Art?

Last week I took time off to visit one of the biggest local "art" events: Art HK 11 which I found extremely enjoyable and shall write about some of the works I found interesting later when I got a little more time to organize the photos I had taken there. I saw an enormous  number of works of vastly different characters, styles and employing different kinds of concepts and materials including paint, ink, paper, wood, glass, metal, plastic, string, fibre glass, gun powder and light! Whilst watching the exhibits, two questions kept popping up in my mind, "What exactly is art? What is the purpose of art, if any?" I tried to find out. I looked it up in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Here's what I found.

According to the author, Thomas Adajian, art is controversial! There is debate even on whether or not art can be defined or if so, whether it is useful to do so since the 1950's ( Peter Kivy, Philosophies of the Arts
1997, and Kendall Walton,“Aesthetics—What?, Why?, and
Wherefore?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65:
147–162. 2007) . Whether or not it can usefully be done, there is little doubt that various contemporary definitions of art do exist and they fall into two approximate groups: one focuses on "art's
institutional features, emphasizing the way art changes over time, such that modern works  appear to break radically with all traditional art,
and the way artworks depend on their 
relations to art history, art genres" etc. and the other which is less conventionalist and which "makes use of a broader, more
traditional concept of aesthetic properties that includes more than
art-relational ones, and focuses on art's pan-cultural and
trans-historical characteristics".

No matter what the truth may be, Adajian thinks that there are some "constraints" on the definition of Art: all definitions must deal with the following: (i) artworks (artifacts or performances)
purposely intended to emphasize aesthetic interest, often non-utilitarian,
exist in virtually every known human culture; (ii) such works  and
the relevant associated traditions , might exist in other possible worlds; (iii)
such works  may or may not have non-aesthetic (ceremonial or religious
or propagandistic) functions not; (iv)
traditionally, artworks are deliberately given esthetic, usually perceptual, qualities often transcending most everyday objects (v)new genres and art-forms
may develop, artistic taste may evolve, esthetic understandings and experience may change; (vi) certain institutions focusing on esthetic artifacts and performances without any practical, ceremonial or religious function may exist in some cultures but not in others (vii) such institutions
sometimes classify entities apparently lacking aesthetic interest with
entities having a high degree of aesthetic interest. Evidently, some of these facts are culture-specific, and others are
more universal.

There are also two more general constraints on definitions of art:

1. Since it is not philosophically helpful to say that something is inexplicable and assuming that it is important to extend one's definition of what constitutes "art" as new artworks appear, still it is unacceptable to merely give a series of "enumerative definitions" without giving any principles which may explain why
some artworks are on the list  and not others because that may give one no clue to the
next or general case. Thus Tarski's list-like definition of truth, for example, is often criticized as unenlightening because it merely enumerates primitive denotations). (Michael Devitt, 2001, “The Metaphysics of Truth,” in
Michael Lynch (ed.), The Nature of Truth. Cambridge: MIT
Press, pp. 579-611.; Davidson,
2005).)

2. Given that most classes outside of mathematics are
vague, and that the existence of borderline cases is characteristic of
vague classes, definitions that take the class of artworks to have
borderline cases are preferable to definitions that don't.
(Stephen Davies Definitions of Art 1991 and The Philosophy of Art, 2006, Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of
Art, 2005)

Traditional definitions of artworks focus on either its representative (mimetic) (Aristotle), expressive (Bernadetto Croce, R. G. Collingwood) or exploration of formal
properties.(Kant, Roger Fry and Clive Bell). But it is doubtful if possessing representational, expressive, and formal properties alone are sufficient because instruction manuals are
representational but not typically artworks, human faces and gestures may be expressive without being works of art, and neither natural
objects nor artifacts produced for the homeliest utilitarian purposes may have formal properties without being artworks. Definitions of art may thus be closely related to how we know something (epistemology), the nature of an object or entity (ontology) how and why we attribute value to things (value theory) and how we perceive and think (philosophy of mind). It is therefore both difficult and somewhat misleading to
extract them and consider each of these three elements in isolation. To illustrate this point, let us take as examples two historically influential definitions of art offered by great
philosophers:

