So today, we're going to discuss the topic of definitions of art or theories of art, as it's sometimes called, and this sort of brings to the fore our question of the third kind. That I distinguished at the beginning of the course that I dealt with in aesthetics, namely questions about the nature of art, metaphysical or ontological questions in the philosophy of art.
And this question arises in a particularly pointed way and interests a lot of people, primarily because of the dramatic developments in art during the 20th century. One example that's often talked about in the literature on this is a famous piece by Marcel Duchamp, French artist, who in 1917 was on the board of a group called the American Society of Independent Artists, which had a very sort of democratic agenda.
And at their founding, they released a statement talking about the need for, as they put it, an exhibition where artists of all schools can exhibit together certain that whatever they send in will be displayed. So Duchamp, who, as I said, was part of the board, or at least one of the leaders of this movement decided to test this commitment to democratic values in art.
And so he anonymously submitted a urinal for display and he paid the submission fee, which they had said would guarantee anybody to have their work displayed, whatever they sent in. He didn't tell anybody, of course, that he was the one who sent this in and he didn't alter the urinal except to sign it with the name are MUT, which I think a number of people have pondered the significance of. But I don't think anybody's ever come to any conclusions as to why he chose that particular pseudonym.
And so this pose a great difficulty to the American Society of Independent Artists. And they debated about whether this work, which Duchamp called Fountain, was actually a work of art and whether they should accept it or not. And in the end, they decided that it was not a work of art. And I believe it was the only submission that they rejected out of hundreds. I think possibly the thousands of submissions that they received. Duchamp resigned in protest at this and found him.
The original was lost. People don't really know what happened to it. I think some people suspect that it was thrown out by the cleaning staff at the gallery. There's all kinds of theories about where it ended up. In 2004, a group of British art critics, I think 500 of them voted Fountain, the most influential artwork of the 20th century. And it was the only artwork that was rejected by the American Society of Independent Artists exhibition on the grounds that it wasn't an artwork at all.
So it's examples like that. And that particular example that poses this question about the nature of works of art. And it's interesting that this is one of the few questions that we'll have discussed in this course that you are not unlikely to read about in the newspapers from time to time, what people want to know is some way of deciding whether these particularly unusual or outlandish artwork's pieces of performance art and so forth actually qualify as works of art.
People get angry, for example, about government funding going to these kinds of projects. That's maybe not so much a worry nowadays, but there is a natural curiosity about what we're supposed to make of these things that have been produced, particularly, as I say, in the 20th century. And philosophers have quite dusa tactically embraced this project of attempting to define art. Definition plays a very important role in the history of philosophy.
So in many Plato's dialogues, the goal is essentially to define justice, for example, or piety, friendship, things like this. And as many of you will be very familiar with, one of the largest research programmes epistemology in the 20th century has been the attempts to analyse knowledge to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for knowing something. And equally, there is a great deal of scepticism about the viability of projects like this.
And it's worth if you know a little bit about the literature on the attempt to analyse knowledge. It's worth thinking about some of the questions that that raises, because, as I say, a great deal of work has been done on that, and a great deal of scepticism, particularly in recent years, has been engendered about the prospects for success at that.
And you may want to look at on the sceptical side of things in that area, Chapter one, Section three of Timothy Williamson's book, Knowledge and Its Limits, and consider whether some of the considerations he raises there might apply to other areas,
such as the attempts to define art. I think it's important at the outset to say a little bit about definitions in general, partly because it's important to get clear in your mind what would count as success in a definition of art, or indeed, what are we interested in when we express a desire for a definition of art? And I say this for a number of reasons. So you might think what we're interested in is a way of accepting or ruling out avant garde works like Fountain as being works of art.
However, if that's what we're interested in, then it's not clear that we're necessarily going to need a definition. We may only need a test for whether something is a work of art. So you remember when we discussed Hume, I said that Hume, at the very least in providing standard of taste, is providing a test for whether something is beautiful. It's not clear that he's attempting to define beauty, but he's presenting a way of determining whether something is beautiful.
And you might think what we want is a test for whether something is a work of art. And for that, it would be enough to show that something like Fountain fails to meet some necessary condition of being an artwork. You would need a full-blown definition of what an artwork is in order to rule it out.
If he could show that Fountain fails to meet a necessary condition of being a work of art, or on the other hand, you could include it by showing that it meets a sufficient condition of being a work of art, but merely having a necessary condition of of being art or a sufficient condition of being art would not of itself necessarily be a definition of art. So that's one point whether what we're interested in is a test of art hould or a definition of art.
