pane cutting herself with a razor or spectate on one of Herman Nitsch’s ritualistic actions is to encounter expressions according to an expanded model.

Two men sitting at a table with large paintings on the walls that have large red blotches of paint covering most of the canvas, and smaller drawings arranged in a 3 by 3 grid on part of the wall.

Here, the practitioner explores the potential of their own body to realise the kinds of psychological transformation discussed by Rosenberg through more direct means, refashioning the form of art in accordance to the openness of an event. The intention is to produce change, not just achieve moments of cathartic release.

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Felix Guattari (1930–1992) conceptualise expression in this manner as a force of articulation that demarcates an assemblage (1996). By “assemblage” they mean a dynamic apparatus that articulates a field of social reproduction or transformation. We could talk about the Brisley/gallery assemblage as actions projecting architecturally constrained affect, or the Pane/razor assemblage of laceration and sensation/psychological intensity. Expression here is not merely the feelings of the artistic given plastic form; it is a power to bring forth potential within a structure in order for it to be differently articulated. This transformative aspect defines an event as a moment of rupture that brings forth unformed potentials within the assemblage. Art practices realised in this mode embrace the unknown as a true force of creation by producing a zone of affect that unfolds possibilities of social/psychological change, in contrast to familiar forms and feelings.

The Aesthetic Attitude

Theories of “aesthetic attitude” are less concerned with isolating essential characteristics of artworks, than with describing a certain state of receptivity or the conditions of spectatorship which make the experience of art possible. According to these theories, to attend to art properly we must enact a special kind of distancing, or “disinterestedness.” Here, art is judged outside of the influence of subjective desire or ulterior motivation. The most significant contemporary defender of the theory of the aesthetic attitude is Jerome Stolnitz (1960). For him, “disinterested attention” means focusing on art objects for longer than one would real world objects, sympathetic to their aims, and encountering them for their own sake alone. Before him, Edward Bullough (1880–1934) had characterised the aesthetic attitude as “psychical distance” (1912), where the everyday self is negated in order to generate a space to encounter the world from an aesthetic viewpoint. Stolnitz traces the aesthetic attitude back to the British philosophy of taste articulated in the work of Edmund Burke (1729–97), David Hume (1711–76), Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), and the Earl of Shaftesbury [Anthony Ashley-Cooper] (1671–1713). However, the most influential (and infamous to hostile commentators) account of this special state of aesthetic receptivity is found in Kant’s Critique of Judgement ([1790, 5: 204–10] 2000, 89–96). In Kant’s own words, “one must not be in the least bit biased in favor of the existence of the thing but must be entirely indifferent in this respect in order to play the judge in matters of taste” (Kant [1790, 5: 205] 2000, 90–1). For Kant, disinterested judgments are non-cognitive—they are outside conceptual knowledge of the object judged, moral interest in it, or any pleasures derived from it. The aesthetic attitude therefore involves willing suspension of the above in order to experience beautiful objects as if one had no prior knowledge of them. His example is a palace, which can be appreciated aesthetically neither by its owner, due to their possessive vanity, nor those who built it, due to their knowledge of the blood and sweat expended on its construction. Similarly, true art is to be distinguished from “remunerative art” ([1790, 5: 304] 2000, 183), whose appeal partly, if not wholly, results from an associated financial reward. A quick, but insufficient, reference also needs to be made to Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), whose The World as Will and Representation ([1819] 2011) contains an important contribution to aesthetic attitude theory. Schopenhauer regards aesthetic contemplation as a form of sanctuary from the violence and enslavement of the world of Will (urges, instincts, cravings). For him, careful aesthetic contemplation brings us closer to the Platonic world of Forms, whilst also giving us a better understanding of the sensory world around us.

The most influential philosophical critique of such theories is Dickie’s “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude” (1964). His objection is that “disinterested” contemplation is simply one way of giving attention to art. In terms of philosophical rigour, it is thus indistinct from careful “interested” contemplation. To push Dickie’s argument further, denying the social history of an artwork to emphasise its aesthetic affect will produce a particular idea of art, just as explaining art as a mere reflex of its conditions of production will produce another. Neither approach could claim to have utmost validity in this scenario. A sensitive dialectical approach, incorporating both aesthetic affect and the sociology of art could come closer to attending to the complexity of the question “What is a work of art?”

Aesthetic attitude theories fell out of favour in the late twentieth century, perhaps because of Dickie’s critique, but also because of the increased influence of sociological and materialist theories of art. The claim for disinterestedness as a necessary condition for experiencing art has scandalised many commentators on the left. The classic sociological rebuttal comes from Bourdieu’s (1930-2002) Distinction ([1979] 1996)—a lengthy text, citing an overwhelming array of statistical data to demonstrate that aesthetic “disinterestedness” is a bourgeois illusion, available only to those whose privileged financial situation allows them the luxury of time, or the illusory distance, for such contemplation. According to Kant’s reading, “remunerative artists” are not true artists, despite the fact that no artist can live on fresh air alone. Bourdieu (486-88) concludes that the aesthetic attitude is simply the attitude of the ruling class, and that the purity of the aesthetic attitude is simply veiled contempt for the impurity, and by implication inferiority, of popular, working class culture. As we have seen, contemporary art criticism, such as O’Doherty (1986) and Bishop (2005), has highlighted that the aesthetic attitude finds its physical and spatial equivalent in the hegemonic “white cube” model of display. From the 1960s onwards, radical art practices attempted to problematise the benign image of art galleries as neutralised and universal arenas for disinterested contemplation.

Grayscale image of two women sitting on the top flight of stairs leading to an entrance to a white-coloured house that has WOMANHOUSE letter-writing above.

An example would be the exhibition Womanhouse (1972), organised by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. Over three months, female artists from Cal Arts’ Feminist Art Program renovated a disused Hollywood mansion, turning it into a space for the discussion, production, performance, and display of original artworks. Rather than affecting the faux neutrality of the aesthetic attitude, all exhibited work was explicitly and aggressively “interested.” Men were prohibited from entering the space, and works were given titles such as Menstruation Bathroom (Judy Chicago), Crocheted Environment, or Womb Room (Faith Wilding), and Eggs to Breasts (Robin Weltch and Vicky Hodgetts). The foregrounding of factors specific to the contemporary experience of femininity highlighted the general omission of women from mainstream art galleries and curatorial programmes. The discursive, dialogic, and productive nature of Womanhouse also functioned as a critique of the sterility, neutrality, and passivity of the aesthetic attitude and its attendant white cube model of display. Womanhouse , as political other to such institutions, exposed the exclusion and oppression which the aesthetic attitude has been shown to disguise.

The Institutional Theory of Art

This chapter opened by discussing Dickie’s (1974) “What is Art? An Institutional Theory of Art.” Alongside Arthur Danto’s “The Artworld” (1964), these two texts outline an “institutional theory of art.” For Danto, “The Artworld” describes an enclosed and self-reproducing system of institutions, discourses, critics, publishers, and artists, all of whom are invested in an agreed-upon definition of art. The primary function of the Artworld then is not the production of specific artworks, but the reproduction and dissemination of a dominant idea of art through cultural and educational institutions like schools, universities, museums, or galleries. Dickie’s argument is even more straightforward. For him, art is simply whatever artefact or activity a representative of the Artworld has designated as art. This is not to suggest that artistic practices cannot occur outside the Artworld, such as the activities of hobbyist painters, or countless aspirational student artists, it is simply that these activities will not be recognised as art without its official institutional acknowledgement.

Given that the previous section of this chapter has already suggested that the Artworld is exclusive and non-representative, its absolute power to act as arbitrator of what is art and not-art is highly problematic. Consequently, all manner of radical art practices repeatedly sought to undermine its authority. A recurrent strategy of the “avant-garde,” dating back to Courbet’s Pavilion of Realism (1855), is the establishment of independent exhibitions on the periphery of the Artworld where alternative and oppositional practices can emerge. Such counter-exhibitions have been mounted by the Impressionists (1874–1886), the Dada movement (1916), the Surrealists (1936, 1938), and more recently the YBAs (Young British Artists) (1988). All of these seem to have been recuperated by the Artworld in one form or another, with many gaining canonical status. This capacity of the Artworld to assimilate its symbolic opposition seems to strengthen Dickie’s and Danto’s theses.

From the 1960s onwards, many artists attempted what is now called “Institutional Critique” of the exclusionary and elitist practices of the Artworld. An infamous exhibition by Hans Haacke at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1971) linked photographs of NYC buildings to financial records, diagrams, and maps of Manhattan to expose links between a Guggenheim trustee and one of New York’s most notorious slum-lords; subsequently his exhibition was cancelled. The feminist artists’ collective The Guerrilla Girls have spent the last three decades covering the billboards outside major art galleries with statistical evidence of the lack of female artists in their permanent collections. Andrea Fraser’s (1989) Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk involved the artist dressing like an employee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and offering a guided tour of the collection, filled with exaggerations, misinformation, and institutional parody. Not only does this performance satirise the stulted manners and orchestrated behaviours of gallery functionaries, it also highlights the extent to which the audiences of art rely on institutional interpretations to translate their own experiences for them.

Preceding both Institutional Critique and the Institutional Theory of Art, perhaps exceeding them both, is an enduringly influential essay by the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” ([1935] 2007). Written during the Nazi ascent to power, the text invites “a far-reaching liquidation” of art’s traditional institutions, whose structures he saw as complicit with the social passivity that allowed authoritarian fascism to rise. Benjamin was excited by the capacity (“exhibition-value”) of new technologies of visual production (photography, lithography, cinema) to create new audiences for art outside the Artworld, thus changing the way art is received and understood. With the advent of these new artforms, the individualised reception of art, like viewing a painting alone in a gallery, is replaced by the collective experience of viewing film in a cinema, or a billboard poster in the city space. Because of this, the authority of art institutions to control the meaning of art recedes, not least because art now comes to meet us, in our situations and contexts, rather than vice versa. The consequence of this is that the meaning of art is constantly recontextualised and co-authored at the point of reception, rather than fixed at the point of production by an artist or the moment of exhibition by a gallery or curator.

Benjamin coins the term “aura” to describe the mystifying concepts (creativity, genius, eternal value, uniqueness, mystery) with which galleries, art criticism, and aesthetics surround art production. For Benjamin, these “auratic” discourses not only make art appear more special than it is, but by exaggerating the uniqueness of art and artists, tend to imply that the rest of us are hopelessly ordinary or limited in comparison. For Benjamin, this resembled the general tendency of the public to passively accept social inequality and the status quo, not to mention the hero worship of the “Führer-cult” he witnessed in 1930s Germany. However, the mass dissemination and reproduction of art gradually causes its aura to wither away. This technological “withering” of art’s aura is inseparable from, and impossible without, the creation of a newly energised, critically active, and democratic public sphere, and therefore irreducibly political. The possibilities of new digital media, especially the internet, have multiplied this political effect exponentially. Activist artist groups like Mongrel (2000) can now hack into the Tate Gallery website and reauthor its content. Simple phone technologies can allow users to steal facsimiles of famous artworks, such as the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, and rework them into an infinite array of internet-based memes, GIFs, or fashion accessories. Writing recently, Andrea Fraser (2005) pessimistically recognised that many of the practices of Institutional Critique have become institutionalised. Yet, current digital reproductive technologies have the seemingly infinite capacity to perpetually redefine art and its institutions from the bottom up, and “reactivate the [art] object reproduced,” leading “to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind” (Benjamin [1935] 2007, 221).

Anti-Essentialism

Representation, formalism, expression, aesthetic attitude, and institutionality each constitute dimensions of art practice, but they do violence to the heterogeneity of art practice when we make them function as art’s necessary and sufficient conditions. To traverse the impasse, we might address the question differently, by asking what variable conditions can determine the unfolding of art. This approach attains the flexibility to consider immanent features—expression, form, etc.—in relation to contextual forces.

One example is Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) positioning of art’s condition between mental processing and the raw data of our senses (Nietzsche 1896). Nietzsche radicalises Kantian aesthetic judgment, pointing out that our viewpoint is articulated through the medium of perception, which is separate from the raw materiality of natural events. Nietzsche’s position is an example of anti-essentialism: what we call truth is something provisional and bound up with the mode of its production. For Nietzsche, perception’s mode is a series of metaphoric abstractions from natural events—from nerve stimulus, to optical information, to mental judgment. The value Nietzsche attributes to art is based on the capacity he thinks art has to help us approach the intensity of those events in nature, and our primal integration within these events. Hence, art conveys our primal perceptual connection with our surroundings by manifesting a play of materiality and conceptual determination. An example of such a practice is Joan Mitchell’s “Rock Bottom” (1960).

Photo of an abstract painting, white canvas with predominantly blue brush strokes interspersed with red, green-yellow-ish and white streaks.

