Defining Art

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So today, we're going to discuss the topic of definitions of art or theories of art,

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as it's sometimes called, and this sort of brings to the fore our question of the third kind.

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That I distinguished at the beginning of the course that I dealt with in aesthetics,

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namely questions about the nature of art, metaphysical or ontological questions in the philosophy of art.

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And this question arises in a particularly pointed way and interests a lot of people,

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primarily because of the dramatic developments in art during the 20th century.

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One example that's often talked about in the literature on this is a famous piece by Marcel Duchamp, French artist,

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who in 1917 was on the board of a group called the American Society of Independent Artists, which had a very sort of democratic agenda.

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And at their founding, they released a statement talking about the need for, as they put it,

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an exhibition where artists of all schools can exhibit together certain that whatever they send in will be displayed.

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So Duchamp, who, as I said, was part of the board,

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or at least one of the leaders of this movement decided to test this commitment to democratic values in art.

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And so he anonymously submitted a urinal for display and he paid the submission fee,

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which they had said would guarantee anybody to have their work displayed, whatever they sent in.

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He didn't tell anybody, of course, that he was the one who sent this in and he didn't alter the urinal except to sign it with the name are MUT,

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which I think a number of people have pondered the significance of.

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But I don't think anybody's ever come to any conclusions as to why he chose that particular pseudonym.

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And so this pose a great difficulty to the American Society of Independent Artists.

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And they debated about whether this work, which Duchamp called Fountain, was actually a work of art and whether they should accept it or not.

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And in the end, they decided that it was not a work of art. And I believe it was the only submission that they rejected out of hundreds.

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I think possibly the thousands of submissions that they received.

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Duchamp resigned in protest at this and found him.

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The original was lost. People don't really know what happened to it.

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I think some people suspect that it was thrown out by the cleaning staff at the gallery.

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There's all kinds of theories about where it ended up.

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In 2004, a group of British art critics, I think 500 of them voted Fountain, the most influential artwork of the 20th century.

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And it was the only artwork that was rejected by the American Society of

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Independent Artists exhibition on the grounds that it wasn't an artwork at all.

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So it's examples like that. And that particular example that poses this question about the nature of works of art.

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And it's interesting that this is one of the few questions that we'll have discussed in

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this course that you are not unlikely to read about in the newspapers from time to time,

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what people want to know is some way of deciding whether these particularly unusual or

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outlandish artwork's pieces of performance art and so forth actually qualify as works of art.

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People get angry, for example, about government funding going to these kinds of projects.

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That's maybe not so much a worry nowadays, but there is a natural curiosity about what we're supposed to make of these things that have been produced,

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particularly, as I say, in the 20th century. And philosophers have quite dusa tactically embraced this project of attempting to define art.

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Definition plays a very important role in the history of philosophy.

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So in many Plato's dialogues, the goal is essentially to define justice, for example, or piety, friendship, things like this.

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And as many of you will be very familiar with,

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one of the largest research programmes epistemology in the 20th century has been the attempts

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to analyse knowledge to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for knowing something.

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And equally, there is a great deal of scepticism about the viability of projects like this.

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And it's worth if you know a little bit about the literature on the attempt to analyse knowledge.

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It's worth thinking about some of the questions that that raises, because, as I say, a great deal of work has been done on that,

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and a great deal of scepticism, particularly in recent years, has been engendered about the prospects for success at that.

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And you may want to look at on the sceptical side of things in that area, Chapter one, Section three of Timothy Williamson's book,

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Knowledge and Its Limits, and consider whether some of the considerations he raises there might apply to other areas,

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such as the attempts to define art. I think it's important at the outset to say a little bit about definitions in general,

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partly because it's important to get clear in your mind what would count as success in a definition of art,

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or indeed, what are we interested in when we express a desire for a definition of art?

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And I say this for a number of reasons.

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So you might think what we're interested in is a way of accepting or ruling out avant garde works like Fountain as being works of art.

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However, if that's what we're interested in, then it's not clear that we're necessarily going to need a definition.

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We may only need a test for whether something is a work of art.

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So you remember when we discussed Hume, I said that Hume,

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at the very least in providing standard of taste, is providing a test for whether something is beautiful.

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It's not clear that he's attempting to define beauty, but he's presenting a way of determining whether something is beautiful.

