What is ART?

What is ART?

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Coffeehouse/6831/whatsart.html#n2

Arthur Danto, professor of philosophy at Columbia University ..., believes that today "you can't say something's art or not art anymore. That's all finished." In his book, After the End of Art, Danto argues that after Andy Warhol exhibited simulacra of shipping cartons for Brillo boxes in 1964, anything could be art. Warhol made it no longer possible to distinguish something that is art from something that is not.

Chris Witcombe, "What is Art? What is an Artist?" http://www.arthistory.sbc.edu/artartists/artartiststoday.html.
Danto (1997),

So, there are house-painters: there are Sunday painters: there are world-politicians who paint for distraction, and distraught bussiness-men who paint to relax. There are ... psychotic patients who enter art therapy, and madmen who set down their visions: there are little children of three, four, five, six, in art class, who produce work of explosive beauty: and then there are the innumerable painters ... who once, probably, were artists, but who now paint exclusively for money and the pleasure of others. None of them are artists, though they all fall short of being so to varying degrees, but they are all painters. And then there are painters who are artists. Where does the difference lie, and why? What does the one lot do which the other lot doesn't? When is painting an art, and why?

Wollheim (1987): Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, London : Thames & Hudson, 1987
13

The criterion of art lies in some directly perceptible property that the painting has.

and

The act of painting has to be an intentional one, i.e., the painter has to have the intention of making art. The act of painting has to be undertaken in a special way in order to be art.

Wollheim (1987): Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, London : Thames & Hudson, 1987
16-17

Art is "the best, because richest, most complex and most easily comprehensible, medium of communication between human beings".

Fowles (1968): John Fowles, The Aristos, London : Pan Books, 1968 (1965).

Art is what is made by an artist

"To be an artist is not to be a member of a secret society; it is not an activity inscrutably forbidden to the majority of mankind. Even the clumsiest, ugliest and most ignorant lovers make love; and what is important is the oneness of man in making artefacts, not the abyss said to exist between a Leonardo and the average of mankind. We are not all to be Leonardos; but of the same kind as Leonardo, for genius is only one end of the scale. I climbed Parnassus once, and between the mundane village of Arachova at the foot and the lonely summit, quite as lovely as the poets have always had it to be, there is nothing but a slope; no abyss, no gulf, no place where wings are necessary."

Fowles (1968): John Fowles, The Aristos, London : Pan Books, 1968 (1965).

There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. Once these were men who took coloured earth and roughed out the forms of a bison on the wall of a cave; today some buy their paints, and design posters for the hoardings; they did and do many other things. There is no harm in calling all these activities art as long as we keep in mind that such a word may mean very different things in different times and places, and as long as we realize that Art with a capital A has no existence. For Art with a capital A has come to be something of a bogey and a fetish.

Gombrich (1995): E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 16th Edition, London : Phaidon, 1995 (1950).

Note here that "art" is that making or marking of surfaces people talk about when they refer to paintings, engravings (including sculptures), drawings and stencils of the Pleistocene. It is sometimes convenient to refer to this making or marking of surfaces as PEDS. Whether this "art" meets anyone's criteria for art is entirely up to them. I do not believe it is useful or necessary to attempt to define art (without the inverted commas), because as every controversy about art, from Braque to Warhol to spray-can graffiti, indicates whether something is art depends on whether someone thinks it is.

Conkey et al. (1997): Margaret W. Conkey, Olga Soffer, Deborah Stratman and Nina G. Jablonski (eds.), Beyond Art: Pleistocene Image and Symbol, San Francisco : The California Academy of Sciences / University of California Press, 1997

On a conceptual level I question the appropriateness of the term "art" relative to prehistoric representations, suggesting that the category of art is not only inappropriate from an epistomological standpoint but also a hindrance to archaeological research, due to the conceptual attachments that it has in fields such as art history or aesthetics."

"Most scholars who deal with rock paintings or objects recovered from prehistoric contexts that cannot be explained in utilitarian terms and are thus categorized as decorative, ritual or symbolic, are aware of the trap posed by the term 'art' ...

Art in the Museum Logistics

Only when objects recovered from prehistoric contexts, or ethnographic contexts, are placed in the art museum and presented as art do they become works of art. But then they are placed outside their context, or maybe even outside any context.

Until now, African pottery, wooden carvings and textiles had been viewed essentially as handicraft because ... they had not been created as art, to be appriciated for their own sake. Even after 'primitive' African art inspired Picasso, Brancusi, Braque, Modigliani and Henri Moore earlier this century, it was its magical and mystical quality that counted most. But at the Royal Academy, objects made by African hands are seperated from their cultural context and can be judged simply as art

Baskets, pottery and maybe even tools can be experienced as works of art in the same way as Brillo boxes, Campbell soupcans (Warhol) and bicycle handlebars tied to a saddle (Picasso) or a picture postcard of the Mona Lisa with a moustache drawn on it and the lettering (Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics) L.H.O.O.Q. (Duchamp).

FORMULATION

"... we treat the Special and General Theories of Relativity as important modernist works of art, the most important for our purpose because they contain and express with the highest intensity the values that for us define Modernism."

Vargish/Mook (1999): Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook, Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative, New Haven and London : Yale UP, 1999

Of course, Vargish and Mook do not define the Relativity Theory as a work of art, they treat it as such in order to explain their argument.
A work of science is not a work of art, although there are some parallels between them. The aesthetic principle seems to be important to both.

The great physicist, Paul A.M. Dirac, claims that "keen sense of beauty" enabled him to discover the wave function for the electron in 1928. And G.N. Watson, one of the most distinguished mathematicians of the early twentieth century said that some of Ramanujan's mathematical formulas gave him the same thrill as Michelangelo's "Day," "Night," "Evening" and "Dawn" in the Medici chapel in the San Lorenzo in Florence.

Penrose (1990): Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics, London : Vintage, 1990 [Oxford : Oxford UP, 1989].

It seems very interesting that the development away from representation and symbolism and toward what may be called 'pure structure' that took place in mathematics and in science, was paralleled by a related development in art. Beginning with Monet and Cézanne and going on to the Cubists and to Mondrian, there is a clearly detectable growth of the realisation that art need not represent or symbolise anything else at all, but rather that it may involve the creation of something new - 'a harmony parallel to that of nature' - as Cézanne put it."

Bohm (1968): David Bohm, 'On the Relationships of Science and Art', in: Anthony Hill (ed.), Data: Directions in Art, Theory and Aesthetics, London : Faber & Faber, 1968