## 1. Constraints on Definitions of Art


 Any definition of art has to square with the following
uncontroversial facts: (i) entities (artifacts or performances)
intentionally endowed by their makers with a significant degree of
aesthetic interest, often greatly surpassing that of most everyday
objects, first appeared hundreds of thousands of years ago and exist
in virtually every known human culture (Davies 2012); (ii) such
entities are partially comprehensible to cultural outsiders -
they are neither opaque nor completely transparent; (iii) such
entities sometimes have non-aesthetic - ceremonial or religious or
propagandistic - functions, and sometimes do not; (iv) such
entities might conceivably be produced by non-human species,
terrestrial or otherwise; and it seems at least in principle possible
that they be extraspecifically recognizable as such; (v)
traditionally, artworks are intentionally endowed by their makers with
properties, often sensory, having a significant degree of aesthetic
interest, usually surpassing that of most everyday objects; (vi) art's
normative dimension - the high value placed on making and
consuming art - appears to be essential to it, and artworks can
have considerable moral and political as well as aesthetic power;
(vii) the arts are always changing, just as the rest of culture is: as
artists experiment creatively, new genres, art-forms, and styles
develop; standards of taste and sensibilities evolve; understandings
of aesthetic properties, aesthetic experience, and the nature of art
evolve; (viii) there are institutions in some but not all cultures
which involve a focus on artifacts and performances that have a high
degree of aesthetic interest but lack any practical, ceremonial, or
religious use; (ix) entities seemingly lacking aesthetic interest, and
entities having a high degree of aesthetic interest, are not
infrequently grouped together as artworks by such institutions; (x)
lots of things besides artworks - for example, natural entities
(sunsets, landscapes, flowers, shadows), human beings, and abstract
entities (theories, proofs, mathematical entities) - have
interesting aesthetic properties. 


 Of these facts, those having to do with art's contingent
cultural and historical features are emphasized by some definitions of
art. Other definitions of art give priority to explaining those facts
that reflect art's universality and continuity with other
aesthetic phenomena. Still other definitions attempt to explain both
art's contingent characteristics and its more abiding ones while
giving priority to neither. 




Two general constraints on definitions are particularly relevant to
definitions of art. First, given that accepting that something is
inexplicable is generally a philosophical last resort, and granting
the importance of extensional adequacy, list-like or enumerative
definitions are if possible to be avoided. Enumerative definitions,
lacking principles that explain why what is on the list is on the
list, don't, notoriously, apply to *definienda* that
evolve, and provide no clue to the next or general case
(Tarski's definition of truth, for example, is standardly
criticized as unenlightening because it rests on a list-like
definition of primitive denotation; see Field 1972; Devitt 2001;
Davidson 2005). Corollary: when everything else is equal (and it is
controversial whether and when that condition is satisfied in the case
of definitions of art), non-disjunctive definitions are preferable to
disjunctive ones. Second, given that most classes outside of
mathematics are vague, and that the existence of borderline cases is
characteristic of vague classes, definitions that take the class of
artworks to have borderline cases are preferable to definitions that
don't (Davies 1991 and 2006; Stecker 2005).




Whether any definition of art does account for these facts and satisfy
these constraints, or *could* account for these facts and
satisfy these constraints, are key questions for aesthetics and the
philosophy of art.


## 2. Definitions From the History of Philosophy




Classical definitions, at least as they are portrayed in
contemporary discussions of the definition of art, take artworks to be
characterized by a single type of property. The standard candidates are
representational properties, expressive properties, and formal
properties. So there are representational or mimetic definitions,
expressive definitions, and formalist definitions, which hold that
artworks are characterized by their possession of, respectively,
representational, expressive, and formal properties. It is not
difficult to find fault with these simple definitions. For example,
possessing representational, expressive, and formal properties cannot
be sufficient conditions, since, obviously, instructional manuals are
representations, but not typically artworks, human faces and gestures
have expressive properties without being works of art, and both natural
objects and artifacts produced solely for homely utilitarian purposes
have formal properties but are not artworks.


 The ease of these dismissals, though, serves as a reminder of the
fact that classical definitions of art are significantly less
philosophically self-contained or freestanding than are most
contemporary definitions of art. Each classical definition stands in
close and complicated relationships to its system's other
complexly interwoven parts - epistemology, ontology, value theory,
philosophy of mind, etc. Relatedly, great philosophers
characteristically analyze the key theoretical components of their
definitions of art in distinctive and subtle ways. For these reasons,
understanding such definitions in isolation from the systems or
corpuses of which they are parts is difficult, and brief summaries are
invariably somewhat misleading. Nevertheless, some representative
examples of historically influential definitions of art offered by
major figures in the history of philosophy should be mentioned.


### 2.1 Some examples




Plato holds in the *Republic* and elsewhere that the arts are
representational, or *mimetic* (sometimes translated
"imitative"). Artworks are ontologically dependent on,
imitations of, and therefore inferior to, ordinary physical
objects. Physical objects in turn are ontologically dependent on, and
imitations of, and hence inferior to, what is most real, the
non-physical unchanging Forms. Grasped perceptually, artworks present
only an appearance of an appearance of the Forms, which are grasped by
reason alone. Consequently, artistic experience cannot yield
knowledge. Nor do the makers of artworks work from knowledge. Because
artworks engage an unstable, lower part of the soul, art should be
subservient to moral realities, which, along with truth, are more
metaphysically fundamental and, properly understood, more humanly
important than, beauty. The arts are not, for Plato, the primary
sphere in which beauty operates. The Platonic conception of beauty is
extremely wide and metaphysical: there is a Form of Beauty, which can
only be known non-perceptually, but it is more closely related to the
erotic than to the arts. (See Janaway 1998, the entry on
 Plato's aesthetics, and the entry on
 Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry.)


 Kant has a definition of art, and of fine art; the latter, which
Kant calls the art of genius, is "a kind of representation that
is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless
promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable
communication" (Kant, *Critique of the Power of
Judgment*, Guyer translation, section 44, 46).) When fully
unpacked, the definition has representational, formalist and
expressivist elements, and focuses as much on the creative activity of
the artistic genius (who, according to Kant, possesses an "innate
mental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art") as on the
artworks produced by that activity. Kant's aesthetic theory is, for
architectonic reasons, not focused on art. Art for Kant falls under
the broader topic of aesthetic judgment, which covers judgments of the
beautiful, judgments of the sublime, and teleological judgments of
natural organisms and of nature itself. So Kant's definition of art is
a relatively small part of his theory of aesthetic judgment. And
Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment is itself situated in a hugely
ambitious theoretical structure that, famously, aims, to account for,
and work out the interconnections between, scientific knowledge,
morality, and religious faith. (See the entry on
 Kant's Aesthetics and Teleology 
and the general entry on 
 Immanuel Kant.)




