Essential Distinctions for Art Theorists

Stephen Davies, Philosophy, University of Auckland

Important note: This is a final draft and differs from the definitive version, which is published in Art and Essence, Stephen Davies & Ananta Ch. Sukla (eds.), (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 3-16. I have been assured by the University of Auckland's research office that if they have made this publicly available then it does not violate the publisher's copyright rules.

Essential Distinctions for Art Theorists

In this chapter, I theorize not about the nature of art, but about theorizing

about art. My aim is to draw attention to the variety displayed by the many

projects that could be classed together as concerned with art's essence. In

light of this multiplicity, the proper evaluation of any theory or definition will

require consideration of its topic, scope, assumptions, and purpose. A failure

to do this is likely to generate confusion and misunderstanding. If, as I argue

later, definitions and theories of art differ in their purposes and

vulnerabilities, they must be subject to contrasting forms of assessment. For

instance, if a definition of art need not subsume a theory of the nature of art's

value, then it will not be appropriate to criticize it for failing to reveal why

we regard art as significant. Alternatively, if a theory of art sets out to explain

why art is made and consumed in terms of some intention, design, purpose,

or function, it is probably not vulnerable to the observation that some

artworks lack the ingredient the theory deems to be crucial.

Along the way I sketch and draw attention to some of the proposed

theories and definitions that are discussed in more detail in the chapters that

follow.

I. Real versus nominal essence

Suppose we are interested in the nature of gold. There is a difference between

these two questions: "What is gold?" and "What is the meaning of 'gold'?"

The former asks directly, as it were, about what makes something gold,

whereas the latter asks about a linguistic item, the name "gold." The first asks

about gold's real essence and the second about its nominal essence.

If a natural kind has a real essence, very often this depends on its

microstructural properties. The elements, such as gold, have distinctive

atomic constitutions. Compounds, such as water, involve bonded or ionized

aggregations of elements according to a certain organization. Biological

species, such as the zebra, are characterized by specific configurations of

genetic matter. Genera, like the eucalypts, depend on taxonomically

significant similarities that reflect evolutionary relatedness.

Now, these microstructural essences are frequently not directly evident

to human perception. Where they are known, their discovery is comparatively

recent. Yet people named and began referring to gold, water, zebras, and gum

trees long ago, using as guides relevant features to which they did have

access, such as gold's color, malleability, mass, solubility only in aqua regia,

and so on. This fact gives one reason to think language might not accurately

map the essences present naturally in the world. Linguistic classifications

sometimes are based on secondary features that may not be invariant or

precise indicators of the underlying essences they are supposed to detect.

In other words, our linguistic categories indicate our beliefs about how

the world is structured and those beliefs can easily be in error. It may be that

we lump together things that are essentially different. "Jade" refers to

nephrite and jadite, two compounds that are not otherwise related. Diamond,

charcoal, and graphite are forms of carbon, though they were thought once to

be very different substances, and the nymph and larval forms of some insects

were named differently and regarded as unconnected rather than as stages in

the life of a single organism. Meanwhile, in the vocabulary of most people,

"seagull" is used somewhat indiscriminately in referring not only to members

of the Laridae but also to species from other genera, such as terns, skuas, and

some petrels. At worst, the items our language purports to pick out do not

exist in fact, "succubus" and "phlogiston" being two examples.

There are reasons other than ignorance, error, and the limitations of

direct perception for anticipating that our language will be at odds with

reality as such. The way we view and categorize the world is shaped by our

desires and projects as much as by the world's independent structure. We are

concerned with categorizing things as means to our various ends as well as

with identifying their intrinsic essences. "Seagull" might remain a useful term

for those with an interest in referring to coastal birds of a certain size and

color even if its use does not pick out a natural kind or set. (For that reason,

the classification designated by "seagull" is not obviously mistaken in the

way that of "succubus" is.) Moreover, language might have an agenda and

limitations of its own that could constrain what can be done with it.

