Artworld Metaphysics turns a critical eye upon aspects of the artworld, and articulates some of the problems, principles, and norms implicit in the actual practices of artistic creation, interpretation, evaluation, and commodification. Aesthetic theory is treated as descriptive and explanatory, rather than normative: a theory that relates to artworld realities as a semantic theory relates to the fragments of natural language it seeks to describe. Robert Kraut examines emotional expression, correct interpretation and objectivity in the context of (...) artworld practice, the relevance of jazz to aesthetic theory, and the goals of ontology (artworld and otherwise). He also considers the relation between art and language, the confusions of postmodern relativism, and the relation between artistic/critical practice and aesthetic theory. (shrink)

The article explores the possibility of defining unaided ready-mades as objects of art. It starts from the assumption that Edmund Husserl’s notion of horizon and Arthur Danto’s notion of artworld have similar meanings. Accordingly, it argues that unaided ready-mades are objects of art that appear with unique cultural horizons called artworlds. The aim is to show that the artworld is an external co-determining horizon that is sufficient for determining unaided ready-mades to be artworks.

Jonathan Neufeld proposes a concept of aesthetic disobedience that parallels the political concept of civil disobedience articulated by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice. The artistic transgressions he calls aesthetic disobedience are distinctive in being public and deliberative in their aim to bring about specific changes in accepted artworld norms. We argue that Neufeld has offered us valuable insight into the dynamic and potent nature of art and the artworld; however, we contend that Neufeld errs by constraining (...) aesthetic disobedience to the artworld. Through a reconsideration of the parallel between aesthetic and civil disobedience, we illustrate how aesthetic disobedience is more accurately conceived of in terms of two kinds of acts: artistic and artworld. In addition to artistic disobedience and artworld disobedience, we add a broader and more diverse sort of transgressive aesthetic disobedience. Our aim is to articulate how Neufeld’s account of a kind of disobedience in the artworld that parallels civil disobedience can prove even more generative. (shrink)

This chapter presents the meeting points and conflicts between Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art and George Dickie’s avowedly succeeding theory. Its focus is on the internalist-externalist debate on the ontology of the artwork as created and perceived within the artworld. It shows that both Danto and Dickie developed anti-formalist theories, that contributed to the demise of aesthetic modernism. Inverting the formalist distinction between internal and external properties of the artwork, they classified the sensuous properties of the artwork as secondary (...) in its essence and identity. Accordingly, Danto and Dickie’s definitions of art emerged from the challenge “to be consistent with art appearing in every possible way.” Both negated the Neo-Wittgensteinians’s proposal to forgo the project of defining art and found the then-new pluralism to be revealing of the essence of art, directing philosophy to art’s nonexhibited infrastructure – beyond the reach of the eye. Across from this, the chapter presents their opposing ideas as revealed through different analyses of the concept of the “artworld”: as an intellectual sphere by Danto versus an institutional one by Dickie. Danto’s internalist/intentionalist ontology begins with the mental and stretches to its embodying material. Opposing it, Dickie’s externalist ontology points to social practices as constituting the artwork, which is attributed with the status of “arthood” by agents in its social sphere. Accordingly, I claim, Danto’s ontology is more versatile than Dickie’s. -/- . (shrink)

“The contemporary” is a phrase in frequent use in artworld discourse as a placeholder term for broader, world-picturing concepts such as “the contemporary condition” or “contemporaneity”. Brief references to key texts by philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, and Peter Osborne often tend to suffice as indicating the outer limits of theoretical discussion. In an attempt to add some depth to the discourse, this paper outlines my approach to these questions, then explores in some detail what these three (...) theorists have had to say in recent years about contemporaneity in general and contemporary art in particular, and about the links between both. It also examines key essays by Jean-Luc Nancy, Néstor García Canclini, as well as the artist-theorist Jean-Phillipe Antoine, each of whom have contributed significantly to these debates. The analysis moves from Agamben’s poetic evocation of “contemporariness” as a Nietzschean experience of “untimeliness” in relation to one’s times, through Nancy’s emphasis on art’s constant recursion to its origins, Rancière’s attribution of dissensus to the current regime of art, Osborne’s insistence on contemporary art’s “post-conceptual” character, to Canclini’s preference for a “post-autonomous” art, which captures the world at the point of its coming into being. I conclude by echoing Antoine’s call for artists and others to think historically, to “knit together a specific variety of times”, a task that is especially pressing when presentist immanence strives to encompasses everything. (shrink)