Hegel's account of art incorporates his view of beauty; he
defines beauty as the sensuous/perceptual appearance or expression of
absolute truth. The best artworks convey, by sensory/perceptual means,
the deepest metaphysical truth. The deepest metaphysical truth,
according to Hegel, is that the universe is the concrete realization
of what is conceptual or rational. That is, what is conceptual or
rational is real, and is the imminent force that animates and propels
the self-consciously developing universe. The universe is the concrete
realization of what is conceptual or rational, and the rational or
conceptual is superior to the sensory. So, as the mind and its
products alone are capable of truth, artistic beauty is metaphysically
superior to natural beauty (Hegel, *Lectures*, [1886, 4]). A
central and defining feature of beautiful works of art is that,
through the medium of sensation, each one presents the most
fundamental values of its
civilization.[1]
Art, therefore, as a cultural expression, operates in the same sphere
as religion and philosophy, and expresses the same content as
they. But art "reveals to consciousness the deepest interests of
humanity" in a different manner than do religion and philosophy,
because art alone, of the three, works by sensuous means. So, given
the superiority of the conceptual to the non-conceptual, and the fact
that art's medium for expressing/presenting culture's
deepest values is the sensual or perceptual, art's medium is
limited and inferior in comparison with the medium that religion uses
to express the same content, viz., mental imagery. Art and religion in
turn are, in this respect, inferior to philosophy, which employs a
conceptual medium to present its content. Art initially predominates,
in each civilization, as the supreme mode of cultural expression,
followed, successively, by religion and philosophy. Similarly, because
the broadly "logical" relations between art, religion and
philosophy determine the actual structure of art, religion, and
philosophy, and because cultural ideas about what is intrinsically
valuable develop from sensuous to non-sensuous conceptions, history is
divided into periods that reflect the teleological development from
the sensuous to the conceptual. Art in general, too, develops in
accord with the historical growth of non-sensuous or conceptual
conceptions from sensuous conceptions, and each individual art-form
develops historically in the same way (Hegel, *Lectures*; Wicks
1993, see also the entries on
 Hegel and on 
 Hegel's Aesthetics). 



For treatments of other influential definitions
of art, inseparable from the complex philosophical systems or corpuses in which
they occur, see, for example, the entries on
 18th Century German Aesthetics,
 Arthur Schopenhauer,
 Friedrich Nietzsche,
 and Dewey's Aesthetics.


## 3. Skepticism about Definitions of Art




Skeptical doubts about the possibility and value of a definition of
art have figured importantly in the discussion in aesthetics since the
1950s, and though their influence has subsided somewhat, uneasiness
about the definitional project persists. (See section 4, below, and
also Kivy 1997, Brand 2000, and Walton 2007).


### 3.1 Skepticisms inspired by views of concepts, history, Marxism, feminism




A common family of arguments, inspired by Wittgenstein's
famous remarks about games (Wittgenstein 1953), has it that the
phenomena of art are, by their nature, too diverse to admit of the
unification that a satisfactory definition strives for, or that a
definition of art, were there to be such a thing, would exert a
stifling influence on artistic creativity. One expression of this
impulse is Weitz's Open Concept Argument: any concept is
open if a case can be imagined which would call for some sort of
decision on our part to extend the use of the concept to cover it, or
to close the concept and invent a new one to deal with the new case;
all open concepts are indefinable; and there are cases calling for a
decision about whether to extend or close the concept of art. Hence art
is indefinable (Weitz 1956). Against this it is claimed that
change does not, in general, rule out the preservation of identity over
time, that decisions about concept-expansion may be principled rather
than capricious, and that nothing bars a definition of art from
incorporating a novelty requirement.




A second sort of argument, less common today than in the
heyday of a certain form of extreme Wittgensteinianism, urges that the
concepts that make up the stuff of most definitions of art
(expressiveness, form) are embedded in general philosophical theories
which incorporate traditional metaphysics and epistemology. But since
traditional metaphysics and epistemology are prime instances of
language gone on conceptually confused holiday, definitions of art
share in the conceptual confusions of traditional
philosophy (Tilghman 1984).




A third sort of argument, more historically inflected than the first,
takes off from an influential study by the historian of philosophy
Paul Kristeller, in which he argued that the modern system of the five
major arts [painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music]
which underlies all modern aesthetics ... is of comparatively
recent origin and did not assume definite shape before the eighteenth
century, although it had many ingredients which go back to classical,
mediaeval, and Renaissance thought. (Kristeller, 1951) Since that list of five arts is
somewhat arbitrary, and since even those five do not share a single
common nature, but rather are united, at best, only by several
overlapping features, and since the number of art forms has increased
since the eighteenth century, Kristeller's work may be taken to
suggest that our concept of art differs from that of the eighteenth
century. As a matter of historical fact, there simply is no stable
*definiendum* for a definition of art to capture.




A fourth sort of argument suggests that a definition of art stating
individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a thing to
be an artwork, is likely to be discoverable only if cognitive science
makes it plausible to think that humans categorize things in terms of
necessary and sufficient conditions. But, the argument continues,
cognitive science actually supports the view that the structure of
concepts mirrors the way humans categorize things - which is with
respect to their similarity to prototypes (or exemplars), and not in
terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. So the quest for a
definition of art that states individually necessary and jointly
sufficient conditions is misguided and not likely to succeed (Dean
2003). Against this it has been urged that psychological theories
of concepts like the prototype theory and its relatives can provide at
best an account of how people *in fact* classify things, but not
an account of *correct* classifications of extra-psychological
phenomena, and that, even if relevant, prototype theory and other
psychological theories of concepts are at present too controversial to
draw substantive philosophical morals from (Rey 1983; Adajian 2005).




