Art historians and philosophers of art have long had classificatory disputes about art regarding whether and how a particular cultural artifact or manmade object should be classified as art and how the arts relate to one another and to the world, often as part of a broader systematic philosophy or focused theory of aesthetics. Disputes continue about what does and does not count as art.
Definitions of art
Defining art can be difficult. Aestheticians and art philosophers often engage in disputes about how to define art. By its original and broadest definition, art (from the Latin ars, meaning "skill" or "craft") is the product or process of the effective application of a body of knowledge, most often using a set of skills; this meaning is preserved in such phrases as "liberal arts" and "martial arts". However, in the modern use of the word, which rose to prominence after 1750, "art" is commonly understood to be skill used to produce an aesthetic result.
Britannica Online defines it as "a visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination". But how best to define the term "art" today is a subject of much contention; many books and journal articles have been published arguing over even the basics of what we mean by the term "art". Theodor Adorno claimed in 1969 "It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident any more." It is not clear who has the right to define art. Artists, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists all use the notion of art in their respective fields, and give it operational definitions that are not very similar to each other's.
The second, more narrow, more recent sense of the word "art" is roughly as an abbreviation for creative art or "fine art." Here, the definition is that skill is being used to express the artist's creativity, or to engage the audience's aesthetic sensibilities. Often, if the skill is being used to create objects with a practical use, rather than paintings or sculpture with no practical function other than as an artwork, it will be considered as falling under classifications such as the decorative arts, applied art and craft rather than fine art. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way, it will be considered design instead of art. Some thinkers have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with value judgments made about the art than any clear definitional difference. The modern distinction does not work well for older periods, such as medieval art, where the most highly regarded art media at the time were often metalwork, engraved gems, textiles and other "applied arts", and the perceived value of artworks often reflected the cost of the materials and sheer amount of time spent creating the work at least as much as the creative input of the artist.
Schemes of classification of arts Historical schemes Antiquity In the Zhou dynasty of ancient China, excellence in the liù yì (六藝), or "Six Arts", was expected of the junzi (君子), or "perfect gentleman", as defined by philosophers like Confucius. Because these arts spanned both the civil and military aspects of life, excelling in all six required a scholar to be very well-rounded and polymathic. The Six Arts were as follows:
Rites (禮) Music (樂) Archery (射) Charioteering and equestrianism (御) Calligraphy (書) Mathematics (數)
Later in the history of imperial China, the Six Arts were pared down, creating a similar system of four arts for the scholar-official caste to learn and follow:
Qín (琴), an instrument representing music Qí (棋), a board game representing military strategy Shū (書), or Chinese calligraphy, representing literacy Huà (畫), or Chinese painting, representing the visual arts
Another attempt to systematically define art as a grouping of disciplines in antiquity is represented by the ancient Greek Muses. Each of the standard nine Muses symbolized and embodied one of nine branches of what the Greeks called techne, a term which roughly means "art" but has also been translated as "craft" or "craftsmanship", and the definition of the word also included more scientific disciplines. These nine traditional branches were: Epic poetry, embodied by Calliope History, embodied by Clio Music and lyric poetry, embodied by Euterpe Love poetry, embodied by Erato Tragedy, embodied by Melpomene Hymns and pantomime, embodied by Polyhymnia Dance and chorus, embodied by Terpsichore Comedy and idyllic poetry, embodied by Thalia Astronomy, embodied by Urania
Middle Ages and Renaissance In medieval Christian Europe, universities taught a standard set of seven liberal arts, defined by early medieval philosophers such as Boethius and Alcuin of York and as such centered around philosophy. The definitions of these subjects and their practice was heavily based on the educational system of Greece and Rome. These seven arts were themselves split into two categories: the Trivium, considered the foundation of knowledge, and comprising the three basic elements of philosophy: grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the Quadrivium, comprising music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy.
At this time, and continuing after the Renaissance, the word "art" in English and its cognates in other languages had not yet attained their modern meaning.
Modern and 19th-century philosophy
Some of the first works of philosophy to discuss art in a modern framework were Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, which engaged with the pioneering aesthetic work of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's Philosophy of Art, which emphasized myth.
As their work in aesthetics had done, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics includes a systematic hierarchy of the five major arts from most material to most expressive: architecture sculpture painting music poetry
For Hegel, mind coming to know itself (absolute spirit) develops successively through art, religion, and philosophy. Within art, this development is more or less mirrored, proceeding from the symbolic through the classical to the romantic form. August Wilhelm Schlegel and Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger also developed their own schematic aesthetics, and Karl Rosenkranz continued this development.