Non c’è alcun dubbio, Leibniz si sbagliava: non viviamo nel migliore dei mondi possibili. In passato, l’arte perlomeno forniva all’uomo consolazione sotto forma di opere che, con la loro bellezza, profondità e inventività, suggerivano vie d’uscita dalla realtà o dischiudevano nuovi orizzonti. Ma ai nostri giorni, non ci è più possibile trovare conforto nell’arte, specie se ci immergiamo nel mondo delle arti visive, dove a dominare incontrastate il mercato, a ricevere le più entusiastiche recensioni critiche e a stimolare l’interesse dei (...) filosofi sono opere davvero povere d’immaginazione formale e, conseguentemente, di contenuto incarnato. Basti pensare ai teschi tempestati di diamanti di Damien Hirst, ai bambini-manichini appesi da Cattelan a un albero di Porta Ticinese a Milano, ai cani di palloncini di Jeffrey Koons, o al Terzo Paradiso di Pistoletto. Cosa possono fare gli studiosi di estetica per invertire la rotta, per rendere il nostro mondo, se non il migliore dei mondi possibili, per lo meno artisticamente più allettante di quello odierno? La risposta la si potrà trovare nella messa a punto di una definizione estetica dell’arte e di un perfezionamento dei suoi criteri di classificazione, che sono anche norme di valutazione. (shrink)

Most art is made by people with a well-developed concept of art and who are familiar with its forms and genres as well as with the informal institutions of its presentation and reception. This is reflected in philosophers’ proposed definitions. The earliest artworks were made by people who lacked the concept and in a context that does not resemble the art traditions of established societies, however. An adequate definition must accommodate their efforts. The result is a complex, hybrid definition: something (...) is art (a) if it shows excellence of skill and achievement in realizing significant aesthetic goals, and either doing so is its primary, identifying function or doing so makes a vital contribution to the realization of its primary, identifying function, or (b) if it falls under an art genre or art form established and publicly recognized within an art tradition, or (c) if it is intended by its maker/presenter to be art and its maker/presenter does what is necessary and appropriate to realizing that intention. Meanwhile, artworlds—historically developed traditions of works, genres, theories, criticism, conventions for presentation, and so on—play a crucial but implicit role in (b) and (c). They are to be characterized in terms of their origins. (shrink)

Contemporary theories of institutions as clusters of stable solutions to recurrent coordination problems can illuminate and explain some unresolved difficulties and problems adhering to institutional definitions of art initiated by George Dickie and Arthur Danto. Their account of what confers upon objects their institutional character does not fit well with current work on institutions and social ontology. The claim that “the artworld” confers the status of “art” onto objects remains utterly mysterious. The “artworld” is a generic notion that (...) designates a sphere of human activity that involves practices that create goals that have led to the emergence of formal and informal institutions. But those institutions, rather than magically “creating” objects subjected to esthetic appreciation, merely solve familiar and ubiquitous coordination problems created by artistic activity in ways other institutions in other areas solve similar and/or analogous coordination problems. (shrink)

This article considers the extent to which insights from the philosophy of art can assist copyright law in identifying the author or authors of works to which many have contributed. In doing so, it looks to institutional theories of art, which go beyond a simple bifurcation of ‘author’ and ‘work’, and focus instead on broader determinants of an art work’s production, such as the ‘artworld’. It puts forward a framework focusing on three components of authorship supported by these theories: (...) role, authority and intention. The paper then draws attention to some important challenges that this framework raises for copyright law’s joint authorship doctrine in the UK and USA, and suggests some ways in which copyright law might be reformed, so as to allow copyright to retain its own benchmarks while also bringing conceptions of authorship in law and art closer together. (shrink)