1. In the Republic and elsewhere, Plato says that the arts are representational, or
mimetic (imitative).
Artworks are ontologically dependent on, and inferior to,
ordinary physical objects, which in turn are ontologically dependent
on, and inferior to, what Plato thinks is  most real, the non-physical Forms. Artworks are thus an imitation of an imitation of something which is considered "real" and thus cannot give us "true knowledge" nor do their makers  work from knowledge. Because
artworks engage" an unstable, lower part of the soul", art should be
subservient to moral realities, which, along with truth, are more
metaphysically fundamental and hence more humanly important than
beauty. For Plato, beauty does  not  belong exclusively to the arts. In his view, beauty is something metaphysical: we may non-perceptually know a certain Form of Beauty which is more closely related to the erotic
than to the arts.
2. Kant defines art as “a kind of
representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end,
nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable
communication.” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews
translation, section 44 2000). This definition includes representational, expressive and formalist elements but forms merely a small part of his much broader discussion of aesthetic judgment and
teleology in a "hugely
ambitious philosophical structure that attempts...to account
for, and work out the relationships between, scientific knowledge,
morality, and religious faith."

Many philosophers have argued, following Wittgenstein's
famous remarks about games (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 1953), that art by its nature, is too diverse to admit of the
unification that a satisfactory definition strives for, and even if there were such a unifying "definition" of art, it is inadvisable to adopt the same because that would stifle artistic creativity. Thus  Morris Weitz, advocates what he calls an "Open Concept Argument" i.e. "any concept is
open if a case can be imagined which would call for some sort of
decision on our part to extend the use of the concept to cover it, or
to close the concept and invent a new one to deal with the new case". To him, all open concepts are indefinable since there are cases calling for a
decision about whether to extend or close the concept of art. (Weitz, “The Role of Theory in
Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15: 27-35 1956 ). But others argue that the fact that works of art change over time does not, in general, mean that no identity over
time can be preserved and that one may decide to expand a concept in a principled rather
than capricious way and hence that nothing bars a definition of art from
incorporating a novelty requirement.

Others may argue that the
concepts manifested or contained in most definitions of art
e.g. expressiveness, form etc. are embedded in general philosophical theories
which incorporate traditional metaphysics and epistemology, which themselves demonstrate merely language gone wild and definitions of art may thus also share in the analogous conceptual confusions of traditional
philosophy (Benjamin Tilghman, But Is It Art? 1984 ).

Still others follow a historical argument exemplified by the influential study by the historian of philosophy
Paul Kristeller,( “The Modern System of the
Arts,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1951 12:
496–527) who argued that "the modern system of the five
major arts like painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music, which underlies all modern aesthetics is of comparatively
recent origin and did not assume definite shape before the 18th century, although it had many ingredients which go back to classical,
mediaeval, and Renaissance thought." They argue that since that list of five arts is
somewhat arbitrary and since even those five do not share a single
common nature, but rather are united, at best, only by several
overlapping features, and since the number of art forms has increased
since the 18th century, it is inevitable that our present concept of art may differ from that of the 18th century. As a matter of historical fact, there simply is no stable
definiendum for a definition of art to capture.

A fourth argument disputes whether it is plausible to adopt a definition of art which specifies individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a thing to
be an artwork because in actual fact, human beings do not always categorize things in terms of
necessary and sufficient conditions. In fact, cognitive science tells us that concepts often do mirror the way humans categorize things ie. in terms of how close a particular artwork is similar to certain prototypes (or exemplars), and not in
terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Therefore a
definition of art in terms of individually necessary and jointly
sufficient conditions is misguided and not likely to succeed.( Jeffrey Dean, 2003 “The Nature of Concepts and the
Definition of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 61: 29-35.) Others argue that  "psychological theories
of concepts like the prototype theory and its relatives can provide at
best an account of how people in fact classify things, but not
an account of correct classifications of extra-psychological
phenomena". Moreover, "prototype theory and other
psychological theories of concepts" are themselves still too controversial to
warrant drawing substantive philosophical inferences therefrom.

