Artworks are cultural touchstones, evoking emotion and reflecting the boundless creativity of humankind. From the fabled works of Leonardo da Vinci to the enduring enchantment of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, many paintings have transcended the era in which they were created and become cherished icons that capture our imagination. This article takes a look at some of the most famous artworks that have captured our fascination and continue to captivate us over time, from the world’s most famous artists like Picasso and Frida Kahlo to lesser known but no less enduring works such as Franz Marc’s vibrant Tiger or Juan Luna’s evocative Espana y Filipinas.
The question of what makes something an artwork is one of the most important and fascinating in philosophy. A variety of philosophical theories have been advanced to answer this question, ranging from classical definitions to more recent cluster theory. Classical definitions, which still play a major role in contemporary discussions of the topic, typically claim that artworks are characterized by their possession of certain properties. Standard candidates include representational properties, expressive properties, and formal properties.
A more modern cluster theory, proposed by Monroe Beardsley, describes artworks as an arrangement of conditions that is capable of affording an aesthetic experience. In his view, these experiences are “complete, unified, intense, subjective” (for more on Beardsley’s conception of aesthetic experience see the entry on Dewey’s aesthetics).
Another approach to the question of what defines an artwork, based on the insights of cognitive science, claims that it is unlikely to be possible to formulate a definition that states individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for something to be considered an artwork. Instead, this approach argues that the nature of the category is determined by the way humans categorize things and that it is therefore a matter of understanding how this categorization works in practice (for more on this view see the entry on Wittgensteinian philosophy).
Several historical definitions have also been advanced. Levinson’s intentional-historical definition, for example, posits that what characterizes artworks is their standing in a particular art-historical relation to a set of earlier artworks. A similar version, called historical narrativism, holds that what characterizes an artwork is its having been intended for some specific purpose or intention that was a precondition of its being an artwork (Dickie 1984).
More recently, philosophers have suggested that the concept of art needs to be expanded beyond two-dimensional pictorial media. This is a response to the fact that there are other culturally significant creations, such as architecture and landscape architecture, that are not easily categorized as art by traditional definitions. This expanded notion of art has come to encompass the products of some performance arts, such as theater, opera, and musical concerts, and ephemeral, non-tangible creations, such as conceptual and readymade artworks, architectural models, and landscape design. The concept of a work of art has even been extended to include some archaeological and natural phenomena, such as geological formations and megalithic monuments.