The author reviews Bucking the Artworld Tide: Reflections on Art, Pseudo Art, Art Education & Theory, a collection of essays on the visual arts by Michelle Marder Kamhi. In her view, Kamhi presents a compelling case against the modernist and postmodernist inventions that have come to dominate the artworld since the early twentieth century—from abstract work to “conceptual art.” Citing countless paintings, sculptures, and works of purported art, these essays offer sparkling nuggets of insight into what art is, (...) what it is not, and why. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore some parallels and dissimilarities between aesthetic appreciation that takes as its focus art objects and that which focuses on natural objects. I cover three areas. The first deals with general approach, whether a paradigm of engagement is more appropriate to environmental aesthetics than one of detachment and disinterest. The second theme is about preservation and whether the appropriate model is static or dynamic. The final theme is about environmental criticism and the application of aesthetic theory (...) to arguments for preservation. (shrink)

This work proposes a coevolutionary theory of aesthetics that encompasses both biotic and human arts. Anthropocentric perspectives in aesthetics prevent the recognition of the ontological complexity of the aesthetics of nature, and the aesthetic agency of many non-human organisms. The process of evaluative coevolution is shared by all biotic advertisements. I propose that art consists of a form of communication that coevolves with its own evaluation. Art and art history are population phenomena. I expand Arthur Danto’s Artworld concept to (...) any aesthetic population of producers and evaluators. Current concepts of art cannot exclusively circumscribe the human arts from many forms of non-human biotic art. Without assuming an arbitrarily anthropocentric perspective, any concept of art will need to engage with biodiversity, and either recognize many instances of biotic advertisements as art, or exclude some instances of human art. Coevolutionary aesthetic theory provides a heuristic account of aesthetic change in both human and biotic artworlds, including the coevolutionary origin of aesthetic properties and aesthetic value within artworlds. Restructuring aesthetics, art criticism, and art history without human beings at the organizing centers of these disciplines stimulate new progress in our understanding of art, and the unique human contributions to aesthetics and aesthetic diversity. (shrink)

Socially engaged art presents social situations to be understood, experienced, and evaluated as works of art while they simultaneously retain everyday non-art functionality. This article begins with an account of the definitional and evaluative concerns that socially engaged art engenders, outlining the debates around the relative importance of ethical and aesthetic values that result from this unsettled relationship between art and non-art. Based on this account, I argue that all socially engaged art requires successful performative bids that declare the work (...) to be art and that it is possible to identify the felicity conditions in which these bids are likely to be successful, as well as the perlocutionary effects that occur when a situation is categorized as art. I apply this analytic framework in a discussion and comparison of pieces by Santiago Sierra and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, demonstrating how this framework facilitates assessments that account for the works as art, while interrogating and evaluating the ethics of their categorization as art. (shrink)

The topic of this article is the relationship of street art to both the street and the artworld. I take it as significant that philosophers have turned their attention to “street art” and not, say, “urban outdoor art” or “site-specific art in urban settings.” The “street” in street art seems to imply more than a location or geographic modifier. I consider the further significance of the “street” in street art, and the view, argued or assumed, of the street when (...) philosophers discuss street art. My second target in this article is what I have called the “discontinuity thesis.” This is the idea, defended or assumed in some of the most important philosophical writing about street art, that street art represents a radical break with the artworld and is “antithetical” to it. I argue that the discontinuity thesis is mistaken, and that to understand the larger institutional context of street art we must examine the sociology of artworlds. Street art has followed a familiar process and pioneering street artists are best seen as “mavericks” in Howard Becker’s sense. I argue that seeing street artists in this way can help better understand and appreciate their work. (shrink)

Supposing that talk of a distinctively artistic type of value is warranted, what separates it from other sorts of value? Any plausible answer must explain both what is of value and what is artistic about artistically valuable properties. Flaws with extant accounts stem from neglect of one component or the other; the account offered here, based on careful attention to actual art-critical practices, brings both together. The “value” component depends on the capacity of artworks to provide subjectively valuable experiences, while (...) the “artistic” component relies on the specific norms constitutive of artworld institutions. Understanding artistic value in this way allows for progress on several persistent problems, including the ethical value of art, relativism in artistic value, and the proper boundaries of philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

