The (condensed) nature of art

Sep 20, 2009 01:38

  1. Art requires people.
  2. Art is things that are understood to be Art.
  3. Art is a conscious or unconscious assignment of value.
  4. Art is situated and is dependent upon creator and consumer.
  5. Art is momentary, because situations and people are transient.
  6. Art is typically expected to have various qualities, but its status as Art doesn't depend on it having them.
  7. Whatever Art is, it can only be defined with reference to itself.

Casual inquiry throws up the "Open Concept Argument", discussed in this paper. In the case of Art, roughly Weitz' contention that because individuals can choose to assign the value of Art to anything as part of a ruse, game or intellectual argument, Art can never have a fixed definition. Which resembles my whole "Art is what is labelled 'Art'" idea I suppose. And the proposition "Art can only be defined with reference to itself" does relate to the family resemblance method for judging an instance's adherence to a concept.

The line of thought goes back, apparently, to Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations I was thoroughly confused by a long while ago. There's an anecdote about Wittgenstein that goes something like this: supposedly at a park Wittgenstein witnessed a photographer organising a group shot, who said "Stand there! No, there! Roughly there!" - and supposedly Wittgenstein became very excited by the phrase "roughly there" roughly because it was an example of the idea - Wittgenstein's idea, perhaps - that language can be very effective without any sort of precision in what is meant.

I also found a review of The Nature of Art: An Anthology, a teaching reader comprised of twenty-eight essays roughly on what 'art' means by, you know, every thinker ever. Might be a good read some time.

philosophy, art

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