Artworks: Meaning, Definition, Value

Index

PREFACE

This work offers a book-length treatment of the issues that have galvanized my thinking in the philosophy of art roughly since 1985. There have been three main issues: What is art? What is it to understand an artwork? What is the value of art? While I would deny that the philosophy of art is mainly a branch of value inquiry, I would claim that the very existence of this branch of philosophy depends on there being interesting answers to the last question. For unless art—or, rather, individual artworks—is of considerable value, it is not clear what would justify the expenditure of great energy in theorizing about aspects of art and its objects. The second question goes readily with this last one. To discover value in an artwork one must, in some sense, form an understanding of it. Since there is much debate, among both philosophers and critics of the arts, over what this involves and when an understanding of a work is legitimate or acceptable, here is an issue ripe for philosophical treatment as long as it illuminates, and adds something to, the already voluminous discussion. If there is anything in this book in which I take a hopefully not immodest satisfaction, it is my accomplishment of both these goals here. It seemed inevitable that these last two questions would demand from me an answer, though on the issue of value, the answers given here address preliminary matters or provide samples. It comes as much more of a surprise to me that I am able to offer an answer to the first question and especially an answer in the form of a definition. I did not approach the philosophy of art with the conviction that such an answer must be possible, and when one occurred to me, it seemed at the time a rather quixotic decision to put it forward and attempt to defend it. Though it neither entails nor is entailed by my answers to the other questions, it is nevertheless in spirit so much of a piece with those answers that it does strike me now as forming with them a single theoretical perspective.

The traditional and highly general questions raised here may disturb for two reasons. First, there has been a tendency recently in the philosophy of art to focus on what Richard Wollheim calls substantive aesthetics—the scrutiny of a specific art form in a way that in some sense meshes closely with the immediate concerns of artists and critics. But Wollheim, at least, maintains that substantive aesthetics should be only a supplement and not a replacement for what he calls general aesthetics—which consists of the sort of issues just mentioned in the preceding paragraph (Wollheim 1987, 7). This seems to me to be necessarily right because one cannot engage in substantive inquiry without raising the questions of general aesthetics unless one stops doing philosophy altogether. So one had better think about those general questions. (For an opposing view, see Kivy 1993). Second, one may be disturbed if one rejects traditional questions on philosophical grounds, a recurrent activity that is currently occurring under the label postmodernism (or poststructuralism). Here, I can only confess that I have not found in this body of thought compelling reason to abandon my favored questions, though I leave it open where the fault lies.

Material in several of the chapters appeared previously in print in the form of journal articles. Chapter 3 is an expansion of a paper with the same title that appeared in the British Journal of Aesthetics 34 (July 1994). Chapter 4 borrows from two papers: The End of an Institutional Definition of Art, British Journal of Aesthetics 26 (spring 1986), and Defining Art: The Functionalism/Proceduralism Controversy, Southern Journal of Philosophy 30 (winter 1992). The final section of Chapter 5 borrows material from Alien Objections to Historical Definitions of Art, British Journal of Aesthetics 36 (July 1996). Chapter 7 was previously published under the same title in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50 (fall 1992). An earlier version of Chapter 8 appeared in the same journal (spring 1994) under the title Art Interpretation. Chapters 9 and 10 are largely new, but both borrow some material from The Role of Intention and Convention in Interpreting Artworks, Southern Journal of Philosophy 31 (winter 1993). Chapter 11 uses material from three papers: Fish’s Argument for the Relativity of Interpretive Truth, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (summer 1990); Pragmatism and Interpretation, Poetics Today 14 (spring 1993); and Relativism About Interpretation, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (winter 1995). Finally, Chapter 13 uses a few pages from Expression of Emotion in (Some of) the Arts, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42 (summer 1984). I thank the editors of these journals for permission to reprint this material.

This work would not merely be worse but would not exist at all without the help of many people.

For providing conditions enabling me to pursue my work in the philosophy of art, I am grateful to a number people going back to graduate school days. Patrick Maynard and Irving Singer introduced me to the philosophy of art as an academic discipline. Baruch Brody, Richard Cartwright, Jerry Katz, and especially Judith Thomson helped me to acquire skills and a cast of mind without which this book would not exist. Ho Wing Meng very kindly allowed me to take over his aesthetics course at the National University of Singapore, enabling me to develop my own ideas in this area under ideal conditions. The philosophy department at Central Michigan University has provided a setting most conducive to continuing my work.