So far I have been discussing "natural kind" terms. Not all our nouns

refer to natural kinds, however. Consider parking tickets. Like "jade", the

term "parking ticket" does not designate a kind with an underlying real

essence, but this is not because we are in error about the true nature of the

underlying essence involved, as is the case with our use of "jade." Rather,

parking tickets are not natural kinds with an underlying essence. They are

human creations, things invented by us to serve some end we have. They did

not exist prior to their invention and they take their meaning or import from

the role assigned to them within a human practice. "What is a parking

ticket?", where it is a question about the nature or concept of the type and not

about the constitution, manufacture, or design of any token (that is, actual

parking ticket), calls for the same answer as "What is the meaning of 'parking

ticket'?" What falls under a humanly invented conceptual category possesses

a nominal, not a real, essence. All concepts are humanly constructed, but

some, such as "jade", are supposed to latch on to natural structures that exist

independently of human thought while others, such as "parking ticket", latch

on to artificial structures, functions, intentions, institutions, or practices.

Parking tickets have no underlying nature about which we could be

mistaken and in this they differ from gold. There are other respects, however,

in which we might be in error about our humanly constructed concepts. We

might be ignorant of the deeper needs, goals, and values that drive our

decisions. It is possible the reasons we give each other are mere

rationalizations and that our categorizations reflect forces and processes of

which we are largely unconscious. For instance, it might be argued that

religion is a social institution that exists only for its usefulness in the

socialization of children, in the preservation of group identity and harmony,

and so on, without its having the content or purposes that its adherents

mistakenly believe to be crucial to its nature. Alternatively, it could be that

we are mistaken about the concept's proper extension, though we know its

intension, or vice versa. We might believe wrongly that the term "moral

agent" is restricted in its application only to human beings. Or we might

agree on what is to count as a sport, yet disagree about what it is that unites

the activities that properly fall under the term. Despite the concessions just

made, it will not be common for us to be radically or extensively mistaken in

our understanding of the character of humanly invented artifacts and

practices.

The preceding can now be applied to our theorizing about art. An

obvious first question asks if art is more like gold or parking tickets? Is it a

natural kind with an underlying real essence, or one that is humanly invented

with a purely nominal essence? It is tempting to think the answer is plain:

Artworks are made by humans, and our concept of art echoes and responds to

human needs. Yet this temptation should be resisted, at least initially. Some

highly reactive or short-lived natural elements or compounds may exist in a

pure or isolated form only in chemical laboratories, so the importance of

human intervention or manufacture is not decisive. And, if we should (as I

think) resist the claim that grass would not be green unless there were people

to observe it, or that trees in uninhabited forests make no sound when they

fall, we should not be too quick to conclude from the dependence of art on

human interests and perceptual modes that it does not have an objective

nature independent of its role in human experience.

On the one hand, art's universality suggests it does not have the

arbitrary contingency of parking tickets, while on the other, the manner in

which its existence presupposes its relatedness to human interests and needs

indicates that it is not like gold. Is there a possibility intermediate between

these two? Consider weeds. Our concept of the weed is like that of the

seagull mentioned earlier: Even if it reflects human concerns and perceptual

limitations, and even if it fails accurately to capture a natural category, our

concept of the weed is, nevertheless, not purely nominal in the way that the

concept of a parking ticket is. It is only in connection with our interests that

plants are weeds, but those interests take account of weeds as plants and, as

such, they have a nature that is not dependent on our interests. In other

words, though the category is a humanly invented one, the human category is

not merely a contingent fabrication with no content or constraints other than

its answering to some classificatory need or other purpose we have, because

it is imposed on and is to some extent answerable to natural categories. If art

is similar, it is not purely or solely dependent for its nature on arbitrary,

variable, mutable human conventions.

As just noted, one reason for thinking that art draws or depends on

natural (even if "response dependent") features would be its universality, or

the identification of universal aesthetic properties. Some philosophers of art

have argued that there are such properties and have considered whether art is

better thought of as a natural, as opposed to a cultural, kind. And if we were

to seek a source for the claimed universality, it would likely lie in our

common biology and shared evolutionary circumstances. The suggestion

need not be that art promotes individual or species survival directly or

mechanically. It would be sufficient to show that the pleasure we gain from

making and consuming art derives from, but without being the target of,

biological dispositions and cognitive structures that were generated for other

evolutionary pay-offs they deliver.

In arguing for the universality of art, it is not necessary to demonstrate

that all arts or artworks have something in common in terms of which they

can be defined, or that given works always trigger a uniform response. Here

is one suggestion: Eighteenth-century aesthetics described a group of

aesthetic properties, including the beautiful and the sublime (see the chapters

in this volume by Townsend and Wicks). These were objective properties of

objects and they had the power to produce responses of pleasure and awe in

observers. They were available to perception, and in many cases could be

recognized without background information or reflective cognition about the

nature or function of the items in which they inhered. If this view is correct,

aesthetic properties have a universal interest independent of cultural

variation, and can also be recognized and appreciated across cultures. (This

might explain how we can recognize the artiness of the artworks of

prehistoric times or of cultures other than our own—see Davies 1997, 2000.)