To deal with the difficulties of finding a universally acceptable definition of what "art" is, some have urged that we may usefully adopt the Wittgensteinian concept of " family resemblance" in terms of " resemblance-to-a-paradigm" and the "cluster
resemblance"  According to the "resemblance-to-a-paradigm" argument, something is or is
identifiable as, an "artwork" if it resembles, in the right way, certain
paradigm artworks, which possess most although not necessarily all of
art's typical features. Others criticize this view as being too inclusive because things do not
simply resemble each other but resemble the others only in certain respects. If so, since
everything does resemble everything else in one respect or another the proposed definition is not helpful because it is too vague and inclusive but on the other hand, if
the relevant resemblances are specified, then those specified similarities will in effect amount to either a necessary or
sufficient condition for being an artwork and we are back to square one. The family resemblance
view also raises questions about what should constitute the relevant criteria for being admitted to the class "artwork" and how we should decide on the "unity of the
class of paradigm" To Adajian, if we cannot explain why some items but not others are included in the "list of paradigm works", it seems
"explanatorily deficient... But if it includes a principle that governs
membership on the list, or if expertise is required to constitute the
list, then the principle, or whatever properties the experts'
judgments track, seem to be doing the philosophical work"!

Then there is what has been called a "cluster version of the family resemblance" by such philosophers as Berys Gaut (“The Cluster Account of Art,” in  Noel Carroll  (ed.) Theories of Art Today 2000, pp. 25-45.), Ellen Dissanayake (What is Art For? 1990,
Denis Dutton, 2006, “A Naturalist Definition of Art,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64: 367–377.). They typically list out a number of characteristics, none of which is considered a necessary condition for being a work of art, but
which jointly are considered as sufficient for being classified as "a work of art" and such
that at least one proper subset thereof is sufficient for being a work
of art. The lists offered by different philosophers vary and may overlap considerably. Examples from such lists include:

1. it has positive aesthetic properties;

2. it is expressive
of emotion;

3. it is intellectually challenging;

4. it is formally
complex and coherent;

5. it is able to convey complex
meanings;

6. it exhibits an individual point of view;

7. it is original;

8. it requires a high degree of skill in producing the artifact or performance;

9. it falls within an established artistic form;

10. the artist intends to create it as a work of art. (Gaut,
2000)

This view has been criticized on a number of  grounds:

1. The list is in fact equivalent to a long,
complicated, disjunctive but still finite "definition". (Davies, 2006)

2. if the
list of properties is incomplete, as some cluster theorists hold, then
some justification or principle may be needed to extend it

3. the 9th element on the list, belonging
to an established art form, seems to invite, rather than answer,
the definitional question.

4. One wonders if there is
a principle that unites the items on the list. In this regard, Gaut construes aesthetic
properties (possession of which is the first item on the list), very
narrowly, but this is not essential to cluster views. Another cluster
theorist, Dutton, who gives a list that overlaps very significantly
with the one above (which includes representational properties,
expressiveness, creativity, exhibiting a high degree of skill,
belonging to an established artform), argues that "aesthetic properties" should be excluded because it is precisely the combination of the other qualities in the list in relevant work of art which make such a work "aesthetic"
(Dutton, 2006)

Philosophers are always struggling to solve the problem of how to reconcile two kinds of facts: 1. historically and culturally, art has never stopped evolving, yet 2. there may be certain common esthetic features in all "works of art" which may be regarded as universal, ie. transcending time and space, culture and history. But those who regard art as an invention of 18th century Europe
will disagree. (Shiner 2001) Conventionalist definitions take art's
cultural features to be "explanatorily fundamental" and try to capture such the phenomena as revolutionary modern art, the traditional
close connection of art with the aesthetic, the possibility of
autonomous art traditions, etc. in social/historical
terms but non-conventionalist or “functionalist”
definitions reverse this explanatory order, prioritize a concept like the
aesthetic (or some allied concept like the formal, or the expressive)
as basic and aim to explain to for the constantly changing art scene by working that concept
harder, perhaps by  extending it to non-perceptual properties.