Another distinction that I think is worth making here is the distinction between defining something and providing necessary and sufficient conditions of being that thing. It's possible to provide necessary and sufficient conditions of being a thing without defining the word for that thing, that kind of thing, or defining what that thing is, very trivial example. You could say a bachelor is what is not not a bachelor. Very easy.
That is a necessary and sufficient condition of being a bachelor, not not being a bachelor. Somewhat less trivial example, confined to mathematics. And this is on your handouts being triangular, closed, plain rectilinear figure is a necessary and sufficient condition of being a trilateral closed plane rectilinear figure. So being basically three sided figure provided it's close Blaine and rectilinear is necessary and sufficient for getting a three angled closed plane rectilinear figure.
But that's not a definition of being triangular because being trilateral is about having three sides, has to do with three sidedness and being triangular has to do with having three angles. Nevertheless, if one if the one condition obtains, then the other condition obtains. So that's another sort of standard case in which you can have necessary and sufficient conditions without a definition.
This then raises the question, well, what do you need to add to necessary and sufficient conditions in order to have a definition? And I think there's at least two things you might say about this. And which of these you go with will depend on what you consider to be the object of the definition. That is what you think you are defining. You might think that you are defining words or sometimes said defining concepts
bit more useful to talk about analysing concepts than defining concepts. But you get that as well. If that's what you're doing, then presumably you want your definition or phrase in the defining clause of the definition to have the same sense or meaning as the word being defined or to express the same concept as the concept expressed by the first part of the definition. And you might think this is why the definition of this would fail as a definition of parity.
The words triangular parity doesn't have the same meaning as the word. Try laterality. Nor does it express the very same concept. That's one reason that would fail is the definition of that word or that concept.
But philosophers also distinguish defining words and concepts from stating the essence of a thing, or as it's sometimes put, defining objects, defining things as a variable distinction between what's called real definition and nominal definition, where a real definition states the essence of a thing, what it is to be a thing of that kind. Nominal definition gives the meaning of a word real here doesn't mean real as opposed to fake, I should say.
It just means pertaining to things or objects. So how might a real and a nominal definition come apart? Well, some people are very inclined to say that the claim that water is what has the chemical structure. H2O is a case of stating the essence of water, saying what it is for something to be water.
But it's not a definition of the word water. So the word water on this line of thinking doesn't mean the same as has the chemical structure, a H2O or thing that has the chemical structure, H2O stuff that has it, that structure. And one reason you might think this is that people understood the word water and can understand the word water with no concept of hydrogen or oxygen,
anything like that. That's part of the motivation for wanting to distinguish between stating essences of things and defining words for those things. So all of this, I think, is important to keep in mind, as you're considering assessing definitions of art. Is the aim to provide a definition of the word? Is the aim deprived state the essence of the thing? Is it just to provide necessary and sufficient conditions of being art or intern?
Do we want simply a test to help us deal with quirky works like Fountain? I should also say one reason why a lot of people describe their views as theories of art is because they're reluctant to say what they're doing is providing a definition of art or some of the reasons that I've mentioned. Most people would talk. We'll be talking about. However, I actually do present their claims as definitions.
OK, so those are some considerations about definition and related matters. It's also worth saying a little bit about what sense of the word art. We want to use whether we want to state the essence of it or to define the word. We're still going to have to use the words to state the problem. So it's worth considering what sense or use of that word. We're talking about now the word art or the arts actually has a quite a variety of senses, particularly historically.
We talk about the art of angling. We use the word art to refer to a skill or a practical application of some knowledge. Talk about the liberal arts. Describe something as more an art than a science. Those sorts of uses are historically important, but are not are clearly not quite. Our focus here, too, uses or senses of the word art that we're interested in I think are also worth distinguishing. So one is the use of art in an evaluative sense to provide a positive evaluation of something.
You may describe it as a work of art. And you get this with other words as well. So he's a man would be an example where you're not just classifying somebody as human and male, but you're saying he displays the attributes of manliness, strength and so forth. A lot of people. Well, I think pretty much everybody writing in this area says we're not interested in explaining that use of the word evaluative, but rather we are interested in the classification classify Katri use of the word art.
So that can be bad art. That can be good art. And it's that sense of the word which is compatible with something failing as art that we're interested in using. And in particular, it's that class of the Katri sense of the word whose central examples are what have become known as the fine arts.
