What is Art?

Intro

In late Antiquity the arts consisted of the seven artes liberales, the liberal arts: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Music. Philosophy was the mother of them all. On a lower level stood the technical arts like architecture, agriculture, painting, sculpture and other crafts. "Art" as we concieve of it today was a mere craft. Art in the Middle Ages was "the ape of nature". And what is art today?

Can we give a definition?

Sir Roger Penrose, one of the foremost scientists of our time, when faced with a similar problem with regard to the definition of quite something else, viz., consciousness, states in his The Emperor's New Mind: "I do not think that it is wise, at this stage of understanding, to attempt to propose a precise definition of consciousness, but we can rely, to good measure, on our subjective impressions and intuitive common sense as to what the term means ..."[1]

The same seems to hold for art: You know what it is, I know it, but a definition is quite something else.

You can't say

Although one probably cannot give a real definition of Art, here are some thoughts (and a whole lot of quotations) on the subject. Let's start with a quote from "What is Art? What is an Artist?" by Chris Witcombe, Department of Art History, Sweet Briar College, Virginia.

"Arthur Danto, professor of philosophy at Columbia University ..., believes that today "you can't say something's art or not art anymore. That's all finished." In his book, After the End of Art, Danto argues that after Andy Warhol exhibited simulacra of shipping cartons for Brillo boxes in 1964, anything could be art. Warhol made it no longer possible to distinguish something that is art from something that is not."[2]

Anything could be a work of art. That gives us a lot of freedom in looking at, enjoying, or creating art. That's not what the other philosopher of art, Richard Wollheim states in his Painting as an Art:

"So, there are house-painters: there are Sunday painters: there are world-politicians who paint for distraction, and distraught bussiness-men who paint to relax. There are ... psychotic patients who enter art therapy, and madmen who set down their visions: there are little children of three, four, five, six, in art class, who produce work of explosive beauty: and then there are the ...

... middle of paper ...

... Science, Language, Ritual, Cambridge : Cambridge UP, 1997. [Back]

Stewart (1995): Ian Stewart, Nature's Numbers: Discovering Order and Pattern in the Universe, London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995.[Back]

Vargish/Mook (1999): Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook, Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative, New Haven and London : Yale UP, 1999. [Back]

Wollheim (1987): Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, London : Thames & Hudson, 1987. [Back to note 3] | [Back to note 4] | [Back to note 5]

Other Websites about "What is Art?"

SITO "Operative Term Is Stimulate" ask the visitors to their site to define art: "We'll accept any definition you're willing to give".

What Art Is Abstract and chapter summaries of What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand by Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi (Chicago etc. : Open Court, 2000).

What is Art? From the website "Art History: A Preliminary Handbook", by Robert J. Belton, Department of Fine Arts, Okanagan University College, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada.

What is Art? What is an Artist? by Chris Witcombe, Department of Art History, Sweet Briar College, Virginia.