The conventionalists deny that art has any essential connection
to so-called aesthetic, formal and expressive
properties or any other type of property taken by traditional definitions
to be essential to art, being strongly influenced by the emergence, in the twentieth century, of artworks that
seem to differ radically from all previous artworks such as the avante-garde
works like Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (an ordinary urinal
which Duchamp exhibited at the Armory Show in Philadelphia in 1915) and
other “ready-mades” – ordinary unaltered objects like
snow-shovels (In Advance of the Broken Arm) and bottle-racks
— conceptual works like Robert Barry's All the things I know
but of which I am not at the moment thinking - 1:36 PM; June 15,
1969, and John Cage's 4''33', which seemed to many philosophers to lack or even, somehow, repudiate, the
traditional properties of art like intended aesthetic interest,
arti-factuality, even perceivability and also by the work of a number
of historically-minded philosophers, who have documented the rise and
development of modern ideas of the fine arts, the individual arts, the
work of art, and the aesthetic like Kristeller, Larry Shiner (The Invention of Art 2001, “Western and Non-Western Concepts of
Art: Universality and Authenticity” in Davies and Sukla (eds.),
Art and Essence, pp. 143-157 2003 ) Carroll, Lydia Goehr The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works,1994) and Kivy.  But even the conventionalist are further divided into two camps:  institutional conventionalist (a synchronic view which holds that a works of art is an artifact created by an artist for presentation to the artworld public) (George Dickie  The Art Circle, 1984) and the historical conventionalist ( which holds a
diachronic view that artworks necessarily stand in an
art-historical relation to some set of earlier artworks).

The views of the the institutional conventionalist is pioneered by Arthur
Danto, (The Transfiguration of the
Commonplace, 1981) a long-time influential
art critic for the Nation. It was him who coined the term
“artworld”, by which he meant “an atmosphere of art
theory.” According to Danto, something is a work of art if and only if (i) it has a subject
(ii) about which it projects some attitude or point of view (has a
style) (iii) by means of rhetorical ellipsis (usually metaphorical)
which ellipsis engages audience participation in filling in what is
missing, and (iv) where the work in question and the interpretations
thereof require an art historical context. (Danto, Carroll) 
It is element (iv) which makes its  definition institutionalist.  According to its most influential advocate, George Dickie, a work of art is an artifact upon
which some person(s) acting on behalf of the artworld has conferred the
status of candidate for appreciation. (Dickie, 1971)
but more recently he thinks that there should be an interlocking
set of five definitions: (1) An artist is a person who participates
with understanding in the making of a work of art. (2) A work of art is
an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public.
(3) A public is a set of persons the members of which are prepared in
some degree to understand an object which is presented to them. (4) The
artworld is the totality of all artworld systems. (5) An artworld
system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an
artist to an artworld public. (Dickie, 1984) Both of such versions have
been widely criticized because some argue that any art created
outside institution is ruled out and that the artworld iself, like any institution, seems capable of
error. In addition, it lacks an
independent account of what makes a context art historical,
and this definition cannot accommodate music. Still others say that its definition of art is viciously circular and also that, given the inter-definition of the key
concepts (artwork, artworld system, artist, artworld public) it lacks
any informative way of distinguishing art institutions systems
from other, structurally similar, social institutions. (David Davies  Art as Performance 2003, p. 248-249, mentions the “commerceworld”) Dickie had previously claimed that anyone who sees herself as a
member of the artworld is a member of the artworld: if so, then unless there are constraints on the kinds of things the
artworld can put forward as artworks or candidate artworks, any entity
can be an artwork (though not all) but Derek Matravers, ( 2000, “The Institutional Theory: A Protean
Creature,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 40:
242–250) has
helpfully distinguished between strong and weak
institutionalism (strong institutionalist holding that there must be some often repeated reason which the art institution always has for
saying that something is a work of art and weak institutionalist
holding that for every work of art, there is some reason or other that
the institution has for saying that it is a work of art.) In particular, weak institutionalism makes one query about art's unity: if nothing unifies the
reasons that the artworld gives for designating entities as artworks,
the unity of the class of artworks may be "vanishingly small"!