In developing, refining, and hopefully improving my thinking on the issues discussed here, I have received help from many others. I am very grateful to George Dickie for reading and replying in print to my criticism of his views about the definition of art and to Joseph Margolis for both discussion and published comment regarding our views about interpretation. My early work on interpretation has benefited from the comments of Fred Adams, Gary Fuller, and Jim McGrath, all from Central Michigan University, and those of David Carrier, Richard Shusterman, and Bruce Vermazen, who also provided very welcome encouragement. George Bailey, James Carney, Stephen Davies, Berys Gaut, Alan Goldman, Robert Howell, Jerrold Levinson, and William Tolhurst have provided very useful comments on individual chapters or papers that became incorporated into chapters. Tom Leddy has consistently provided useful discussion and correspondence on all aspects of my work. I have been especially helped by both the example of and ongoing discussion with Noel Carroll, James Carney, Stephen Davies, and Jerrold Levinson.

Stephen Davies, Alan Goldman, Paisely Livingston, and Anita Silvers read the entire manuscript, and all offered extremely useful criticisms and suggestions. I am especially grateful to them.

Finally, my family, Naseem, Sonia, and Nadia, have made my life one in which I could do this work. It would be wrong to speak of a debt here; it is something beyond that.

INTRODUCTION

Questions

There are, as I conceive the subject, four central questions that a philosophy of art needs to answer: (1) What is art? (2) What is it to understand a work of art? (3) What is the value of art? (4) What kind of entities are artworks? This book proposes and defends answers to the first three of these questions. Regarding the last question, it has little to add to what others have already said.¹ When necessary, it borrows from their work but makes no attempt to present a systematic ontology of art.

There are, of course, many other questions that arise within the philosophy of art. Some of these are strictly parts of the larger questions raised above. For example, a host of questions about the interpretation of artworks fall under question 2. Are interpretations ever true (false)? Is there a single comprehensive true interpretation of artworks? Are there many acceptable interpretations of the same artwork? Are there incompatible acceptable interpretations of the same artwork? What is the meaning of an artwork? What is the role of an artist’s intention in interpreting artworks? All these questions and more need to be answered if we are to find out what it is to understand an artwork. However, there are other philosophical questions about art that do not so obviously fall under, or within, any of the four central questions. What is pictorial representation? What is musical expressiveness? What is fiction? How should we understand our emotional reactions to fictions?² Are these questions any less central than the ones I have already mentioned?

There is no good answer that cuts across all philosophies of art. In my philosophy of art, the answer is yes. The most fundamental understanding of art is prior to answers to the questions just raised. But this is not so in all philosophies of art. It is not so R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of art,³ in which an understanding of artistic (if not merely musical) expressiveness plays a fundamental role. In a more recent example, the notion of representation and fiction have a similar status in Kendall Walton’s philosophy of art.⁴ It is important to note that different starting points in theories do not imply incompatibility of theories.

Before turning to an outline of answers to my favored questions, let me spend a little more time explaining why those questions achieve the status they have in my thinking.

There is a philosophy of art for the same reason that there is a philosophy of language. There would be no such thing as the philosophy of art if art, like language, was not believed to make a special and peculiarly important contribution to every culture and every civilization. It is part of being human that we speak a natural language, and it at least seems to some of us equally part of being human that we produce and enjoy artworks. A philosophy of art produced without cognizance of this purported value would not be worth knowing about. However, there is an important difference between art and language. There is much less controversy (which is not to say there is none at all) over the value of language compared to the value of art (ignoring such uses of language as those that produce literary artworks). For this reason, art’s purported value not only makes reasonable and important the desire to better understand art, but what is valuable about art (question 3) must itself be a central question within that subject matter. Art might be less valuable than it is cracked up to be. Or its value might vary both in degree and in kind among different art forms and genres.

Some part of the controversy over the actual value of art turns on uncertainty about the extension of the concept of art. This uncertainty is both considerable and multifaceted. Is art proper confined to the so-called fine arts (and in what do the fine arts consist in the late twentieth century)? If not, are there principles that determine which non-fine art items are artworks? Is the extension of art determined independently of its value or function, or do those notions figure in the very definition of art? Because these are very live and still disputed questions, I believe one must attempt to answer the question, what is art? (question 1).