Now, so long as art arose out of this natural concern with the aesthetic, it

would display a universal aspect. This would require only that all art at its

origin reflected a concern with such properties and that such properties often

are present and of interest in works of art. It would not require that all

artworks or artforms display such properties—they might develop or be

directed in ways antithetical to this—or that narrational, semantic,

representational, referential, and other more culturally relative properties are

absent from or less important in art than aesthetic properties. Which is

fortunate, because art clearly displays great cultural and historical variability,

to an extent that makes much of it only minimally accessible to cultural

outsiders, even if it also rests on the kind of universal base just described.

These are controversial claims. The aesthetic, as traditionally

understood, has made something of a comeback recently—for instance, see

Zangwill 1995a, Higgins, 1996, and Brand 2000a. In the latter decades of the

twentieth century, however, the emphasis was more on art's socio-cultural

embeddedness, with the implication that like parking tickets, it is

unconstrained by connections with any underlying natural essences or

processes, and therefore varies arbitrarily from time to time and place to

place. Talk of "aesthetic properties" has been replaced to some extent by talk

of "artistic properties", these being relational (rather than straightforwardly

perceptible) properties that depend on a piece's location within a genre, an

oeuvre, a style, an artistic tradition, and so on (see Danto 1981 and the

chapter in this volume by Stecker). The idea that different times or cultures

share a concept of art has been challenged also. What certainly is true is both

that what is counted as art has varied considerably over the ages (see the

chapters in this volume by Santoro-Brienza and Shiner) and also that the

"modern system of the fine arts" developed in the eighteenth century (which

recognized painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry as fine arts),

when coupled with the idea that art is non-utilitarian and is primarily for

contemplation, excludes the artifacts of many places and cultures from the

artistic realm. Not even the fine arts, according to Kivy (1997), share a

common essence. Pictorial representation cannot be assimilated to linguistic

description, and vice versa. Meanwhile, music's "grammar" and

expressiveness are distinct from those of narratives and pictures. On this

view, the fine arts are an ad hoc assemblage, not a natural set.

So far the discussion has raised a host of issues without providing a

framework in terms of which they can be usefully analyzed. Perhaps we

would be justified in speculating that art, while it lacks a real essence, does

not have an essence that is purely nominal in the sense of being entirely

independent of, and unconstrained by, natural kinds or features. It depends in

part on widely shared, biologically conditioned senses, capacities, and

appetites of human beings, as well as on social factors that are local,

culturally specific, and historically relative. But how do we go on from here?

To do so fruitfully, further distinctions are needed. I concentrate on two

issues in the following sections; on the scope and subject of the enterprise

and on differences between theorizing and defining.

II. Questions of scope and subject

I have identified our subject as art, but already it is clear that this topic can be

sliced in many ways. Among the key notions are: The arts, work of art,

artform, oeuvre, genre, school, movement, and style. Each of these deserves

its own treatment. An account of what is essential to something's being a

work of art is likely to be different, naturally enough, from an analysis of the

nature of the arts viewed as a general collective, just as a consideration of the

character of tragedy will differ from a discussion of Fauvism. So long as the

topic is clearly identified and the tendency to extrapolate beyond its

boundaries is curbed, a narrowly circumscribed analysis is likely to be as

useful as one that looks at the broader picture. At some point, though, a wide

perspective is needed if an exhaustive theory is to be provided, because the

analysis of local themes is likely to presuppose or make reference to more

general ones. For instance, a discussion of style is bound eventually to

implicate the notions of oeuvre, artwork, and artform.

Another matter is the scope of the topic to be addressed. How far do

we extend the notion of art and where do we draw the line between art and

non-art? Is the primary contrast to be drawn between art and nature or art and

craft? Do we need to distinguish Art with a capital "A", the fine arts or high

art, from art with a small "a", mass or low art? Can something be art if its

primary purpose is to serve as a prop in religious ritual? Are quilting,

needlepoint sewing, tattooing, millinery, coiffure, haute cuisine, interior

design, scrimshaw, comics, soaps, vintage cars, gardens, fireworks displays,

and fashion parades to be included among the arts and artforms? And what of

the practices of other cultures? Are Indonesian shadow puppet plays, the sand

paintings of the Navajo, and the song cycles through which the Australian

aborigines relate tribal history and geography works of art?