Historical definitions hold that all artworks stand in some specified art-historical relation to some specified
earlier artworks and denies any trans-historical
concept of art, or the “artish.” All historical
definitions resemble inductive definitions, claiming that certain entities
belong unconditionally to the class of artworks, while others do so
because they stand in the appropriate relations thereto. According Jerrold Levinson's ( Music, Art, and Metaphysics,
1990) 's intentional-historical
definition, an artwork is a thing that has been seriously intended for
regard in any way preexisting or prior artworks are or were correctly
regarded. Historical functionalism says
that an item is an artwork at time t, where t is not
earlier than the time at which the item is made, if and only if it is
in one of the central art forms at t and is made with the
intention of fulfilling a function art has at t or it is an
artifact that achieves excellence in achieving such a function.
(Stecker 2005) Historical narrativism holds that a
sufficient but not necessary condition for the identification of a
candidate as a work of art is the construction of a true historical
narrative according to which the candidate was created by an artist in
an artistic context with a recognized and live artistic motivation, and
as a result of being so created, it resembles at least one acknowledged
artwork. (Carroll, 1993). It is thus like institutionalism and similar criticism applies to them: 1. historical definitions needs but lack any
informative characterization of art traditions (art functions, artistic
contexts, etc.) and hence of any specific way of informatively distinguishing them
(and likewise art functions, or artistic predecessors) from
non-art traditions (non-art functions, non-artistic
predecessors). 2. Correlatively, non-Western art, or alien, autonomous art of any kind appears to pose a
problem for historical views: any autonomous art tradition or artworks
— terrestrial, extra-terrestrial, or merely possible — causally
isolated from our art tradition, is either ruled out by the definition,
which seems to be a reductio, or included, which concedes the
existence of a supra-historical concept of art. Historical definitions
also require, but do not provide a satisfactory, informative account of
the basis case – the first artworks, or ur-artworks, in the case
of the intentional-historical definitions, or the first or central
art-forms, in the case of historical functionalism.

Are art traditions autonomous? It can be said that anything we would recognize as an art tradition or an
artistic practice would display aesthetic concerns, because
aesthetic concerns have been central from the start, and persisted
centrally for thousands of years, in the Western art tradition. Hence
it is an historical, not a conceptual truth that anything we recognize
as an art practice will centrally involve the aesthetic; it is just
that aesthetic concerns that have always dominated our art tradition.
(Levinson, 2002) The idea here is that if the reason that anything
we'd take to be a Φ-tradition would have Ψ-concerns is
that our Φ-tradition has focused on Ψ-concerns since its
inception, then it is not essential to Φ-traditions that they have
Ψ-concerns, and Φ is a purely historical concept. But according to Adajian, this
principle entails, implausibly, that every concept is purely
historical. He argues: suppose that we find a new civilization
whose inhabitants could predict how the physical world works with great
precision, on the basis of a substantial body of empirically acquired
knowledge that they had accumulated over centuries we can then credit them with having a scientific tradition because our own scientific tradition has since its inception  focused on
explaining thing but still, we can't say that science is a purely
historical concept with no essential connection to explanatory
aims. Other theorists like Davies hold that it is historically necessary
that art begins with the aesthetic, but deny that art's nature is
to be defined in terms of its historical unfolding. (Stephen Davies,1997 “First Art and Art's
Definition,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 35:
19-34) As to the first artworks, or the central art-forms or
functions, some theorists hold that an account of them can only take
the form of an enumeration e.g.  Stecker takes this approach: he says that
the account of what makes something a central art form at a given time
is, at its core, institutional, and that the central artforms can only
be listed. (Stecker  Artworks: Definition, Meaning,
Value 1997, and Aesthetics and the Philosophy of
Art, 2005) It is doubtful if relocating the list
at a different, albeit deeper, level in the definition renders the
definition sufficiently perspicuous.

As opposed to the conventionalist view, the functional definitions of art take some function(s) or intended function(s)
to be definitive of artworks. Here only aesthetic definitions, which
connect art essentially with the aesthetic — aesthetic judgments,
experience, or properties – will be considered. Different
aesthetic definitions incorporate different views of aesthetic
properties and judgments. As noted above, some philosophers lean heavily on a distinction
between aesthetic properties and artistic properties, taking the
former to be perceptually striking qualities that can be directly
perceived in works, without knowledge of their origin and purpose, and
the latter to be relational properties that works possess in virtue of
their relations to art history, art genres, etc. It is also, of
course, possible to hold a less restrictive view of aesthetic
properties, on which aesthetic properties need not be perceptual; on
this broader view, it is unnecessary to deny that abstracta like
mathematical entities and scientific laws possess aesthetic
properties.)