Finally, artworks are typically objects that can only be appreciated if understood. In this way, they differ from sunsets and some other beauties of nature. However, just as it is uncertain what the value and extension of art is, it is uncertain—indeed, very controversial—what an understanding of an artwork is or whether it is the same sort of thing across art forms. One cannot have a good grasp of the concept of art until one becomes clear about what counts as understanding artworks and what such understanding achieves. Hence the importance of question 2.

Many other questions commonly asked within the philosophy of art, though not included in this list of central questions, become urgent within the framework these questions provide. For example, since art’s representational and expressive properties contribute so much to the value of artworks and since the identification of these properties is so important in the understanding of artworks, questions about the nature of artistic expression and representation need answering. For similar reasons, so do questions about the nature of fiction and of our emotional and cognitive reactions to fiction. I am inclined to think that if there is a question worth asking in the philosophy of art, it is worth asking in the present framework.

Answers

This book is intended to offer a unified, if incomplete, philosophy of art—a theory of the nature and functions of art and of the practice of interpreting and appreciating it. On this theory, a definition of art, in terms of its evolving functions, is used to explain and justify current interpretive practices and motivate an investigation of artistic value.

Artworks has three parts. Each part tries to answer one of the first three central questions discussed above. The proposed answers are placed within the context of an ongoing debate criticizing, but also explaining what can be learned from, alternative views.

Definitions (Part I) is concerned with the question, what is art? It argues for an answer in terms of the functions of art. (This is done in Chapter 3). However, the definition given is very different from other functional definitions that have been offered. It does not define art in terms of one function or a handful of functions performed by artworks, such as expressing or communicating emotion, being formally significant, or producing aesthetic experience. I classify such proposals as versions of simple functionalism (the topic of Chapter 2). Such definitions invariably face counterexamples—of artworks not possessing the favored function or of nonartworks possessing it. Such definitions also face the charge of leaving no room for bad art. My favored definition avoids these problems. It claims (roughly) that an item is an artwork at time t if and only if it is in one of the central art forms at t and is intended to fulfill a function art has at t or it is an artifact that achieves excellence in fulfilling such a function.

I want readers to see this definition as one option among a set of alternatives. Interesting alternatives to functionalism began to appear in the 1950s in the form of antiessentialist theories (discussed in Chapter 1). Antiessentialists claim that art has no fixed, unchanging essence and, on the most influential version of antiessentialism, that art cannot be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Later, institutional and historical theories (discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively) appeared on the scene. Both types of theories define art in terms of relations artworks bear to other things. The defining (relational) properties of artworks, on these theories, are nonperceptual and, usually, nonfunctional. On institutional theories, art is defined as a status an object possesses in virtue of its position in a specific social practice. On historical theories, an object is an artwork in virtue of a relation it bears to earlier artworks, this relation varying in different historical theories.

Although the chapters of Part I offer criticism of these alternatives, many of their insights have been incorporated into my own definition. I accept from all these theories the insight that art cannot be defined in terms of a single function. My functionalism reflects the antiessentialist idea that artistic functions evolve in an open-ended fashion so that there will be resemblance, rather than identity, between the valuable functions of art in one period and those in another. While I do not agree with the antiessentialists on the impossibility of defining art, we agree that there is no adequate definition providing nondisjunctive necessary conditions of arthood. With the institutional and historical theories, I accept the idea that, for an object to be art, it does not necessarily have to fulfill one of art’s functions. Roughly, for works produced in central art forms, such as poetry, painting, and music, the intention to fulfill is enough. While institutional definitions of art are rejected here, institutional definitions of related notions, such as that of an art form, are provisionally endorsed. I feel most kinship with the historical approach, and my own definition has a distinctly historical aspect.

Since the order of exposition of Part I is so different from that found in this Introduction, let me say a word about the former arrangement. Chapter 1 first tries to show that recent art practice, as well as puzzling features of the concept of art, sufficiently motivate an interest in defining art. It then turns to, and tries to deflect, the antiessentialist challenge to this project. Though others have done this before, the chapter focuses on aspects of the challenge neglected by earlier commentators. Chapter 2 examines and, when necessary, devises the most plausible simple functionalist proposals. In order to motivate my own considerably more complicated approach, it tries to explain why even the most plausible versions of simple functionalism are unsatisfactory. As already noted, Chapter 3 explains, and defends against many possible objections, my own functionalist definition. Finally, Chapters 4 and 5 examine competing institutional and historical theories. Although it is perhaps more common to clear the field before offering one’s own view, these definitions are examined after presenting my own, because I regard them as important alternatives that deserve serious consideration. Though they are criticized, I do not want these alternatives to be regarded merely as obstacles to be cleared away in preparation for presenting the favored position.