The painting comprises a colour field of gestural mark-making, conveying emotions felt by the artist within a landscape. In his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–37) Heidegger extends Nietzsche’s analysis to explore how we draw out possibilities of experience through interpretation. He argues that our viewpoint and the particular ways in which it is embedded in the world influences the way the world is disclosed to us. The way we approach disclosure is by circling within the dynamics of experience, between the objects of experience and the ways in which we approach them. The artwork is an aspect of this interpretative circling. It captures and draws out its dynamics. Like Nietzsche’s critique of truth and Heidegger’s analysis of disclosure, Mitchell’s painting articulates judgments as the product of dynamically combined viewpoints, references, memories and sensations.

The attention Nietzsche and Heidegger bring to the embedding of knowledge within specific modes of perception sets the groundwork for deconstruction, which extends these insights into a general analysis of textuality. Textuality assumes material relations that comprise social reality have an inescapable written quality that shapes acts of interpretation. In deconstruction textuality is taken as a condition of knowledge production. Deconstruction addresses art’s ontology by asking what is at stake when we pose the question “What is art?” An example of this deconstructive strategy would be Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) essay This is Not a Pipe (1983), on Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images (1928–29), which features the image of a pipe and the caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Foucault claims the pipe cannot be present without the painting. In a similar manner, Paul de Man (1919–1983) argues the practice of philosophy cannot commence without writing (1982). De Man foregrounds how philosophical discourse tends to rest upon metaphor, or figural language, and emphasises how such tropes have to coexist in writing with literal or grammatical meaning, yet even though they appear to mutually exclude each other in the act of reading, texts are always open to literal or figural interpretation. For example, Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”—a story where a community is detained underground and forced to watch shadows, which they mistake for truth, before breaking out of the cave into the blinding light of actual truth—merely describes a series of events if read literally (Plato 380 BCE). Insight comes when we read it figuratively as an allegory of the difference between truth and opinion. Yet, the literal interpretation is also important, because it reveals these tropes as figures of language, compromising the effectiveness of the argument. In order to proceed Plato’s arguments must suppress, or be blind to, literal interpretation, yet blindness runs contrary to the metaphor of illumination central to Plato’s narrative. Such deconstructive analysis reads literal and figural interpretations through each other, a procedure de Man terms “allegories of reading.” Magritte’s painting allegorises in this way by presenting a discontinuity between image and caption, revealing how the interpretation of painting depends on a play of visual aspects and the power of naming. This strategy was later appropriated by Marcel Broodthaers to critique the authority of the public museum in Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles (1968–71).

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) developed similar insights to frame truth as subject to a process of differing and deferral from itself (Derrida 1967). As de Man notes, words and signs never fully summon forth what they mean but can only be defined through appeal to additional words, from which they differ. Meaning is forever “deferred” or postponed through an endless chain of signifiers. Thus, for Derrida, we reside in a web of language/interpretation that has been laid down by tradition and which shifts each time we hear or read an utterance. Philosophy becomes an act of forensically reading these displacements and instabilities, analyzing the relations of power they manifest. We never arrive at the fixed essences expected by the philosophical tradition, but bear witness to the textual architectures out of which all truth claims arise. Derrida’s (1987) The Truth in Painting seizes upon a passing reference to the “parergon” or frame in Kant’s third critique to demonstrate the codependency of artwork, “Artworld,” and art. [4] For Derrida, the physical frame of a painting can be viewed simultaneously as internal and external to the artwork; the frame is subordinate to the artwork, yet also emphasises and completes it. Also, it can legitimately be regarded as part of the wall of the gallery and part of the painting, collapsing the boundaries between artwork and context. For Derrida, the concept of the parergon can be extended metaphorically to deconstruct the relationship of the artwork to the wider Artworld which acts as its determining frame. Focusing on what “frames” an artwork indicates an instability in any theory of the aesthetic that regards it as separate to social form.

Some of the most significant and sustained challenges to philosophical aesthetics in recent years have come from the work of Jacques Rancière (2009a; 2004). In The Politics of Aesthetics (2004), Rancière introduced the concept of three regimes of artistic production, each of which codifies and delimits what is and what is not recognizable as art in a given epoch. The “representative regime,” stemming from Aristotelian thought, lays down the “rules” of artistic production, including the delimitation of different genres / modes of practice. It also fixes the “principles of convenance”—the styles, methods, images, tropes, and significations proper to each artistic category within this rigid taxonomy. In contradistinction, an earlier “ethical regime” of art, emerging from Platonic thought, judges art according to its truthfulness to an ideal. A third regime, the “aesthetic regime” of modern art production, anarchically undoes these systems of regulation and definition, revealing them as repressive limits on the socio-political capacity of art. Though the concept of these regimes insists that our understanding of art is historically determined, the regimes themselves are meta-historic, unlike the conceptual categories of art history, and can overlap and co-exist in a particular era. For Rancière, the disciplines of philosophical aesthetics and art history are political as they restrict what is knowable as art through the task of categorisation and definition. At the same time, both artistic practice and aesthetics can act as counter-politics to this system by opening aporia within the prevailing regimes of production, exposing the exclusivity and hierarchical ordering of the Artworld, and the a priori ordering of the world, which Rancière refers to as the “distribution of the sensible” (2004, 12), that determines the forms and rights of participation in all of the above.

From narrow definitions of art based on representation, form, expression, or residing in a specific aesthetic attitude or institutional framework, we have developed a position that insists upon such criteria as mutable and historically contingent. This contingency is revealed by both careful philosophical reading and the agency of contemporary artworks. The one universal claim we can make for art is that it is a form of practice. For example, to discuss expression in art effectively, we were forced to broaden this categorisation out from notions of purgation (Aristotle) and self-transformation (Rosenberg) to consider expression on a social basis by addressing how events bring forth change (Deleuze) and how art can take the form of an event. Thus, we might conclude that what we call expression in art is inconstant and bound closely to the diverse specificities of practice.

The weakness of restricted representational, expressive, and formalist theories is the centrality they give to the artist and critic in turn as locus of meaning. Against such theories, we have identified that the origin of art resides as much within modes of social form and social structure. Individual acts of artistic production are part of a series of ongoing chains of signification that spread across general structures of meaning as they manifest at that time. In short, such acts are additive or disruptive. In contrast, institutional theory runs the risk of explaining artistic production, display and reception in a manner that leaves the disruptive charge of the individual work unexplained. Finally, the “aesthetic attitude” has been criticised for suggesting a universalised experience of modern art, outside of national, political, historical, or cultural reference points, disguising the predominantly white, bourgeois, western-centric, patriarchal, and heteronormative character of the artworld’s discourses and power bases. At the same time, the aesthetic act can work against normativity, exposing difference, and heterogeneity, and dissensus within presumed communities of sense (Rancière 2010; Derrida 1987).

From de Man we conclude, to answer the question “What is Art?” we must be attentive to its literal meanings, born out in the specificities of material and context. Moreover, this kind of answer interrogates the disciplinary assumptions that inform the question, a process that ultimately deconstructs the truth claims of philosophy. What is left is a paradoxical interplay of materiality and signification, which allows us to make the limited conclusion that intrinsic functions (representation, form and expression) co-exist with extrinsic determiners (aesthetic attitude and institutionality), challenging assumptions that inform many of the positions (Plato, Fry, Collingwood, Dickie, etc.) we have examined. A philosophy that seeks to reveal art’s essence is blind to the sensuous particularity and heterogeneity of works of art. Insight comes when philosophy analyses these specificities withholding its own assumptions. It might also learn something about itself in the process.

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Works of Art Essay

To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Basic facts about the works, personal philosophies of artists, artwork in time-context, comparison: form, content, and subject matter, aesthetic qualities and symbolic significance.

Pieces of artwork from different time periods portray varying styles. Several time periods had distinctive schools of thought. As a result, an artist who created a piece of work revealed a certain philosophical point of view. Aspects like positioning of key figures in an artwork tell of a particular style used to construct an image. Personal philosophies of artists rely upon the prevailing conditions of the time. It is imperative that the viewer makes some identities such as the visual appearance of the work.

Therefore, many works of art belonging to the same period are closely related to the context of the period. This essay has two main parts. The first part highlights more about the impressionism period’s paintings, basic facts about the works, the personal philosophies of the artists, and art work in time context. On the other hand, the second part compares the forms of art with respect to content, subject matter and form. It also compares and contrasts the symbolic significance, aesthetic attributes and the different perspectives from the artists.

The period chosen is Impressionism. Despite the differences in the paintings to be compared, all have got one description in common. Historically, impressionism as an art period dates back to 1874. These artworks have a unique way from their ability to create brilliant and rosy images. Usually, paintings from the impressionism depicted nature. Light and shadows are blended to create softened outlines. The viewer gets an impression of the sun illuminating the canvas (Perry, 1997, p. 11).

The works belong to an impressionism period. The three paintings chosen for comparison are the works of Cassatt Mary, Renoir Pierre-Aguste and Signac Paul. In all paintings, the theme involves people in a house setting. At a glance, the paintings do not have many details except the subjects in their setting.

The positioning of main figures in the frames is a point that draws interest. In the works below, the figures assume a central location in the frame. In addition, the figures in the pictures are presented in bold colors. The bold colors are blended well with shadows to create an outstanding brilliance.

The above paintings are, from left to right, Mary Cassatt’s 1880 painting, Renoir Pierre-Auguste’s 1864 painting, and Signac Paul’s 1885 painting. The first two paintings have their main figures positioned in the foreground. The last painting has the main figures in the middle ground of the frame.

However, a viewer of the painting cannot miss to note the inclusion of purple colors in all paintings. Therefore, the usage of bold colors that present a shimmering effect, and softened outlines of images is evidence that these paintings belong to the impressionism style of painting. Consequently, Mary Cassatt, Renoir Pierre-Aguste, and Signac Paul were impressionists.

Mary Cassatt’s paintings, during the impressionism period, often depicted family life. In the first place, she painted ladies in their homes. For instance, the painting above is entitled, Lydia crocheting in the Garden at Marley . At that time, her male compatriots in the art painting were working on landscapes.

The impressionism movement was the school of thought in the painting world that Mary lived in. The greatest influence for in-home paintings was females in her time were not allowed to walk alone unattended. This piece of work was done when her sister was ill. There is vibrancy in the painting.

However, the face of Lydia is sad. Therefore, Mary must have been sad too; her sister was ill at the time. One should note that the painting was made in France at that time. Women’s place in society was confined to the homesteads. This influenced the setting of her paintings (Swain, 2011, p 20).

Renoir’s painting above is entitled Little Miss Romaine Lacaux . This oil on canvas paint was done in 1864. The painting was also influenced by the impressionism school of thought. This painting is one among many others depicting children. He held a philosophy of living and working. The main influence for this painting was the closure of the Gleyre Studio in 1864 (Klein & Monet, 2006, p 11). Another influence was his affection for children. His age at that time might have influenced this affection.

Paul Signac had a wealthy background. His painting career was initially influenced by his friendship with other artists like Monet. Signac was both an anarchist and libertarian. The painting illustrated above was created in 1885; the year Signac was in constant resistance from bourgeois (Walther & Suckale, 2002, p 508).

Generally, Signac was influenced by impressionist paintings of artists like Monet and Seurat. Two milliners, Rue du Caire portray the widely held idea in the 19 th century that a woman’s work was indoors. Thus, this picture reveals a disorganized environment in which a woman conducts her daily chores.

The three artworks belong to different artists but same time period. The works are further distinguished from one another through philosophies that an artist held then. In this example, the school of thought was impressionism. As a result, each artist combined artistic requirements of impressionism with prevailing situations. This combination was represented as a pictorial idea of the artist about some subject. Therefore, the school of thought, at that time influenced an artwork.

In the first painting made by Mary Cassatt, the blend of colors offsets the dull mood of the picture’s face. The image is generally flat. Nevertheless, the brown color scaling the perspective in the middle ground of the frame adds some form and texture picture. The large bonnet worn by the lady suggests the painters’ internal feeling of hiding a sad mood in the face of the picture.

In the second painting, Renoir combines the effect of shadows and light to offset the flat upper part of the girl with form. The circular shape of the cloth in the lower waistline of the picture introduces motion and transition in colors. Colors begin with dullness and brighten upwards. This color transition introduces innocence in the child; the subject matter.

Lastly, Signac’s milliner is based on flatness. The brushstrokes applied to the tablecloth combines with the wallpaper to introduce parallelism, in the picture. However, flatness of the picture is reduced by the bending figure. Form is introduced in the picture, around the back of the milliner. This underscores the painter’s subject matter; domestic chores of a woman, that time.

The painting of Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marley has an awkward aesthetic value. The large bonnet on her head does not match with either her thin body or sad face. Unlike the other two paintings, Mary Cassatt symbolically expressed her sadness through this quality.

There is a quality of elegance in Little miss Romaine by Renoir. The elegance is enhanced by usage of bright colors around the face of the girl. This symbolically depicts innocence in children. Lastly, the aesthetic quality in the Two Milliners is powerful. The bending woman in the picture symbolically represents burden. Despite the differences, all paintings embrace the use of bold and bright colors to present their subject matter.

In conclusion, impressionism employed the use of bold and bright colors in most of the paintings. The most preferred color was purple. The paintings comprised majorly of outdoor scenes like landscapes. Through such artworks, an artist’s subject matter is evident. Therefore, impressionists usually painted according to the prevailing situations at the time.