There's a very important paper by Paul Oscar Chris Steller called The Modern System of the Arts, in which he traces the development of this concept of art and argues that our current notion of art, which has the fine arts as they're central cases, did not develop, are assumed definite form. I think he puts it before the 18th century. So the Greeks group certain arts together on the grounds of mimesis and you get precursors like that. But they didn't group together.
According to Chris Steller, the ones that we grouped together as and particularly they didn't group together the fine arts. The fine arts, according to Chris, Stellar were codified in the mid 18th century. And the there were five distinguished back then painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry and music. And over the years, people considered whether to include other things like engravings, prose, literature, things like this as arts as well.
But these formed the kind of core or nucleus. So that's we're thinking about. And it's kind of an interesting fact if it's true that earlier societies in the West did not group together the things that we group together as art under a single concept or a term. OK, so I mentioned last week in the discussion of expression that early in the 20th century, one theory of art was the so-called expression theory of art, according to which art is a kind of expression.
Now, this for I think, rather obvious reasons, is no longer really in favour. It doesn't seem to do justice even to all musical works. Not all musical works are expressive or IC's are forms of expression. And you had other attempts like by Clive Bell, for example, to define art as what he called significant form. That's not really in favour anymore, partly because of the obscurity of the notion of significant form in Bell's writings on it.
And so for reasons I'll get to at the end of this lecture, there arose a great deal of scepticism about the prospects for defining art. But this changed in the late 60s with the work of George Dickie. So the move that Dickie made was to say you shouldn't think of defining art in terms of perceptible features of it or intrinsic features of things that are artworks. That's not going to work. That's not going to cover the full range of prose, literature, music, painting, sculpture, cetera.
There's no perceptible feature to Dickie. That all of those things have. And certainly it won't accommodate Marcel Duchamp's works. Rather, what you've got to consider arts relations to other things. And particularly its place within an institutional framework. It's those relations that make a thing on artwork. And Dickey's theory is accordingly called the institutional theory of art. And his arguments for it derive from some considerations originally advanced by Arthur Danto.
Although Danto, it should be said, disagrees with Dickeys institutional theory of art. But Danto observed that you could have two perceptibly indistinguishable objects, one of which is an artwork. And the other is not. So again. Fountain would be a perfectly good example of this. You could have a urinal and fountain looking exactly the same, but one be an artwork and the other not. Or again, in Dante's example, Andy Warhol is Brillo boxes.
You could have actual Brillo boxes that were indistinguishable from an artist's Brillo box. And yet one of them is a work of art and the other is not. What accounts for this? Asks Danto. Well, he thinks this shows that what makes the thing a work of art can't be something visible to the senses, but rather, as Danto put it on atmosphere, a theory that the eye cannot describe. In Dickey's work. The basic thought is that it's its place in an institutional framework.
Fountain has a certain place in the institutions of the art world that a regular urinal does not. What is that framework then becomes the question. So that argument is supposed to show that it's got to be some framework or other rather than the exhibited or intrinsic properties of the work that makes it art. And to answer that question, Dickey, over the years has provided two different theories.
The original institutional theory, and this is on the back of your hand out stated as follows, an artwork is an artefact with aspects that have had conferred upon them by some person or persons acting on behalf of the art world. The status of candidates for appreciation. So in Dickey's example, in his first statement of this theory, a chimpanzee might make a painting, as I think he was talking about.
Particular case where it did and it might be displayed by the zoo, but it would not be a work of art, says Dickey. However, if he took it down the street to the art gallery and the curator displayed it and as a candidate for appreciation, it would become an artwork. So Dickey says, and this is supposed to illustrate that it's those aspects of the framework, namely it's being given or aspects of it being given the status of candidates for appreciation by someone acting on behalf of the art world.
That makes it into a work of art. Now, the original institutional theory generated an enormous amount of attention. And I'm not going to go into the great debates about that one because I I'd rather focus on dickeys, update of this theory, the new institutional theory of art, which he offered in nineteen eighty four. So according to the new institutional theory and I'll explain why he's made these changes in a moment is a bit simpler.
And this is also in the handout. According to it, an artwork is an artefact of a kind created to be presented to an art world public. And Dickey explains each component of this definition. So first of all, an artefact includes not only objects, but also events and also physical objects used in a new way.
Without the material of which they're made being altered. This, of course, is to help accommodate cases like fountain or again, simpler example, a piece of driftwood might be taken from the beach, put on display. It's used in a new way, even if the material substance of it is not altered. An artist, Karen Dickey, is someone who participates with understanding in the making of a work of art. The key notion of an art world public, he explains.