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And you might think what we want is a test for whether something is a work of art.

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And for that, it would be enough to show that something like Fountain fails to meet some necessary condition of being an artwork.

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You would need a full-blown definition of what an artwork is in order to rule it out.

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If he could show that Fountain fails to meet a necessary condition of being a work of art, or on the other hand,

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you could include it by showing that it meets a sufficient condition of being a work of art,

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but merely having a necessary condition of of being art or a sufficient condition of being art would not of itself necessarily be a definition of art.

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So that's one point whether what we're interested in is a test of art hould or a definition of art.

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Another distinction that I think is worth making here is the distinction between defining

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something and providing necessary and sufficient conditions of being that thing.

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It's possible to provide necessary and sufficient conditions of being a thing without defining the word for that thing,

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that kind of thing, or defining what that thing is, very trivial example.

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You could say a bachelor is what is not not a bachelor. Very easy.

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That is a necessary and sufficient condition of being a bachelor, not not being a bachelor.

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Somewhat less trivial example, confined to mathematics. And this is on your handouts being triangular, closed,

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plain rectilinear figure is a necessary and sufficient condition of being a trilateral closed plane rectilinear figure.

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So being basically three sided figure provided it's close Blaine and rectilinear is

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necessary and sufficient for getting a three angled closed plane rectilinear figure.

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But that's not a definition of being triangular because being trilateral is about having three sides,

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has to do with three sidedness and being triangular has to do with having three angles.

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Nevertheless, if one if the one condition obtains, then the other condition obtains.

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So that's another sort of standard case in which you can have necessary and sufficient conditions without a definition.

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This then raises the question, well, what do you need to add to necessary and sufficient conditions in order to have a definition?

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And I think there's at least two things you might say about this.

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And which of these you go with will depend on what you consider to be the object of the definition.

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That is what you think you are defining. You might think that you are defining words or sometimes said defining concepts

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bit more useful to talk about analysing concepts than defining concepts. But you get that as well.

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If that's what you're doing,

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then presumably you want your definition or phrase in the defining clause of the definition to have the same sense or meaning

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as the word being defined or to express the same concept as the concept expressed by the first part of the definition.

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And you might think this is why the definition of this would fail as a definition of parity.

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The words triangular parity doesn't have the same meaning as the word. Try laterality.

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Nor does it express the very same concept. That's one reason that would fail is the definition of that word or that concept.

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But philosophers also distinguish defining words and concepts from stating the essence of a thing, or as it's sometimes put, defining objects,

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defining things as a variable distinction between what's called real definition and nominal definition,

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where a real definition states the essence of a thing, what it is to be a thing of that kind.

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Nominal definition gives the meaning of a word real here doesn't mean real as opposed to fake, I should say.

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It just means pertaining to things or objects. So how might a real and a nominal definition come apart?

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Well, some people are very inclined to say that the claim that water is what has the chemical structure.

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H2O is a case of stating the essence of water, saying what it is for something to be water.

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But it's not a definition of the word water. So the word water on this line of thinking doesn't mean the same as has the chemical structure,

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a H2O or thing that has the chemical structure, H2O stuff that has it, that structure.

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And one reason you might think this is that people understood the word water and can understand the word water with no concept of hydrogen or oxygen,

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anything like that. That's part of the motivation for wanting to distinguish between stating essences of things and defining words for those things.

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So all of this, I think, is important to keep in mind, as you're considering assessing definitions of art.

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Is the aim to provide a definition of the word? Is the aim deprived state the essence of the thing?

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Is it just to provide necessary and sufficient conditions of being art or intern?

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Do we want simply a test to help us deal with quirky works like Fountain?

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I should also say one reason why a lot of people describe their views as theories of art is because they're

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reluctant to say what they're doing is providing a definition of art or some of the reasons that I've mentioned.

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Most people would talk. We'll be talking about. However, I actually do present their claims as definitions.

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OK, so those are some considerations about definition and related matters. It's also worth saying a little bit about what sense of the word art.

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We want to use whether we want to state the essence of it or to define the word.

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We're still going to have to use the words to state the problem. So it's worth considering what sense or use of that word.

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We're talking about now the word art or the arts actually has a quite a variety of senses, particularly historically.

