An artwork is a thing that reflects the skill of its creator. The act of generating an artwork may also convey certain messages to its audience, or create emotions relating to the beauty of its form. Artworks are generally studied in the fields of art history, art criticism, and aesthetics.
A work of art is a representation in any medium of an object, event, or scene. The most common types of artwork include paintings, sculptures, and drawings. However, many other media can be used to produce an artwork, including movies, music, and writing. The most important feature of an artwork is its aesthetic appeal. Some artworks are also useful for their historical or cultural value.
The meaning of the term “artwork” has changed over time. Early definitions referred to anything that was creative or ornamental, but later senses focused on more refined artistic forms. The term is also sometimes used for a collection of art objects.
An important question concerning artworks is whether their nature is a matter of fact or a matter of taste. Some philosophers have argued that the concept of an artwork is a factual one, while others have claimed that it is a matter of taste. Those who favor the former view have been called “factualists” and those who favor the latter are “aestheticians.”
Classical definitions of art – like the standard version given in this article – link it essentially to some kind of aesthetic property or judgment. Various aestheticians have advanced different views of what this is, but typically they involve either a claim that the artwork has some kind of representational or expressive properties, or a claim that the artist’s skill produces certain kinds of effects.
A related issue is the extent to which the concept of art can be understood as a kind of social institution. Some versions of this view, called institutional definitions, argue that the artworld system imposes its own conditions on what constitutes an artwork. This version has been criticized for its circularity, since it requires that the artworld system recognize an artwork in order to define it as such (Dickie 1984).
More recently, some philosophers have proposed new, more cladistic definitions of artworks. These rely on the assumption that all human cultures have art traditions, and that each of these has an artwork that represents its most fundamental values and interests. Some of these traditions are considered to be fine arts, while others are not.
A final concern about these cladistic definitions is that they appear to imply that art must always be something that humans have created, or at least that it cannot be created by nonhuman animals. This result of this logical extension is problematic, and has led some people to reject cladistic definitions of artworks.