Depending on the enterprise, the answers to such questions will have

to be declared as starting assumptions or, alternatively, the business of

arriving at an answer will be the substantive goal of the discussion. In either

event, it is important to make clear what the question is, why it is addressed,

and what kind of result would count as an answer. As described previously,

there need be no objection to circumscribing the scope of the topic to be

addressed, so long as this is done explicitly and unwarranted generalizations

are avoided. Large scale theorizing, however, cannot avoid arguing through

these questions about the scope or extension of the key terms.

Another point to bear in mind is the potential usefulness of an inquiry

that traces connections between central and other uses of the term "art." Like

many words, a number of meanings is listed for "art" in most dictionaries:

Human creative skill; work exhibiting this; the branches of creative activity

concerned with painting, music, etc.; any one of these branches; creative

activity; human skill or workmanship as opposed to the work of nature;

aptitude or knack; academic disciplines, such as languages, history, and

literature, known as the Humanities; and so on. By contrast with a word like

"bank", the meanings of which are unrelated, apparently there are

connections between the various meanings given for "art" and it is

worthwhile to draw these out. The same is true of some terms, such as

"artifact", that stand in an etymological relationship to "art." Even if the

display of human creative skill is neither necessary nor sufficient to make the

product of that skill an artwork, there is surely a connection between the

nature and interest of much art and the creativity that goes into its production.

And this means that in discriminating and analyzing art versus nature, art

versus craft, or art versus Art, the underlying links may be as revealing as the

differences that will be highlighted.

For simplicity, in what follows I will assume the goal is to discuss the

nature of works of art in the Western fine art tradition.

III. Theorizing versus defining

In addressing the question "what is a work of art?" it is important to consider

whether the project is to define art, or merely to identify a condition that is

necessary but not sufficient for something's being art, or merely to identify a

condition that is sufficient but not necessary for something's being art, or to

provide a theory of art. In this section, I contrast definitions and theories of

art. The difference between these sometimes is overlooked, but is crucial. It

becomes apparent when we notice that a person can hold the theory that art is

not definable.

"What is the meaning of 'life'?" or "What is life?" are questions

inviting a definition as a response. Compare them with "What is the meaning

of life?" This calls for a theory. It will be obvious that the two kinds of

questions require different sorts of answers, though these answers may

overlap in part. With this in mind, we can get a grip on the difference

between a definition of art and a theory of art by considering how "What is

the meaning of 'art'?" calls for a different answer than "What is the meaning

of art?" Here are some of the differences between the two enterprises.

To return to my initial example, a definition of the nature of gold

should be exhaustive and exclusive. In other words, it should identify the set

of properties that all and only gold things possess; that is, the set of necessary

conditions that are jointly sufficient for something's being gold. Though

definitions frequently imply criteria that can be practically applied in

identifying what falls under the concept, this is not necessary. It could be that

the definition, though correct, gives no practical guide to the determination of

the concept's extension. The definition of gold makes me no wiser about how

to identify gold, since I do not know how to create a pure sample or how to

determine its atomic number. In consequence, the content of a definition can

sometimes be surprising, even to someone who is already skilled in picking

out instances of what is defined. Moreover, a definition may be adequate

though it offers no account of the human significance of its topic. A definition

of gold's nature must refer to its microstructure, since it is this that

characterizes all and only gold, but need not explain why people have

murdered to obtain gold. By contrast, a theory of gold is likely to focus on

what is generally important about gold, even if not all gold is important in

this way and even if other things may be similarly important. A theory of

gold should never be entirely surprising, since it should consider, among

other things, the human practices and values within which gold is implicated.

Usually, a theory is supposed to assist us in identifying the things it is about.

A theory of gold might mention how gold is to be distinguished from fools'

gold, for instance. Finally and crucially, a full explanation or theory regarding

gold would need to mention, among other things, its social and cultural

significance and its place in human history. In other words, it must consider

why gold matters to us.