A fifth argument against defining art, with a normative tinge that is
psychologistic rather than sociopolitical, takes the fact that there
is no philosophical consensus about the definition of art as reason to
hold that no unitary concept of art exists. Concepts of art, like all
concepts, after all, should be used for the purpose(s) they best
serve. But not all concepts of art serve all purposes equally
well. So not all art concepts should be used for the same purposes.
Art should be defined only if there is a unitary concept of art that
serves all of art's various purposes - historical,
conventional, aesthetic, appreciative, communicative, and so on. So,
since there is no purpose-independent use of the concept of art, art
should not be defined (Mag Uidhir and Magnus 2011; cf. Meskin 2008).
In response, it is noted that some account of what makes various
concepts of art concepts of *art* is still required; this
leaves open the possibility of some degree of unity beneath the
apparent multiplicity. The fact (if it is one) that different concepts
of art are used for different purposes does not itself imply that they
are not connected in ordered, to-some-degree systematic ways. The
relation between (say) the historical concept of art and the
appreciative concept of art is not an accidental, unsystematic
relation, like that between river banks and savings banks, but is
something like the relation between Socrates' healthiness and
the healthiness of Socrates' diet. That is, it is not evident
that there exist a mere arbitrary heap or disjunction of art concepts,
constituting an unsystematic patchwork. Perhaps there is a single
concept of art with different facets that interlock in an ordered way,
or else a multiplicity of concepts that constitute a unity because one
is at the core, and the others depend asymmetrically on it. (The last
is an instance of core-dependent homonymy; see the entry on
 Aristotle, section on Essentialism and
Homonymy.) Multiplicity alone doesn't entail pluralism.



A sixth, broadly Marxian sort of objection rejects the project of
defining art as an unwitting (and confused) expression of a harmful
ideology. On this view, the search for a definition of art
presupposes, wrongly, that the concept of the aesthetic is a
creditable one. But since the concept of the aesthetic necessarily
involves the equally bankrupt concept of disinterestedness, its use
advances the illusion that what is most real about things can and
should be grasped or contemplated without attending to the social and
economic conditions of their production. Definitions of art,
consequently, spuriously confer ontological dignity and respectability
on social phenomena that probably in fact call more properly for
rigorous social criticism and change. Their real function is
ideological, not philosophical (Eagleton 1990).




Seventh, the members of a complex of skeptically-flavored arguments,
from feminist philosophy of art, begin with premises to the effect
that art and art-related concepts and practices have been
systematically skewed by sex or gender. Such premises are supported
by a variety of considerations. (a) The artworks the Western artistic
canon recognizes as great are dominated by male-centered perspectives
and stereotypes, and almost all the artists the canon recognizes as
great are men - unsurprisingly, given economic, social, and
institutional impediments that prevented women from making art at all.
Moreover, the concept of genius developed historically in such a way
as to exclude women artists (Battersby, 1989, Korsmeyer 2004). (b) The
fine arts' focus on purely aesthetic, non-utilitarian value resulted
in the marginalization as mere "crafts" of items of considerable
aesthetic interest made and used by women for domestic practical
purposes. Moreover, because all aesthetic judgments are situated and
particular, there can be no such thing as disinterested taste. If
there is no such thing as disinterested taste, then it is hard to see
how there could be universal standards of aesthetic excellence. The
non-existence of universal standards of aesthetic excellence
undermines the idea of an artistic canon (and with it the project of
defining art). Art as historically constituted, and art-related
practices and concepts, then, reflect views and practices that
presuppose and perpetuate the subordination of women. The data that
definitions of art are supposed to explain are biased, corrupt and
incomplete. As a consequence, present definitions of art,
incorporating or presupposing as they do a framework that incorporates
a history of systematically biased, hierarchical, fragmentary, and
mistaken understandings of art and art-related phenomena and concepts,
may be so androcentric as to be untenable. Some theorists have
suggested that different genders have systematically unique artistic
styles, methods, or modes of appreciating and valuing art. If so,
then a separate canon and gynocentric definitions of art are indicated
(Battersby 1989, Frueh 1991). In any case, in the face of these
facts, the project of defining art in anything like the traditional
way is to be regarded with suspicion (Brand, 2000).




An eighth argument sort of skeptical argument concludes that, insofar
as almost all contemporary definitions foreground the nature of
art*works*, rather than the individual *arts* to which
(most? all?) artworks belong, they are philosophically unproductive
(Lopes, 
2014).[2]
 The grounds for this conclusion concern disagreements among standard
definitions as to the artistic status of entities whose status is for
theoretical reasons unclear - e.g., things like ordinary bottleracks
(Duchamp's *Bottlerack*) and silence (John Cage's *4'33''*).
If these hard cases are artworks, what makes them so, given their
apparent lack of any of the traditional properties of artworks? Are,
they, at best, marginal cases? On the other hand, if they are not
artworks, then why have generations of experts - art historians,
critics, and collectors - classified them as such? And to whom else
should one look to determine the true nature of art? (There are, it is
claimed, few or no empirical studies of art full stop, though
empirical studies of the individual arts abound.) Such disputes
inevitably end in stalemate. Stalemate results because (a) standard
artwork-focused definitions of art endorse different criteria of
theory choice, and (b) on the basis of their preferred criteria,
appeal to incompatible intuitions about the status of such
theoretically-vexed cases. In consequence, disagreements between
standard definitions of art that foreground artworks are
unresolvable. To avoid this stalemate, an alternative definitional
strategy that foregrounds the arts rather than individual artworks, is
indicated. (See section 4.5.)


### 3.2 Some descendants of skepticism




Philosophers influenced by the moderate Wittgensteinian strictures
discussed above have offered family resemblance accounts of art, which,
as they purport to be non-definitions, may be usefully considered at
this point. Two species of family resemblance views will be considered:
the resemblance-to-a-paradigm version, and the cluster
version.




On the resemblance-to-a-paradigm version, something is, or is
identifiable as, an artwork if it resembles, in the right way, certain
paradigm artworks, which possess most although not necessarily all of
art's typical features. (The "is identifiable"
qualification is intended to make the family resemblance view something
more epistemological than a definition, although it is unclear that
this really avoids a commitment to constitutive claims about
art's nature.) Against this view: since things do not
resemble each other *simpliciter*, but only in at least one
respect or other, the account is either far too inclusive, since
everything resembles everything else in some respect or other, or, if
the variety of resemblance is specified, tantamount to a definition,
since resemblance in that respect will be either a necessary or
sufficient condition for being an artwork. The family resemblance
view raises questions, moreover, about the membership and unity of the
class of paradigm artworks. If the account lacks an explanation of why
some items and not others go on the list of paradigm works, it seems
explanatorily deficient. But if it includes a principle that governs
membership on the list, or if expertise is required to constitute the
list, then the principle, or whatever properties the experts'
judgments track, seem to be doing the philosophical work.