Klein, AG. & Monet, C. (2006). Claude Monet . Minnesota: ABDO Publishing Company.

Olga’s Gallery (2011). Web.

Perry, G. (1997). Impressionist Palette: quilt color and design . California: C&T Publishing Inc.

Swain, C. (2011). Claude Monet, Edward Degas, Mary Cassatt, Vincent Van Vogh . London: Benchmark Education Company.

Walther, IF. & Suckale, R. (2002). Masterpieces of Western Art : A History of Art in 900 individual studies from the Gothic to the present day, part 1. Bonn: Taschen.

Oil Paintings by Renoir, Maler, de Corter
Women Writers and Artists About Social Problems
An analysis of the Luncheon of the boating party
Art through History
Art Period Comparison: Classicism and Middle Age
Art Transformation Since the Middle Ages to the Current Times
Art influences Culture: Romanticism & Realism
Necklace of Five Gold Pendants and Twenty One Stone Beads
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

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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.

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

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. [ 1 ] 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 argument sort of skeptical 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). [ 2 ] 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. 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 this 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 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 needn’t suffice to make it so (Khalidi 2013; see also the entry on social institutions ). [ 3 ] 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 Abellian 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 that 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: “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 very 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. [ 4 ] 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. It is not clear that we are really so in the dark when it comes to determining whether practices in alien cultures or traditions are arts.

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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“Without Art Mankind Could Not Exist”: Leo Tolstoy’s Essay What is Art

In his essay “What is Art?” Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, defines art as a way to communicate emotion with the ultimate goal of uniting humanity.

How can we define art? What is authentic art and what is good art? Leo Tolstoy answered these questions in “What is Art?” (1897), his most comprehensive essay on the theory of art. Tolstoy’s theory has a lot of charming aspects. He believes that art is a means of communicating emotion, with the aim of promoting mutual understanding. By gaining awareness of each other’s feelings we can successfully practice empathy and ultimately unite to further mankind’s collective well-being.

Furthermore, Tolstoy firmly denies that pleasure is art’s sole purpose. Instead, he supports a moral-based art able to appeal to everyone and not just the privileged few. Although he takes a clear stance in favor of Christianity as a valid foundation for morality, his definition of religious perception is flexible. As a result, it is possible to easily replace it with all sorts of different ideological schemes.

Personally, I do not approach Tolstoy’s theory as a set of laws for understanding art. More than anything, “What is art?” is a piece of art itself. A work about the meaning of art and a fertile foundation on which truly beautiful ideas can flourish.

Most of the paintings used for this article were drawn by realist painter Ilya Repin. The Russian painter created a series of portraits of Tolstoy, which were exhibited together at the 2019 exhibition “Repin: The Myth of Tolstoy” at the State Museum L.N. Tolstoy. More information regarding the relationship between Tolstoy and Repin can be found in this article .

Who was Tolstoy?

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Leo Tolstoy ( Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy) was born in 1828 in his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, some 200km from Moscow. His family belonged in the Russian aristocracy and thus Leo inherited the title of count. In 1851 he joined the tsarist army to pay off his accumulated debt but quickly regretted this decision. Eventually, he left the army right after the end of the Crimean War in 1856.

After traveling Europe and witnessing the suffering and cruelty of the world, Tolstoy was transformed. From a privileged aristocrat, he became a Christian anarchist arguing against the State and propagating non-violence. This was the doctrine that inspired Gandhi and was expressed as non-resistance to evil. This means that evil cannot be fought with evil means and one should neither accept nor resist it.

Tolstoy’s writing made him famous around the world and he is justly considered among the four giants of Russian Literature next to Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev. His most famous novels are War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). However, he also wrote multiple philosophical and theological texts as well as theatrical plays and short stories. Upon completing his masterpiece Anna Karenina , Tolstoy fell into a state of insufferable existential despair.

Charmed by the faith of the common people, he turned to Christianity. Eventually, he dismissed the Russian Church and every other Church as corrupted and looked for his own answers. His theological explorations led to the formulation of his own version of Christianity, which deeply influenced his social vision. He died in 1910 at the age of 82 after suffering from pneumonia.

Art Based On Beauty And Taste

Tolstoy wrote “What is art?” in 1897. There, he laid down his opinions on several art-related issues. Throughout this essay , he remains confident that he is the first to provide an exact definition for art:

“…however strange it may seem to say so, in spite of the mountains of books written about art, no exact definition of art has been constructed. And the reason of this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.”

So, what is art for Tolstoy? Before answering the question, the Russian novelist seeks a proper basis for his definition. Examining works of other philosophers and artists, he notices that they usually assume that beauty is art’s foundation. For them beauty is either that which provides a certain kind of pleasure or that which is perfect according to objective, universal laws.

Tolstoy thinks that both cases lead to subjective definitions of beauty and in turn to subjective definitions of art. Those who realize the impossibility of objectively defining beauty, turn to a study of taste asking why a thing pleases. Again, Tolstoy sees no point in this, as taste is also subjective. There is no way of explaining why one thing pleases someone but displeases someone else, he concludes.

Theories that Justify the Canon

Theories of art based on beauty or taste inescapably include only that type of art that appeals to certain people:

“First acknowledging a certain set of productions to be art (because they please us) and then framing such a theory of art that all those productions which please a certain circle of people should fit into it.”

These theories are made to justify the existing art canon which covers anything from Greek art to Shakespeare and Beethoven. In reality, the canon is nothing more than the artworks appreciated by the upper classes. To justify new productions that please the elites, new theories that expand and reaffirm the canon are constantly created:

“No matter what insanities appear in art, when once they find acceptance among the upper classes of our society, a theory is quickly invented to explain and sanction them; just as if there had never been periods in history when certain special circles of people recognized and approved false, deformed, and insensate art which subsequently left no trace and has been utterly forgotten.”

The true definition of art, according to Tolstoy, should be based on moral principles. Before anything, we need to question if a work of art is moral. If it is moral, then it is good art. If it is not moral, it is bad. This rationale leads Tolstoy to a very bizarre idea. At one point in his essay, he states that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and his own War and Peace are immoral and therefore bad art. But what does Tolstoy exactly mean when he says that something is good or bad art? And what is the nature of the morality he uses for his artistic judgments?

What is Art?

Art is a means of communicating feelings the same way words transmit thoughts. In art, someone transmits a feeling and “infects” others with what he/she feels. Tolstoy encapsulates his definition of art in the following passages:

“To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling – this is the activity of art. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hand on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”

In its essence, art is a means of union among men brought together by commonly experienced feelings. It facilitates access to the psychology of others fostering empathy and understanding by tearing down the walls of the Subject. This function of art is not only useful but also necessary for the progress and wellbeing of humanity.

The innumerable feelings experienced by humans both in past and present are available to us only through art. The loss of such a unique ability would be a catastrophe. “Men would be like beasts”, says Tolstoy, and even goes as far as to claim that without art, mankind could not exist. This is a bold declaration, which recalls the Nietzschean aphorism that human existence is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.

Art in the Extended and Limited Sense of the Word

Tolstoy’s definition expands to almost every aspect of human activity way beyond the fine arts. Even a boy telling the story of how he met a wolf can be art. That is, however, only if the boy succeeds in making the listeners feel the fear and anguish of the encounter. Works of art are everywhere, according to this view. Cradlesong, jest, mimicry, house ornamentation, dress and utensils, even triumphal processions are all works of art.

This is, in my view, the strongest point of Tolstoy’s theory. Namely, that it considers almost the totality of human activity as art. However, there is a distinction between this expanded art, and art in the limited sense of the word. The latter corresponds to the fine arts and is the area that Tolstoy investigates further in his essay. A weak point of the theory is that it never examines the act of creation and art that is not shared with others.

Real and Counterfeit Art

The distinction between real and counterfeit, good and bad art is Tolstoy’s contribution to the field of art criticism. Despite its many weaknesses, this system offers an interesting alternative to judging and appreciating art.

Tolstoy names real art (i.e. authentic, true to itself) the one resulting from an honest, internal need for expression. The product of this internal urge becomes a real work of art, if it successfully evokes feelings to other people. In this process, the receiver of the artistic impression becomes so united with the artist’s experience, that he/she feels like the artwork is his/her own. Therefore, real art removes the barrier between Subject and Object, and between receiver and sender of an artistic impression. In addition, it removes the barrier between the receivers who experience unity through a common feeling.

“In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.” Furthermore, a work that does not evoke feelings and spiritual union with others is counterfeit art. No matter how poetical, realistic, effectful, or interesting it is, it must meet these conditions to succeed. Otherwise it is just a counterfeit posing as real art.

Emotional Infectiousness

Emotional infectiousness is a necessary quality of a work of art. The degree of infectiousness is not always the same but varies according to three conditions:

The individuality of the feeling transmitted: the more specific to a person the feeling, the more successful the artwork.
The clearness of the feeling transmitted: the clearness of expression assists the transition of feelings and increases the pleasure derived from art.
The sincerity of the artist: the force with which the artist feels the emotion he/she transmits through his/her art.

Out of all three, sincerity is the most important. Without it, the other two conditions cannot exist. Worth noting is that Tolstoy finds sincerity almost always present in “peasant art” but almost always absent in “upper-class art”. If a work lacks even one of the three qualities, it is counterfeit art. In contrast, it is real if it possesses all three. In that case, it only remains to judge whether this real artwork is good or bad, more or less successful. The success of an artwork is based firstly on the degree of its infectiousness. The more infectious the artwork, the better.

The Religious Perception of Art

Tolstoy believes that art is a means of progress towards perfection. With time, art evolves rendering accessible the experience of humanity for humanity’s sake. This is a process of moral realization and results in society becoming kinder and more compassionate. A genuinely good artwork ought to make accessible these good feelings that move humanity closer to its moral completion. Within this framework, a good work of art must also be moral.

But how can we judge what feelings are morally good? Tolstoy’s answer lies in what he calls “the religious perception of the age”. This is defined as the understanding of the meaning of life as conceived by a group of people. This understanding is the moral compass of a society and always points towards certain values. For Tolstoy, the religious perception of his time is found in Christianity. As a result, all good art must carry the foundational message of this religion understood as brotherhood among all people. This union of man aiming at his collective well-being, argues Tolstoy, must be revered as the highest value of all.

Although it relates to religion, religious perception is not the same with religious cult. In fact, the definition of religious perception is so wide, that it describes ideology in general. To this interpretation leads Tolstoy’s view that, even if a society recognizes no religion, it always has a religious morality. This can be compared with the direction of a flowing river:

If the river flows at all, it must have a direction. If a society lives, there must be a religious perception indicating the direction in which, more or less consciously, all its members tend.

It is safe to say that more than a century after Tolstoy’s death, “What is Art?” retains its appeal. We should not easily dismiss the idea that (good) art communicates feelings and promotes unity through universal understanding. This is especially the case in our time where many question art’s importance and see it as a source of confusion and division.

Tolstoy, L.N. 1902. What is Art? In the Novels and Other Works of Lyof N. Tolstoy . translated by Aline Delano. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. pp. 328-527. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43409
Jahn, G.R. 1975. ‘The Aesthetic Theory of Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art?’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 34, No. 1. pp. 59-65. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/428645
Morson, G.S. 2019. ‘Leo Tolstoy’. Encyclopædia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Tolstoy

Theodor Adorno on the Essay: An Antidote to Modernity

By Antonis Chaliakopoulos MSc Museum Studies, BA History & Archaeology Antonis is an archaeologist with a passion for museums and heritage and a keen interest in aesthetics and the reception of classical art. He holds an MSc in Museum Studies from the University of Glasgow and a BA in History and Archaeology from the University of Athens (NKUA) where he is currently working on his PhD.

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What is art and/or what is beauty, the following answers to this artful question each win a random book..

Art is something we do, a verb. Art is an expression of our thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and desires, but it is even more personal than that: it’s about sharing the way we experience the world, which for many is an extension of personality. It is the communication of intimate concepts that cannot be faithfully portrayed by words alone. And because words alone are not enough, we must find some other vehicle to carry our intent. But the content that we instill on or in our chosen media is not in itself the art. Art is to be found in how the media is used, the way in which the content is expressed.

What then is beauty? Beauty is much more than cosmetic: it is not about prettiness. There are plenty of pretty pictures available at the neighborhood home furnishing store; but these we might not refer to as beautiful; and it is not difficult to find works of artistic expression that we might agree are beautiful that are not necessarily pretty. Beauty is rather a measure of affect, a measure of emotion. In the context of art, beauty is the gauge of successful communication between participants – the conveyance of a concept between the artist and the perceiver. Beautiful art is successful in portraying the artist’s most profound intended emotions, the desired concepts, whether they be pretty and bright, or dark and sinister. But neither the artist nor the observer can be certain of successful communication in the end. So beauty in art is eternally subjective.

Wm. Joseph Nieters, Lake Ozark, Missouri

Works of art may elicit a sense of wonder or cynicism, hope or despair, adoration or spite; the work of art may be direct or complex, subtle or explicit, intelligible or obscure; and the subjects and approaches to the creation of art are bounded only by the imagination of the artist. Consequently, I believe that defining art based upon its content is a doomed enterprise.