Monroe Beardsley's  definition holds that an artwork is: “either
an arrangement of conditions intended to be capable of affording an
experience with marked aesthetic character or (incidentally) an
arrangement belonging to a class or type of arrangements that is
typically intended to have this capacity.” (The Aesthetic Point of
View 1982, p. 299). Beardsley's conception of aesthetic experience
is Deweyan: aesthetic experiences are experiences that are complete,
unified, intense experiences of the way things appear to us, and are,
moreover, experiences which are controlled by the things experienced.  Nick Zangwill's aesthetic
definition of art says that something is a work of art if and only if
someone had an insight that certain aesthetic properties would be
determined by certain nonaesthetic properties, and for this reason the
thing was intentionally endowed with the aesthetic properties in virtue
of the nonaesthetic properties as envisaged in the insight. (, 1995a, “Groundrules in the Philosophy of
Art,” Philosophy, 70: 533–544.and “The Creative Theory of Art,”
American Philosophical Quarterly, 32: 315-332). Aesthetic properties for Zangwill are those judgments that
are the subject of “verdictive aesthetic judgments”
(judgements of beauty and ugliness) and “substantive aesthetic
judgements”, (e.g., of daintiness, elegance, delicacy, etc. ). The
latter are ways of being beautiful or ugly; aesthetic in virtue of a
special close relation to verdictive judgments, which are subjectively
universal. Other aesthetic definitions are easily obtained, by
grafting on a different account of the aesthetic. For example, one
might define aesthetic properties as those having an evaluative
component, whose perception involves the perception of certain formal
base properties, such as shape and color. (Raphael De Clercq,“The Concept of an Aesthetic
Property,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 60:
167–172. 2002).

Views which combine features of institutional and aesthetic
definitions also exist. Iseminger, for example, builds a definition on
an account of appreciation, on which to appreciate a thing's
being F is to find experiencing its being F to be
valuable in itself, and an account of aesthetic communication (which it
is the function of the artworld to promote). (Gary Iseminger, The Aesthetic Function of
Art 2004). 
Another definition that combines features of institutional and
aesthetic definitions is that of David Davies who adopts
Nelson Goodman's account of symbolic functions that are aesthetic
(a symbol functions aesthetically when it is syntactically dense,
semantically dense, syntactically replete, and characterized by
multiple and complex reference, which he takes to clarify the
conditions under which a practice of making is a practice of
artistic making. (Davies 2004; Goodman Languages of Art: An Approach
to a Theory of Symbols 1968)

Aesthetic definitions have been criticized for being both too narrow
and too broad. They are held to be too narrow because they are unable
to cover influential modern works like Duchamp's ready-mades and
conceptual works like Robert Barry's All the things I know
but of which I am not at the moment thinking - 1:36 PM; June 15,
1969, which appear to lack aesthetic properties. (Duchamp famously
asserted that his urinal, Fountain, was selected for its lack
of aesthetic features.) Aesthetic definitions are held to be too broad
because beautifully designed automobiles, neatly manicured lawns, and
products of commercial design are often created with the intention of
being objects of aesthetic appreciation, but are not artworks.
What about so-called "bad art"? What are we to make of them: are they art or not art? (Dickie, Art and Value, and Stephen Davies,
Philosophy of Art, p. 37).