Part II answers the question, what is it to understand an artwork? Because we value art, we typically approach artworks in order to appreciate them, but this can be done in more than one way. Thus we may seek to appreciate a work as would a contemporary of its author, or we may seek to appreciate it in a way that makes it relevant to concerns or ways of thinking of our own time. Also, our appreciation may focus on different properties or functions of a work. Someone may approach a novel to become wrapped up in the imaginary world it presents or to read it as an expression of thought about the actual world, or both. Many of these ways of appreciating artworks are determined by functions standard for a given art form, although it is always possible to approach a work in an unusual way. The understanding we seek is one that will enable us to appreciate a work in a particular way. (However, it must be remembered that some works are disappointing, and it should not be a requirement on a proper understanding of a work that it maximize positive appreciation.) I think of our understanding of a work as the interpretation we give it. Because we appreciate and understand works in different ways, we interpret with different aims. Typically the aim with which we interpret is determined by the way in which we hope to appreciate a work, but there is one exception, and that is when we seek to understand some aspect of work for the sake of understanding alone.

The standard of acceptability for interpretations is relative to aim. An interpretation that would be unacceptable if it were an attempt to understand the artist’s intentions may be a perfectly acceptable attempt to make a work relevant to contemporary concerns. The recognition of this, along with the fact that people interpret with different aims, allows for the resolution of many traditional problems about interpretation. A good initial testing ground for the proposed framework is the issue whether there are incompatible acceptable interpretations of the same artwork (Chapter 7). The temptation to believe that there are is considerable because of the attractiveness of critical pluralism—the view that there are many noncombinable acceptable interpretations of the same work. However, especially for those like myself, who believe that interpretations often are either true or false, a satisfactory way of accommodating incompatible acceptable interpretations is not easy to find. On the framework presented here, the need for such accommodation is greatly reduced insofar as many apparently incompatible interpretations can be seen to be compatible when it is recognized that, because they are made with different aims, what each asserts can be true without coming into direct conflict with the others. Such compatible interpretations may still be noncombinable, coming, as they do, from interpretive projects with distinct aims. There are indeed some logically incompatible interpretations that are mutually acceptable, but only in the nonremarkable sense of being equally well justified.

The main tenets of my views about art interpretation are set out in Chapters 8 and 9. The former is concerned with the debate between critical pluralism and critical monism, the view that there is a single correct comprehensive interpretation of each artwork. I argue that these views are compatible—indeed, both are true—and hence there need be no debate about which to accept. However, there are versions of both monism and pluralism—extreme intentionalism, relativism, nondescriptivism—that are incompatible with pluralism or monism per se, and these versions are false if the views presented here are true. Arguments are offered against such versions in Chapters 8, 9, and 11.

Chapter 9 investigates whether there is a good rationale for picking out, from the various interpretive projects that produce acceptable interpretations, one that can reasonably, if somewhat stipulatively, be said to identify the meaning of a work. After examining arguments against doing this, and looking at various candidates, I suggest that interpretations that identify what an artist intentionally does in a work, as well as what the artist does, even if not intentionally, in virtue of conventions in place at the time the work is created, give us the work’s meaning. Whatever merit this proposal has, it must be emphasized that acceptable interpretations of artworks are not confined to those that identify a work’s meaning in the sense just specified but also include interpretations that pursue very different interests. Hence, though this part is called Meanings, the meanings in question are not confined to a work’s meaning in the indicated sense.

Chapter 10 examines the popular invocation of apparent, or implied, artists in literary theory and the philosophy of art. A work often gives the impression of being made by a certain type of artist—one who brings a particular perspective to the work, who has certain obsessions perhaps, certain emotional tendencies, certain intellectual concerns, and so forth. The artist that the work appears to have, or that we infer from various features of the work, may be quite different from (but, of course, may be very much like) the actual artist. Many who have theorized about art and literature have been much drawn to this notion and have put it to a multitude of uses in their accounts of interpretation, artistic expression, and style, among other things. Chapter 10 examines several attempts to use this notion to formulate an alternative account of artwork meaning. The thought I want to ward off is that, with the apparent artist in hand, reference to the actual artist drops out of, or becomes peripheral to, the interpretive enterprise in general and to the notion of work meaning in particular.