The same points apply when the topic is the work of art. A successful

definition must specify a set of properties all and only artworks possess and

in virtue of which they are artworks. It could be surprising; or, at least, it

could feature properties to which we do not normally refer in identifying

works of art. Moreover, it might be adequate even though it provides no clue

as to why the production and consumption of art is valued so highly that

some people see their artistic commitments and preferences as central to their

identities. By contrast, a theory of art can be more general in discussing what

is typical or normative for works of art. A theory of art should never be

totally revelatory, unless it can also argue that everyone is deeply deceived

about the concept they employ. Many theories of art can be expected to

consider how artworks are identified and individuated. In doing so,

sometimes they will concentrate on difficult cases, such as Duchamp's

readymades, and try to explain why they are borderline and what might be

relevant to settling their status or otherwise as art. Lastly but importantly, an

adequate theory of art is bound to reflect on art's significance within human

lives and affairs.

Some people would reject the distinction between art's definition and a

theory of art's value because they hold that its value is essential to anything's

being art, so that an adequate definition must encompass a theory of art's

value. They regard the concept as inescapably evaluative or normative. The

classification of something as art does not precede its evaluation but, rather,

requires its assessment. The idea here is that it is a necessary condition for

something's qualifying as a work of art that it have an appropriate degree of

the requisite value. It then might be subject to a further evaluation: It is

relatively good or bad as an artwork in proportion to the extent that it exceeds

the initial threshold. Others distinguish a descriptive from an evaluative sense

for the term "art", and see definition as concerned only with the former.

Where one falls on this issue depends on what one thinks of very bad

art, I believe. If all art contains an important element of positive value, and is

bad (if it is) on balance, only to the extent that it contains less of what is

valuable than do many other artworks, then the concept would be essentially

evaluative. But it is doubtful that all art contains an important element of

positive value. Unless one takes a narrowly legislative view of what is to be

counted as art it is hard to deny the existence of works that qualify as art in a

fairly straightforward way while being embarrassingly poor. It is not that they

perform a function that confers artistic value, but only to a barely adequate,

modest extent. They are artistic failures, but artworks nonetheless.

This is not yet to show that descriptivism wins the day, however. For

instance, it might be held that art's value is essential to its nature as

something the artist intends to achieve. A work could be without merit

because the artist failed in his intention to make a piece that was artistically

valuable in the appropriate fashion. Alternatively, a work might become

dysfunctional with respect to its value. For instance, a painting could be

damaged and would remain an artwork though it lost most of its aesthetic

properties with the result that it could not perform its intended aesthetic

function. In both cases, the connection with value remains central, even if the

work fails to attain or retain the kind of value that is crucial. Functionalism

need not insist that every work of art fulfills an aesthetic function but only

that each ought to be functionally adequate (Zangwill 2001a).

Despite these observations, my sympathies lie with the descriptivist.

Some bad art is not simply bad on balance or relatively speaking, but is void

of artistic virtue, bad through and through. Moreover, this is not to be

explained as resulting either from subsequent damage to the work or from a

failing in the artist's design or execution. The work is not damaged, it is

presented under appropriate conditions, and the audience is sensitive and

informed. Meanwhile, the artist succeeded completely in doing what she

wanted and achieved all that she intended. The problem is that though she

made an artwork what she intended and achieved was artistically worthless

(or, anyway, served no aesthetic function).

Surely, though, there is an intimate connection between art and its

value? Of course! Art is capable of enriching and ennobling our lives. If it

did not answer to deep human needs and interests, we would not accord it the

iconic status it enjoys in our societies. But that does not entail that this need

be mentioned in a definition. The points just made are about art's best and

most significant instances. They are about what art should be, not what it is.

It is because art has the power to attain such heights—and also because it is

difficult to make the greatest works—that we value the enterprise as we do.

These are observations about art in general. When we focus on art as the

collection of its works, or if we take as our goal the definition of "work of

art", considerations of value cannot play a central role. And this is precisely

because there is no guarantee that any particular artwork will be of high or

any value (even if it turns out to be just as the artist intended). Because there

is no recipe for the production of the best art—that is, no algorithm, process,

or method that entails success at the highest level—and moreover, because

not every work of art aspires to excellence or is intended to be great, the

definition of art must be descriptive in the way indicated previously, which is

perfectly consistent with the admission that we would not view art in general

as we do if none of its works earned our devotion. Its potential for value is

crucial to our attitude to art in general or as process, but aspiring to this value

is neither necessary nor sufficient for art as product, or as the body of its

works.