Now a theme in aesthetics, the study of art, is the claim that there is a detachment or distance between works of art and the flow of everyday life. Thus, works of art rise like islands from a current of more pragmatic concerns. When you step out of a river and onto an island, you’ve reached your destination. Similarly, the aesthetic attitude requires you to treat artistic experience as an end-in-itself : art asks us to arrive empty of preconceptions and attend to the way in which we experience the work of art. And although a person can have an ‘aesthetic experience’ of a natural scene, flavor or texture, art is different in that it is produced . Therefore, art is the intentional communication of an experience as an end-in-itself . The content of that experience in its cultural context may determine whether the artwork is popular or ridiculed, significant or trivial, but it is art either way.

One of the initial reactions to this approach may be that it seems overly broad. An older brother who sneaks up behind his younger sibling and shouts “Booo!” can be said to be creating art. But isn’t the difference between this and a Freddy Krueger movie just one of degree? On the other hand, my definition would exclude graphics used in advertising or political propaganda, as they are created as a means to an end and not for their own sakes. Furthermore, ‘communication’ is not the best word for what I have in mind because it implies an unwarranted intention about the content represented. Aesthetic responses are often underdetermined by the artist’s intentions.

Mike Mallory, Everett, WA

The fundamental difference between art and beauty is that art is about who has produced it, whereas beauty depends on who’s looking.

Of course there are standards of beauty – that which is seen as ‘traditionally’ beautiful. The game changers – the square pegs, so to speak – are those who saw traditional standards of beauty and decided specifically to go against them, perhaps just to prove a point. Take Picasso, Munch, Schoenberg, to name just three. They have made a stand against these norms in their art. Otherwise their art is like all other art: its only function is to be experienced, appraised, and understood (or not).

Art is a means to state an opinion or a feeling, or else to create a different view of the world, whether it be inspired by the work of other people or something invented that’s entirely new. Beauty is whatever aspect of that or anything else that makes an individual feel positive or grateful. Beauty alone is not art, but art can be made of, about or for beautiful things. Beauty can be found in a snowy mountain scene: art is the photograph of it shown to family, the oil interpretation of it hung in a gallery, or the music score recreating the scene in crotchets and quavers.

However, art is not necessarily positive: it can be deliberately hurtful or displeasing: it can make you think about or consider things that you would rather not. But if it evokes an emotion in you, then it is art.

Chiara Leonardi, Reading, Berks

Art is a way of grasping the world. Not merely the physical world, which is what science attempts to do; but the whole world, and specifically, the human world, the world of society and spiritual experience.

Art emerged around 50,000 years ago, long before cities and civilisation, yet in forms to which we can still directly relate. The wall paintings in the Lascaux caves, which so startled Picasso, have been carbon-dated at around 17,000 years old. Now, following the invention of photography and the devastating attack made by Duchamp on the self-appointed Art Establishment [see Brief Lives this issue], art cannot be simply defined on the basis of concrete tests like ‘fidelity of representation’ or vague abstract concepts like ‘beauty’. So how can we define art in terms applying to both cave-dwellers and modern city sophisticates? To do this we need to ask: What does art do ? And the answer is surely that it provokes an emotional, rather than a simply cognitive response. One way of approaching the problem of defining art, then, could be to say: Art consists of shareable ideas that have a shareable emotional impact. Art need not produce beautiful objects or events, since a great piece of art could validly arouse emotions other than those aroused by beauty, such as terror, anxiety, or laughter. Yet to derive an acceptable philosophical theory of art from this understanding means tackling the concept of ‘emotion’ head on, and philosophers have been notoriously reluctant to do this. But not all of them: Robert Solomon’s book The Passions (1993) has made an excellent start, and this seems to me to be the way to go.

It won’t be easy. Poor old Richard Rorty was jumped on from a very great height when all he said was that literature, poetry, patriotism, love and stuff like that were philosophically important. Art is vitally important to maintaining broad standards in civilisation. Its pedigree long predates philosophy, which is only 3,000 years old, and science, which is a mere 500 years old. Art deserves much more attention from philosophers.

Alistair MacFarlane, Gwynedd

Some years ago I went looking for art. To begin my journey I went to an art gallery. At that stage art to me was whatever I found in an art gallery. I found paintings, mostly, and because they were in the gallery I recognised them as art. A particular Rothko painting was one colour and large. I observed a further piece that did not have an obvious label. It was also of one colour – white – and gigantically large, occupying one complete wall of the very high and spacious room and standing on small roller wheels. On closer inspection I saw that it was a moveable wall, not a piece of art. Why could one piece of work be considered ‘art’ and the other not?

The answer to the question could, perhaps, be found in the criteria of Berys Gaut to decide if some artefact is, indeed, art – that art pieces function only as pieces of art, just as their creators intended.

But were they beautiful? Did they evoke an emotional response in me? Beauty is frequently associated with art. There is sometimes an expectation of encountering a ‘beautiful’ object when going to see a work of art, be it painting, sculpture, book or performance. Of course, that expectation quickly changes as one widens the range of installations encountered. The classic example is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), a rather un-beautiful urinal.

Can we define beauty? Let me try by suggesting that beauty is the capacity of an artefact to evoke a pleasurable emotional response. This might be categorised as the ‘like’ response.

I definitely did not like Fountain at the initial level of appreciation. There was skill, of course, in its construction. But what was the skill in its presentation as art?

So I began to reach a definition of art. A work of art is that which asks a question which a non-art object such as a wall does not: What am I? What am I communicating? The responses, both of the creator artist and of the recipient audience, vary, but they invariably involve a judgement, a response to the invitation to answer. The answer, too, goes towards deciphering that deeper question – the ‘Who am I?’ which goes towards defining humanity.

Neil Hallinan, Maynooth, Co. Kildare

‘Art’ is where we make meaning beyond language. Art consists in the making of meaning through intelligent agency, eliciting an aesthetic response. It’s a means of communication where language is not sufficient to explain or describe its content. Art can render visible and known what was previously unspoken. Because what art expresses and evokes is in part ineffable, we find it difficult to define and delineate it. It is known through the experience of the audience as well as the intention and expression of the artist. The meaning is made by all the participants, and so can never be fully known. It is multifarious and on-going. Even a disagreement is a tension which is itself an expression of something.

Art drives the development of a civilisation, both supporting the establishment and also preventing subversive messages from being silenced – art leads, mirrors and reveals change in politics and morality. Art plays a central part in the creation of culture, and is an outpouring of thought and ideas from it, and so it cannot be fully understood in isolation from its context. Paradoxically, however, art can communicate beyond language and time, appealing to our common humanity and linking disparate communities. Perhaps if wider audiences engaged with a greater variety of the world’s artistic traditions it could engender increased tolerance and mutual respect.

Another inescapable facet of art is that it is a commodity. This fact feeds the creative process, whether motivating the artist to form an item of monetary value, or to avoid creating one, or to artistically commodify the aesthetic experience. The commodification of art also affects who is considered qualified to create art, comment on it, and even define it, as those who benefit most strive to keep the value of ‘art objects’ high. These influences must feed into a culture’s understanding of what art is at any time, making thoughts about art culturally dependent. However, this commodification and the consequent closely-guarded role of the art critic also gives rise to a counter culture within art culture, often expressed through the creation of art that cannot be sold. The stratification of art by value and the resultant tension also adds to its meaning, and the meaning of art to society.

Catherine Bosley, Monk Soham, Suffolk

First of all we must recognize the obvious. ‘Art’ is a word, and words and concepts are organic and change their meaning through time. So in the olden days, art meant craft. It was something you could excel at through practise and hard work. You learnt how to paint or sculpt, and you learnt the special symbolism of your era. Through Romanticism and the birth of individualism, art came to mean originality. To do something new and never-heard-of defined the artist. His or her personality became essentially as important as the artwork itself. During the era of Modernism, the search for originality led artists to reevaluate art. What could art do? What could it represent? Could you paint movement (Cubism, Futurism)? Could you paint the non-material (Abstract Expressionism)? Fundamentally: could anything be regarded as art? A way of trying to solve this problem was to look beyond the work itself, and focus on the art world: art was that which the institution of art – artists, critics, art historians, etc – was prepared to regard as art, and which was made public through the institution, e.g. galleries. That’s Institutionalism – made famous through Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades.

Institutionalism has been the prevailing notion through the later part of the twentieth century, at least in academia, and I would say it still holds a firm grip on our conceptions. One example is the Swedish artist Anna Odell. Her film sequence Unknown woman 2009-349701 , for which she faked psychosis to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital, was widely debated, and by many was not regarded as art. But because it was debated by the art world, it succeeded in breaking into the art world, and is today regarded as art, and Odell is regarded an artist.

Of course there are those who try and break out of this hegemony, for example by refusing to play by the art world’s unwritten rules. Andy Warhol with his Factory was one, even though he is today totally embraced by the art world. Another example is Damien Hirst, who, much like Warhol, pays people to create the physical manifestations of his ideas. He doesn’t use galleries and other art world-approved arenas to advertise, and instead sells his objects directly to private individuals. This liberal approach to capitalism is one way of attacking the hegemony of the art world.

What does all this teach us about art? Probably that art is a fleeting and chimeric concept. We will always have art, but for the most part we will only really learn in retrospect what the art of our era was.

Tommy Törnsten, Linköping, Sweden

Art periods such as Classical, Byzantine, neo-Classical, Romantic, Modern and post-Modern reflect the changing nature of art in social and cultural contexts; and shifting values are evident in varying content, forms and styles. These changes are encompassed, more or less in sequence, by Imitationalist, Emotionalist, Expressivist, Formalist and Institutionalist theories of art. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), Arthur Danto claims a distinctiveness for art that inextricably links its instances with acts of observation, without which all that could exist are ‘material counterparts’ or ‘mere real things’ rather than artworks. Notwithstanding the competing theories, works of art can be seen to possess ‘family resemblances’ or ‘strands of resemblance’ linking very different instances as art. Identifying instances of art is relatively straightforward, but a definition of art that includes all possible cases is elusive. Consequently, art has been claimed to be an ‘open’ concept.

According to Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1976), capitalised ‘Art’ appears in general use in the nineteenth century, with ‘Fine Art’; whereas ‘art’ has a history of previous applications, such as in music, poetry, comedy, tragedy and dance; and we should also mention literature, media arts, even gardening, which for David Cooper in A Philosophy of Gardens (2006) can provide “epiphanies of co-dependence”. Art, then, is perhaps “anything presented for our aesthetic contemplation” – a phrase coined by John Davies, former tutor at the School of Art Education, Birmingham, in 1971 – although ‘anything’ may seem too inclusive. Gaining our aesthetic interest is at least a necessary requirement of art. Sufficiency for something to be art requires significance to art appreciators which endures as long as tokens or types of the artwork persist. Paradoxically, such significance is sometimes attributed to objects neither intended as art, nor especially intended to be perceived aesthetically – for instance, votive, devotional, commemorative or utilitarian artefacts. Furthermore, aesthetic interests can be eclipsed by dubious investment practices and social kudos. When combined with celebrity and harmful forms of narcissism, they can egregiously affect artistic authenticity. These interests can be overriding, and spawn products masquerading as art. Then it’s up to discerning observers to spot any Fads, Fakes and Fantasies (Sjoerd Hannema, 1970).

Colin Brookes, Loughborough, Leicestershire

For me art is nothing more and nothing less than the creative ability of individuals to express their understanding of some aspect of private or public life, like love, conflict, fear, or pain. As I read a war poem by Edward Thomas, enjoy a Mozart piano concerto, or contemplate a M.C. Escher drawing, I am often emotionally inspired by the moment and intellectually stimulated by the thought-process that follows. At this moment of discovery I humbly realize my views may be those shared by thousands, even millions across the globe. This is due in large part to the mass media’s ability to control and exploit our emotions. The commercial success of a performance or production becomes the metric by which art is now almost exclusively gauged: quality in art has been sadly reduced to equating great art with sale of books, number of views, or the downloading of recordings. Too bad if personal sensibilities about a particular piece of art are lost in the greater rush for immediate acceptance.

So where does that leave the subjective notion that beauty can still be found in art? If beauty is the outcome of a process by which art gives pleasure to our senses, then it should remain a matter of personal discernment, even if outside forces clamour to take control of it. In other words, nobody, including the art critic, should be able to tell the individual what is beautiful and what is not. The world of art is one of a constant tension between preserving individual tastes and promoting popular acceptance.

Ian Malcomson, Victoria, British Columbia

What we perceive as beautiful does not offend us on any level. It is a personal judgement, a subjective opinion. A memory from once we gazed upon something beautiful, a sight ever so pleasing to the senses or to the eye, oft time stays with us forever. I shall never forget walking into Balzac’s house in France: the scent of lilies was so overwhelming that I had a numinous moment. The intensity of the emotion evoked may not be possible to explain. I don’t feel it’s important to debate why I think a flower, painting, sunset or how the light streaming through a stained-glass window is beautiful. The power of the sights create an emotional reaction in me. I don’t expect or concern myself that others will agree with me or not. Can all agree that an act of kindness is beautiful?