This article explores a concept of artistic transgression I call aesthetic disobedience that runs parallel to the political concept of civil disobedience. Acts of civil disobedience break some law in order to publicly draw attention to and recommend the reform of a conflict between the commitments of a legal system and some shared commitments of a community. Likewise, acts of aesthetic disobedience break some entrenched artworld norm in order to publicly draw attention to and recommend the reform of a (...) conflict between artworld commitments and some shared commitments of a community. Considering artistic transgressions under the concept of aesthetic disobedience highlights often-overlooked features of modern artworld practices. Most significantly, it draws attention to the deliberative participation of a wide variety of citizens of the artworld, including not just artists and performers but also members of audiences, in the transformation of the rules and boundaries of the artworld itself. (shrink)

In Art Incorporated, you seek to debunk the myth of the artworld as autonomous of the market forces of global capitalism. Instead, you argue, works of art have become yet another commodity. However, one could say that works of art have always been commodities as well as objects of aesthetic appreciation. What makes the problem pertinent now, in the age of artists like Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst?

This article owes a lot to Arthur C. Danto's heuristic writings about the Artworld, which have shown us, that the ontological status of works of art is, at least when we discuss some current, maybe even dominating trends in contemporary art, dependent on our more or less philosophical interpretations of them. The effects of the Dantoan atmosphere of theory and art historical consciousness are, still, decisive for just some contemporary art. Danto's interest in the philosophical side of contemporary art (...) makes his philosophy of art exclusive in relation to art which is less philosophically appealing than the readymade tradition, to the extent that Danto did not, for a long time, even try to incorporate problems of beauty, aesthetic experience, and formal qualities, to his theory of the Artworld. (Opening paragraph.). (shrink)

Danto, A. The artworld.--Dickie, G. What is art?--Margolis, J. Works of art are physically embodied and culturally emergent entities.--Kjørup, S. Art broadly and wholly conceived.--Meyer, L. B. Forgery and the anthropology of art.--Brunius, T. Theory and ideologies in aesthetics.--Tilghman, B. R. Artistic puzzlement.--Binkley, T. Deciding about art.--Alexander, H. G. On defining in aesthetics.--Iseminger, G. Appreciation, the artworld, and the aesthetic.--Glickman, J. Creativity in the arts.--Sclafani, R. The theory of art.--Lyas, C. Danto and Dickie on art.--Beardsley, M. C. Is (...) art essentially institutional? (shrink)

Art and the aesthetic -- Traditional aestheticism -- A new aestheticism -- Aesthetic communication -- The artworld and the practice of art -- The artifactual concept of function -- Art as an aesthetic practice -- Artistic value as aesthetic.

In this essay I explore the relationship of sport to art. I do not intend to argue that sport is one of the arts. I will rather argue that sport and art have a commonality, in that both are alienated philosophy. This is to propose – in an argument that has its roots in Hegel's aesthetics – that sport and art may both be interpreted as a way of reflecting upon metaphysical and normative issues, albeit in media that are alien (...) to philosophy's conceptual language. The medium of art is the manipulation of sensuous materials, such as stone, paint, or sound. The medium of sport is the pursuit of a physical challenge, at which the athlete may fail. I will develop this argument by borrowing from the philosophy of art of Arthur C. Danto. In particular, I will suggest that a parallel to his concept of ‘artworld’ can be seen in a ‘sportworld’. As the artworld is an ‘atmosphere of theory’ and a ‘knowledge of history’ through which an event is interpreted and thereby constituted as art, so a sportworld is the atmosphere of theory through which an event is constituted as sport. I will argue that much of the existing discussion of the relationship between sport and art is grounded in an ill-conceived aesthetics. In order to be appreciated and appropriately interpreted, sport must be understood within a modernist aesthetics and hermeneutics. As such, the core issue of an aesthetics of sport is not that of beauty, but rather of the meaning of the sport, and what I shall call the capacity of sport to ‘speak as a world’ – to bring to consciousness through play the taken-for-granted cultural conditions through which our social lives are constituted, and within which metaphysical and normative problems are articulated. I will propose that the hermeneutics of music provides a useful model for the interpretation of sport. (shrink)

