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 innumerable painters ... who once, probably, were artists, but who now paint exclusively for money and the pleasure of others. None of them are artists, though they all fall short of being so to varying degrees, but they are all painters. And then there are painters who are artists. Where does the difference lie, and why? What does the one lot do which the other lot doesn't? When is painting an art, and why?"[3]

The criterion of art

What makes a painting a work of art? According to the Institutional Theory of Art, "Painters make paintings, but it takes a representative of the art-world to make a work of art."[4] So, What is art? is not a question to be answered by the lay-man. We need Priests to tell us what the Truth is, i.e., to decide wether a painting is a work of art or not.

Besides the "externalist" Institutional Theory of Art answer Wollheim gives two internalist answers:

"The criterion of art lies in some directly perceptible property that the painting has."

and

The act of painting has to be an intentional one, i.e., the painter has to have the intention of making art. The act of painting has to be undertaken in a special way in order to be art.[5]

The origins of art

In a book with a totally different subject, The Prehistory of the Mind, Steve Mithen defines art as

artefacts or images with symbolic meanings as a means of communication.

Art, in Mithen's theory, is a product of the cognitive fluidity in the "Modern" (i.e., Homo sapiens sapiens) Human Mind. The three cognitive processes critical to making art were all present but still separated

in the earlier Early Human Mind (e.g., Neanderthal). These cognitive processes are 1. Interpreting "natural symbols" such as hoofprints ("natural history intelligence"); 2. Intentional communication ("social intelligence"); and 3. The ability to produce artefacts from mental templates, e.g. a stone handaxe ("technical intelligence"). [6] So here art is defined as symbolic images as a means of communication. In fact, according to John Fowles, author of The French Lieutenant's Woman, art is "the best, because richest, most complex and most easily comprehensible, medium of communication between human beings."[7]

Steve Mithen is talking about the origins of art. And so does, in a different way, Albert Einstein in his famous quote

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."[8]

Now we have six answers to our question:

Anything can be a work of art.

True, in the here and now.

It takes a representative of the art-world to make a work of art.

Sounds a little bit like the easy way out. Moreover, if 6 is true, then 2 is untrue: If the mysterious is the source of all true art, the opinions and expertise of a select group do not really seem to matter very much. Theirs is the know-how, the knowledge; Einstein saw more in imagination: "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

The criterion of art lies in some directly perceptible property that the work of art has.

Then the observer has to learn how to recognize this property.

The act of painting has to be undertaken intentionally and in a special way in order to be art.

Undertaken intentionally by an artist. Art is what is made by an artist. This brings us to another question: What is an artist?

Art is artefacts