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We talk about the art of angling. We use the word art to refer to a skill or a practical application of some knowledge.

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Talk about the liberal arts. Describe something as more an art than a science.

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Those sorts of uses are historically important, but are not are clearly not quite.

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Our focus here, too, uses or senses of the word art that we're interested in I think are also worth distinguishing.

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So one is the use of art in an evaluative sense to provide a positive evaluation of something.

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You may describe it as a work of art. And you get this with other words as well.

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So he's a man would be an example where you're not just classifying somebody as human and male,

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but you're saying he displays the attributes of manliness, strength and so forth.

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A lot of people. Well, I think pretty much everybody writing in this area says we're not interested in explaining that use of the word evaluative,

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but rather we are interested in the classification classify Katri use of the word art.

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So that can be bad art. That can be good art.

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And it's that sense of the word which is compatible with something failing as art that we're interested in using.

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And in particular, it's that class of the Katri sense of the word whose central examples are what have become known as the fine arts.

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There's a very important paper by Paul Oscar Chris Steller called The Modern System of the Arts,

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in which he traces the development of this concept of art and argues that our current notion of art,

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which has the fine arts as they're central cases, did not develop, are assumed definite form.

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I think he puts it before the 18th century. So the Greeks group certain arts together on the grounds of mimesis and you get precursors like that.

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But they didn't group together.

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According to Chris Steller, the ones that we grouped together as and particularly they didn't group together the fine arts.

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The fine arts, according to Chris, Stellar were codified in the mid 18th century.

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And the there were five distinguished back then painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry and music.

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And over the years, people considered whether to include other things like engravings, prose, literature, things like this as arts as well.

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But these formed the kind of core or nucleus. So that's we're thinking about.

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And it's kind of an interesting fact if it's true that earlier societies in the West did not

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group together the things that we group together as art under a single concept or a term.

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OK, so I mentioned last week in the discussion of expression that early in the 20th century,

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one theory of art was the so-called expression theory of art, according to which art is a kind of expression.

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Now, this for I think, rather obvious reasons, is no longer really in favour.

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It doesn't seem to do justice even to all musical works.

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Not all musical works are expressive or IC's are forms of expression.

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And you had other attempts like by Clive Bell, for example, to define art as what he called significant form.

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That's not really in favour anymore, partly because of the obscurity of the notion of significant form in Bell's writings on it.

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And so for reasons I'll get to at the end of this lecture, there arose a great deal of scepticism about the prospects for defining art.

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But this changed in the late 60s with the work of George Dickie.

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So the move that Dickie made was to say you shouldn't think of defining art in terms

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of perceptible features of it or intrinsic features of things that are artworks.

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That's not going to work. That's not going to cover the full range of prose, literature, music, painting, sculpture, cetera.

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There's no perceptible feature to Dickie. That all of those things have.

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And certainly it won't accommodate Marcel Duchamp's works. Rather, what you've got to consider arts relations to other things.

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And particularly its place within an institutional framework. It's those relations that make a thing on artwork.

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And Dickey's theory is accordingly called the institutional theory of art.

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And his arguments for it derive from some considerations originally advanced by Arthur Danto.

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Although Danto, it should be said, disagrees with Dickeys institutional theory of art.

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But Danto observed that you could have two perceptibly indistinguishable objects, one of which is an artwork.

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And the other is not. So again. Fountain would be a perfectly good example of this.

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You could have a urinal and fountain looking exactly the same, but one be an artwork and the other not.

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Or again, in Dante's example, Andy Warhol is Brillo boxes.

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You could have actual Brillo boxes that were indistinguishable from an artist's Brillo box.

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And yet one of them is a work of art and the other is not.

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What accounts for this? Asks Danto. Well, he thinks this shows that what makes the thing a work of art can't be something visible to the senses,

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but rather, as Danto put it on atmosphere, a theory that the eye cannot describe.

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In Dickey's work. The basic thought is that it's its place in an institutional framework.

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Fountain has a certain place in the institutions of the art world that a regular urinal does not.

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What is that framework then becomes the question. So that argument is supposed to show that it's got to be some framework or other

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rather than the exhibited or intrinsic properties of the work that makes it art.

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And to answer that question, Dickey, over the years has provided two different theories.