A thing of beauty is a whole; elements coming together making it so. A single brush stroke of a painting does not alone create the impact of beauty, but all together, it becomes beautiful. A perfect flower is beautiful, when all of the petals together form its perfection; a pleasant, intoxicating scent is also part of the beauty.

In thinking about the question, ‘What is beauty?’, I’ve simply come away with the idea that I am the beholder whose eye it is in. Suffice it to say, my private assessment of what strikes me as beautiful is all I need to know.

Cheryl Anderson, Kenilworth, Illinois

Stendhal said, “Beauty is the promise of happiness”, but this didn’t get to the heart of the matter. Whose beauty are we talking about? Whose happiness?

Consider if a snake made art. What would it believe to be beautiful? What would it deign to make? Snakes have poor eyesight and detect the world largely through a chemosensory organ, the Jacobson’s organ, or through heat-sensing pits. Would a movie in its human form even make sense to a snake? So their art, their beauty, would be entirely alien to ours: it would not be visual, and even if they had songs they would be foreign; after all, snakes do not have ears, they sense vibrations. So fine art would be sensed, and songs would be felt, if it is even possible to conceive that idea.

From this perspective – a view low to the ground – we can see that beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. It may cross our lips to speak of the nature of beauty in billowy language, but we do so entirely with a forked tongue if we do so seriously. The aesthetics of representing beauty ought not to fool us into thinking beauty, as some abstract concept, truly exists. It requires a viewer and a context, and the value we place on certain combinations of colors or sounds over others speaks of nothing more than preference. Our desire for pictures, moving or otherwise, is because our organs developed in such a way. A snake would have no use for the visual world.

I am thankful to have human art over snake art, but I would no doubt be amazed at serpentine art. It would require an intellectual sloughing of many conceptions we take for granted. For that, considering the possibility of this extreme thought is worthwhile: if snakes could write poetry, what would it be?

Derek Halm, Portland, Oregon

[A: Sssibilance and sussssuration – Ed.]

The questions, ‘What is art?’ and ‘What is beauty?’ are different types and shouldn’t be conflated.

With boring predictability, almost all contemporary discussers of art lapse into a ‘relative-off’, whereby they go to annoying lengths to demonstrate how open-minded they are and how ineluctably loose the concept of art is. If art is just whatever you want it to be, can we not just end the conversation there? It’s a done deal. I’ll throw playdough on to a canvas, and we can pretend to display our modern credentials of acceptance and insight. This just doesn’t work, and we all know it. If art is to mean anything , there has to be some working definition of what it is. If art can be anything to anybody at anytime, then there ends the discussion. What makes art special – and worth discussing – is that it stands above or outside everyday things, such as everyday food, paintwork, or sounds. Art comprises special or exceptional dishes, paintings, and music.

So what, then, is my definition of art? Briefly, I believe there must be at least two considerations to label something as ‘art’. The first is that there must be something recognizable in the way of ‘author-to-audience reception’. I mean to say, there must be the recognition that something was made for an audience of some kind to receive, discuss or enjoy. Implicit in this point is the evident recognizability of what the art actually is – in other words, the author doesn’t have to tell you it’s art when you otherwise wouldn’t have any idea. The second point is simply the recognition of skill: some obvious skill has to be involved in making art. This, in my view, would be the minimum requirements – or definition – of art. Even if you disagree with the particulars, some definition is required to make anything at all art. Otherwise, what are we even discussing? I’m breaking the mold and ask for brass tacks.

Brannon McConkey, Tennessee Author of Student of Life: Why Becoming Engaged in Life, Art, and Philosophy Can Lead to a Happier Existence

Human beings appear to have a compulsion to categorize, to organize and define. We seek to impose order on a welter of sense-impressions and memories, seeing regularities and patterns in repetitions and associations, always on the lookout for correlations, eager to determine cause and effect, so that we might give sense to what might otherwise seem random and inconsequential. However, particularly in the last century, we have also learned to take pleasure in the reflection of unstructured perceptions; our artistic ways of seeing and listening have expanded to encompass disharmony and irregularity. This has meant that culturally, an ever-widening gap has grown between the attitudes and opinions of the majority, who continue to define art in traditional ways, having to do with order, harmony, representation; and the minority, who look for originality, who try to see the world anew, and strive for difference, and whose critical practice is rooted in abstraction. In between there are many who abjure both extremes, and who both find and give pleasure both in defining a personal vision and in practising craftsmanship.

There will always be a challenge to traditional concepts of art from the shock of the new, and tensions around the appropriateness of our understanding. That is how things should be, as innovators push at the boundaries. At the same time, we will continue to take pleasure in the beauty of a mathematical equation, a finely-tuned machine, a successful scientific experiment, the technology of landing a probe on a comet, an accomplished poem, a striking portrait, the sound-world of a symphony. We apportion significance and meaning to what we find of value and wish to share with our fellows. Our art and our definitions of beauty reflect our human nature and the multiplicity of our creative efforts.

In the end, because of our individuality and our varied histories and traditions, our debates will always be inconclusive. If we are wise, we will look and listen with an open spirit, and sometimes with a wry smile, always celebrating the diversity of human imaginings and achievements.

David Howard, Church Stretton, Shropshire

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Art Essay Writing Guide

Table of Contents

What is the purpose of an art essay?

Generally, an art essay is an essay that talks about art in sculpture, paintings, architecture, music and portraits.

These kinds of essays are used for:

Painting visual pictures: an art essay is an essay that showcases visual arts and creative ideas that people have come up with.
Improving creativity: the whole purpose of art essays is to provide a platform for students to tap into their creative side and vividly paint a picture of a certain image using words.

Art essay topic choice

Like every other essay, there are general tips that should be considered when coming up with an art essay writing topic.

The type of art: this may include a painting, a sculpture or just a simple hand diagram. The type of art is important as it sets out what you are supposed to write about.
What intrigues you about the art: this is the most important part of the essay. The whole art essay is based on what you want others to know about the piece of art.
Personal interests: what you, as a writer, love is very important as it narrows down the topic. It is easier to write on topics that are well-known to you.

There are a number of art essay writing topics to choose from.

Below is a list of topics for an art essay

Differences between Picasso’s concepts and Matisse’s
The history of art in the Netherlands
Differences between Bernini and Borromini
The inspiration behind famous painting
The Mona Lisa
Leonardo Da Vinci
Ancient Roman structures
The sculptures of nude women
Impressionism era of art in Netherlands
The graphics of modern day art
Insinuations behind ‘The Thinker’
The Pieta of Michelangelo
The contribution of Vincent Van Gogh and Piet Mondrian
Flemish Baroque in the 17th century.

The above are some of the good topics for an art essay.

Structure of an art essay

The art essay topics determine the kind of structure to build on. However, most have a standard art essay structure.

Sample of art essay outline

Introduction.

The Mona Lisa is one of the most known paintings in the world. This is the painting of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco Del Giocondo, believed to have been painted in the 16th century. It is the work of Leonardo da Vinci and it was purchased by King Francis I. The Mona Lisa is currently under the ownership of the French government.

Thesis statement

The Mona Lisa has had a great impact towards the contribution of art in France:

(i) It is one of the most famous paintings in the world. The Mona Lisa is the painting that everyone wants to see. It is so precious that only a copy of it is actually showcased in the museum.

(ii) It has led to the growth of art. The Mona Lisa has inspired artists all over France. There has been a rise of many artists including Camille Pissarro, a painter, and Etienne-Jules Marey, a photographer.

It is clear that the Mona Lisa is the soft spot in France. The French take pride in it and have used it to improve their lives. Besides its contribution to art, it has also placed France among the leading countries that celebrate art. This has therefore created a culture of being drawn to art and it is reflected in their way of life.

The above is a sample of outline for an art essay.

Arts essay tips on writing the introduction

An art essay introduction identifies the art and the artist. Art is diverse, as it could be sculptures, architecture, performing arts or paintings in it. This is where you state why you chose that topic. It also contains a history of the said art and brief details, like who the artist is, the year, the location, etc.

The introduction for an art essay states the thesis. It may be a general statement about the art or a specific aspect of it.

Tips on thesis writing

The thesis statement should be simple and easy to write about. Too complex statements tend to be confusing.

Pick a statement that is closer to your understanding.
Ensure it is as simple as possible.
To avoid irrelevancy, one can have an art essay draft that they can build on.

Tips on the body (transitions, paragraphs, and length)

This is the main part of the essay where you derive analysis based on your point of view. Describe why the art is so appealing to you. Ensure that your defense covers an angle that has not already been covered for uniqueness. For example, one can focus only on the strokes of a portrait. However, ensure that what you describe is relevant to the thesis of your art essay topics.

The essay should not be too long. The sentence construction should also be well done. For this reason, it is advisable to have your points arranged into paragraphs. Ensure that each paragraph is independent and speaks volumes. This ensures that the art essay hooks the reader.

The transition from one paragraph to the next should also be smooth. Using cliché transitions makes the essay boring; therefore, you need to be creative.

Tips on conclusion writing

In an art essay conclusion, one needs to state their opinion. What you think the artists` feelings were and why they decided to paint it the way they did. At this point, you can state the events that contributed to the artist coming up with that art. The conclusion for an art essay requires a lot of research into the background of both the art and the artist(s). For this reason, the references and sources of the information should be cited.

Advice for writers

In art essay writing it is important to first do your research. Art is so diverse and this can be sometimes confusing. The topic to write on should be related to your interests, for example, as a musician, you would find it easier to write about performing arts and music. Besides this, do not plagiarize any work done. Cite and state all sources, making sure that you observe all rules of patent and copyrights.

For you to be a good writer, these art essay tips will be very helpful. The best writer is the one who admits to being in a need of help. The art essay writing guide can also be used to find more about art essay writing steps. Different sources could give different art essay outlines so you need to be careful.

Finalizing the essay

After writing the art essay, it is important to have a clean essay. This calls for proofreading and editing. Proofreading ensures that you do not have any grammatical errors, the art essay outlining is as required, your sentence construction is good and the language used is the required one. Some sites offer art essay writing guide for use when one gets stuck. Proofreading also ensures that the art essay structure is followed. After this is done, ensure that the format used is correct whether APA, MLA or Chicago.

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High [9th-12th] Worksheet

Writing an essay about a work of art: planning sheet and notes, created on june 14, 2016 by swieringa.

Using the DAIJ format to write a five paragraph essay about a work of art. (Describe, Analyze, Interpret, Judgement/Opinion) This can work with any style of artwork, and art made by any artist (even the student's own work.)

19 Keeps, 3 Likes, 1 Comments

Visual arts standard 2: using knowledge of structures and functions, visual arts standard 3: choosing and evaluating a range of subject matter, symbols, and ideas, visual arts standard 4: understanding the visual arts in relation to history and cultures, visual arts standard 5: reflecting upon and assessing the characteristics and merits of their work and the work of others, visual arts standard 6: making connections between visual arts and other disciplines.

lintpicker 07/01/2016 at 04:52am Thanks for sharing!

ARTS - Herzberg: Writing Essays About Art

Art History
Current Artists and Events
Local Art Venues
Video and Image Resources
Writing Essays About Art
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What is a Compare and Contrast Essay?

What is a compare / contrast essay.

In Art History and Appreciation, contrast / compare essays allow us to examine the features of two or more artworks.

Comparison -- points out similarities in the two artworks
Contrast -- points out the differences in the two artworks

Why would you want to write this type of essay?

To inform your reader about characteristics of each art piece.
To show a relationship between different works of art.
To give your reader an insight into the process of artistic invention.
Use your assignment sheet from your class to find specific characteristics that your professor wants you to compare.

How is Writing a Compare / Contrast Essay in Art History Different from Other Subjects?

You should use art vocabulary to describe your subjects..

Find art terms in your textbook or an art glossary or dictionary

You should have an image of the works you are writing about in front of you while you are writing your essay.

The images should be of high enough quality that you can see the small details of the works.
You will use them when describing visual details of each art work.

Works of art are highly influenced by the culture, historical time period and movement in which they were created.

You should gather information about these BEFORE you start writing your essay.

If you describe a characteristic of one piece of art, you must describe how the OTHER piece of art treats that characteristic.

Example: You are comparing a Greek amphora with a sculpture from the Tang Dynasty in China.

If you point out that the color palette of the amphora is limited to black, white and red, you must also write about the colors used in the horse sculpture.

Organizing Your Essay

Thesis statement.

The thesis for a comparison/contrast essay will present the subjects under consideration and indicate whether the focus will be on their similarities, on their differences, or both.

Thesis example using the amphora and horse sculpture -- Differences:

While they are both made from clay, the Greek amphora and the Tang Dynasty horse served completely different functions in their respective cultures.

Thesis example -- Similarities:

Ancient Greek and Tang Dynasty ceramics have more in common than most people realize.

Thesis example -- Both:

The Greek amphora and the Tang Dynasty horse were used in different ways in different parts of the world, but they have similarities that may not be apparent to the casual viewer.

