Artwork is a visual representation of ideas, emotions and concepts. It can take many forms including painting, sculpture, photography and other digital media. It is often used to express culture, history and beliefs as well as capture attention in a unique way. It can also be a powerful tool to promote creativity in children and adults. Creating art provides a sense of accomplishment and can boost self-esteem and confidence. In addition, it can stimulate the brain by encouraging flexible thinking and improving concentration.
Traditional definitions of art emphasize its aesthetic properties. These properties are not restricted to perceptual formal properties; higher-order aesthetic properties such as drama, humor and irony are considered to be part of the essential content of artworks (Zemach 1997). The conventionalist view of art thus considers that a work is an artwork if it has some of these properties.
An alternative view is that what distinguishes artworks is their standing in some particular art-historical relations to certain earlier artworks. This view is called historical narrativism or, more generally, intentional-historical art (Levinson 1990).
A further alternative is that what characterizes artworks is their having the features that are characteristic of them at some given moment in time. This is the family resemblance view of art. On this account, something is an artwork if it resembles in the right way some paradigm artworks, which are understood to possess all of the typical features of art.
The resemblance view of art can be modified by adding the condition that an entity is an artwork only if it has been deliberately intended to be regarded in some way as preexisting, or prior, works of art. This version of the definition is called neo-institutionalism (Davies 2004).
It has been argued that the family-resemblance and intentional-historical versions of the art-definition do not adequately answer the Euthyphro-style question, “What makes a thing an artwork?” (McFee 2011). It has been further argued that they have other problems, such as circularity and lack any informative way of distinguishing artworld systems from non-artworld ones.
It has also been argued that the data that these definitions draw upon are biased, corrupt and incomplete. As a result, they may be so androcentric as to be untenable. If this is the case, gynocentric and/or feminist definitions of art are required.