Chapter 11 examines an alternative approach to art interpretation—the contemporary pragmatist approach defended in different versions by, among others, Stanley Fish, Joseph Margolis, Richard Rorty, and Richard Shusterman. Many of the conclusions reached here about interpretations—especially my endorsement of a plurality of interpretive aims—would be accepted by pragmatists. However, even the conclusions we share in common we reach by different routes. Two of the principles that guide contemporary pragmatist thinking are: (1) the correspondence theories of truth, objectivity, and knowledge are to be rejected, and (2) truth, objectivity, and knowledge are to be somehow construed in terms of agreement within a community. The main thrust of the chapter is directed against the second principle, which I think is seriously mistaken. (The first principle can mean so many different things that no general evaluation of it is possible.)

Finally, Part III tries to understand artistic value in terms of the important functions of artworks. Neither a functional definition of art nor a functional account of artistic value implies that the value of art is instrumental rather than intrinsic. Nevertheless, it is the burden of Chapter 12 to argue that the value of art is instrumental through and through. Chapter 13 describes some preeminent, though by no means the only, functions of literary artworks.

Having talked about particular answers found in the chapters that follow, let me say something, before closing this section, about the character of these answers. Good theories are often said to be simple and elegant (if elegance is distinct from simplicity). On this criterion, the views proposed here fare poorly. My theories of art, art interpretation, and artistic value are complex and inelegant sometimes to an extent that some might regard them as parodies of theories rather than theories per se. Regarding their qualifications as theories, I can only say that, while the answers given here are my best attempts to reach the truth about their subject matter (and in that sense are given with complete seriousness), they are also advanced with the realization that there is something quixotic about seriously hoping that one’s attempts will be completely successful. Regarding the complexity and inelegance of my answers, I must confess to a deep-seated belief that many of the notions we start out examining in philosophy, such as the notions of art, of interpretation, of artistic value (artistic expressiveness can be added here), tend to collect together (but do so to some purpose) a motley of phenomena that are not amenable to a simple and uniform treatment. Hence, to me, a simple and elegant philosophical theory is automatically suspect.

Aesthetics Versus Philosophy of Art

The reader may have noted the absence of the word aesthetic in the preceding pages, a dogged persistence in referring to the philosophy of art rather than aesthetics. I would like to offer an explanation even though this is not strictly necessary for understanding the chapters that follow.

I begin on an autobiographical note. In my early attempts to discover what other philosophers had to say about art, the preeminence of the aesthetic—the aesthetic attitude, aesthetic experience, aesthetic qualities—that pervaded so much of the philosophical writing on art until fairly recently was a great stumbling block. Approaching a work with the aesthetic attitude or enjoying aesthetic experience, if one could make sense of these (to me) very artificial notions, seemed at best peripheral to the literature, drama, and painting that was at the center of my artistic interests. I also had a strong hunch the aesthetic would fare no better in discovering what was really important about art forms, like music, which I enjoyed but about which I knew less. It seemed to me that art was important because there was so much to learn from it (as I still believe), and the concentration on the aesthetic to the exclusion of all else seemed to make this insight inaccessible.

It turns out that many others had a similar reaction. (One must mention George Dickie as a leader of the movement to put the aesthetic in its place.) Now that philosophy of art is no longer merely aesthetics, I must admit that I can see a far more important place for something we can stipulatively call aesthetic experience than I did before. In fact, my current position is that the cognitive value of artworks—which had always been the most important one for me—is symbiotically related to their aesthetic value, and that aesthetic value pervades the realm of art more extensively than does cognitive value. (These ideas are developed in Chapter 13.) I hope this concession to the aesthetic is not simply the result of aging.

Nevertheless, since this work is squarely concerned with art and not other objects sometimes included in aesthetic inquiry, such as nature, and since aesthetic value is only one kind of value for which artworks can be appreciated and not art’s defining characteristic, philosophy of art is the best way to describe what takes place in these pages. Aesthetics, of course, can be used as nothing more than a synonym of philosophy of art, but it can also mean the study of the causes and nature of a certain sort of experience or have the connotation of a philosophy of art with a strong emphasis on the aesthetic. Because of this, its use in place of the philosophy of art has distinct disadvantages.