Wherein does the merit of great art reside? Art can be of cognitive

value; it can be a source of useful or important information. More often,

though, its value is equated with its capacity to generate pleasurable

experiences. Such an account faces some obvious problems; for example, it

must explain why we are interested in works with a harrowing content and

why we welcome the negative experiences these and other works sometimes

produce. Also, there remains a question about whether pleasure is important

or serious enough to account for art's value (see the discussion of Kant's

views in the chapter in this volume by Townsend). Artworks can become

thoroughly integrated into the fabric of our lives, with the result that saying

we value them for the pleasure they provide can seem to be as absurd and as

inadequate as maintaining that we value our friends and children for the

pleasure we get from them (Sharpe 2000). These are not issues I will pursue,

though.

I turn now to a different kind of theory, one that seeks a historical

essence for art. Instead of searching for some property necessarily present in

all artworks, this type of theory sees the development of art as determined by

some historical process or ordering. By way of illustration, consider this

view: Works of art need not display aesthetic properties. Instead, complex

semantic, symbolic, or representational properties might be dominant in the

majority of cases. Indeed, works of art might go out of their way to eschew

aesthetic properties and to present an anti-aesthetic face to the artworld. But

there could not have been art as we know it had it not started with a delight in

perceptually available aesthetic properties. In other words, there is a

historical (but not an ontological) primacy or significance in art's displaying

aesthetic properties. Or, to take a related position, it could be argued that at its

outset, art had to be functional. Artworks had to be intended to serve the

purpose for which art in general was created (whether this was to afford

aesthetic delight, or for some other reason) and this intention had to be

successfully realized more often than not. Later, though, when the relevant

practices had been conventionalized and institutionalized, it became possible

to make artworks that served no recognizable art function. Again, the claim is

one about a historical necessity. It is about the way the extension of "art" had

to be satisfied over time, not about a nature shared by each and every

artwork.

One of the most famous of such theories was proposed by Hegel

(1975) in lectures given between 1823 and 1829. In his view, the goal of

history was the self-revelation of Geist or spirit. Art contributed to this not as

the culmination of the process but by preparing the way for a subsequent

stage. When it had done so it had fulfilled its historical destiny; its history

had come to an end. This occurred with the art of ancient Greece, which went

as far as it could in revealing the nature of Geist through the perfect marriage

of its content and form. (For further discussion, see the chapter in this volume

by Wicks.)

A more recent version of a similar theory has been developed by

Arthur Danto (1984, 1986, 1997a). He maintains that art's historical purpose

was to pose in a vivid and unavoidable form the philosophical question that

asks about art's own nature. It does this in a series of stages, all but the last of

which misrepresent the essence they aim to display. For instance, the ideas

that art is representation and that art is expression turned out not to capture its

essence. The final and decisive act in art's historical unfolding took place,

according to Danto, with Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes in 1964. By mimicking

the outward form of a non-art artifact, this artwork provoked its audience to

look beyond it appearance and perceptible features to an "atmosphere of

theory" as the source of its art-status. In the post-historical era that follows,

art can still be created but it can have nothing new to say. Anything can

become art, with no movement or style more legitimate than any other. As

Danto presents it, the removal of a duty owed to history creates the

opportunity of a new freedom and vitality for art, so art's post-historical

phase is not marked by exhaustion or withering but by a new vitality.

There is much that might be said about Danto's theory, but I mention it

here for two main reasons: First, to make clear that not all theories of art's

essence are concerned to produce a definition; Danto's narrative has no such

goal. The second point echoes one I made above in discussing the value of

art. One can have a theory of art that is about the nature of art in general

without its being about the character or content of each and every artwork,

such as might be the focus of the project of definition.

IV. Some Definitions of Art

In this final section I review the form taken by some recent definitions. First

though, I mention one of the most popular views; that art cannot be defined

because there is no set of necessary conditions that is sufficient for

something's being art.

The most famous statement of this view is by Morris Weitz (1956);

see the discussion in this volume by McFee. Weitz claimed there is no

perceptible property common to all and only artworks. Suppose he is correct

in this view. Still, it would be as reasonable to conclude that the defining

properties are imperceptible ones, such as properties expressing a relation of

the work to its maker's intentions, or to an institutional practice, or to the

history of prior art production, than to conclude that art is indefinable. Weitz

felt he could reach the last conclusion because he thought the unpredictable,

changeable character of art was incompatible with the rigid requirements of

any definition. The national debt keeps changing, but is not indefinable as a

result, so why should art be different? Perhaps Weitz thought this was

because, with art, it is not just the application of the "rules" that changes but

also the rules themselves. The constitutive rules for the game of art-making

are under constant challenge and revision.