As a public who is aware that what is presented is art and has a minimal understanding of the media of a particular art form. Other important notions in his theory. One of which is an art world system, which is his term for the framework, for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an art world public. So the system of institutional relations that makes this possible and the art world is the totality of these art world systems,
these frameworks within which it is presented. Now, one thing that may strike you about this definition, once the terms of it are explained, is that it is circular and Dickey is perfectly aware of this and he says this is not a problem. And the reason it's not a problem is that circular definitions can still sometimes be informative. One purpose for which we use definitions is to explain the meaning of a term to someone else.
And if we're doing that, then evidently it's not so good if it's circular. However, this is not the purpose of this definition. We all understand we have an implicit at least understanding of what art is, and it can be informative to learn of its relations to other things, even if those other things ultimately have to explain and b explain themselves in terms of their relation to artworks.
Dickey says We acquire the concept of art along with all these other concepts, like the concept of an art world or of an artist. And so by definition, that displays the relations between these concepts can still be true and informative by making explicit what the relations are. And he thinks many concepts are like this. So he thinks the concept of law. You don't acquire the concept of law on its own. You also acquire the concept of a legislature, an executive and a judiciary.
And these things are explained in terms of one another. And the concepts of these are grasped together. And so a good definition of them, will it be circular in the sense that you need to explain the concepts on the one side of the definition? Ultimately, in terms of the concept being defined. So why think that this definition is the right way to go for an institutional theory? Dickie thinks there are a few problems with the original theory that were raised to him by Monroe Beardsley.
One thing, one problem he thinks there is with the old theory is that it's talked about people acting on behalf of the art world problem with this stick. He says, is that the art world is an informal institution. It's just a practise and you can't act on behalf on behalf of a practise. So to the original theory talks about conferring a status on an object, the status of a candidate for appreciation. And you think it's inappropriate to talk in such informal concept contexts of conferring status?
It's formal concepts like contexts like degrees, ceremonies at universities in which a status is conferred. So he hopes to simplify it in this way. And further, the reason he's gone with this characterisation, namely that an artwork is an artefact of a kind created to be presented to an art world, public is, as he somewhat incautiously puts it at one point.
An artist always creates for a public of some sort. And I say that was incautious of him because he then backtracks on it and says it is, of course, true that artists withhold their work from art world publics, for example, if they don't think it's good enough. But, says Dickey, the very fact that they have withheld their work indicates that what they've created is a thing of a kind that gets presented to an art world public.
So, for example, they may have created a sculpture. Sculptures are a kind of thing that gets presented to an art world public. Now, that is meant to deal with one of the more common objections to the institutional theory, at least in its original form. So at least in its original form, the institutional theory seems to imply that someone with no contact with an art world outside of that institution could not create art.
So perhaps a feral child raised in the woods seems not inconceivable any way that a feral child could create something that is an artwork. And Dickey's original theory seems not to allow that. This variation of the theory is supposed to accommodate that, because it could be that the feral child create something that is at least of a kind that gets presented to an art world public. Maybe he creates a sculpture, for example, even if he has no concept of an art world public or contact with it.
OK, now I'm going to move on to the next theory, partly because we're a little pressed for time. If you want to read more about this, as you should, because this is probably the most important of the theories of art that have been presented. It's worth taking a look at Stephen Daviess book Definitions of Art, which is quite an exhaustive survey of the various definitions of art that have been presented.
I should say a bit of a downside of that book is that it focuses primarily on the original institutional theory, but it's still worth taking a look at. OK. The next main class of theories of art are what have been called aesthetic theories of art and Munmorah Monroe Beardslee is probably the most best-known exponent of one of these. And these tried to explain the concept of art in terms of the concept of a set of the aesthetic and Beardsley's version, which is on your hand out.
The claim is that an artwork is something produced with the intention of giving it the capacity to satisfy the aesthetic interest. Satisfying the aesthetic interests here just means providing an aesthetic experience, an aesthetic experience fiercely does not define. That's at least as tricky as defining art itself. He gives a partial characterisation of what aesthetic experience is, though he says that it's characterised, at least in part, by having some or all of the following characteristics.
And you don't need to write this down. This will be on the detailed panned out says it's characterised by a certain sense of freedom from concern about matters outside the object, a certain intense affect, detached, detached from practical ends and an exhilarating sense of exercising powers of discovery and of integration of the self and its experiences. So a lot of this is quite clearly derived from Kant talking about the kind of disinterested pleasure involved in aesthetic experience.