Visualizing a Compare & Contrast Essay:

Introduction (1-2 paragraphs) .

Creates interest in your essay
Introduces the two art works that you will be comparing.
States your thesis, which mentions the art works you are considering and may indicate whether the focus will be on similarities, differences, or both.

Body paragraphs

Make and explain a point about the first subject and then about the second subject
Example: While both superheroes fight crime, their motivation is vastly different. Superman is an idealist, who fights for justice …… while Batman is out for vengeance.

Conclusion (1-2 paragraphs)

Provides a satisfying finish
Leaves your reader with a strong final impression.

Downloadable Essay Guide

How to Write a Compare and Contrast Essay in Art History Downloadable version of the description on this LibGuide.

Questions to Ask Yourself After You Have Finished Your Essay

Are all the important points of comparison or contrast included and explained in enough detail?
Have you addressed all points that your professor specified in your assignment?
Do you use transitions to connect your arguments so that your essay flows into a coherent whole, rather than just a random collection of statements?
Do your arguments support your thesis statement?

Art Terminology

British National Gallery: Art Glossary Includes entries on artists, art movements, techniques, etc.

Lee College Writing Center

Writing Center tutors can help you with any writing assignment for any class from the time you receive the assignment instructions until you turn it in, including:

Brainstorming ideas
MLA / APA formats
Grammar and paragraph unity
Thesis statements
Second set of eyes before turning in

Contact a tutor:

Phone: 281-425-6534
Email: w [email protected]
Schedule a web appointment: https://lee.mywconline.com/

Other Compare / Contrast Writing Resources

Southwestern University Guide for Writing About Art This easy to follow guide explains the basic of writing an art history paper.
Purdue Online Writing Center: writing essays in art history Describes how to write an art history Compare and Contrast paper.
Stanford University: a brief guide to writing in art history See page 24 of this document for an explanation of how to write a compare and contrast essay in art history.
Duke University: writing about paintings Downloadable handout provides an overview of areas you should cover when you write about paintings, including a list of questions your essay should answer.
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Last Updated: May 14, 2024 8:50 AM
URL: https://lee.libguides.com/Arts_Herzberg

The Elements of Art Eight tools, infinite expression

All artwork speaks the same language through a vocabulary of eight terms expressed in infinite ways. We all understand the vocabulary of art subconsciously, but recognizing how it’s applied enriches our experience of art and allows for nuanced discussion of artworks and appreciation of the artist's passion and skill. The vocabulary of art is made up of the Formal Elements of Design: line, shape, form, space, color, texture, motion, and time.

The most basic element of design is the line: a mark with greater length than width, the path traced by a moving point. In mathematics, a line has no width, but in art, lines can be thin, thick, rough or smooth. Lines can convey tremendous emotion, from aggressive zig-zags or tranquil waves to nauseating spirals. Artists can convey confidence in bold lines, or precision with straight lines.

A shape is formed when lines enclose a space. The edges of the shape are its contour, which can be geometric or organic, open or closed. Like lines, shapes can be expressive, sharp or soft, architecturally rigid or flowing. Simple shapes form a common vocabulary that stretches back millenia, often associated with specific attributes. Roman Architects believed the circle to be divinely perfect, and used it when designing their temples. Triangles were imagined to point to the heavens.

Form is the real or perceived dimensionality of a shape, expressing length, width, and depth. Spheres, cubes, pyramids are three-dimensional forms, and some of the fundamental building blocks for expression in art. Form can also describe the structure of a work of art. The composition of a painting or the chapters of a book. Form can be used to talk about the arrangement of formal elements that present the whole.

Space is the area between and around objects. In art and design, the space is as important as the forms it surrounds. Space can be two or three dimensional, and is often referred to as negative space. Space holds the objects it contains, providing context. Space is as emotive as lines and shapes, and can create feelings of isolation, claustrofobia, or wide open possibility.

Color is possibly the most complex tool at the artist's disposal. Color is scientifically defined as the light that reflects off illuminated objects, whose pigmentation absorbs some wavelengths, and the wavelengths that remain enter the eye. The colors we see are part of the visible spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo, but these colors combine into millions of perceivable colors. To talk about the variations of colors, we use the terms hue, value, and intensity. Hue defines the range the color sits within, like a greenish yellow or a yellowy green. Value is the relative lightness or darkness of the color, and intensity is the relative brightness or dullness of the color.

Texture comes from the latin word texo , meaning 'to weave' and refers to the qualities of a material surface. Texture may be seen and felt in dimensional objects, such as canvas or a marble sculpture, and two-dimensional objects can create the illusion of texture, like a photograph of a rough wooden surface. Texture can be evocative. Smooth objects can feel refined, and rough surfaces may create a gritty, aggressive appearance.

Motion is the movement or change of an object over time. In art motion can be applied to sculpture, called kinetic sculpture , and is a natural element of video and performance art.

The effect of time on artwork is an oft overlooked element of design. All objects change over time, though in different ways. A stone artifact from 30,000 BCE may be nearly unchanged from the time of its creation, but paintings fade. Time is also part of how we consume art. A book may take weeks to read, and that time creates a different context for the experience than an article read in minutes. Video uses time the same way a painter uses negative space, employing pacing, momentum, and balance over the length of the film.

Reed Enger, "The Elements of Art, Eight tools, infinite expression," in Obelisk Art History , Published June 24, 2017; last modified November 08, 2022, http://www.arthistoryproject.com/essays/the-elements-of-art/.

Categorizing Art

Can we make sense of it all?

Art History Methodologies

Eight ways to understand art

The Value of Art

Why should we care about art?

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The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

by Erik Larsen

Introduction and Historical Information

Despite its relative brevity, Walter Benjamin ’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” continues to inspire significant scholarly attention as a major work in the history of modern aesthetic and political criticism. The essay is credited with developing an insightful interpretation of the role technological reproduction plays in shaping aesthetic experience; more specifically, Benjamin catalogues the significant effects of film and photography on the decline of autonomous aesthetic experience. After fleeing the Nazi government in 1933 , Benjamin moved to Paris, from where he published the first edition of “Work of Art” in 1936 (Brodersen XV). This publication appeared in French translation under the direction of Raymond Aron in volume 5, no. 1 of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Benjamin subsequently rewrote the essay and after editorial work by Theodore and Margarethe Adorno it was posthumously published in its commonly recognized form in his Schriften of 1955 (Wolin 183-4).

Basic Themes and Arguments

Benjamin begins his essay by briefly distinguishing his categories from traditional aesthetic values, those of “creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery” (218). In contrast, “Work of Art” relates these tendencies to bourgeois and fascist ideologies and to the conditions, inevitably generated out of capitalism itself, which provoke “revolutionary demands in the politics of art” (217-8). In order to catalogue and ultimately subvert classical and Romantic aesthetic ideals, Benjamin describes the process by which modern technological reproduction strips these institutions and their iconic artworks of their aesthetic authority. Benjamin claims that in times past the role of art has been to provide a magical foundation for the cult. Here the artwork’s use value was located in its central position within ritual and religious tradition (223-4). A statue or idol conveyed a sense of detached authority, or frightening magical power, which inhered in (and only in) that particular historical artifact. The reproduction in mass of such an item would have been unthinkable because it was its unique singularity that produced the sacrality of the ritual.

In order better to describe this illusive quality Benjamin introduces the concept of the “aura.” As the term implies, the aura includes the atmosphere of detached and transcendent beauty and power supporting cultic societies. It also includes the legitimacy accorded to the object by a lengthy historical existence. Benjamin writes: “the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (221). In order to clarify the idea he compares it to the experience of natural phenomenon: “we define the aura of the later as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch” (222-3). Benjamin’s example is noteworthy because, as with the cultic artifact, the aura of the mountains seems to rest on something autonomous and free from human intervention. The statue is not like any other object produced or used within a society; it appears free from the taint of ideological control or human interference, as though its power, like that of the mountain, issues independently from within.

The coming of modernity and the disappearance of the cult only partially signal the end of auratic art. Benjamin recognizes in modern art’s emphasis on autonomy a lingering cult of the aura. Specifically, the L’art pour l’art movement preserved and developed the sense of autonomy and distance native to ancient religious works (224). In fact, it could be said that Romantic and symbolist aesthetic ideals, derived partially from Kant’s apotheosis of the artwork’s autonomy, represent an extreme attempt to indemnify the aura. For example, Mallarmé’s vision of a “pure” artwork is of something utterly detached from everyday reality or social and political influences (Melberg 100). Much of nineteenth-century art and aesthetics thus represent a conscious attempt to defend the special status of the artwork from the banality of bourgeois capitalism. More specifically, the cult of “pure” art is a response to the mechanical reproduction of artworks that threatens to strip them completely of their aura.

Benjamin acknowledges the reality of artistic reproduction throughout history, although he suggests that mechanical reproduction introduced an entirely new and revolutionary change in the experience of the artwork (218). With mechanical reproduction, which appears in its most radical forms in film and photography, millions of images of an original are circulated, all of which lack the “authentic” aura of their source. This process both affects and is the effect of changing social conditions in which all previously unique and sacred institutions have become equal (223). The general willingness to accept a reproduction in place of the original also signifies an unwillingness to participate in the ritualistic aesthetics and politics of earlier times. For example, a photograph or film of a Catholic cathedral denudes its unique aura, transforming the role of participant into that of a spectator or possibly a detached commentator.

Although Benjamin discusses photography briefly, his argument focuses primarily on the revolutionary potential of film as a mode of mechanical reproduction. The film actor, unlike stage performers, does not face or respond to an audience. The audience’s view also becomes synonymous with the imperious perspective accorded to the camera. The net effect of these innovations is to place the viewer in the impersonal position of critic—something prior cultic experiences of art would never have allowed (229). The prevalence of film, as well as other mechanical reproductions, also creates a culture of minor experts ready to judge art rather than loose themselves in participatory ritual (231). Benjamin also notes that film relies on a series of cut and spliced images that must be assembled to form an aesthetic whole. Like Dadaist painting, film’s swift juxtapositions and movements strike the viewer violently, disrupting contemplation and easy consumption of the image (238). Susan Buck-Morss develops this point further, commenting that for Benjamin art must “restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanity’s self-preservation, and to do this, not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them” (5).

The deep political and social significance of these reflections are developed briefly in Benjamin’s epilogue, wherein he recognizes in fascism a final and terrible instantiation of the L’art pour l’art movement. As a form of extreme capitalism, fascism ultimately does not alter the structure of property relationships. Instead it substitutes aesthetic expression into the world of politics, thus supposedly allowing the masses the right to self-expression. The result is a reinstatement of the aura and cultic values into political life, a process which inevitably ends in war (241-2). In a chilling final paragraph Benjamin suggests that self-alienation within fascism has become so extreme that the destruction of humanity becomes an aesthetic experience. In response to this total aestheticization of politics, Benjamin writes that communism responds in a supposedly positive gesture by “politicizing art” (242).

Reception and Interpretation

Numerous scholarly articles and books continue to focus on Benjamin’s artwork essay, with a mixture of positive and negative responses indicative of its general readership over many years. Ian Knizek, for example, criticizes Benjamin’s essay by suggesting that the aura could be transferred effectively to the reproduction (361). Adorno similarly criticized the essay by pointing to the manner in which modern modes of reproduction produce less rather than more critical citizens. He also suggested that in certain instances the autonomous work of art excludes the aura and produces greater self-rationalization (Wolin 193-4). Other more recent critical work has explored Benjamin’s arguments in the context of contemporary debates about the unprecedented levels of participation in art that novel forms of electronic media offer (Ziarek 209-25). Generally speaking, the essay continues to play a significant role in understanding how technology contributes to a de-aestheticization of the artwork in modernity. However, its relatively optimistic attitude towards technology and media, one not shared by many of Benjamin’s contemporaries, has been linked by Miriam Hansen to that of the avant-garde aesthetics of the 1920s (181-2).

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

Brodersen, Momme. Walter Benjamin: A Biography. Ed. Martin Derviş. Trans. Malcom R. Green and Ingrida Ligers. New York: Verso, 1996.

Buck-Morss, Susan. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” October 62 (1992) : 3-41.

Hansen, Miriam. “Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology.’” New German Critique 40 (1987) : 179-224.

Knizek, Ian. “Walter Benjamin and the Mechanical Reproducibility of Art Works Revisited.” British Journal of Aesthetics 33 (1993) : 357-66.

Melberg, Arne. “The Work of Art in the Age of Ontological Speculation: Walter Benjamin Revisited.” Walter Benjamin and Art. Ed. Andrew Benjamin. New York: Continuum, 2005. 93-107.

Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Ziarek, Krzysztof. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Electronic Mutability.” Walter Benjamin and Art. Ed. Andrew Benjamin. New York: Continuum, 2005. 209-25.

