What counts as art?

People who think a lot about the arts, philosophers of art, scholars of aesthetics, and social theorists, have evolved many theories that attempt to unearth the special features of the arts that other areas of knowledge do not have. In this unit we shall just focus on three main groups of theory: art as imitation - mimetic theories, art as expression - expressionist theories, and art as having a particular form - formalist or significant form theories. According to the first group, art should imitate the world; according to the second, art should be an expression of certain ideas or emotions; and according to the third, the artwork should have certain special qualities that produce the appropriate response in the audience.

Art as an imitation of reality

The mimesis theory of art originates in ancient Greece. It is often a theory that we instinctively apply when making everyday artistic judgments: 'that is such a good portrait - it is a really good likeness'. It is to be found in the sculptures of ancient Greece and Rome, but it took rather a long time to come to Western Europe, only really appearing in painting after the Golden Age of Dutch painting at the end of the 16th Century. We could argue that ancient tragedies like Antigona and Renaissance artists like Michelangelo, who decorated the Sistine Chapel ceiling, art is quite realistic - it represents selected aspects of the world as the author viewed it. It does not always portray the natural world as it can also be a representation of a supernatural world (heaven, gods), but there is an attempt at imitating something. The paintings of the realists of the 19th century, such as John Constable, are perhaps the highpoint of work that fits this theory nicely. Drama was supposed to mimic human interactions realistically, realistic novels were supposed to portray plausible human behaviour in a made up world, likewise early film. Perhaps some of today's hyper-realistic art belongs to this category.

But this theory runs into a lot of trouble. Even in painting, there are huge swathes of history in which the theory does not work. Egyptian art, for example, is not intended to be realistic. Think of typical depictions of the body in Egyptian stone carving. Each part of the body was presented in its most typical aspect, meaning that the whole was simply not physically possible. Painting throughout history up to the late 16th century and from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day was not intended to imitate. Think of 14th-century Czech icon painting, for example. Here, there was no attempt at realism - but it was portrayed as a symbol that meant something to those who professed the orthodox faith. Think of the abstract works of Kandinsky, Rothko, Jackson Pollock, there is little that can be called imitation here. The theory gets into really big trouble in stylised art forms such as music and dance. Handel's water music does a very bad job of imitating any kind of river or stream, and most musical works do not aim at imitating anything. We even given a special name to pieces in music that reference the world at all - we call them programme music.  What sort of imitation applies to dance - people do not typically carry out everyday conversations in the second position! The mimesis theory, like many theories of art, applies well to some examples but cannot handle others.  As the novelist Virginia Woolf puts it: "Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough".

The expressionist theory of art

The second theory considers art as an expression of some kind of inner state such as emotions - it became important during the Romantic movement and holds true until today. It claims that the intention of art is to evoke emotions in the audience. Expression is not fully spontaneous and uncontrollable - it needs to be guided by the author, who combines the pre-existing elements into new forms (sounds into music, words into literature), evoking emotions in the audience. The author might aim to express her own emotions and hope that the audience will latch on to them through the artwork, but she may also seek to express the ideas and emotions of a wider community or culture. Of course, this theory raises some questions: Does all art evoke a certain reaction? Is it even intended to do so? 

Beware the intentional fallacy in art, which assumes that the meaning of the work is the artist's intention.
 

This theory can address some of the problems of mimesis theory. We can see that Jackson Pollock, as well as ancient Egyptian art, can produce emotional reactions in the audience. Moreover, it fits with the first reaction of many people confronted with an artwork 'I like that' or 'I don't like that'. But there are some deep problems with this - not least that it should be possible for us to dislike work but that it is neverheless good. Then there is a worry that it casts the net too widely but, at the same time, does not fit some works accepted by many as good art. Many things in the world produce emotions in us, not just art. We can have emotional reactions to great science or to reading a historical narrative. Does that make Science and History into art? If we say that it has to do with the intentions of the artist to produce emotions, then the problem is, as with all these intentional theories, how on earth do we know the intentions of the artist? Are we to reserve judgment in interpreting a work of art until we have done enough research on the artist's intentions? At the same time, the theory does not seem to fit quite a lot of what we might reasonably consider art.  I very much doubt that in ancient Egypt, the carver at work on the tomb of Tutankhamun was thinking about the emotions of his audience. What are the emotions that a complex work like Pride and Prejudice intended to convey? Furthermore, if the work is supposed to represent an expression of the emotions of the artist, what about the sixth symphony of Mahler with its cataclysmically tragic ending written during a particularly happy period of Mahler's life just after the birth of his daughter?

Students often assume that all art fits the expressionist theory. 
Not all art is an expression of the emotions of an artist!
 

While the expressionist theory of art may have some merits, it contains hidden dangers for the ToK student. There is a tendency in the ToK world to think that art is about the communication of a message from the artist to the audience. This message could be an emotion or an idea. This is what I call the 'message theory of art'. Sending the message is sometimes taken to be the artist's intention. When students say this to me, I ask them why the artist did not just write the message and do away with the bother of making the artwork. To reduce an artwork to its 'message' is, in a sense, to ignore the artwork. So, while it might be useful to start with the overall impression of an artwork as the first stage in understanding it, this is not to say that the meaning of the artwork is some kind of message. Mahler's sixth symphony may be described as 'tragic', but this surely does not do justice to the meaning of such a complex work, which is scored for over 100 musicians and lasts for nearly one-and-a-half hours. Students often assume the message theory of art in their essays without giving any justification. This is something to avoid.