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The original institutional theory, and this is on the back of your hand out stated as follows,

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an artwork is an artefact with aspects that have had conferred upon them by some person or persons acting on behalf of the art world.

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The status of candidates for appreciation.

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So in Dickey's example, in his first statement of this theory, a chimpanzee might make a painting, as I think he was talking about.

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Particular case where it did and it might be displayed by the zoo, but it would not be a work of art, says Dickey.

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However, if he took it down the street to the art gallery and the curator displayed it and as a candidate for appreciation,

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it would become an artwork. So Dickey says, and this is supposed to illustrate that it's those aspects of the framework,

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namely it's being given or aspects of it being given the status of candidates for appreciation by someone acting on behalf of the art world.

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That makes it into a work of art. Now, the original institutional theory generated an enormous amount of attention.

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And I'm not going to go into the great debates about that one because I I'd rather focus on dickeys,

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update of this theory, the new institutional theory of art, which he offered in nineteen eighty four.

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So according to the new institutional theory and I'll explain why he's made these changes in a moment is a bit simpler.

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And this is also in the handout. According to it, an artwork is an artefact of a kind created to be presented to an art world public.

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And Dickey explains each component of this definition.

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So first of all, an artefact includes not only objects, but also events and also physical objects used in a new way.

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Without the material of which they're made being altered. This, of course, is to help accommodate cases like fountain or again,

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simpler example, a piece of driftwood might be taken from the beach, put on display.

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It's used in a new way, even if the material substance of it is not altered.

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An artist, Karen Dickey, is someone who participates with understanding in the making of a work of art.

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The key notion of an art world public, he explains.

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As a public who is aware that what is presented is art and has a minimal understanding of the media of a particular art form.

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Other important notions in his theory.

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One of which is an art world system, which is his term for the framework, for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an art world public.

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So the system of institutional relations that makes this possible and the art world is the totality of these art world systems,

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these frameworks within which it is presented. Now, one thing that may strike you about this definition, once the terms of it are explained,

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is that it is circular and Dickey is perfectly aware of this and he says this is not a problem.

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And the reason it's not a problem is that circular definitions can still sometimes be informative.

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One purpose for which we use definitions is to explain the meaning of a term to someone else.

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And if we're doing that, then evidently it's not so good if it's circular.

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However, this is not the purpose of this definition.

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We all understand we have an implicit at least understanding of what art is, and it can be informative to learn of its relations to other things,

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even if those other things ultimately have to explain and b explain themselves in terms of their relation to artworks.

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Dickey says We acquire the concept of art along with all these other concepts, like the concept of an art world or of an artist.

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And so by definition, that displays the relations between these concepts can still be true and informative by making explicit what the relations are.

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And he thinks many concepts are like this. So he thinks the concept of law. You don't acquire the concept of law on its own.

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You also acquire the concept of a legislature, an executive and a judiciary.

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And these things are explained in terms of one another. And the concepts of these are grasped together.

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And so a good definition of them, will it be circular in the sense that you need to explain the concepts on the one side of the definition?

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Ultimately, in terms of the concept being defined. So why think that this definition is the right way to go for an institutional theory?

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Dickie thinks there are a few problems with the original theory that were raised to him by Monroe Beardsley.

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One thing,

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one problem he thinks there is with the old theory is that it's talked about people acting on behalf of the art world problem with this stick.

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He says, is that the art world is an informal institution. It's just a practise and you can't act on behalf on behalf of a practise.

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So to the original theory talks about conferring a status on an object, the status of a candidate for appreciation.

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And you think it's inappropriate to talk in such informal concept contexts of conferring status?

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It's formal concepts like contexts like degrees, ceremonies at universities in which a status is conferred.

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So he hopes to simplify it in this way.

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And further, the reason he's gone with this characterisation, namely that an artwork is an artefact of a kind created to be presented to an art world,

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public is, as he somewhat incautiously puts it at one point.

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An artist always creates for a public of some sort. And I say that was incautious of him because he then backtracks on it and says it is, of course,

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true that artists withhold their work from art world publics, for example, if they don't think it's good enough.

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But, says Dickey,

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the very fact that they have withheld their work indicates that what they've created is a thing of a kind that gets presented to an art world public.