Even if this last observation is also true, it does not entail that an over-

arching definition is excluded. For instance, the same point could be made

about the laws, but we do not suppose this to show that we cannot define the

body of law (for instance, as the product of a certain kind of legislative

procedure and legal tradition). Besides, Weitz owes us an account of what

unifies the concept of art and the story he offers—that artworks are grouped

together and distinguished from other things in terms of family resemblance

—is not adequate. The notion of resemblance is too vague and flimsy to carry

this explanatory burden unless one specifies just what kinds or degrees of

resemblance are effective and to do that is to propose a kind of definition,

after all.

Many people are inclined to embrace Weitz's conclusion, though I

have just suggested his arguments fail. Why does it seem attractive? I think it

is because there is an assumption that definitions target real essences and that

these are fixed. I have suggested that art does not have a real essence, as gold

does, but also that this does not rule out the possibility of definition.

Moreover, if the arts are more like weeds than parking tickets—that is, if the

concept is not arbitrarily conventional but is, instead, answerable to facts

about human capacities and interests that are widely shared across many

cultures—the definition of art may be revealing and interesting, not just an

empty tautology.

Despite the popularity of Weitz's conclusion, the final decades of the

last century saw the development and presentation of many definitions of art

or of the work of art. I classify the main contenders as belonging to three

types; functional, procedural, and historical (Davies 1991). According to the

functionalist, something is art if it is made to serve the point or function that

is distinctive of art. Usually, this function is said to be that of producing an

aesthetic experience (Beardsley 1983, Lind 1992, Anderson 2000) or of

generating aesthetic properties (Zangwill 1995b). By contrast, the

proceduralist maintains that something becomes art as a result of undergoing

various social processes, just as someone becomes married as a result of

going through a particular social ceremony. The most developed and

discussed version of a procedural definition is George Dickie's Institutional

theory (Dickie 1974, 1984). Moving now to the third category, historical

definitions insist that something qualifies as art by standing in an appropriate

relation to earlier artworks. The defining relation has been identified as a

matter of stylistic continuity or derivation (Carney 1991, 1994), of being

intended for regard in a way appropriate to earlier art (Levinson 1979, 1989,

1993a), and of providing an intelligible continuation in the narrative that

makes a coherent history of art's production (Carroll 1988, 1993a, 1994,

1999:249-64). Though these approaches may be opposed, it is possible to

argue for their disjunctive combination. So for instance, Robert Stecker

(1994, 1997a) proposes that something can be a work of art (at a given time)

either by fulfilling a central function of art (as recognized at that time) or by

being intended to be in one of the institutionally established artforms (as

recognized at that time). His definition is time-indexed to allow for historical

malleability not only in the institutions of art but also in the functions deemed

central to art.

I do not propose to discuss or evaluate these theories, but see the

chapter in this volume by Stock. Still, it is worth asking if recent decades of

debate have progressed toward consensus. Stecker (2000) argues that they

have. There is convergence on several fronts. All plausible definitions are

disjunctive, he claims, when all their qualifications and conditions are spelled

out. For example, since art has no one, unchanging function or form,

functionalist definitions must acknowledge art's historicity if they are to be

plausible. Yet reference to art's function is ineliminable from accounts of the

arthood of the first works, since these lacked artistic predecessors and

institutional settings. Definitions should also recognize the importance of

intention in order to explain how something that fails to meet any of art's

functions and that does not fall within the established forms of art might

qualify as a work of art, nevertheless, since it was intended to do one or other

of these things. Moreover, the importance of artworld institutions must be

granted in order to explain how items can become art through their

appropriation by artworld members when they were either not produced by

humans or not produced, directly or indirectly, with an art-making intention.

If Stecker is correct, there is progress. It is unlikely that this will

remove disagreement between philosophers, artists, or the general public

about art's nature or what is to count as art. It is not a requirement for the

adequacy of any definition or theory that it is universally accepted and

endorsed, however, which is why sociological surveys cannot substitute for,

or measure the success of, philosophers' arguments.

Notes