Arthur Schopenhauer's aesthetics features a hierarchical framework that valorizes music. It has been distinguished by its historic influence on the Symbolist movement and composers, including Richard Wagner and Arnold Schoenberg. In response to Schopenhauer and Wagner, and in a substantial reversal of Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy contrasts the Apollonian and Dionysian, particularly Dionysian myth with Socratic (philosophical) reason.
20th century onward Hegel's aesthetics caught on particularly in France, and with continual modifications the list has remained relevant and a subject of debate in French culture into the 21st century. This classification was popularized by Ricciotto Canudo, an early scholar of film who wrote "Manifesto of the Seventh Art" in 1923. The epithets given to each discipline by its placement of the list are often used to refer to them through paraphrase, particularly with calling film "the seventh art".
Theodor W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, emerging from the tradition of Hegelian dialectic and Nietzschean perspectivism, followed in the vein of Negative Dialectics by arguing that art retains critical truths precisely where philosophical conceptualization falls short. Adorno continued attending to the historical development of art, including its medium and form, and its autonomy and social function, contrasting high culture with the culture industry, as in his and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment and his Philosophy of New Music.
The ongoing dispute over what should constitute the next form of art has been fought for over a century. Currently, there are a variety of contenders for le onzième art, many of which are older disciplines whose practitioners feel that their medium is underappreciated as art. One particularly popular contender for the 11th is multimedia, which is intended to bring together the ten arts just as Canudo argued that cinema was the culmination of the first six arts.
The French Ministry of Culture often participates in the decision making for defining a "new" art.Crampton, Thomas. "For France, Video Games Are as Artful as Cinema" , The New York Times, 6 November 2006. The ten arts are generally given as follows: architecture sculpture painting music literature, including poetry and prose the performing arts, including dance and theatre film and cinema les arts médiatiques, including radio, television, and photography comics video games, or digital art forms more generally"Connaissez-vous le 10eme art ? L'art numérique.", 2007.
Performance art, as separate from the performing arts, has been called le douzième, or "twelfth", art.Mas, Jean. Manifeste de la Performance, AICA-France/Villa Arson, 2012.
Generalized definitions of art The traditional Western classifications since the Renaissance have been variants of the hierarchy of genres based on the degree to which the work displays the imaginative input of the artist, using artistic theory that goes back to the ancient world. Such thinking received something of a boost with the aesthetics of Romanticism. A similar theoretical framework applied in traditional Chinese art; for example in both the Western and Far Eastern traditions of landscape painting (see literati painting), imaginary landscapes were accorded a higher status than realistic depictions of an actual landscape view – in the West relegated to "topographical views".
Many have argued that it is a mistake to even try to define art or beauty, that they have no essence, and so can have no definition. Often, it is said that art is a cluster of related concepts rather than a single concept. Examples of this approach include Morris Weitz and Berys Gaut. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Weitz argued that art is an "open concept" whose constituents and criteria for inclusion could change over time; he also sought to distinguish purely "descriptive" from "evaluative" uses of the term art.
Another approach is to say that "art" is basically a sociological category, that whatever art schools and museums, and artists get away with is considered art regardless of formal definitions. This institutional theory of art has been championed by George Dickie. Most people did not consider a store-bought urinal or a sculptural depiction of a Brillo Box to be art until Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol (respectively) placed them in the context of art (i.e., the art gallery), which then provided the association of these objects with the values that define art.
Proceduralists often suggest that it is the process by which a work of art is created or viewed that makes it "art", not any inherent feature of an object, or how well received it is by the institutions of the art world after its introduction to society at large. For John Dewey, for instance, a writer's intent to call a writing a "poem" should control, whether other poets acknowledge it or not. Whereas if exactly the same set of words was written by a journalist, intending them as shorthand notes to help him write a longer article later, these would not be a poem.
Leo Tolstoy in his seminal 1898 text What is Art?, on the other hand, claims that what makes something art or not is how it is experienced by its audience, not by the intention of its creator. Functionalists, like Monroe Beardsley argue that whether a piece counts as art depends on what function it plays in a particular context. For instance, the same Greek vase may play a non-artistic function in one context (carrying wine), and an artistic function in another context (helping us to appreciate the beauty of the human figure).
Disputes about classifying art