Some claim that the disadvantage of speaking of the philosophy of art is that it makes the work produced under that label appear peripheral. I doubt that aesthetics has received such good press in our century as to alter this impression where it exists. There is, in fact, nothing peripheral in the concepts—interpretation, expression, representation, metaphor, work, art, aesthetic—or the metaphysical, epistemological, or value theoretical issues philosophy of art investigates. The only way to alter the impression of being a peripheral part of the discipline is to write intrinsically interesting philosophy that makes connections with other parts of the discipline as well as other disciplines. I hope this book is a step in that direction.

Part I

Definition

1

Why We Should Look for a Definition of Art

It may seem rather surprising in these antiessentialist times, but the philosophical search for a definition of art is alive and well. Or perhaps, especially to some in neighboring disciplines, this fact may appear deplorably typical of the penchant of academic philosophy to beat dead horses in a determined effort to stay out of touch with the real concerns of the artworld.¹ (A triptych: The first panel shows a group of philosophers engrossed in beating a dead horse while artists crowd around vainly trying to catch the philosophers’ attention. The second panel shows artists dejectedly walking away while philosophers continue to beat; in the distance a sympathetic group of art theorists approach. In the third panel artists happily commune with art theorists while philosophers continue with their original task in not so splendid isolation.) In any case, new definitions of art are produced almost as rapidly as new styles of artworks and art making.

Whether the pursuit of a definition of art is surprising or predictable, let me begin, since I shall be in the thick of it for the first third of this book, by trying to explain what drives it and ward off various worries whether attempting to define art is a worthwhile project. I then conclude this chapter by saying something about the history of the discussion that shapes the current debate.

Before going forward, it is necessary to take one step back. Just what is the project of defining art? Morris Weitz (1956), who has had an enormous influence on the subsequent discussion, specified it as the project of giving necessary and sufficient conditions for an item to be an artwork. If one thinks of what Weitz is requiring, in what used to be called the formal mode, that is, the issuing of a sentence of the form A is an artwork if and only if C, one has the right to remain puzzled over the status of this biconditional. Does the right-hand side give the meaning of the left-hand side? Does the former analyze the latter? What sort of equivalence is being asserted by this sentence? However, in speaking of necessary and sufficient conditions, Weitz should not be taken as requiring that a definition be expressed by a certain kind of sentence but as telling us what any sentence giving such a definition must assert or say. It must assert conditions, jointly necessary and sufficient, for an item to be an artwork. This implies that it will tell us what is the extension of art.² It implies no more. In any case this is how I interpret Weitz’s requirement on a definition of art and accept it as an adequate specification of the project of defining art.

Motivation for Seeking a Definition of Art

Why should one be interested in defining art? To claim that such an interest is out of touch with the real concerns of the artworld is far from obvious. Two well-known aspects of the artworld are among the most powerful forces driving the search for a definition of art. First, the avant-garde art of the past one hundred years has made the nature of art increasingly puzzling. It has progressively stripped works of the marks by which items have customarily been recognized as art, while expanding the category of objects (and nonobjects) capable of art status. With regard to the category of objects, examples are legion. Found art has added unworked objects chosen by the artist, often ordinary artifacts: snow shovels and can openers. Earth, bricks, scraps of cloth are the material of now famous recent works. There seems to be nothing that could not now be made over into an artwork. With regard to the stripping away of the traditional marks of art, the same thing is true. In some works, the contribution of the artist in shaping the final product is minimized (as in the found art just mentioned). In some, form seems to disappear (as it did in Carl Andre’s Spill, in which hundreds of identical plastic blocks were thrown on a gallery floor). Some attempt to eliminate aesthetic quality. (Robert Morris issued a notarized statement withdrawing all aesthetic quality and content from a metal construction with the paradoxically evocative title Litanies.) An earlier example of such stripping away is nicely described by Leo Steinberg in writing about Matisse’s Joy of Life: One had always assumed that, faced with a figurative painting, one was entitled to look at the figures in it, that is, focus on them one by one. . . . But in this picture, if one looks at the figures distinctly, there is a curious lack of reward (Steinberg 1973, 212).³

Second, artists in recent times seem to be especially interested in the nature of art, of particular art forms, of artistic media and materials, and often make these interests the subject matter of their artworks. Both Clement Greenberg and Arthur Danto, though in quite different ways, see the essence of modernism as a search for the nature of art.⁴ In fact, this is more true of some artists and movements than others, but fairly characterizes, among others, Kandinsky and Klee, the Dadaists, minimalism, and conceptual art.