The cluster version of the family resemblance view has been defended
by a number of philosophers (Bond 1975, Dissanayake 1990, Dutton
2006, Gaut 2000). The view typically provides a list of properties, no one of
which is a necessary condition for being a work of art, but which are
jointly sufficient for being a work of art, and which is such that at
least one proper subset thereof is sufficient for being a work of
art. Lists offered vary, but overlap considerably. Here is one, due to Gaut: (1)
possessing positive aesthetic properties; (2) being expressive of
emotion; (3) being intellectually challenging; (4) being formally
complex and coherent; (5) having the capacity to convey complex
meanings; (6) exhibiting an individual point of view; (7) being
original; (8) being an artifact or performance which is the product of
a high degree of skill; (9) belonging to an established artistic form;
(10) being the product of an intention to make a work of art (Gaut
2000). The cluster account has been criticized on several grounds.
First, given its logical structure, it is in fact equivalent to a
long, complicated, but finite, disjunction, which makes it difficult
to see why it isn't a definition (Davies 2006). Second, if the list
of properties is incomplete, as some cluster theorists hold, then some
justification or principle would be needed for extending it. Third,
the inclusion of the ninth property on the list, *belonging to an
established art form*, seems to regenerate (or duck), rather than answer, the
definitional question. Finally, it is worth noting that, although
cluster theorists stress what they take to be the motley heterogeneity of the
class of artworks, they tend with surprising regularity to tacitly
give the aesthetic a special, perhaps unifying, status among the
properties they put forward as merely disjunctive. One cluster
theorist, for example, gives a list very similar to the one discussed
above (it includes representational properties, expressiveness,
creativity, exhibiting a high degree of skill, belonging to an
established artform), but omits aesthetic properties on the grounds
that it is the combination of the other items on the list which,
combined in the experience of the work of art, are precisely the
aesthetic qualities of the work (Dutton 2006). Gaut, whose list is
cited above, includes aesthetic properties as a separate item on the
list, but construes them very narrowly; the difference between these
ways of formulating the cluster view appears to be mainly nominal. And
an earlier cluster theorist defines artworks as all and only those
things that belong to any instantiation of an artform, offers a list
of seven properties all of which together are intended to capture the
core of what it is to be an artform, though none is either necessary
or sufficient, and then claims that having aesthetic value (of the
same sort as mountains, sunsets, mathematical theorems) is "what
art is *for*" (Bond 1975). 


## 4. Contemporary Definitions


 Definitions of art attempt to make sense of two different sorts of
facts: art has important historically contingent cultural features, as
well as trans-historical, pan-cultural characteristics that point in
the direction of a relatively stable aesthetic core. (Theorists who
regard art as an invention of eighteenth-century Europe will, of
course, regard this way of putting the matter as tendentious, on the
grounds that entities produced outside that culturally distinctive
institution do not fall under the extension of "art" and
hence are irrelevant to the art-defining project (Shiner
2001). Whether the concept of art is precise enough to justify this
much confidence about what falls under its extension claim is
unclear.) Conventionalist definitions take art's contingent
cultural features to be explanatorily fundamental, and aim to capture
the phenomena - revolutionary modern art, the traditional close
connection of art with the aesthetic, the possibility of autonomous
art traditions, etc. - in social/historical
terms. Classically-flavored or traditional definitions (also sometimes
called "functionalist") definitions reverse this
explanatory order. Such classically-flavored definitions take
traditional concepts like the aesthetic (or allied concepts like the
formal, or the expressive) as basic, and aim to account for the
phenomena by making those concepts harder - for example, by
endorsing a concept of the aesthetic rich enough to include
non-perceptual properties, or by attempting an integration of those
concepts (e.g., Eldridge, section 4.4 below) .


### 4.1 Conventionalist Definitions: Institutional and Historical




Conventionalist definitions deny that art has essential connection to
aesthetic properties, or to formal properties, or to expressive
properties, or to any type of property taken by traditional
definitions to be essential to art. Conventionalist definitions have
been strongly influenced by the emergence, in the twentieth century,
of artworks that seem to differ radically from all previous
artworks. Avant-garde works like Marcel Duchamp's
"ready-mades" - ordinary unaltered objects like
snow-shovels (*In Advance of the Broken Arm*) and 
bottle-racks - conceptual works like Robert Barry's *All the things I know
but of which I am not at the moment thinking - 1:36 PM; June 15,
1969*, and John Cage's *4'33''*, have seemed to
many philosophers to lack or even, somehow, repudiate, the traditional
properties of art: intended aesthetic interest, artifactuality, even
perceivability. Conventionalist definitions have also been strongly
influenced by the work of a number of historically-minded
philosophers, who have documented the rise and development of modern
ideas of the fine arts, the individual arts, the work of art, and the
aesthetic (Kristeller, Shiner, Carroll, Goehr, Kivy).




Conventionalist definitions come in two varieties, institutional and
historical. Institutionalist conventionalism, or institutionalism, a
synchronic view, typically hold that to be a work of art is to be an
artifact of a kind created, by an artist, to be presented to an
artworld public (Dickie 1984). Historical conventionalism, a
diachronic view, holds that artworks necessarily stand in an
art-historical relation to some set of earlier artworks.


### 4.2 Institutional Definitions




The groundwork for institutional definitions was laid by Arthur Danto,
better known to non-philosophers as the long-time influential art
critic for the *Nation*. Danto coined the term
"artworld", by which he meant "an atmosphere of art
theory." Danto's definition has been glossed as follows:
something is a work of art if and only if (i) it has a subject (ii)
about which it projects some attitude or point of view (has a style)
(iii) by means of rhetorical ellipsis (usually metaphorical) which
ellipsis engages audience participation in filling in what is missing,
and (iv) where the work in question and the interpretations thereof
require an art historical context (Danto, Carroll). Clause (iv) is
what makes the definition institutionalist. The view has been
criticized for entailing that art criticism written in a highly
rhetorical style is art, lacking but requiring an independent account
of what makes a context *art historical*, and for not applying
to music. 




