Artworks are creative works that express a specific culture. They can be objects, images or performances. They can also be ideas or thoughts. Despite their differences, artworks are united by their common purpose: to create beauty. Artwork has a wide range of functions, but two of the most significant are communication and transcendence.
The first function is the expression of emotions. Artwork can evoke feelings such as love, sadness and fear. It can even make people feel awed, amazed and inspired. In addition to this, artwork can help people understand the world around them and connect with it in a way that words alone cannot.
This is what makes art so powerful. The second function is the communication of ideas. For example, science can be communicated through art by illustrating concepts and theories. In addition, art can also be used to convey information about a culture or society. This is known as the social function of art. Artwork can also be used to promote a particular political idea, or as a means of protest.
Artwork can also be used for a variety of cultural functions, such as commemoration and celebration. These are often associated with religious and secular events, and may be seen as a way to commemorate the past or celebrate current events. In addition, many cultures use art to express their values and beliefs. This is known as the symbolic function of art. The most famous examples of this include the pyramids of Giza and the Maya glyphs.
There are a number of different theories about what constitutes an artwork. The resemblance-to-a-paradigm theory suggests that something is an artwork if it resembles, in the right way, certain paradigm artworks, which possess most although not necessarily all of art’s typical features. This view has been criticised because it seems to imply that anything that possesses some of these features is automatically an artwork (see below).
A more promising approach, based on the notion that art is an activity with a non-utilitarian vocation, is to define art as “an arrangement of conditions intended to afford an experience with marked aesthetic character.” This definition is similar to Dewey’s concept of art: it defines an experience in terms of how things appear to us, and is not restricted to what we can perceive physically.
Another definition of art is based on its historical development. This explains why artworks can seem to have very little in common, since they develop in parallel. For example, a Picasso painting has very little in common with Christo’s packaged works. This view is defended on the grounds that, in the same way that a clade is defined by its evolutionary history, so too can an artworld be defined by its historical evolution (see below).
A further definition of art is to take it to be something for which experts have reasons to confer art-status. This is the theory that has been most popular in recent times. This is a worrying theory, because it entails that the criteria for identifying an artwork can be reduced to a list of properties that experts believe are important in certain cases.