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The Importance of Writing About Art

side by side series of the cover of Funny Weather

“Can art do anything, especially in periods of crisis?” This is the question that drives Olivia Laing’s collection of criticism, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. When calls for social action are urgent, the labor of the imagination can seem frivolous—at worst, an artwork is irrelevant; at best, it’s only a slant approach to the pursuit of justice. And if art itself is peripheral to the work a community really needs, I wonder, how much more removed is art criticism? How can those of us who write about books and songs and paintings justify our efforts? In a provocative series of essays, reviews, and artist profiles, Olivia Laing makes a case for art’s slow, subtle efficacy. And in her acuity as a critic, she demonstrates that not only art, but writing about art, can be a powerful agent of social change.

Everything Laing writes bears the gravitas of her social consciousness. In these essays, she’s sick over the rejection of refugees at the borders, and over violence against queer and Black communities. But she doesn’t focus the energy of her prose on bans and brutality so much as on their opposites: welcome and liberation. She’s drawn to artists of “resistance and repair”—those “who look with sharp eyes at the societies they inhabit but who also propose new ways of seeing.” Among them: Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose graffiti playfully offered alternatives to corporate oppression; David Wojnarowicz, whose work spoke amid the silencing of the gay community in 1980s New York; and David Hockney, who made what he called “propaganda for queer love.” She loves these artists because their work transfigures suffering into joy and poverty into abundance, helping us to imagine, to hope in, and to work for new ways of being human together.

It’s difficult to envision realities beyond what’s already perceptible, especially when the binaries that define our politics leave so little room for the imagination. The artists written about in Funny Weather (2020) invite us to see the world as they imagine it, and they do so not with the coercive forces of ideology, but with the persuasion of emotional experience. The capacity to surface emotion is one of art’s unique virtues. How many times has my throat gone tight for a folk song’s timbre, or my heart raced over a certain shade of blue? And I couldn’t tell you why, exactly; the experience resists explanation. Art has the capacity to bypass our biases with expressions of beauty or the grotesque that appeal to us not with language or logic but to our affective and sensing selves.

Thus the critic’s task is a paradox: to translate into words works that were created to say what words cannot. In fact, many of the artists that interest Laing expressly set out to defy the limits of language. Included in Funny Weather is a profile on the minimalist painter Agnes Martin. “It isn’t easy to catch the working of these paintings in words,” Laing writes about Martin’s muted canvases. “They aren’t to be read, but rather responded to, enigmatic triggers for a spontaneous upwelling of pure emotion.” So how does Laing make reading about paintings worth our while, when, as she puts it, “the paintings are the thing”? She replicates the emotional potency of the work: its aesthetic intrigue and its personal testimony.

When Laing describes a work of art, she vividly recreates what can be perceived with the senses to evoke the work’s aesthetic intrigue. What does it look like, feel like, sound like? Staying on the surface, she makes room for each reader’s unique emotional response, and the aesthetic force of the work is not lost. Take, for example, these lines about Rachel Kneebone’s surreal porcelain sculptures: “Kneebone builds towers, or maybe pits, of body parts: hundreds upon thousands of elegantly extended, gleaming legs, triumphant and appalling. You look and see a flower; you look again and see a cock. What are these excrescences, that might be mineral or animal or vegetable, that might be melted wax or human hands?” Laing invites us into the viewing experience using the second person ( “you look . . . you look again”) and captures the visual ambiguity of these shapes ( “or . . . or . . . or”). She brings us into the moment of encounter—the double-take we’d do were we standing beside her in the gallery. As if up close with this fleshy porcelain, I feel at once squeamish and seduced. Suddenly I’m rattled by the violence in the news that deems the human body disposable, and I’m all fired up about the grace and dignity of the human form.

When I read Laing on Georgia O’Keefe’s Black Place paintings, I notice her translation of color: “the serried hills smashed into shards of grey and puce, bifurcated by yolk-coloured cracks or spills of oily black.” Though I’ve never seen these paintings, I can vividly imagine their tones, and the eggs and the oil feel to me earthy, elemental. Then there are Laing’s nouns and verbs— smashed, shards, crack —which evoke an emotional tenor of ruggedness and severity. Suddenly I’m not in an armchair in my living room; I’m with O’Keefe in the desert, and I’m awestruck. Seeing the world as O’Keefe sees it, I wonder what it means to be a woman in a man’s art world—what grit is required to be undaunted by giant desert skies and impossibly arid land.

Critic Cleanth Brooks coined the term heresy of paraphrase , warning against abstracting a poem from the experience of reading the poem by trying to explain its meaning. Though Laing does offer her own readings of artworks, she sidesteps the hazards of paraphrase by focusing less on her own interpretation than on the work’s atmosphere, doing the best she can with the written word to allow readers their own experience of the sensory material. If an artwork persuades by its aesthetic intrigue, then this approach to criticism has the capacity to advance the persuasion that the art itself begins.

Just as Laing ushers us into the feeling of an artwork, she also suggests how it might feel to be in a room with the artists themselves. The tone of each essay is notably different from the one before, evoking the voice of its subject. When Laing writes on Basquiat, she’s cool, casual. She recalls the East Village shifting from a “burnt-out wasteland” to the hub of an “art boom”; she calls Basquiat a “down-and-out prodigy,” “flipped . . . from hungry outsider to hot property.” She closes the essay with Basquiat’s own words: “Yeah, boom, for real.” There’s a hip-hop rhythm to these monosyllables— burnt-out, boom, down-and-out, flipped, and hot —and while I read I feel I’m eavesdropping on artist banter in a studio on the Lower East Side. When Laing writes on Martin’s esoteric abstractions, her diction is esoteric: she observes Martin’s “salubrious environs,” recalls the “grandeur of scale and grave beauty” of her early canvases, and lauds “the luminous work of her maturity.” She describes Martin as monastic and mystical, and captures these attributes in the prose. Through diction, Laing brings us into dialogue with artists, translating something of the personal testimonies conveyed in their work. In this, I discover something about the point of writing about art: We write to keep a conversation going.

A conversation in which two people share their own experiences can be far more politically persuasive than a slogan or manifesto. Likewise, an artwork that bears the testimony of the artist—his experience of oppression, the weight of her grief—can be a powerful agent of provocation. It can change minds. “Really the point of art for me was that I wanted to carry on talking and thinking with other people,” sculptor Sarah Lucas tells Laing. Laing observes that Lucas, whose uncanny sculptures reimagine femininity, sets out to foster “an ongoing, free-moving conversation about ideas.”

All of the artists in Funny Weather excite conversation with the radical nature of their work. Joseph Cornell’s assemblage—fantastical scenes confined within boxes—provokes discussion about freedom and constraint. Maggie Nelson’s genre- and gender-bending memoir The Argo nauts invites new thinking about sex and reproduction. Robert Rauschenberg’s eclectic combines , which deem no material unworthy of inclusion, prompt questions about democracy. As Laing illuminates these works for me, I become curious about the artists’ questions and sympathetic to their perspectives, eager to participate in the conversation they’ve begun.

If art begins a conversation, criticism continues the conversation. And we need sustained conversation because dialogue doesn’t often prompt sudden change. It can take me years of interaction with a neighbor—small talk across the yard, patient listening over midday coffee, ongoing, uncritical observation—before I begin to move through the world bearing my neighbor’s perspective in mind. Laing sees “paint as a way of entering and becoming someone else.” I’m convinced that the slow erosion of egotism through interpersonal exchange—be it face-to-face conversation or an artist’s painted testimony viewed in a gallery three decades on—is more impactful than a headline or op-ed. The news moves at a dizzying pace, leaving little time to envision that our world could be more generous, more generative than it is now. Art offers “a different kind of time frame,” Laing says, “in which it might be possible both to feel and to think, to process the intense emotional impact of the news and to consider how to react, perhaps even to imagine other ways of being.”

Laing’s writing is accessible enough to engage the reader in ongoing conversation. At turns academic, it’s never so dense as to feel exclusive; any scholarly prose is leavened by pop diction and strings of lyrical sentences. At times Laing is downright chatty, as when she recalls a Marc Hundley print that was “so lovely I wanted to steal it.” When I opened the book, I was unfamiliar with many of the artists she studies, but in reading, I feel welcome—into artists’ lives, into their studios, into the texture and tenor of their compositions. I haven’t studied art history and I don’t make visual art, yet I feel Laing is inviting me to participate in the dialogue she’s generating. Welcome is a theme in her work. She’s against fences, thinks walls are prisons. She’s for openness—the open skies of O’Keefe’s deserts, the open canvas of Martin’s grids. She’s for the open mind, the open door. “Is there enough room?” she asks. “It feels like yes.”

The best criticism introduces us to artists we might not have known and makes us care about them. It amplifies artists’ voices, and if we’re talking about Laing, we’re talking about voices from the margins. She recalls the poster image for David Wojnarowicz’s film Silence=Death: a striking self-portrait in which the artist’s mouth is sewn shut. “If silence equals death, the biting slogan of Aids activists, then part of the work of resistance is to make the people who are being silenced visible,” she writes. Wojnarowicz did so in his art—a photographic record of a plagued and grieved community. Laing does so by writing about Wojnarowicz’s art. And here I am, writing about writing about Wojnarowicz’s art. The conversation continues.

The work of which art is capable in the face of injustice is slow-going. The news moves quickly; cultivating a hopeful imagination takes time. To envision possibilities beyond what we already know requires a plausibility structure erected by sustained conversation in a community of others who are willing to listen, to have their minds changed, to peer out and glimpse what’s taking shape beyond what’s already visible, artist and critic and reader together in the looking. “Is art resistance?” Laing asks. “Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises.”

This piece was originally published on August 26, 2021.

Belonging and Paris Stories

While the stories in Mavis Gallant’s 2002 collection don’t always center on Paris, a number of the characters have some sort of imagined relationship to the city, using it as a stand-in for their own lack of belonging.

Death and Remembrance in Hamnet

Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel shows the painful reality that transformation and remembrance go hand in hand. This isn’t comforting—how can it be?—but to remember, to practice remembrance daily, shapes a person.

Transgenerational Trauma and Testimonio Poetics in There Is No Good Time for Bad News

With its emphasis on seeking freedom, promoting justice, and restoring individual dignity, the testimonio form has proved to be a powerful decolonial literary tool. Aruni Kashyap uses testimonio in his poetry to tell silenced tales of state repression in Assam as an act of political resistance.

Foreignness and Familiarity in Mavis Gallant’s “Mlle. Dias de Corta”

Mavis Gallant’s “Mlle. Dias de Corta” unfolds more like a novel than a short story. It’s a second-person address to a tenant the narrator, an aging, xenophobic French widow, had twenty years before—a young actress, Alda Dias de Corta, whom the widow took in “for companionship rather than income.”

Maria Popova’s Figurations of Inner Life

It almost does not matter what someone does or what happens to them. Rather, what matters is what someone thinks they have experienced. As Popova suggests, the true changes in our lives are cognitive as much as they are biographical—or, rather, if they are biographically significant, it is only because they are cognitively so.

Women Mentoring Women in Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan

Sigrid Nunez’s memoir of the author’s relationship with Susan Sontag, the writer and doyenne of the twentieth-century New York intelligentsia, plays with the concept of the memoir genre. Nunez largely disappears from her own pages as she explains, through vignettes and remembered lines, Sontag’s mentorship.

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Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion? You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. If capacity has been reached for the day, the queue will close early.

Twentieth-Century Modern Masters: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection

Beginning in the early 1940s, Jacques and Natasha Gelman formed what is arguably the strongest private collection, in the world, of the art of the School of Paris. The eighty-one paintings, drawings, and bronzes in the Gelman collection, by thirty European artists, provide a remarkable survey of modern art, mainly in France, during the early decades of this century. The artists represented, often by several examples, include Bonnard, Braque, Dalí, Dubuffet, Matisse, Miró, and Picasso. Among the highlights arc Matisse's Young Sailor II (1906), perhaps the most famous of all Fauve portraits; Braque's Still Life with Banderillas (1911), a major Cubist painting; de Chirico's Jewish Angel (1916); and Dalí's Accommodations of Desires (1927), a picture that reveals much about the artist personally, in addition to serving as a pivotal work in the evolution of the Surrealist movement. Of great importance also are fourteen pictures by Picasso, dating from his youth to his old age.

This publication accompanies the first public exhibition of the Gelman's magnificent selection of master works. Sabine Rewald's texts examine these works closely, interpreting them individually as well as in their broader cultural context. New and interesting insights into each work are augmented by the large number of comparative photographs and by the provenance, bibliography, and exhibition histories given for every painting, drawing, and sculpture. The reader is thus presented with an extraordinarily rich overview of this most decisive period in twentieth-century art.

William S. Lieberman, chairman of the Department of 20th Century Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, has written an informal introduction that chronicles the Gelmans' collecting activity. Essays by Pierre Schneider, Lawrence Gowing, Gary Tinterow, and Dawn Ades focus on such topics as the School of Paris, Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Also included are appreciations by Jacques Dupin, John Ashbery, and John Golding.

Met Art in Publication

La Revue blanche, Pierre Bonnard French, Lithograph in four colors on off-white wove paper

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 8, Modern Europe

Modern Masters: European Paintings from The Museum of Modern Art

Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Twentieth-Century French Drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection

Picasso Linoleum Cuts: The Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kramer Collection

What was Trump found guilty of? See the 34 business records the jury decided he falsified

Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records after prosecutors successfully convinced a jury he disguised hush money reimbursement as legal expenses. He is the first former president to be convicted of a crime.