The most prominent and influential institutionalism is that of George
Dickie. Dickie's institutionalism has evolved over
time. According to an early version, a work of art is an artifact upon
which some person(s) acting on behalf of the artworld has conferred
the status of candidate for appreciation (Dickie 1974). Dickie's more
recent version consists of an interlocking set of five definitions:
(1) An artist is a person who participates with understanding in the
making of a work of art. (2) A work of art is an artifact of a kind
created to be presented to an artworld public. (3) A public is a set
of persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to
understand an object which is presented to them. (4) The artworld is
the totality of all artworld systems. (5) An artworld system is a
framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an
artworld public (Dickie 1984). Both versions have been widely
criticized. Philosophers have objected that art created outside any
institution seems possible, although the definition rules it out, and
that the artworld, like any institution, seems capable of error. It
has also been urged that the definition's obvious circularity is
vicious, and that, given the inter-definition of the key concepts
(artwork, artworld system, artist, artworld public) it lacks any
informative way of distinguishing *art* institutions systems
from other, structurally similar, social institutions (D. Davies 2004,
pp. 248-249, notes that both the artworld and the
"commerceworld" seem to fall under that definition). Early
on, Dickie claimed that anyone who sees herself as a member of the
artworld *is* a member of the artworld: if this is true, then
unless there are constraints on the kinds of things the artworld can
put forward as artworks or candidate artworks, any entity can be an
artwork (though not all are), which appears overly expansive. Finally,
Matravers has helpfully distinguished *strong* and
*weak* institutionalism. Strong institutionalism holds that
there is some reason that is always the reason the art institution has
for saying that something is a work of art. Weak institutionalism
holds that, for every work of art, there is some reason or other that
the institution has for saying that it is a work of art (Matravers
2000). Weak institutionalism, in particular, raises questions about
art's unity: if absolutely nothing unifies the reasons that the
artworld gives for conferring art-hood on things, then the unity of
the class of artworks is vanishingly small. Conventionalist views,
with their emphasis on art's heterogeneity, swallow this
implication. From the perspective of traditional definitions, doings
so underplays art's substantial if incomplete unity, while leaving it
a puzzle why art would be worth caring about. 


 Some recent versions of institutionalism depart from Dickie's by
accepting the burden, which Dickie rejected, of providing a
substantive, non-circular account of what it is to be an art
institution or an artworld. One, due to David Davies, does so by
building in Nelson Goodman's account of aesthetic symbolic
functions. Another, due to Abell, combines Searle's account of social
institutions with Gaut's characterization of art-making properties,
and builds an account of artistic value on that coupling.



Davies' neo-institutionalism holds that making an artwork
requires articulating an artistic statement, which requires specifying
artistic properties, which in turn requires the manipulation of an
artistic vehicle. Goodman's "symptoms of the
aesthetic" are utilized to clarify the conditions under which a
practice of making is a practice of *artistic* making: on
Goodman's view, a symbol functions aesthetically when it is
syntactically dense, semantically dense, relatively replete, and
characterized by multiple and complex reference (D. Davies 2004;
Goodman 1968; see the entry on
 Goodman's aesthetics).
Manipulating an artistic vehicle is in turn possible only if the
artist consciously operates with reference to shared understandings
embodied in the practices of a community of receivers. So art's
nature is institutional in the broad sense (or, perhaps better,
socio-cultural). By way of criticism, Davies'
neo-institutionalism may be questioned on the grounds that, since all
pictorial symbols are syntactically dense, semantically dense,
relatively replete, and often exemplify the properties they represent,
it seems to entail that every colored picture, including those in any
catalog of industrial products, is an artwork (Abell 2012).




Abell's institutional definition adapts Searle's view of social kinds:
what it is for some social kind, *F*, to be *F* is for it to be
collectively believed to be *F* (Abell 2012; Searle 1995, 2010;
and see the entry on
 social institutions).
On Abell's view, more specifically, an institution's type is
determined by the valued function(s) that it was collectively believed
at its inception to promote. The valued functions collective belief in
which make an institution an art institution are those spelled out by
Gaut in his cluster account (see section 3.1, above). That is,
something is an art institution if and only if it is an institution
whose existence is due to its being perceived to perform certain
functions, which functions form a significant subset of the following:
promoting positive aesthetic qualities; promoting the expression of
emotion; facilitating the posing of intellectual challenges, and the
rest of Gaut's list. Plugging in Gaut's list yields the final
definition: something is an artwork if and only if it is the product
of an art institution (as just defined) and it directly effects the effectiveness with which that institution performs the perceived functions to which
its existence is due. One worry is whether Searle's account of
institutions is up to the task required of it. Some institutional
social kinds have this trait: something can fail to be a token of that
kind even if there is collective agreement that it counts as a token
of that kind. Suppose someone gives a big cocktail party, to which
everyone in Paris invited, and things get so out of hand that the
casualty rate is greater than the Battle of Austerlitz. Even if
everyone thinks the event was a cocktail party, it is possible
(contrary to Searle) that they are mistaken: it may have been a war or
battle. It's not clear that art isn't like this. If so, then the fact
that an institution is collectively believed to be an art institution
needn't suffice to make it so (Khalidi 2013; see also the entry on
 social 
institutions).[3]
A second worry: if its failure to specify which subsets of the ten
cluster properties suffice to make something an artwork significantly
flaws Gaut's cluster account, then failure to specify which subsets of
Gaut's ten properties suffice to make something an art institution
significantly flaws Abellian institutionalism.


### 4.3 Historical Definitions




Historical definitions hold that what characterizes artworks is
standing in some specified art-historical relation to some specified
earlier artworks, and disavow any commitment to a trans-historical
concept of art, or the "artish." Historical definitions
come in several varieties. All of them are, or resemble, inductive
definitions: they claim that certain entities belong unconditionally
to the class of artworks, while others do so because they stand in the
appropriate relations thereto. According to the best known version,
Levinson's intentional-historical definition, an artwork is a thing
that has been seriously intended for regard in any way preexisting or
prior artworks are or were correctly regarded (Levinson 1990). A
second version, historical narrativism, comes in several varieties. On
one, a sufficient but not necessary condition for the identification
of a candidate as a work of art is the construction of a true
historical narrative according to which the candidate was created by
an artist in an artistic context with a recognized and live artistic
motivation, and as a result of being so created, it resembles at least
one acknowledged artwork (Carroll 1993). On another, more ambitious
and overtly nominalistic version of historical narrativism, something
is an artwork if and only if (1) there are internal historical
relations between it and already established artworks; (2) these
relations are correctly identified in a narrative; and (3) that
narrative is accepted by the relevant experts. The experts do
not *detect* that certain entities are artworks; rather, the
fact that the experts assert that certain properties are significant
in particular cases is constitutive of art (Stock 2003).