Both these aspects of the art of the past century have, if anything, forced the issue of the definition of art on anyone, including philosophers, who takes an interest in the artworld.

However, these developments only bring into sharp relief something that was always true: the puzzling character of the concept of art. The concept is puzzling not in one way but in several. The problems that follow are not meant to be exhaustive.

First, there is a difficulty about just which concept of art is the object of our interest, and about its origin and history. Historical anthologies in the philosophy of art standardly begin with Plato, and the mimetic definition of art is commonly associated with the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Yet the Greek word usually translated as art, technē, is thought by no one to express our concept of art, else contemporary aestheticians would give much more attention to navigation and bridle making than they in fact do. Nevertheless, Plato seems to recognize a subgroup of technē, which he collects together in book 3 of the Republic in virtue of its importance to the education of the future guardians of the state, a subgroup that comes much closer in extension (though is by no means identical) to our concept. The items he mentions (at 401a) include poetry, painting, music, weaving and embroidery, architecture, and furniture of all kinds. Plato does not have a neat label for this subclass of technē, but the criterion by which he groups its members together refers to what we would regard as expressive, rather than representational, properties, namely, the fact that they have a character akin to the virtuous or vicious character traits of persons.⁵

Since the work of Paul Oskar Kristeller (1979), it is widely accepted that the concept of fine art was not fully formed until sometime in the eighteenth century. I would not dispute that, but I am not sure that even this concept is the object of contemporary definitions. Peter Kivy (1991) has argued that pure instrumental music was not considered among the fine arts, because it is not a representational art, implying that being such was (is?) a sine qua non of class membership. Rather it was classed among the decorative arts. Kristeller himself claims that the five major arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry form the irreducible nucleus of the modern system of the (fine) arts. By the late twentieth century, the number of art forms have multiplied many fold. That the original five constitute a central core is much less obvious, and being representational is clearly not a sine qua non of class membership.

We could say that there is one concept, perhaps extending back to Plato’s subclass of technē but at least back to the eighteenth-century system of the fine arts, which has undergone considerable change (if it makes sense to talk about a concept undergoing change) or, at least, about which our beliefs have considerably changed. However, I think it is better, and more in keeping with current tendencies of thought, to think of our concept as different from both Plato’s and the eighteenth century’s. The extension picked out by our concept is so very different, and recall that it is the extension of a term or concept that a definition is fashioned to pick out. The earlier concepts are linked to ours both causally and by similarities of content. For that reason we can think of them as predecessor concepts.

How is our concept different from the eighteenth century’s? The ways mentioned so far would be accepted by most everyone: our concept countenances the multiplication of art forms, the vast broadening of objects capable of achieving art status, the stripping away of traditional marks of arthood as necessary for art status. I would suggest other ways that might strike some (but hopefully not everyone) as more controversial or as fixing on, at best, borderline cases. The eighteenth century tended to think of the artist as a genius, obviously someone apart from the average human being. There is a strong tendency now to think of artistic activity (which is presumably, although not necessarily, activity tending to result in artworks or performances) as much more democratically spread throughout our society’s population, beginning with children and children’s art. Similarly, the fact that artworks are found in all societies and cultures (as far as I know) suggests that, although art is not a natural kind, art making is an activity natural to human beings, that (again) it takes a multitude of forms, that it need not be made just for the purpose of contemplation, enjoyment, or instruction, but can be found in objects with the most wide-ranging functions (from vessels for containing liquids to talismans that ward off evil spirits). (All these tendencies of thought may be muted, especially when theorists fix exclusively on the art of the avant-garde.)

The discussion so far suggests that our current concept of art has a much broader extension than the eighteenth-century concept of fine art, though it is different again from the ancient Greek concept of technē. This raises two further, related problems, which need only be briefly stated here, since they are much more familiar than the problem just discussed. First, why do all the diverse things that are artworks and forms that are art forms fall under the concept of art? Second (the other side of the same coin), why do items that are not artworks but resemble them in various significant ways fail to fall under the concept? Why do the various items discussed above, from the talismans and ceramic vessels to the avant-garde pieces, fall under the concept of art, while fine cigars, wine, and food, as well as various skillful entertainments and advertising, are excluded (if they all are)? The concept of fine