Are aesthetic definitions meaningful or useful?  Beardsley's view, for example, has
been criticized by Dickie, in particular the former's view of an "aesthetic attitude". (Dickie 1965, Cohen 1973, Kivy
1975) Do esthetic criteria help or hinder our understanding of art? To Adajian, the
less restrictive conception of aesthetic properties discussed which may be based on non-perceptual formal properties, can be
deployed because conceptual works may  have aesthetic
features, much the same way that mathematical entities are often
claimed to. (James Shelley 2003, “The Problem of Non-Perceptual
Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 43: 363-378. 2003, Noel Carroll, 2004, “Non-Perceptual Aesthetic
Properties.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 44:
413-423. 2004) We should certainly distinguish between those esthetic properties which are time-sensitive from those which are not. Certain higher-order aesthetic properties like drama, humor, and irony, which
explains why the works of  Duchamp and
Cage may appeal to some are indeed time-sensitive. (Eddy Zemach Real Beauty 1997) Third, it might be held that it is the
creative act of presenting something that is in the
relevant sense unfamiliar, into a new context, the artworld, which has
aesthetic properties. Finally, some works (Zangwill's “second-order” strategy) like
Duchamp's ready-mades may lack aesthetic properties but they are parasitic upon, because
meant to be considered in the context of, works that do have aesthetic
functions, and hence constitute borderline cases. But one can, perhaps
heroically deny that Duchamp's Fountain is
a work of art. (Beardsley1982).To me, the last point is especially useful in helping us understand so-called "postmodern" art, which is full of examples of collages, mock-imitation and pastiches of the specific works of former famous artists or more generally references to styles of former historical times or even ironic self-reference to the earlier works of the same artists. 

Adajian concludes that conventionalist esthetic definitions may explain modern art well but not art's universality, especially vis a vis non-Western art traditions and institutions (Stephen Davies  2000, “Non-Western Art and Art's
Definition,” in Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art
Today, pp. 199-217; Larry Shiner, 2003, “Western and Non-Western Concepts of
Art: Universality and Authenticity” in Davies and Sukla (eds.),
Art and Essence, pp. 143-157.).nor 
revolutionary modern art. We do need a new esthetic which can cover in a principled way conceptual
and other radical art. If list-like definitions are flawed because
uninformative, then so are conventionalist definitions, whether
institutional or historical. He says, "if the class of artworks is an
arbitrary one, lacking any genuine unity, then enumerative definitions
cannot be faulted for being uninformative: they do all the explaining
that it is possible to do, because they capture all the unity that
there is to capture." Walton has written “It is not at all clear that these words –
‘What is art?’ – express anything like a single
question, to which competing answers are given, or whether philosophers
proposing answers are even engaged in the same debate….
The sheer variety of proposed definitions should give us pause. One
cannot help wondering whether there is any sense in which they are
attempts to … clarify the same cultural practices, or address
the same issue.” (Kendall Walton 1977 “Review of Art and the
Aesthetic,” Philosophical Review, 86: 97-101 and 2007, “Aesthetics—What?, Why?, and
Wherefore?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65:
147–162)

To me, there may well be as many definitions of what art is as there are artists and artistic traditions at different times and places. One other useful definition of art is the one found in Wikipedia which defines art as "the product or process of deliberately arranging items (often with symbolic significance) in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect and encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture and paintings". But traditionally. It says that the term art was used to refer to "any skill or mastery" which conception changed during the Romantic period, when art came to be seen as "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science" but generally, art is made with the intention of stimulating thoughts and emotions.
Fine art means that a skill is being used to express the artist's
creativity, or to engage the audience's aesthetic sensibilities, or to
draw the audience towards consideration of the finer things.
Often, if the skill is being used in a common or practical way, people
will consider it a craft instead of art. If skill is used in a commercial or industrial way, it will be considered commercial art or applied art. Some art followers have argued that the difference between fine art and
applied art has more to do with value judgments made about the art than
any clear definitional difference. Art may be used to to communicate
ideas e.g. in politically, spiritually, or philosophically motivated
art; to create a sense of beauty, to explore the nature of perception; for pleasure; or to generate strong emotions or for itself. The word "art" may  refer to either the a study of creative skill, a process
of using the creative skill, a product of the creative skill, or the
audience's experience with the creative skill. The creative arts are a collection of disciplines (arts) that produce artworks (art
as objects) that are compelled by a personal drive (art as activity)
and echo or reflect a message, mood, or symbolism for the viewer to
interpret (art as experience) and artworks may be defined by purposeful,
creative interpretations of limitless concepts or ideas in order to
communicate something to another person. 

Theodor Adorno says in Esthetic Theory (1970) that "It is now taken for granted that nothing which concerns
art can be taken for granted any more: neither art itself, nor art in
relationship to the whole, nor even the right of art to exist." He may well be right because we have indeed entered the postmodern age in art, in which art seems to want to regard itself as mere "play" and is not afraid to parody even itself!