[Bups-dis] Defining Art

[djf500 at york.ac.uk]

My point was not that things that get called 'art' aren't somehow 
culturally significant objects. If we can on well enough with concepts like 
'a sculpture', 'a novel' etc, then i'm not sure where art comes into it. I 
can't see what is in common between a Manet and a brillo box - wherever 
it's put (unless someone's painted it). And that's not an attack on the 
brillo box.

Daniel  

On Jan 30 2007, Amanda Montgomery wrote:

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>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.
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