Philosophy of Art

What it asks

Two questions, and the second is stranger than the first.

What makes something art? Beauty fails, since much art is not beautiful and much beauty is not art. Skill fails; representation fails; expression fails. Each is defeated by ordinary examples, most of them made in the last century by artists who could see the definitions coming.

And what IS a work? A painting is a particular object that can burn. A novel is not - it survives the destruction of every copy. A symphony is neither the score nor any performance. So works of art are not all the same kind of thing, and saying what kind each is turns out to be a genuine metaphysical problem.

The recurring problems

Definition. Every proposed necessary condition has a counterexample. One influential response is that art is an open concept whose extension is deliberately expanded by artists, so a definition is not merely missing but impossible in principle.

Where art-status resides. If it is not in the object's properties, then two indistinguishable objects can differ in being art - which points to context, history or institutional practice, none of which the eye can see.

Forgery. A perfect copy of a painting is worth a fraction of the original, and a perfect copy of a novel is the novel. That difference divides the arts into those where the making is part of the work and those where it is not, and it is one of the field's genuine analytical results.

Intention. Whether what the maker meant governs what the work means. Denying it entirely leaves interpretation unconstrained; accepting it makes the work a report of a mental state.

How it developed

The category of fine art is an eighteenth-century assembly. Before it, painting, poetry and music were not obviously one kind of thing, and the questions could not be asked in this form.

The nineteenth century worked with imitation and expression. Formalism at the start of the twentieth located artistic value in arrangement alone, deliberately excluding subject matter.

Then practice outran theory. Duchamp's readymades presented manufactured objects as art and could not be dismissed. Weitz argued in 1956 that art is an open concept and definition is a mistake.

The institutional and historical theories were the response: art-status comes from a work's relation to a practice or to what came before, not from anything in it. Danto's argument in 1964, prompted by boxes indistinguishable from grocery packaging, is the pivotal statement - what makes the difference is an atmosphere of theory and a history the eye cannot detect.

Recent work has largely abandoned definition and turned to the ontology of works and to the relation between art and value of other kinds.

The positions within it

Formalism, expression theories, institutional and historical definitions, cluster accounts, and anti-essentialism. Aestheticism and moralism divide over whether a work's ethical character bears on its artistic merit. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

Definition is a background question rather than the field's centre. The active work is on the ontology of works - especially for arts that are performed, digital or reproducible - and on interpretation.

The moral question has returned with force, driven by disputes about works whose makers are found intolerable. The field has more to say about this than the public argument uses, and its most useful contribution is the distinction between whether a work is good and whether one should attend to it.