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So, for example, they may have created a sculpture. Sculptures are a kind of thing that gets presented to an art world public.

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Now, that is meant to deal with one of the more common objections to the institutional theory, at least in its original form.

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So at least in its original form,

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the institutional theory seems to imply that someone with no contact with an art world outside of that institution could not create art.

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So perhaps a feral child raised in the woods seems not inconceivable any way that a feral child could create something that is an artwork.

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And Dickey's original theory seems not to allow that.

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This variation of the theory is supposed to accommodate that,

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because it could be that the feral child create something that is at least of a kind that gets presented to an art world public.

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Maybe he creates a sculpture, for example, even if he has no concept of an art world public or contact with it.

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OK, now I'm going to move on to the next theory, partly because we're a little pressed for time.

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If you want to read more about this, as you should, because this is probably the most important of the theories of art that have been presented.

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It's worth taking a look at Stephen Daviess book Definitions of Art,

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which is quite an exhaustive survey of the various definitions of art that have been presented.

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I should say a bit of a downside of that book is that it focuses primarily on the original institutional theory,

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but it's still worth taking a look at. OK.

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The next main class of theories of art are what have been called aesthetic theories of art

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and Munmorah Monroe Beardslee is probably the most best-known exponent of one of these.

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And these tried to explain the concept of art in terms of the concept of a set of the aesthetic and Beardsley's version, which is on your hand out.

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The claim is that an artwork is something produced with the intention of giving it the capacity to satisfy the aesthetic interest.

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Satisfying the aesthetic interests here just means providing an aesthetic experience, an aesthetic experience fiercely does not define.

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That's at least as tricky as defining art itself.

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He gives a partial characterisation of what aesthetic experience is, though he says that it's characterised,

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at least in part, by having some or all of the following characteristics.

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And you don't need to write this down.

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This will be on the detailed panned out says it's characterised by a certain sense of freedom from concern about matters outside the object,

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a certain intense affect,

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detached, detached from practical ends and an exhilarating sense of exercising powers of discovery and of integration of the self and its experiences.

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So a lot of this is quite clearly derived from Kant talking about the kind of disinterested pleasure involved in aesthetic experience.

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Two notable features of this way of defining art. First of all, the aesthetic intention,

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the intention to create something with the capacity to provide aesthetic

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experience need not be the only intention with which the artist creates a work.

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So they might have religious intentions. They might create the work in order to glorify God, for example,

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and those might even be more important to the artist or for understanding this artefact.

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Beardsley's point is only that aesthetic intention must also be there in order for it's to be a work of art.

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And likewise, since it's just the intention to give it the capacity to provide these experiences,

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the work need not actually provide aesthetic experience.

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It might be I think his example might get struck by lightning before anybody ever gets any aesthetic experience from it.

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But because that intention was present. It's an artwork. Now,

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one question that is really sort of glaring regarding these this aesthetic theory is that it seems not to

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apply to the problematic cases that raise this question about the definition of art in the first place.

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So one of the reasons that Duchamp's fountain is problematic, according to many at least,

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is that it appears not to have been created with the intention of providing an aesthetic experience.

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That's not to say it can't provide an aesthetic experience.

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A lot of people have talked about how nice the gleam of the porcelain looks when you look at the thing.

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But the point being that the intention with which it was created was not to provide that aesthetic experience.

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What does Beardslee say about that?

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He argues that his definition captures the point of a definition of art better than ones that attempts to accommodate cases like Fountain.

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So according to him, the point of having a definition of art is to say, what are the noteworthy features to which the word art draws our attention?

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And so to what are the theoretically important distinctions which the word art is most apt for making?

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And because of this purpose of providing such a definition, the definition we provide needs closely reflect ordinary usage of this word.

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And as it happens, he thinks that his definition meets this purpose because one of the distinctions that we want to make is

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that between objects that enter artistic activities because of their connexion to the aesthetic interest.

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So our interest in having aesthetic experiences and objects that enter artistic practises in other ways.

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And he says the word art is most appropriate for making this distinction.

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In particular, he says there is no advantage to using this word in order to classify as art whatever comments on art.

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He thinks this is what we should say about Fountain. That it's a witty comment on the art world, but it's not itself an artwork.

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He says if you classify everything, the comments on art as art then reviews in the newspaper of art exhibitions will have to count as art.

