What is art?

Abstract

To say that the question “What is art?” is intimidating is, of course, an understatement. It has exercised the greatest minds in history and yet if any consensus has emerged, the claims that can be agreed upon tend to be minimal, vague, or capacious to the point of simply raising further questions. And perhaps this should not be surprising — “What is art?” is an ontological question, and ontological questions tend to be inherently flawed by the fact that they seek to establish objective fact and yet they are, inevitably, articulated from a subjective position that is ultimately inescapable. We might naturally expect, therefore, that the answer to the question will differ, at least to some degree, from person to person and from culture to culture, and will likely change and evolve over time. I would therefore be foolish in the extreme to think that I might be able to offer a more compellingly definitive answer than those august views routinely collected in anthologies of art theory. By way of an answer I could, instead, rehearse some of these canonical ideas about the nature of art, or at least the ones that sit most comfortably and persuasively with me. And I might do a bit of that. But if that were all I were to offer, the reader would be better off going to the respective sources and reading the great thinkers on art first hand. Given the partially subjective nature of any attempt to answer the question “What is art?,” perhaps a more personal and essayistic approach might be more appropriate — “What is art for me?,” or “What is art for us?” But I’m not at all sure that these questions are any less daunting…. [Excerpt]