The similarity of these views to institutionalism is obvious, and
the criticisms offered parallel those urged against institutionalism.
First, historical definitions appear to require, but lack, any
informative characterization of art traditions (art functions, artistic
contexts, etc.) and hence any way of informatively distinguishing them
(and likewise art functions, or artistic predecessors) from
*non*-art traditions (non-art functions, non-artistic
predecessors). Correlatively, non-Western art, or alien, autonomous
art of any kind appears to pose a problem for historical views: any
autonomous art tradition or artworks - terrestrial,
extra-terrestrial, or merely possible - causally isolated from
our art tradition, is either ruled out by the definition, which seems
to be a *reductio*, or included, which concedes the existence
of a supra-historical concept of art. So, too, there could be entities
that for adventitious reasons are not correctly identified in
historical narratives, although in actual fact they stand in relations
to established artworks that make them correctly *describable*
in narratives of the appropriate sort. Historical definitions entail
that such entities aren't artworks, but it seems at least as 
plausible to say that they are artworks that are not identified as such. Second,
historical definitions also require, but do not provide a
satisfactory, informative account of the basis case - the first
artworks, or ur-artworks, in the case of the intentional-historical
definitions, or the first or central art-forms, in the case of
historical functionalism. Third, nominalistic historical definitions
seem to face a version of the *Euthyphro* dilemma. For either
such definitions include substantive characterizations of what it is
to be an expert, or they don't. If, on one hand, they include no
characterization of what it is to be an expert, and hence no
explanation as to why the list of experts contains the people it does,
then they imply that what makes things artworks is inexplicable. On
the other hand, suppose such definitions provide a substantive account
of what it is to be an expert, so that to be an expert is to possess
some ability lacked by non-experts (taste, say) in virtue of the
possession of which they are able to discern historical connections
between established artworks and candidate artworks. Then the
definition's claim to be interestingly *historical* is
questionable, because it makes art status a function of whatever
ability it is that permits experts to discern the art-making
properties. 




Defenders of historical definitions have replies. First, as regards
autonomous art traditions, it can be held that anything we would
recognize as an *art* tradition or an *artistic*
practice would display aesthetic concerns, because aesthetic concerns
have been central from the start, and persisted centrally for
thousands of years, in the Western art tradition. Hence it is an
historical, not a conceptual truth that anything we recognize as an
art practice will centrally involve the aesthetic; it is just that
aesthetic concerns that have always dominated our art tradition
(Levinson 2002). The idea here is that *if the reason that anything
we'd take to be a Ph-tradition would have Ps-concerns is
that our Ph-tradition has focused on Ps-concerns since its
inception, then it is not essential to Ph-traditions that they have
Ps-concerns, and Ph is a purely historical concept*. But
this principle entails, implausibly, that every concept is purely
historical. Suppose that we discovered a new civilization whose
inhabitants could predict how the physical world works with great
precision, on the basis of a substantial body of empirically acquired
knowledge that they had accumulated over centuries. The reason we
would credit them with having a *scientific* tradition might
well be that our own scientific tradition has since its inception
focused on explaining things. It does not seem to follow that science
is a purely historical concept with no essential connection to
explanatory aims. (Other theorists hold that it is historically
necessary that art begins with the aesthetic, but deny that
art's nature is to be defined in terms of its historical
unfolding (Davies 1997).) Second, as to the first artworks, or the
central art-forms or functions, some theorists hold that an account of
them can only take the form of an enumeration. Stecker takes this
approach: he says that the account of what makes something a central
art form at a given time is, at its core, institutional, and that the
central artforms can only be listed (Stecker 1997 and 2005). Whether
relocating the list at a different, albeit deeper, level in the
definition renders the definition sufficiently informative is an open
question. Third, as to the *Euthyphro*-style dilemma, it might
be held that the categorial distinction between artworks and
"mere real things" (Danto 1981) explains the distinction
between experts and non-experts. Experts are able, it is said, to
create new categories of art. When created, new categories bring with
them new universes of discourse. New universes of discourse in turn
make reasons available that otherwise would not be available. Hence,
on this view, it is both the case that the experts' say-so alone
suffices to make mere real things into artworks, and also true that
experts' conferrals of art-status have reasons (McFee
2011). 


### 4.4 Traditional (mainly aesthetic) definitions




Traditional definitions take some function(s) or intended function(s)
to be definitive of artworks. Here only aesthetic definitions, which
connect art essentially with the aesthetic - aesthetic judgments,
experience, or properties - will be considered. Different
aesthetic definitions incorporate different views of aesthetic
properties and judgments. See the entry on 
 aesthetic judgment.




As noted above, some philosophers lean heavily on a distinction
between aesthetic properties and artistic properties, taking the
former to be perceptually striking qualities that can be directly
perceived in works, without knowledge of their origin and purpose, and
the latter to be relational properties that works possess in virtue of
their relations to art history, art genres, etc. It is also, of
course, possible to hold a less restrictive view of aesthetic
properties, on which aesthetic properties need not be perceptual; on
this broader view, it is unnecessary to deny what it seems pointless
to deny, that abstracta like mathematical entities and scientific laws
possess aesthetic properties.)




Monroe Beardsley's definition holds that an artwork:
"either an arrangement of conditions intended to be capable of
affording an experience with marked aesthetic character or
(incidentally) an arrangement belonging to a class or type of
arrangements that is typically intended to have this capacity"
(Beardsley 1982, 299). (For more on Beardsley, see the entry on 
 Beardsley's aesthetics.) 
Beardsley's conception of aesthetic experience is Deweyan:
aesthetic experiences are experiences that are complete, unified,
intense experiences of the way things appear to us, and are, moreover,
experiences which are controlled by the things experienced (see the
entry on
 Dewey's aesthetics).
Zangwill's aesthetic definition of art says that something is a
work of art if and only if someone had an insight that certain
aesthetic properties would be determined by certain nonaesthetic
properties, and for this reason the thing was intentionally endowed
with the aesthetic properties in virtue of the nonaesthetic properties
as envisaged in the insight (Zangwill 1995a,b). Aesthetic properties
for Zangwill are those judgments that are the subject of
"verdictive aesthetic judgments" (judgements of beauty and
ugliness) and "substantive aesthetic judgements" (e.g., of
daintiness, elegance, delicacy, etc.). The latter are ways of being
beautiful or ugly; aesthetic in virtue of a special close relation to
verdictive judgments, which are subjectively universal. Other
aesthetic definitions build in different accounts of the
aesthetic. Eldridge's aesthetic definition holds that the satisfying appropriateness to one another of a thing's form and content is the aesthetic quality possession of which is necessary and sufficient for
a thing's being art (Eldridge 1985). Or one might define aesthetic
properties as those having an evaluative component, whose perception
involves the perception of certain formal base properties, such as
shape and color (De Clercq 2002), and construct an aesthetic
definition incorporating that view.




