Can We Define Art

Can we define art? Of course we can define art. According to dictionary, art Is the quality, production, expression, or realm of what is beautiful appealing or of more than ordinary significance. But in the eye of some artist included Morris Welts, they believe art Is undefined for many reason. According to Morris Weitz, he point out a few theories of art and argues in his article The Role of Theory in Aesthetics, that they are lacking to the extent that they cannot satisfactorily cover all of the range of things we would like to consider artworks. In addition, they dont accurately capture the concept of art. Weitz argues that where previous theories go wrong Is in their attempts to establish a set of necessary and sufficient condition of art, when in fact what we should do Is ask about art the concept. Once this concept Is understood, he argues that it will make clear the logical impossibility of defining art in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Furthermore, Weitzs main argument for why theories of art fail comes from his application of Wittgensteins thoughts about language. pecifically the word game. o art. In fact, according to Wittgenstein, he highlighted the difficulty of defining the word games, he said let us consider what we call games: I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic Games, and so on. What is common to them all? Dont say: there must be something common to all. For if you look at them you will not see something that common to all, but similarities. relationships. and a whole series of them at that . He was showing there is no one common feature to all games. And the word games cannot be simply defined; he argues that games have amily resemblances to each other. Some games resemble other games in some respects; there is no more to it, no necessary and sufficient condition. In addition, Weitz argues, this same resemblance principle may apply to art. The problem of the nature of art is like that of the nature of games, at least in these respects: If we actually look and see what it Is that we call art, we will also find no common properties only strands of similarities. He also said, The basic resemblance between these concepts is their open texture. In elucidation them certain cases can e given, about which there can be no question as to their being correctly described as art or game but no exhaustive set of cases can be given. Art is an open concept. Its nature Is such that new cases will constantly arise which will require a decision on the part of those interested on whether to extend the concept to include the new cases. He said that the expansive, changing and creauve nature of art would make defining properties or closure of the concept logically impossible. It is for this reason that he claims previous attempts at defining art have been in vain. Weitzs houghts we may actually find ourselves closer to arts definition. And Weitz says: What I am arguing, then, is that the very expansive, adventurous character of art, its ever-present changes and novel creations, make It logically Impossible to ensure any set of defining properties. It means is that If you were to take a wide range of instances of artworks, there would be no one feature common to them all. However, they are all the common concept products, namely one that is expansive and adventurous. Its necessary, so for a work of art to embody this creativity at least to Of2 human mind product that possesses this concept. In addition, objects in nature arent made by someone with art concept as unbound, adventurous creativity; they also arent creation from a concept in a human mind, furthermore, their existence is independent of human intellect or observation. For example, mountain, trees, flowers and something like that arent works of art. For more information, whoever is producing the object; they wont be doing as an exercise of creativity and unbound expression and so is not necessarily producing the object with an artistic conception in mind. For example, it is not necessary to have a concept of art in mind when creating a map or a floor plan or a scale model. As Weitz claimed, artworks can be differentiated from non-artworks is a hint that perhaps attempting to define art is not quite such a vain pursuit. Furthermore, I do not think defining and elucidation of the concept are different tasks as Weitz would have us believe. If a given artwork has art the concept behind it then this appears to suffice as a necessary condition for its being a work of art. Which leads me to believe the word art may be defined by the oncept behind its instances. A relevant comment on this approach is the response that, in allowing art to be defined by the concept behind it, anyone may place or point to some object or mark and proclaim; that is art. For example a piece of paper scrunched up and thrown on the floor, or an everyday object bizarrely placed may be declared art. My response to this is that in proclaiming such objects as art the proclaimed is correctly commenting on and employing the concept of art previously established. An attempt at challenging previous artistic convention does not onstitute creation outside of art the concept. Furthermore, I would like to extend the set of non-artworks to contain all things that exist, in their current state, independently of intervention by a person with artistic intent. In short, to declare an object an artwork is not enough for the declaration to be true. Since it would have existed and continues to exist in its current state regardless. This I feel is analogous to why objects in nature are not artworks. In conclusion, I feel Weitzs comment on the nature of art are important, but as opposed to leading to the conclusion that art s undefined. In fact, it gets us well on the way to a definition free from the problems faced by previous theories. Weitz is happy to be very specific in his description of the concept of art, which I have argued allows us to rule out many things as non- artworks. By considering the differences in artworks and non-artworks, we can see that where something is a work of art, the artistic concept has been present in a human intellect, which has conceived and created the piece. Non-artworks exist in their current state independently of any such concept.