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Art, definition of

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-M006-2
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Published
2011
DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-M006-2
Version: v2,  Published online: 2011
Retrieved March 29, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/art-definition-of/v-2

4. Recursive definitions

Weitz’s suggestion that something is a work of art in virtue of its resemblance to other (prior) works of art indirectly acknowledges the historicist character of art-making. Artists frequently draw on, refer to or react against their predecessors. Moreover, what constitutes art and what can be done within art depends on what has been art and what has been done within art in the past; the art of the distant past of a culture might differ in many respects from the art of its present, despite the continuity of the process that links one to the other. The historicist character of art has received growing recognition within philosophical aesthetics since the 1950s; more recent attempts at a definition reflect this.

In crude outline, a historicist definition of art has two parts. The first explains how the first works in history came to be art – perhaps by stipulation, or because they served an appropriate function. The second, recursive part has the general form: ‘Something is an art work if it stands in an appropriate relation to art that predates it.’ The ‘appropriate relation’ is characterized in various ways. A suitably historicized functionalist definition, for example, would construe the relation as holding between the (intended, central, significant) function of the present candidate and the (intended, central, significant) functions of past works. A suitably historicized proceduralist definition would construe the relation as holding between the procedures applied to the present candidate and the procedures used successfully in conferring art-status on prior works. (We have already noted the historicist aspect given to functionalism by Stecker. The institutional theory is ripe for and would be improved by a similar treatment.)

Some recent historicist definitions conceive the defining relation neither in terms of function nor procedure. Jerrold Levinson (1979) sees the defining relation in the intended treatment of the candidate – a work of art is a thing that has been ‘seriously intended for regard-as-a-work-of-art’; that is, regard (meaning treatment, taking, engagement with or approach) in any way preexisting works of art are or were correctly regarded. James Carney (1991) characterizes the defining relation as a shared style: an object is a work of art if and only if it can be linked by those suitably informed, along one or more various specific dimensions, to a past or present general style or styles exhibited by prior works of art. Noël Carroll (1993) takes the unifying relation to be that of narrative continuity, though he denies offering this as a definition. In his view, something is an art work if it can be linked to preceding art-making practices and contexts by a narrative committed to historical accuracy that reveals the piece as an intelligible outcome of recognizable modes of thinking and making of a sort already commonly adjudged to be artistic. If there is dispute about the artistic nature of the context from which the candidate work arose, then this is to be settled by appeal to a metanarrative that links that context with acknowledged artworld practices, procedures and processes.

The detail of each of these theories might be examined critically. For instance, one might ask if Levinson can distinguish the art-making intention from other intentions that similarly invite a regard of something as if it were art without aiming, directly or indirectly, at making that thing art; and one might consider whether Carney could analyse the notion of artistic style, or Carroll could develop the relevant notion of continuity in narrative, without begging the definitional question. (Of course, a theorist might avoid such queries by further generalizing the recursive part of the definition – something is a work of art if and only if it stands in the appropriate art-creating relation to previous works. This approach meets these objections, though, only by emptying the definition of content.)

Instead of pursuing such matters here we may mention one concern about the general strategy. It seems that there is more than one tradition of art-making and appreciation; also, what is possible at a given time within one tradition might not be possible at the same time, or at any time, in others. Recursive definitions explain how something is art by relating it in the appropriate way to a given tradition. Such definitions will be at best incomplete, because so much of the explanatory burden is carried by the implicit, undefined notion of an artistic tradition. If something is a work of art within only one of many possible traditions, then the notion of art is not fully explicated until a basis is provided for distinguishing traditions of art from other historically continuous, cultural processes or practices and, also, for individuating one artistic tradition from another.

Two ways of attempting to dismiss this point seem to fail. First, it would be both false and offensive to confine art to a single cultural tradition, such as that arising from western Europe, and to dismiss other traditions merely as generating nonart that serves functions similar to those of art. And even if we allow for the many human artistic traditions, it might be implausible to reject the possibility of nonhuman, nonterrestrial art. Second, it would be an error to suggest that the proposed definition allows that something is a work of art if it relates appropriately to any pieces in any tradition of art-making, for the work then becomes decontextualized. This is unconvincing because it implies that, if something could become art within one tradition, it could become art in any; if Duchamp could make a work of art of a urinal in the USA, a Chinese artist might have done the same in China. Rather than emphasizing that the art status of a piece depends on the piece’s historico-cultural location, this approach treats the place of the piece in its given tradition as irrelevant to its status as art.

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Citing this article:
Davies, Stephen. Recursive definitions. Art, definition of, 2011, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-M006-2. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/art-definition-of/v-2/sections/recursive-definitions.
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