Mr. Danto argues that recent developments in the artworld, in particular the production of works of art that cannot be told from ordinary things, make urgent the need for a new theory of art and make plain the factors such a theory can and cannot involve. In the course of constructing such a theory, he seeks to demonstrate the relationship between philosophy and art, as well as the connections that hold between art and social institutions and art history. The (...) book distinguishes what belongs to artistic theory from what has traditionally been confused with it, namely aesthetic theory and offers as well a systematic account of metaphor, expression, and style, together with an original account 0f artistic representation. A wealth of examples, drawn especially from recent and contemporary art, illuminate the argument. (shrink)

According to Arthur Danto, post-modern or post-historical art began when artists like Andy Warhol collapsed the Modern distinction between art and everyday life by bringing “the everyday” into the artworld. I begin by pointing out that there is another way to collapse this distinction: bring art out of the artworld and into everyday life. An especially effective way of doing this is to make street art, which, I argue, is art whose meaning depends on its use of the (...) street. I defend this definition and show how it handles graffiti and public art. (shrink)

Considers original streaming TV, popular fiction, artworld trends, and academic theories and explains the recent obsession with immersion, authenticity, and total transparency.

A notion of "good work," derived from William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement but also part of a wider tradition in philosophy (associated with pragmatism and Everyday Aesthetics) understanding the global significance of, and opportunities for, aesthetic experience, grounds both art making and appreciation in the organization of labor generally. Only good work, which can be characterized as "authentic" or as unalienated conditions of production and reception, allows the arts to thrive. While Arts and Crafts sometimes promotes a (...) limited aesthetic (both theoretically and stylistically) around handicraft, a good-work aesthetic theory encompasses a broader range of working methods and materials without compromising the core Arts and Crafts "authenticity" principles of control over production and creative autonomy. Moreover, it gives weight to the equally important role of spectators by linking their aesthetic education to good work in their working lives and, in turn, to the success of artworks. The theory delivers insights into the nature of works as collaborative projects and the developmental courses, participatory and esoteric, open to the arts generally; and it is a robust counter to anti-aestheticism and intellectualism in the theory and practice of the arts. William Morris and the artist-craftsmen and -women of the Arts and Crafts Movement have a theory of art and the aesthetic that has an importance beyond their own artistic work and its achievements. Morris delivered lectures on the arts in many British towns and cities in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s; these were published as Hopes and Fears for Art and later as a volume of his collected works.1 The movement codified and publicized its practices through various societies and organizations like the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society and Charles Ashbee's Guild and School of Handicraft, each producing its own literature, which ranged from practical handbooks to political exhortations. Later, William Lethaby's lectures, often to organizations that were part of the movement, were published as Form in Civilisation.2 To that extent, then, a Morrisian or Arts and Crafts aesthetic theory has to be constructed from sources that were necessarily rhetorical, as well as being practical and theoretic. Morris and Lethaby were explicitly aiming to influence current artistic practice through their lectures to audiences usually composed of artists, architects, civic leaders, and so on (and this no doubt at least partly accounts for their neglect in philosophical aesthetics). Still, I will argue that this reconstructed theory is sufficiently coherent and sophisticated to be worth investigating for its relevance to contemporary debates in analytic aesthetics, particularly against those arguing for art as a nonaesthetic activity (of which the seminal text remains Arthur Danto's "The Artworld"), and for its arguments for art's connections (as an activity of both making and experiencing artworks) with other life experiences.3 In these respects, then, in the history of aesthetics it is a forerunner of, or at least has intellectual associations with, pragmatist aesthetics (yet it is often unacknowledged within that paradigm, so neither Dewey's Art as Experience nor the more recent pragmatist works by Richard Shusterman cite Morris) and shares ground associated with the Everyday Aesthetics movement.4In arguing for the theoretic and historic significance of a Morrisian aesthetic, I take encouragement and a lead from Paul Guyer's recent acknowledgement of the neglect of Morris in accounts of the history of philosophical aesthetics. Guyer names Morris, along with Schiller, Ruskin, and Dewey, as properly understanding the full significance of the distinctive character of aesthetic experience. As Guyer writes, they understood that aesthetic experience is distinctive in its freedom from our most immediate obsessions with purpose and utility, but that the freedom it thereby allows us is not a freedom for the simple contemplation of beauty with no further concerns or implications, but rather a freedom to develop our imaginative and cognitive capacities, to gain knowledge of ourselves and others, and to imagine new ways of life, a freedom that is valued not simply for its own sake but also because of the benefits the developments of these capacities can bring to the rest of our lives. (shrink)

