Art is a multifaceted concept, reflecting the complexity of human creativity and expression. It encompasses a wide range of activities and creations, such as visual arts like painting and sculpture, performing arts like music and theater, and literature. It also includes architecture, design and fashion, and can be viewed as a form of self-expression or as a means to convey societal messages. Art is the creative application of human skill and imagination that can be appreciated primarily for its beauty or emotional power.
The concept of art is organic, changing over time to suit the needs of a particular era. For example, in the era of Romanticism, art came to mean something individualistic. Artists sought to express their personality in their work and to do something no one had done before (such as cubism or futurism). During the Modernist era, the emphasis on originality led many artists to question what was truly art.
Skeptical doubts about the possible and value of a definition of art have figured importantly in the discussion of aesthetics since the 1950s. Although these worries have subsided somewhat, uneasiness about the definability of art persists.
The central problem concerns the alleged fact that no single, unified, adequately descriptive concept of art exists. Instead, a ‘bloated heap’ of disjunctive art concepts exists, each of which seems to be able to describe some aspect of the phenomenon of artworks but is unable to do so adequately.
Some of these disjunctive concepts, for example those endorsed by traditional definitions, connect art essentially with the aesthetic – that is, with aesthetic judgments and experiences – while others, such as the cladistic definition defended by Stephen Davies, are concerned with the intended function(s) of artworks. Other disjunctive concepts connect art essentially with institutional properties such as belonging to an established art form.
A further issue is the alleged incompatibility of the project of defining art with the general philosophy of aesthetics. Aesthetics, it is argued, tends to confuse the concept of art with the idea that the world of natural objects can be grasped through simple cause and effect relations alone. This view, in turn, gives ontological dignity to social phenomena that call more properly for rigorous, critical social analysis.
A more subtle, but no less serious, concern is that a definition of art would be indefensible if it merely served to classify a ‘bloated heap’ of unsystematic concepts. However, it is argued that this concern misunderstands the nature of the ‘heap’. It is not a mere arbitrary heap of facets but rather a to some degree systematic patchwork of concepts that interlock and are linked together – see the entry on Homonymy for an explanation of how this can be achieved. The ‘heap’ has a structure that can be described in various ways: perhaps it is a hierarchy, where each of the concepts consists of a set of disjunctive and minimally sufficient constitutive conditions for art-hood; or perhaps it is an array of nested circles, where each concept depends asymmetrically on the others.