Two notable features of this way of defining art. First of all, the aesthetic intention, the intention to create something with the capacity to provide aesthetic experience need not be the only intention with which the artist creates a work. So they might have religious intentions. They might create the work in order to glorify God, for example, and those might even be more important to the artist or for understanding this artefact.
Beardsley's point is only that aesthetic intention must also be there in order for it's to be a work of art. And likewise, since it's just the intention to give it the capacity to provide these experiences, the work need not actually provide aesthetic experience. It might be I think his example might get struck by lightning before anybody ever gets any aesthetic experience from it.
But because that intention was present. It's an artwork. Now, one question that is really sort of glaring regarding these this aesthetic theory is that it seems not to apply to the problematic cases that raise this question about the definition of art in the first place. So one of the reasons that Duchamp's fountain is problematic, according to many at least, is that it appears not to have been created with the intention of providing an aesthetic experience.
That's not to say it can't provide an aesthetic experience. A lot of people have talked about how nice the gleam of the porcelain looks when you look at the thing. But the point being that the intention with which it was created was not to provide that aesthetic experience. What does Beardslee say about that? He argues that his definition captures the point of a definition of art better than ones that attempts to accommodate cases like Fountain.
So according to him, the point of having a definition of art is to say, what are the noteworthy features to which the word art draws our attention? And so to what are the theoretically important distinctions which the word art is most apt for making? And because of this purpose of providing such a definition, the definition we provide needs closely reflect ordinary usage of this word.
And as it happens, he thinks that his definition meets this purpose because one of the distinctions that we want to make is that between objects that enter artistic activities because of their connexion to the aesthetic interest. So our interest in having aesthetic experiences and objects that enter artistic practises in other ways. And he says the word art is most appropriate for making this distinction.
In particular, he says there is no advantage to using this word in order to classify as art whatever comments on art. He thinks this is what we should say about Fountain. That it's a witty comment on the art world, but it's not itself an artwork. He says if you classify everything, the comments on art as art then reviews in the newspaper of art exhibitions will have to count as art.
Any comment made about art will count as art. So, too, we shouldn't count just anything that's exhibited as a work of art, because this would count exhibits at science museums, stamp clubs and world fairs as art. Quite a dated example. And likewise, we shouldn't call art whatever happens to be called art by artists. And he says this wouldn't classify it all, but would rather be circular. By which I assume he means we wouldn't be explaining what they mean when they call it art.
OK. So that's his rationale for that. Now, I think there is a bit of a problem with this. So what, Dickie, is in effect, what. Beardslee is in effect providing is what the philosopher Rudolf Carnap described as an explicative definition. So an explicative definition tries to respect the central cases of the use of a word, but without worrying about the other cases. So it's it's.
It's basically a way of coining a new word or assigning a new meaning to the word, but one which respects central cases of the old meaning. And you do this if the ordinary word is too vague, imprecise, fuzzy, and it can be useful for certain theoretical purposes. But it's worth stressing that it is to assign a new meaning to the word rather than to try and capture the meaning the word already has.
It tries to respect it in part. So it's not a complete stipulation of how you're going to use the word. But it's at least in part, a stipulation of how you're going to use the word. So it's not like saying I'm going to use the word bank to mean cow. But it's partly like that. It's a decision to use a word in a certain way, not attempt to describe how the word is ordinarily used. What? So what Beardslee is in effect saying is we shouldn't try to provide descriptive definitions of art.
Rather, we should be providing explicative definitions in current EPP's sense. And I don't see where he's justified this claim. I'm not saying it can't be justified. But part of the reason we were interested in this question, the first place was to understand art in the ordinary sense, to be told. We shouldn't be asking that question. And rather, we should be in part stipulating a new meaning for this word related to the old meaning.
Whatever that was, I think required some justification that Beardslee does not provide. So that's that's one concern about the aesthetic theory in Beardsley's version of it. I'm just going to briefly discuss the third class of theories before moving on to scepticism about the project of defining art itself. So the third main class of theories of art around nowadays are what are known as historical theories of art. And the main proponent of this is Gerald Levinsohn.
And this, too, is on your hand out. So in Levinson's view on artwork is an object that, as he puts it, is non passingly intended by a person or persons with a proprietary right over it to be regarded in any of the ways in which prior works of art have been correctly or standardly regarded. Point about the reference to non passing intentions. Is that it can't be just a whim that you have for a few moments to intended to be regarded in a certain way.