Artworks frequently are the objects of multiple and apparently conflicting aesthetic judgements. This commonplace of the artworld poses a challenge for realist metaphysics, because to assert conflicting judgements of an artwork seems to amount to asserting p & p. Critical pluralism is an ever-more frequently invoked solution to this impasse. What its varieties share in common is the claim that the disagreement between judgements is only an apparent one. I argue, however, that critical pluralism masquerades either as relativism or (...) anti-realism. I examine a number of pluralist proposals, including one that attempts to reconcile pluralism with critical monism, and argue that they are inadequate to their advertised task. Finally, I sketch a solution employing dialetheic logic that captures both intuitions about these cases: that sometimes, judgements about artworks can truly conflict and jointly be true. (shrink)

What determines whether an object is an artwork? In this paper I consider what I will call ‘social’ theories of art, according to which the arthood of objects depends in some way on the art-related social practices that we have. Though such a dependence claim is plausible in principle, social theories of art tend to unpack the determining link between artworks and social practices in terms of intentional relations between the objects in question and the people involved in the relevant (...) practices. This intentionalism has unappealing upshots. Drawing on two-dimensional approaches in social ontology, I show how social theories of art can be done differently, improving their prospects. (shrink)

"Question: What do all works of art have in common? Answer: They are all products of a major cultural institution called "The Artworld." Question: Is this what makes them art? Answer: Yes. The New Institutional Theory of Art is a different kind of theory about art. The theory is capable of explaining how it is that a urinal offered up by Marcel Duchamp, and a statue of Moses offered up by Michelangelo, are both works of art, and under precisely (...) the same terms. Together with this, the theory can also explain why it is that Michelangelo's work is magnificent, whereas Duchamp's is "interesting," at best. By focusing not on the works of art themselves, but rather upon the complex social-cultural context of their creation and presentation, the New Institutional Theory provides fresh, clear and powerful explanations of the very inner workings of Art, writ large. The artists, the public, the issues, the techniques, the bothers and the worries are all illuminated for the reader to gain true insight into the actual logic of Art. This book is intended for all readers, professionals and non-professionals alike.". (shrink)

The premise of this article is straightforward: cheap art as a method and movement, though often ignored in the aesthetics literature, is ideally suited for creative activism. To understand this claim, we must have a working definition of the term "cheap art", which I develop in the first section. In doing so, I focus on four features of cheap art, united by the core idea of anti-elitism, that make it well suited to support creative activism: (1) Cheap art is light, (...) quick, sloppy, and easy to do. (2) Cheap art is made from cheap materials. (3) Cheap art rejects the idea of art as a business created for the artworld elite and aims instead to provide art of the people and for the people. (4) Cheap art challenges its audience members rather than seeking to placate or soothe them. After a brief defense of the claim that cheap art is in fact art, I discuss each aspect in detail, emphasizing its advantages for creative activism. I close with two suggestions for evaluating cheap art, which I argue can be extended to creative activism more broadly. (shrink)

In response to globalization, is there to be a single, homogeneous set of aesthetic values governing the production and consumption of art? I focus on a newcomer to globalized contemporary art, China, and argue that artworld art is far from the only art currently being produced. I describe four connected kinds of art currently made in China: Modernist, traditional, and avant-garde, which are artworld art, and mass commercial, which is not. Practices in all four conform to expectations globally (...) that Chinese art of all kinds should exemplify imitation, emulation, and copying. Such conformity entails what Winnie Wong has termed ‘staging Chineseness’. I conclude with an examination of this process in two recent exhibitions before proposing that a proliferation of a variety of values is unavoidable while contemporary artworld practitioners continue to introduce local concerns, and while the self-claimed high status of artworld art is progressively challenged by the vitality worldwide of non-artworld art. While some of these values are resistant to Western globalizing homogenization, others conform to it. (shrink)