[Bups-dis] Defining Art

[Amanda Montgomery]

Defining art is definately an area fraught with difficulties, as I
mentioned with universal qualities and the like. However though it's a
very inclusive concept I don't know if we should go so far as to get rid
of it. I suppose when you look at what art means for you personally
you're really looking at the idea that aesthetic experience (whatever
you find that to be) is what determines your relationship with art. This
might allow you to say 'Tracey Emin is art for me, but not good art,' or
even 'I can accept that many people experience this as art, but I
don't.' However there's also the issue of ideas like 'the sublime', an
experience that has no human creator (eg. a mountain, a vast ocean and
so on) and creates this overwhelming experience, but would anyone call
that mountain or ocean art? It's tempting to want to rigidly define
things, but we might loosly conclude that at it's base art is some form
of communication, there is always a human behind the act. Even Duchamp
couldn't remove himself from the act of choosing his objects, and so we
react to 'art' differently than we would, say a boulder or a cloud. It
might be contrived and fairly illogical to look at these objects in such
a different way (eg a normal brillo box versus one in the oddness of the
gallery space), but if that way of looking is there then it seems to me
that 'art' remains a kind of useful concept.