Is it true that all works of art carry a 'hidden message' from artist to audience? If you agree, you will need to find evidence for this view rather than assume it. Perhaps the audience plays a more active role in the creation of the meaning of a work of art.

The formalist theory of art

The third theory discussed here takes artistic value and meaning to be determined by the formal features of the work. Formal features are things like the proportions of the work in space and time, colour palette, composition, structure and so on. When we go to painting class, we learn how to compose a painting or construct a colour palette. We learn rules such as lighter colours are further away, or in photography, 'use the rule of thirds' to place important details of the scene. In music, formal notions are structures like the form of the piece - whether it is sonata or rondo form. The form is about the kind of narration and the structure of the plot in a novel or the metre and rhyme scheme in poetry. What is special about formalist theories is that they depend only on the artwork itself, not on any feature outside its borders, unlike the mimetic and expressionist theories.

A narrow version of this approach, significant form theory, was proposed by the art critic Clive Bell in the early 20th Century. Bell wanted to link the structure of the artwork to the emotions experienced by a suitably sensitive viewer. He said that if the artist got it right, then the significant form of the artwork produced 'aesthetic emotions' in the viewer. Therefore, there was an objective component to artistic value  (for more on subjectivity and objectivity, see Core theme: Scope 2 - Knowledge concepts - What knowledge is at stake?). 

This view leverages our intuitions that the physical structure of the artwork must make a difference to our appreciation of it and justifies placing importance on the actual technical mastery of certain skills by the artist - the kind of thing that is missed when we hear 'my little sister could have done that!' as an exclamation at the art museum. Moreover, it assumes that not every member of the audience has the right sensitivity to these formal features of the artwork. The reactions of some audience members should be taken more seriously than others, namely those who are sensitive to significant form. This does fit with our intuition that musicians can hear more in a piece of music than non-musicians or that a photographer can see more in a photograph than someone who is untrained. 

Formalists do not deny that art can both express feelings and imitate reality, but they consider art's purpose to be art itself. "Art for the art's sake". In their opinion, art is to amuse and be enjoyed, to appreciate the creative nature of it. In art, they appreciate the organic unity, complexity or diversity, motif, evolution and balance, among others, not the truth it portrays or the representation it is.

But problems arise when we ask exactly what are these special talents that make us sensitive to significant forms. The answer often is that 'aesthetic emotions' are produced in these talented audience members. And if we ask what is significant form, the answer is that it produces aesthetic emotions in the rightly sensitive viewer - in other words, we have a circular argument - or that the answer begs the question. Worse still, there is obviously a category of artworks that do not possess special formal features because they incorporate everyday 'found' objects. We can think of Tracey Emin's bed, or Marcel Duchamps' urinal, Damien Hirst's shark, Robert Rachenberg's goat, John Cage's 4'33", Andy Warhol's soup cans, and so on. 

Do not confuse 'begging the question', which is creating a circular argument - so it is about logic, with raising the question - which is about, er... raising questions.
 

Other theories of art

There are other theories of art that are not included in the three groups above. For example, the institutional theory of art takes art to be defined by the third group of stakeholders: the art world. Anything could be art in principle, but what makes it art is that it is accepted by the right group of people: those critics, gallery owners, experts, reviewers, and so on who act as gatekeepers for the arts. In a sense, this theory shies away from proposing a definition of art at all and simply points to the role played by power. Aesthetic functionalism is a bit like the significant form theory and suggests that a work is art if it provides the right function to society. The significant form is a functionalist theory, although a narrow one because artwork has the function of creating aesthetic emotions in suitable audience members.

Berys Gaut suggested that art was a 'cluster concept' - that there were not necessary and sufficient conditions but rather that an artwork satisfied some but not necessarily all of a larger group of conditions. Concepts like these are called family resemblances because, just like in a family, there is no one characteristic that everyone has but rather, there are characteristics in common between some members but not others, and that every member of the family shares some characteristic with someone else in the family.

For Gaut X is an artwork if and only if it satisfies some, if not all, of the following conditions:

1. x is intended to be an artwork
2. X is identifiable as an artwork
3. X falls easily under an established art category
4. X possesses aesthetic, formal, expressive, or representational properties
5. X has the capacity to communicate complex meanings
6. The production of X requires skill
7. The production of X requires creative imagination
8. X invites the emotional and cognitive response of the audience

There are some feminist thinkers who push back against the idea that art has a definition at all. Part of the reason is that any reductive definition or theory of art that is clear-cut or definitive will freeze in unequal power relations between men and women. Since men are inevitably in positions of power, men will define art in a way that disenfranchises women and women's forms of doing art. The obvious examples here are the distinctions between sewing or needlecraft done mainly by women and haute couture (fashion creation) done mainly by men, cooking done mainly by women, and haute cuisine done mainly by men. This argument parallels Michel Foucault's comment that any distinction empowers one group of people and disenfranchises another. A theory or definition of art is no exception.