Views which combine features of institutional and aesthetic
definitions also exist. Iseminger, for example, builds a definition on
an account of appreciation, on which to appreciate a thing's
being *F* is to find experiencing its being *F* to be
valuable in itself, and an account of aesthetic communication (which it
is the function of the artworld to promote) (Iseminger 2004).




Aesthetic definitions have been criticized for being both too narrow
and too broad. They are held to be too narrow because they are unable
to cover influential modern works like Duchamp's ready-mades and
conceptual works like Robert Barry's *All the things I know but of
which I am not at the moment thinking - 1:36 PM; June 15, 1969*,
which appear to lack aesthetic properties. (Duchamp famously asserted
that his urinal, *Fountain*, was selected for its lack of
aesthetic features.) Aesthetic definitions are held to be too broad
because beautifully designed automobiles, neatly manicured lawns, and
products of commercial design are often created with the intention of
being objects of aesthetic appreciation, but are not artworks.
Moreover, aesthetic views have been held to have trouble making sense
of bad art (see Dickie 2001; Davies 2006, p. 37). Finally, more
radical doubts about aesthetic definitions center on the
intelligibility and usefulness of the aesthetic. Beardsley's view, for
example, has been criticized by Dickie, who has also offered
influential criticisms of the idea of an aesthetic attitude (Dickie
1965, Cohen 1973, Kivy 1975).




To these criticisms several responses have been offered. First, the
less restrictive conception of aesthetic properties mentioned above,
on which they may be based on non-perceptual formal properties, can be
deployed. On this view, conceptual works would have aesthetic
features, much the same way that mathematical entities are often
claimed to (Shelley 2003, Carroll 2004). Second, a distinction may be
drawn between time-sensitive properties, whose standard observation
conditions include an essential reference to the temporal location of
the observer, and non-time-sensitive properties, which do not.
Higher-order aesthetic properties like drama, humor, and irony, which
account for a significant part of the appeal of Duchamp's and
Cage's works, on this view, would derive from time-sensitive
properties (Zemach 1997). Third, it might be held that it is the
*creative* *act* of presenting something that is in the
relevant sense unfamiliar, into a new context, the artworld, which has
aesthetic properties. Or, fourth, it might be held that
(Zangwill's "second-order" strategy) works like
ready-mades lack aesthetic functions, but are parasitic upon, because
meant to be considered in the context of, works that do have aesthetic
functions, and therefore constitute marginal borderline cases of art
that do not merit the theoretical primacy they are often
given. Finally, it can be flatly denied that the ready-mades were
works of art (Beardsley 1982).




As to the over-inclusiveness of aesthetic definitions, a distinction
might be drawn between primary and secondary functions. Or it may be
maintained that some cars, lawns, and products of industrial design are
on the art/non-art borderline, and so don't constitute clear
and decisive counter-examples. Or, if the claim that aesthetic theories
fail to account for bad art depends on holding that some works have
absolutely *no* aesthetic value whatsoever, as opposed to some
non-zero amount, however infinitesimal, it may be wondered what
justifies that assumption. 


### 4.5 Hybrid (Disjunctive) Definitions




Hybrid definitions characteristically disjoin at least one
institutional component with at least one aesthetic component, aiming
thereby to accommodate both more traditional art and avant-garde art
that appears to lack any significant aesthetic dimension. (Such
definitions could also be classified as institutional, on the grounds
that they make provenance sufficient for being a work of art.) Hence
they inherit a feature of conventionalist definitions: in appealing to
art institutions, artworlds, arts, art functions, and so on, they
either include substantive accounts of what it is to be an
*art*institution/world/genre/-form/function, or are
uninformatively circular.




One such disjunctive definition, Longworth and Scarantino's, adapts
Gaut's list of ten clustering properties, where that list (see 3.5
above) includes institutional properties (e.g., belonging to an
established art form) and traditional ones (e.g., possessing positive
aesthetic properties); see also Longworth and Scarantino 2010. The
core idea is that art is defined by a disjunction of minimally
sufficient and disjunctively necessary conditions; to say that a
disjunct is a minimally sufficient constitutive condition for
art-hood, is to say that every proper subset of it is insufficient for
art-hood. An account of what it is for a concept to have disjunctive
defining conditions is also supplied. The definition of art itself is
as follows: [?]*Z*[?]*Y* (Art iff (*Z* [?]
*Y*)), where (a) *Z* and *Y*, formed from properties on
Gaut's cluster list, are either non-empty conjunctions or non-empty
disjunctions of conjunctions or individual properties; (b) there is
some indeterminacy over exactly which disjuncts are sufficient; (c)
*Z* does not entail *Y* and *Y* does not entail
*Z*; (d) *Z* does not entail Art and *Y* does not
entail Art. Instantiation of either *Z* or *Y* suffices for
art-hood; something can be art only if at least one of *Z*,
*Y* is instantiated; and the third condition is included to
prevent the definition from collapsing into a classical one. The
account of what it is for concept *C* to have disjunctive
defining conditions is as follows: *C* iff (*Z* [?]
*Y*), where (i) *Z* and *Y* are non-empty conjunctions
or non-empty disjunctions of conjunctions or individual properties;
(ii) *Z* does not entail *Y* and *Y* does not entail
*Z*; (iii) *Z* does not entail C and *Y* does not
entail C. A worry concerns condition (iii): as written, it seems to
render the account of disjunctive defining conditions
self-contradictory. For if *Z* and *Y* are each minimally
sufficient for *C*, it is impossible that *Z* does not
entail *C* and that *Y* does not entail *C*. If so,
then nothing can satisfy the conditions said to be necessary and
sufficient for a concept to have disjunctive defining conditions.




A second disjunctive hybrid definition, with an historical cast,
Robert Stecker's historical functionalism, holds that an item is an
artwork at time *t*, where *t* is not earlier than the
time at which the item is made, if and only if it is in one of the
central art forms at *t* and is made with the intention of
fulfilling a function art has at *t* or it is an artifact that
achieves excellence in achieving such a function (Stecker 2005). A
question for Stecker's view is whether or not it provides an adequate
account of what it is for a function to be an art function, and
whether, consequently, it can accommodate anti-aesthetic or
non-aesthetic art. The grounds given for thinking that it can are
that, while art's original functions were aesthetic, those functions,
and the intentions with which art is made, can change in unforeseeable
ways. Moreover, aesthetic properties are not always preeminent in
art's predecessor concepts (Stecker 2000). A worry is that if the
operative assumption is that if *x* belongs to a predecessor
tradition of *T* then *x* belongs to *T*, the
possibility is not ruled out that if, for example, the tradition of
magic is a predecessor tradition of the scientific tradition, then
entities that belong to the magic tradition but lacking any of the
standard hallmarks of science are scientific entities.




