Key Terms
The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can even be defined has also been a matter of controversy as has philosophical usefulness of a definition of art.
A handy tool to employ in the attempt to establish for precise definitions is to specify the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the application of a term, the use of a concept, or the occurrence of some phenomenon or event. The article below shows the challenge of defining “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions because the concepts can be so ambiguous. It also describes the tricky issues surrounding the word “if” and its use in conditional sentences.
Beauty is an important part of our lives. Ugliness too. The term "aesthetic" dates back to 1735 with the the publication of German Philosopher, A.G. Baumgarten’s masters thesis in 1735. It has been subject to much criticism, but since antiquity, philosophers have been interested in our experiences of and judgments about beauty and ugliness. They have tried to understand the nature of these experiences and judgments, and they have also wanted to know whether these experiences and judgments were legitimate. For example, in the years from the 1960s through the1990s even the suggestion that an artwork might be considered "good" simply because it brought pleasure was often mocked and derided. During this time, to be considered "good" art was meant to be cognitively, morally or politically beneficial. Other examples of aesthetic judgments include: truth, mind-independence, nonaesthetic dependence, and lawlessness.
Traditionally, however, the birth of aesthetics as a discipline is marked by the publication of A.G. Baumgarten’s masters thesis in 1735, where the term gets its first mention.
Key Terms/Concepts
Philosophers
Artists
Clive Bell was a British Art Critic who developed the art theory known as significant form, which specified a set of criteria for what qualified as a work of art. Bell thought that for an object to be deemed a work of art it required potential to provoke aesthetic emotion (emotions felt during aesthetic activity or appreciation - fear, wonder, sympathy, etc.). Beauty did not need to be present.
The important thing about a picture, however, is not how it is painted, but whether it provokes aesthetic emotion.
Source: Clive Bell; Significant Form
Susanne Langer was an American philosopher, writer, and educator known for her theories on the influences of art on the mind. She believed that symbolism is the central concern of philosophy because it underlies all human knowing and understanding. Her philosophy explored the continuous process of meaning-making in the human mind through the power of "seeing" one thing in terms of another. She maintained there is a basic and pervasive human need to symbolize, to invent meanings, and to invest meanings in one's world, have become commonplace today.
Like others, Langer believed that what distinguishes humans from animals is the capacity for using symbols. While all animal life is dominated by feeling, human feeling is mediated by conceptions, symbols, and language. Animals respond to signs, but stimulus from a sign is significantly more complex for humans. This perspective on symbols is also associated with symbolic communication, a field in which animal societies are studied to help understand how symbolic communication affects the conduct of members of a cooperating group.
Source: Susanne Langer
| Artwork title: Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 57 | Collection SFMOMA |
| Artist name: Robert Motherwell | Purchase through a gift of Phyllis C. Wattis and gift of Gardiner Hempel |
| Date created: 1957-1961 | © Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York |
| Classification: painting | https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/94.383 |
| Medium: charcoal and oil on canvas | Not on view at this time. |
| Dimensions: 84 in. × 109 1/8 in. (213.36 cm × 277.18 cm) | |
| Date acquired: 1994 |
Collingwood is a principal proponent of the expressive theory of art. He views works of art as the imaginative expression of emotion. He considered the social role of artists as a form of communication, "the artist and spectator jointly come to realize, to come to know, certain mental states."
Collingwood also holds there are four concepts of human activity (craft, magic, representation, and amusement) which are commonly called ‘art’, but which according to Collingwood, should be sharply distinguished from what he calls "art proper," the implication being that craft, magic, representation, and amusement are commonly, but improperly, called art.
Source: Collingwood's Aesthetics
Morris Weitz's views are considered anti-definitionalist - or rejecting essentialist definitions altogether. He argued that art has no fixed essence, no property common to all works of art, so no real definition of art can be made. Art-making is creative and fluid and therefore any attempt at a concrete definition is impossible.
In his piece “Art as an Open Concept,” Weitz argues that all theories of art fail by inherently misconceiving the concept of art itself - that it is futile to assert there is such a thing single true theory of art. Of all the theories proposed, none have been unanimously accepted and almost all of them contradict one another. Weitz also suggests these theories fail to recognize art as an open concept without any necessary or sufficient conditions surrounding it. But, Weitz points out, even in spite of these contradictions, we are still able to talk about art, to refer to things as art, and to classify works of art into other sub-concepts such as styles, modes, media, etc. He further states that although art and its sub-concepts are employed for the description and evaluation of works, those descriptions and evaluations themselves depend upon criteria, that does not make such criteria necessary or sufficient because concepts used to describe and evaluate works may be changed or expanded which means they will then become new cases with new properties and the criteria for defining art must follow new principles. However, the new principles may turn out to make the act of attempting to define their conditions betrayals of the concepts of the original criteria.
Source: Morris Weitz
Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. He placed aesthetics in a central role of life, threading comments about literature, poetry, architecture, the visual arts, music, and the philosophy of culture throughout his writings and shows how aesthetics is interconnected in the philosophies of language, mind, mathematics, and philosophical method. He writes about questions of meaning, of perception, and of sense, all clearly central to aesthetic experience, and his writing on these subjects is significant for questions of artistic meaning and interpretation that is still explored today.