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Any comment made about art will count as art. So, too, we shouldn't count just anything that's exhibited as a work of art,

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because this would count exhibits at science museums, stamp clubs and world fairs as art.

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Quite a dated example. And likewise, we shouldn't call art whatever happens to be called art by artists.

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And he says this wouldn't classify it all, but would rather be circular.

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By which I assume he means we wouldn't be explaining what they mean when they call it art.

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OK. So that's his rationale for that. Now, I think there is a bit of a problem with this.

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So what, Dickie, is in effect, what. Beardslee is in effect providing is what the philosopher Rudolf Carnap described as an explicative definition.

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So an explicative definition tries to respect the central cases of the use of a word, but without worrying about the other cases.

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So it's it's.

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It's basically a way of coining a new word or assigning a new meaning to the word, but one which respects central cases of the old meaning.

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And you do this if the ordinary word is too vague, imprecise, fuzzy, and it can be useful for certain theoretical purposes.

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But it's worth stressing that it is to assign a new meaning to the word rather than to try and capture the meaning the word already has.

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It tries to respect it in part. So it's not a complete stipulation of how you're going to use the word.

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But it's at least in part, a stipulation of how you're going to use the word.

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So it's not like saying I'm going to use the word bank to mean cow. But it's partly like that.

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It's a decision to use a word in a certain way, not attempt to describe how the word is ordinarily used.

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What? So what Beardslee is in effect saying is we shouldn't try to provide descriptive definitions of art.

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Rather, we should be providing explicative definitions in current EPP's sense.

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And I don't see where he's justified this claim.

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I'm not saying it can't be justified.

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But part of the reason we were interested in this question, the first place was to understand art in the ordinary sense, to be told.

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We shouldn't be asking that question. And rather, we should be in part stipulating a new meaning for this word related to the old meaning.

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Whatever that was, I think required some justification that Beardslee does not provide.

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So that's that's one concern about the aesthetic theory in Beardsley's version of it.

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I'm just going to briefly discuss the third class of theories before moving on to scepticism about the project of defining art itself.

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So the third main class of theories of art around nowadays are what are known as historical theories of art.

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And the main proponent of this is Gerald Levinsohn.

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And this, too, is on your hand out. So in Levinson's view on artwork is an object that, as he puts it,

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is non passingly intended by a person or persons with a proprietary right over it to be regarded

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in any of the ways in which prior works of art have been correctly or standardly regarded.

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Point about the reference to non passing intentions.

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Is that it can't be just a whim that you have for a few moments to intended to be regarded in a certain way.

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That's not enough to turn it into a work of art. And the basic idea is that something becomes a work of art.

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On account of its relations to pass the works of art,

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i.e. in relations between the way in which the artist intends for it to be regarded

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and the way in which past works of art were standardly or correctly regarded.

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The claim is not, I should say, that the artist needs to have the concept of art or needs even to be aware of the history of art.

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All that matters is that the artist intend for the work to be regarded in a certain way and for it to be true

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that that way of regarding this work is a way in which past works were correctly regarded or standardly regarded.

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I think that that's worth stressing because there's two ways of reading this claim about intention.

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OK. So I've provided a lengthy discussion of Levinsohn on the detailed handout, which will be up on Web lern.

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But for the moment, that's what I'll say about that.

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Now, I mentioned that beginning in the particularly the 50s, a great deal of scepticism arose about the very possibility of defining art.

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And you often get this regarding the project of definition. So I mentioned attempts to analyse knowledge.

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A lot of scepticism about the prospects of that being successful.

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And this was motivated in the 50s by Vic and Shine's discussion in the

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philosophical investigations of what he described as family resemblance concepts.

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Now, I provided the quotation on the handout from the investigation's not going to read it out,

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actually, but I'm just going to highlight kind of the key claims of this.

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So it begins Stein's view.

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It's in the context in which he's discussing language and whether we can talk about whether we can give an essence to language.

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And Vic, insurance claim is that for some words,

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there's nothing that all the things that they apply to have in common and in virtue of which we apply the same words to all.

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For example, the word game, Sophus, in the case of a word like game.

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There are many different kinds of affinity between the things that we apply the words to,

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and we apply the same words to all of these things in virtue of these affinities.