A third hybrid definition, also disjunctive, is the cladistic
definition defended by Stephen Davies. who holds that something is
art (a) if it shows excellence of skill and achievement in realizing
significant aesthetic goals, and either doing so is its primary,
identifying function or doing so makes a vital contribution to the
realization of its primary, identifying function, or (b) if it falls
under an art genre or art form established and publicly recognized
within an art tradition, or (c) if it is intended by its
maker/presenter to be art and its maker/presenter does what is
necessary and appropriate to realizing that intention (Davies, 2015).
(In biology, a *clade* is a segment in the tree of life: a group
of organisms and the common ancestor they share.) Artworlds are to be
characterized in terms of their origins: they begin with prehistoric
art ancestors, and grow into artworlds. Hence all artworks occupy a
line of descent from their prehistoric art ancestors; that line of
descent comprises an art tradition that grows into an artworld. So
the definition is bottom-up and resolutely anthropocentric. A worry:
the view seems to entail that art traditions can undergo any changes
whatsoever and remain art traditions, since, no matter how distant,
every occupant of the right line of descent is part of the art
tradition. This seems to amount to saying that as long as they remain
traditions at all, art traditions cannot die. Whether art is immortal
in this sense seems open to question. A second worry is that the
requirement that every art tradition and artworld stand in some line
of descent from prehistoric humanoids makes it in principle impossible
for any nonhuman species to make art, as long as that species fails to
occupy the right location in the tree of life. While the
epistemological challenges that identifying artworks made by nonhumans
might pose could be very considerable, this consequence of the
cladistic definition's emphasis on lineage rather than traits raises a
concern about excessively insularity.



A fourth hybrid definition is the "buck-passing" view of Lopes, which
attempts an escape from the stalemate between artwork-focused
definitions over avant-garde anti-aesthetic cases by adopting a
strategy that shifts the focus of the definition of art away from
artworks. The strategy is to recenter philosophical efforts on
different problems, which require attention anyway: (a) the problem of
giving an account of each individual art, and (b) the problem of
defining what it is to be an art, the latter by giving an account of
the larger class of normative/appreciative kinds to which the arts
(and some non-arts) belong. For, given definitions of the individual
arts, and a definition of what it is to be an art, if every artwork
belongs to at least one art (if it belongs to no existing art, then it
pioneers a new art), then a definition of artwork falls out: *x*
is a work of art if and only if *x* is a work of K, where K is an
art (Lopes 2014). When fully spelled out, the definition is
disjunctive: *x* is a work of art if and only if *x* is a
work belonging to art1 or *x* is a work belonging to
art2 or *x* is a work belonging to art3
.... Most of the explanatory work is done by the theories of the
individual arts, since, given the assumption that every artwork
belongs to at least one art, possession of theories of the individual
arts would be necessary and sufficient for settling the artistic or
non-artistic status of any hard case, once it is determined what art a
given work belongs to. As to what makes a practice an art, Lopes'
preferred answer seems to be institutionalism of a Dickiean variety:
an art is an institution in which artists (persons who participate
with understanding in the making of artworks) make artworks to be
presented to an artworld public. (Lopes 2014, Dickie 1984) Thus, on
this view, it is arbitrary which activities are artworld systems:
there is no deeper answer to the question of what makes music an art
than that it has the right institutional
 structure.[4] 
So it is arbitrary which activities are arts. Two worries. First, the
key claim that every work of art belonging to no extant art pioneers a
new art may be defended on the grounds that any reason to say that a
work belonging to no extant artform is an artwork is a reason to say
that it pioneers a new artform. In response, it is noted that the
question of whether or not a thing belongs to an art arises only when,
and because, there is a prior reason for thinking that the thing is an
artwork. So it seems that what it is to be an artwork is prior, in
some sense, to what it is to be an art. Second, on the buck-passing
theory's institutional theory of the arts, which activities are arts
is arbitrary. This raises a version of the question that was raised
about the cladistic definition's ability to account for the existence
of art outside our (Hominin) tradition. Suppose the connection
between a practice's traits and its status as an art are wholly
contingent. Then the fact that a practice in another culture that
although not part of our tradition had most of the traits of one of
our own arts would be no reason to think that practice was an art, and
no reason to think that the objects belonging to it were artworks. It
is not clear that we are really so in the dark when it comes to
determining whether practices in alien cultures or traditions are
arts. 


## 5. Conclusion




Conventionalist definitions account well for modern art, but have
difficulty accounting for art's universality - especially
the fact that there can be art disconnected from "our"
(Western) institutions and traditions, and our species. They also
struggle to account for the fact that the same aesthetic terms are
routinely applied to artworks, natural objects, humans, and abstracta.
Aesthetic definitions do better accounting for art's
traditional, universal features, but less well, at least according to
their critics, with revolutionary modern art; their further defense
requires an account of the aesthetic which can be extended in a
principled way to conceptual and other radical art. (An aesthetic
definition and a conventionalist one could simply be conjoined. But
that would merely raise, without answering, the fundamental question
of the unity or disunity of the class of artworks.) Which defect is
the more serious one depends on which *explananda* are the more
important. Arguments at this level are hard to come by, because
positions are hard to motivate in ways that do not depend on prior
conventionalist and functionalist sympathies. If list-like definitions
are flawed because uninformative, then so are conventionalist
definitions, whether institutional or historical. Of course, if the
class of artworks, or of the arts, is a mere chaotic heap, lacking any
genuine unity, then enumerative definitions cannot be faulted for
being uninformative: they do all the explaining that it is possible to
do, because they capture all the unity that there is to capture. In
that case the worry articulated by one prominent aesthetician, who
wrote earlier of the "bloated, unwieldy" concept of art
which institutional definitions aim to capture, needs to be taken
seriously, even if it turns out to be ungrounded: "It is not at
all clear that these words - 'What is
art?' - express anything like a single question, to which
competing answers are given, or whether philosophers proposing answers
are even engaged in the same debate.... The sheer variety of
proposed definitions should give us pause. One cannot help wondering
whether there is any sense in which they are attempts to ...
clarify the same cultural practices, or address the same issue"
(Walton 2007).