Each count is tied to a different business record that prosecutors demonstrated Trump is responsible for changing to conceal or commit another crime .

Those records include 11 checks paid to former lawyer Michael Cohen , 11 invoices from Michael Cohen and 12 entries in Trump's ledgers.

The jury found that Trump authorized a plan to reimburse Cohen for the $130,000 hush money payment issued to Stormy Daniels and spread the payments across 12 months disguised as legal expenses.

Live updates: Former President Donald Trump found guilty on all counts in hush money case

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

Breakdown of 34 counts of falsifying business records

Here are the 34 business records Trump was found guilty of falsifying, as described in Judge Juan Merchan 's jury instructions :

Count 1: Michael Cohen's invoice dated Feb. 14, 2017
Count 2: Entry in the Detail General Ledger for the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust dated Feb. 14, 2017
Count 3: Entry in the Detail General Ledger for the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust dated Feb. 14, 2017
Count 4: A Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust Account check and check stub dated Feb. 14, 2017
Count 5: Michael Cohen's invoice dated March 16, 2017
Count 6: Entry in the Detail General Ledger for the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust dated March 17, 2017
Count 7: A Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust Account check and check stub dated March 17, 2017
Count 8: Michael Cohen's invoice dated April 13, 2017
Count 9: Entry in the Detail General Ledger for Donald J. Trump dated June 19, 2017
Count 10: A Donald J. Trump account check and check stub dated June 19, 2017
Count 11: Michael Cohen's invoice dated May 22, 2017
Count 12: Entry in the Detail General Ledger for Donald J. Trump dated May 22, 2017
Count 13: A Donald J. Trump account check and check stub May 23, 2017
Count 14: Michael Cohen's invoice dated June 16, 2017
Count 15: Entry in the Detail General Ledger for Donald J. Trump dated June 19, 2017
Count 16: A Donald J. Trump account check and check stub dated June 19, 2017
Count 17: Michael Cohen's invoice dated July 11, 2017
Count 18: Entry in the Detail General Ledger for Donald J. Trump dated July 11, 2017
Count 19: A Donald J. Trump account check and check stub dated July 11, 2017
Count 20: Michael Cohen's invoice dated Aug. 1, 2017
Count 21: Entry in the Detail General Ledger for Donald J. Trump dated Aug. 1, 2017
Count 22: A Donald J. Trump account check and check stub dated Aug. 1, 2017
Count 23: Michael Cohen's invoice dated Sept. 11, 2017
Count 24: Entry in the Detail General Ledger for Donald J. Trump dated Sept. 11, 2017
Count 25: A Donald J. Trump account check and check stub dated Sept. 12, 2017
Count 26: Michael Cohen's invoice dated Oct. 18, 2017
Count 27: Entry in the Detail General Ledger for Donald J. Trump dated Oct. 18, 2017
Count 28: A Donald J. Trump account check and check stub dated Oct. 18, 2017
Count 29: Michael Cohen's invoice dated Nov. 20, 2017
Count 30: Entry in the Detail General Ledger for Donald J. Trump dated Nov. 20, 2017
Count 31: A Donald J. Trump account check and check stub dated Nov. 21, 2017
Count 32: Michael Cohen's invoice dated Dec. 1, 2017
Count 33: Entry in the Detail General Ledger for Donald J. Trump dated Dec. 1, 2017
Count 34: A check and check stub dated Dec. 5 2017

Jurors saw copies of these records entered as evidence. Evidence from the entire trial is available on the New York Courts website .

Contributing: Aysha Bagchi

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Essay On Art in English for Students
Therefore, art adds happiness and colours to our lives and save us from the boring monotony of daily life. Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas. Conclusion of the Essay on Art. All in all, art is universal and can be found everywhere. It is not only for people who exercise work art but for those who consume it.
What is a Work of Art?
In his essay "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935-37) Heidegger extends Nietzsche's analysis to explore how we draw out possibilities of experience through interpretation. He argues that our viewpoint and the particular ways in which it is embedded in the world influences the way the world is disclosed to us. The way we approach ...
A summary of Walter Benjamin's 'Work of Art' essay, and ...
Throughout the essay, Benjamin situates mechanical reproduction in between two stark political forces; on the one hand it is a dangerous force that allows for the aestheticization of politics, on ...
Works of Art
This essay has two main parts. The first part highlights more about the impressionism period's paintings, basic facts about the works, the personal philosophies of the artists, and art work in time context. On the other hand, the second part compares the forms of art with respect to content, subject matter and form.
What is an Art Essay? Tips to Elevate Your Art Essay Writing
An art essay is a literary composition that analyzes different aspects of artwork, including paintings, sculpture, poems, architecture, and music. These essays look at the visual elements of different artworks. An art essay, for example, might look at the optical elements and creative approaches utilized in particular works of art.
The Definition of Art
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 ...
Writing about Art
Writing about art is basically a process of interpretation, and a common assignment in beginning as well as advanced art history courses is to write a response or analytical essay pertaining to a specific work, either a painting or sculpture. This usually suggests that you begin your essay with a straightforward description of the work followed ...
Art History Essays
Art History Analysis - Formal Analysis and Stylistic Analysis. Typically in an art history class the main essay students will need to write for a final paper or for an exam is a formal or stylistic analysis. A formal analysis is just what it sounds like - you need to analyze the form of the artwork. This includes the individual design ...
PDF ART HISTORY: GUIDE TO ESSAY WRITING
Referencing works of art: It is standard practice to cite the title of a work of art in (or underlined italics if you don't have a facility for italics). You should do this throughout your essay and in the Image Plates at the end, always try to give the location of the work in a city, building or museum. You
The Value of Art
The value of creating. At its most basic level, the act of creating is rewarding in itself. Children draw for the joy of it before they can speak, and creating pictures, sculptures and writing is both a valuable means of communicating ideas and simply fun. Creating is instinctive in humans, for the pleasure of exercising creativity.
7 Important Art Essays
Here are seven significant examples of art essays written by some of most influential intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag.
A Complete Guide on How to Write an Art Essay Competently
An art essay is a kind of work that analyzes the aspects of artworks, such as sculpture, painting, music, and architecture. These essays can be used with the aim to investigate the visual elements of the artworks. For instance, an art essay may examine the optical components and creative approaches used in particular pieces of art. ...
Defining 'Art'
First, some examples. We'll begin with the pragmatic. In 1957, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright wrote: "Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.". Another practical definition comes to us from Charles Eames: "Art resides in the quality of doing; process is not ...
"Without Art Mankind Could Not Exist": Leo Tolstoy's Essay What is Art
The loss of such a unique ability would be a catastrophe. "Men would be like beasts", says Tolstoy, and even goes as far as to claim that without art, mankind could not exist. This is a bold declaration, which recalls the Nietzschean aphorism that human existence is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.
What is Art? and/or What is Beauty?
Beauty is rather a measure of affect, a measure of emotion. In the context of art, beauty is the gauge of successful communication between participants - the conveyance of a concept between the artist and the perceiver. Beautiful art is successful in portraying the artist's most profound intended emotions, the desired concepts, whether they ...
How To Write An Art Essay, Topics And Structure
Generally, an art essay is an essay that talks about art in sculpture, paintings, architecture, music and portraits. These kinds of essays are used for: Painting visual pictures: an art essay is an essay that showcases visual arts and creative ideas that people have come up with.
PDF The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
film—have had on art in its traditional form. II Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.
Writing an Essay About a Work of Art: Planning Sheet and Notes
1 session; 45 minutes per session. Objectives: 1. SWBAT answer questions about a work of art they are looking at. 2. SWBAT write an outline to a five paragraph essay by using a worksheet with guiding questions. 3. SWBAT use art-specific vocabulary accurately to explain what they see in a work of art. 4.
LibGuides: ARTS
Find art terms in your textbook or an art glossary or dictionary; You should have an image of the works you are writing about in front of you while you are writing your essay. The images should be of high enough quality that you can see the small details of the works. You will use them when describing visual details of each art work.
Essay on The Meaning of a Work of Art
Art begins with the creator. An artist is driven to express his or her unique perspective be it a musical score, a painting, a literary work, or any number of other forms. There is satisfaction in the mere act of creating, but the work is fulfilled when it strikes a chord in the being of another. Art is a means of relating one specific insight ...
The Origin of the Work of Art
"The Origin of the Work of Art" (German: Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes) is an essay by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger drafted the text between 1935 and 1937, reworking it for publication in 1950 and again in 1960. Heidegger based his essay on a series of lectures he had previously delivered in Zurich and Frankfurt during the ...
The Elements of Art
The vocabulary of art is made up of the Formal Elements of Design: line, shape, form, space, color, texture, motion, and time. Line. The most basic element of design is the line: a mark with greater length than width, the path traced by a moving point. In mathematics, a line has no width, but in art, lines can be thin, thick, rough or smooth.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
by Erik Larsen. Introduction and Historical Information. Despite its relative brevity, Walter Benjamin 's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," continues to inspire significant scholarly attention as a major work in the history of modern aesthetic and political criticism. The essay is credited with developing an ...
The Importance of Writing About Art
In a provocative series of essays, reviews, and artist profiles, Olivia Laing makes a case for art's slow, subtle efficacy. And in her acuity as a critic, she demonstrates that not only art, ... The work of which art is capable in the face of injustice is slow-going. The news moves quickly; cultivating a hopeful imagination takes time.
Oath of Office for the Presidency
Footnotes Jump to essay-1 Act of March 1, 1792, 1 Stat. 239, § 12. Jump to essay-2 2 Messages and Papers of the Presidents 576 (J. Richardson ed. 1896).Chief Justice Roger Taney, who as a member of Jackson's Cabinet had drafted the message, later repudiated this possible reading of the message.
Overview of Executive Vesting Clause
Id. art. II, § 3. See ArtII.S3.3.1 Overview of Take Care Clause . Moreover, the Supreme Court has recognized that [b]ecause no single person could fulfill that responsibility, the Take Care Clause implicitly provides the President with authority to supervise subordinate officers assisting with this responsibility. 5 Footnote
Occupations and Privileges and Immunities Clause
Footnotes Jump to essay-1 See, e.g., Hicklin v. Orbeck, 437 U.S. 518, 524 (1978). Jump to essay-2 Articles of Confederation of 1781 art. IV, § 1.The Supreme Court has interpreted the constitutional provision to have no change of substance or intent from the Articles' version. Austin v. New Hampshire, 420 U.S. 656, 661 (1975). Jump to essay-3 Toomer v.
Twentieth-Century Modern Masters: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman
Beginning in the early 1940s, Jacques and Natasha Gelman formed what is arguably the strongest private collection, in the world, of the art of the School of Paris. The eighty-one paintings, drawings, and bronzes in the Gelman collection, by thirty European artists, provide a remarkable survey of modern art, mainly in France, during the early decades of this century.
What was Trump convicted of? See the 34 falsified business records
Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records after prosecutors successfully convinced a jury he disguised hush money reimbursement as legal expenses. He is the ...
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Essay on Art

What is Art?

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2 What is a Work of Art?

Introduction

Representational Theories of Art

The Aesthetic Attitude

The Institutional Theory of Art

Anti-Essentialism

Further Reading

Works of Art Essay

Introduction

Bibliography

The Definition of Art

1. Constraints on Definitions of Art

4.5 Hybrid (Disjunctive) Definitions

2. Definitions From the History of Philosophy

3. Skepticism about Definitions of Art

4. Contemporary Definitions

4.4 Traditional (mainly aesthetic) definitions

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“Without Art Mankind Could Not Exist”: Leo Tolstoy’s Essay What is Art

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Art Based On Beauty And Taste

Theories that Justify the Canon

What is Art?

Art in the Extended and Limited Sense of the Word

Real and Counterfeit Art

Emotional Infectiousness

The Religious Perception of Art

Theodor Adorno on the Essay: An Antidote to Modernity

Frequently Read Together

Timeline of Ancient Greek Art & Sculpture

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Art Essay Writing Guide

What is the purpose of an art essay?

Art essay topic choice

Below is a list of topics for an art essay

Structure of an art essay

Sample of art essay outline

Thesis statement

Arts essay tips on writing the introduction

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Tips on conclusion writing

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ARTS - Herzberg: Writing Essays About Art

What is a Compare and Contrast Essay?

Why would you want to write this type of essay?

How is Writing a Compare / Contrast Essay in Art History Different from Other Subjects?

You should have an image of the works you are writing about in front of you while you are writing your essay.

Works of art are highly influenced by the culture, historical time period and movement in which they were created.

Organizing Your Essay

Visualizing a Compare & Contrast Essay:

Body paragraphs

Conclusion (1-2 paragraphs)

Downloadable Essay Guide

Questions to Ask Yourself After You Have Finished Your Essay

Art Terminology

Lee College Writing Center

Other Compare / Contrast Writing Resources

The Elements of Art Eight tools, infinite expression

Categorizing Art

Art History Methodologies

The Value of Art

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The Importance of Writing About Art

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