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So a couple of things he mentions on in this quotation, board games, card games, ball games, athletic games and so on.

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If you talk about these games and trying to find a feature they all share and in virtue of which we call them all games,

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you might think, well, they're all entertaining. But that's less clear with a case like chess or knots and crosses versus noughts and crosses,

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which I assume is meant to be an example of an entertaining one.

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So, two, you might think there's always winning and losing or competition between players.

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But think of patients in ball games.

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There's winning and losing. But when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again.

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This feature has disappeared. And as he says, think now.

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Singing and dancing games. Here we have the element of entertainment. But how many other characteristic features have disappeared?

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And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way. Can see how similarities crop up and disappear, disappear.

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And the upside of these considerations is that we see a network,

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complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss crossing similarities in the large and small famous passage.

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I can think of no better expression to characterise these similarities than family

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resemblances for the various resemblances between members of a family build features,

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colour of eyes, gait, temperament, so on and so forth, overlap and crisscross in the same way.

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So members of family can resemble each other in their physical appearance.

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But that's not because there's one feature of their appearance that they all share.

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They might share one thing with B and B might share something with C, but ANC don't share the same feature.

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That's the basic thought. And in a very influential article, philosopher by the name of Maurice White's applied this to Art.

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His claim was that no single condition is either necessary or sufficient for being a work of art.

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Indeed, invites his view. Even being an artefact is not a necessary condition of being a work of art.

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Because, he says, we can see this piece of driftwood. We can say this piece of driftwood, which we found on the beach, is a lovely piece of sculpture.

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Rather, it's more like the concept of a game as vacante, Stein describes it.

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So there are various conditions. This is vite stalking by which we recognise something as an artwork.

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And it's true that a thing must meet some of these conditions in order to be an artwork.

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However, there is no one condition such that a thing must meet it in order to be an artwork.

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This is a reiteration of that point that there is no single condition.

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That's a necessary condition of being an artwork.

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There's a variety of conditions in which we're in virtue of which things count as artworks.

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But no single one is one that every artwork has to meet. Now Veitch goes further.

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He says not only is this the case, but we cannot list what all of these conditions are.

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So you could have this claim and say there's a fixed number of conditions.

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You've got to meet either A, B, C or D. No individual one is necessary.

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But meeting one or the other of them is necessary. But that's not vises view.

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He thinks the list is not closed. The list of conditions is not closed.

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Our concept of art hasn't settled. What all of the conditions that a thing can meet.

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That can make a thing art. And he thinks this is on account of the role of adventure, creativity in art.

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So when when we get a new work of art like fountain because of this open character of the concept,

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we have to make a decision as to whether we're going to include it or not,

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whether we're going to add a condition to our concept of art that this thing

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meets and in virtue of which it counts as art or if we're going to exclude it.

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But the key point and the reason that the concept is open reason he describes it that way is that it's not

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we shouldn't think of this as something that the concept we have has already implicitly settled or decided.

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When new cases come up, we have to make a decision as to whether we're going to modify the conditions of applying the concept or not.

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He says we could, of course, close the concept. We could decide that's it.

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No more conditions. But Vite says we shouldn't make that decision.

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It is up to us. And he's recommending against it because he thinks this would foreclose on the conditions of creativity in the arts, as he puts it.

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And he thinks that past definitions of art, such as the expression theory, fail as definitions.

382
00:52:06,920 --> 00:52:11,900
But they do point to some of the conditions that are involved in our concept of art.

383
00:52:11,900 --> 00:52:17,960
They're not necessary conditions, but they point to some of these conditions and in particular,

384
00:52:17,960 --> 00:52:23,360
they point to some of the things that these theories have regarded as valuable things

385
00:52:23,360 --> 00:52:32,070
to pay attention to in artworks such as its form and such as its expressive character.

386
00:52:32,070 --> 00:52:42,570
OK. Now, I see we don't have any more time, but I've listed some of the considerations to think about with reference device on the handout.

387
00:52:42,570 --> 00:52:45,720
Some of the objections to it. And of course,

388
00:52:45,720 --> 00:52:56,310
the main objection would be if we can find an actual definition of art that would show that Bite's is mistaken about the character of art here.

389
00:52:56,310 --> 00:53:02,000
Thank you very much.