Attempting to Define Art

Definition Essay – Attempting to Define Art

Considering that last semester I took both History of Western Art and, in the philosophy department, Aesthetics, I would have thought that I am now in a better position than I was a year ago to answer the question, “What is art?” Going into the philosophy course I had the idea that art worked as a means of taking abstract values and placing them into concrete form. However, it soon became clear that there were many other praiseworthy things that could be said about art: it can be sublime, making us feel both the overwhelming force of nature and the overcoming strength of our free will (Kant); it bridges the natural and the ideal, allowing man to achieve political freedom (Schiller); it makes life bearable through tragedy, allowing civilized man to experience the Dionysian (Nietzsche). Whatever art is, it seems the experience of it is ineffable to a degree that philosophers can reasonably ascribe to it so many grand and diverse effects.

Even the idea that art represents our values comes into doubt. Hegel saw it as one of three ways of knowing, the other two being religion and philosophy. But as art’s power of representation failed to keep pace with progress in the other two, he announced that “art is, and remains for us, on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past.” He obviously did not anticipate the rise of modernity and non-representational art. Whether or not these works can compare to the great productions of the past is debatable, but they do exist in a thriving critical culture.

Finally, drawing a distinction between art and non-art is no easy task. The rapid increase in wealth created by capitalism in the past two centuri...

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...at means) use of a medium.

Another possible problem with these general characteristics of art is that they do not exclude the productions of animals. The music of songbirds is not generally considered art to us, but to birds it may be. This is not a minor point: while human art exists in a more complicated social context, our capacity for it is something we evolved. Our complex and varied aesthetics may be the outgrowth of biological urges to produce and receive art, just as the bird’s singing comes from an innate impulse. Philosophers have tended to look to proximate causes of why we produce art (i. e. because we find it beautiful) as opposed to ultimate causes (i. e. we find it beautiful because humans evolved in such a way that…). I do not know what insights biology and evolution can offer into art, but I think they promise to illuminate why humans produce it.