That's not enough to turn it into a work of art. And the basic idea is that something becomes a work of art. On account of its relations to pass the works of art, i.e. in relations between the way in which the artist intends for it to be regarded and the way in which past works of art were standardly or correctly regarded. The claim is not, I should say, that the artist needs to have the concept of art or needs even to be aware of the history of art.
All that matters is that the artist intend for the work to be regarded in a certain way and for it to be true that that way of regarding this work is a way in which past works were correctly regarded or standardly regarded. I think that that's worth stressing because there's two ways of reading this claim about intention. OK. So I've provided a lengthy discussion of Levinsohn on the detailed handout, which will be up on Web lern. But for the moment, that's what I'll say about that.
Now, I mentioned that beginning in the particularly the 50s, a great deal of scepticism arose about the very possibility of defining art. And you often get this regarding the project of definition. So I mentioned attempts to analyse knowledge. A lot of scepticism about the prospects of that being successful. And this was motivated in the 50s by Vic and Shine's discussion in the philosophical investigations of what he described as family resemblance concepts.
Now, I provided the quotation on the handout from the investigation's not going to read it out, actually, but I'm just going to highlight kind of the key claims of this. So it begins Stein's view. It's in the context in which he's discussing language and whether we can talk about whether we can give an essence to language. And Vic, insurance claim is that for some words, there's nothing that all the things that they apply to have in common and in virtue of which we apply the same words to all.
For example, the word game, Sophus, in the case of a word like game. There are many different kinds of affinity between the things that we apply the words to, and we apply the same words to all of these things in virtue of these affinities. So a couple of things he mentions on in this quotation, board games, card games, ball games, athletic games and so on. If you talk about these games and trying to find a feature they all share and in virtue of which we call them all games,
you might think, well, they're all entertaining. But that's less clear with a case like chess or knots and crosses versus noughts and crosses, which I assume is meant to be an example of an entertaining one. So, two, you might think there's always winning and losing or competition between players. But think of patients in ball games. There's winning and losing. But when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again. This feature has disappeared. And as he says, think now.
Singing and dancing games. Here we have the element of entertainment. But how many other characteristic features have disappeared? And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way. Can see how similarities crop up and disappear, disappear. And the upside of these considerations is that we see a network, complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss crossing similarities in the large and small famous passage.
I can think of no better expression to characterise these similarities than family resemblances for the various resemblances between members of a family build features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, so on and so forth, overlap and crisscross in the same way. So members of family can resemble each other in their physical appearance. But that's not because there's one feature of their appearance that they all share.
They might share one thing with B and B might share something with C, but ANC don't share the same feature. That's the basic thought. And in a very influential article, philosopher by the name of Maurice White's applied this to Art. His claim was that no single condition is either necessary or sufficient for being a work of art. Indeed, invites his view. Even being an artefact is not a necessary condition of being a work of art.
Because, he says, we can see this piece of driftwood. We can say this piece of driftwood, which we found on the beach, is a lovely piece of sculpture. Rather, it's more like the concept of a game as vacante, Stein describes it. So there are various conditions. This is vite stalking by which we recognise something as an artwork. And it's true that a thing must meet some of these conditions in order to be an artwork.
However, there is no one condition such that a thing must meet it in order to be an artwork. This is a reiteration of that point that there is no single condition. That's a necessary condition of being an artwork. There's a variety of conditions in which we're in virtue of which things count as artworks. But no single one is one that every artwork has to meet. Now Veitch goes further. He says not only is this the case, but we cannot list what all of these conditions are.
So you could have this claim and say there's a fixed number of conditions. You've got to meet either A, B, C or D. No individual one is necessary. But meeting one or the other of them is necessary. But that's not vises view. He thinks the list is not closed. The list of conditions is not closed. Our concept of art hasn't settled. What all of the conditions that a thing can meet. That can make a thing art. And he thinks this is on account of the role of adventure, creativity in art.
So when when we get a new work of art like fountain because of this open character of the concept, we have to make a decision as to whether we're going to include it or not, whether we're going to add a condition to our concept of art that this thing meets and in virtue of which it counts as art or if we're going to exclude it.
But the key point and the reason that the concept is open reason he describes it that way is that it's not we shouldn't think of this as something that the concept we have has already implicitly settled or decided. When new cases come up, we have to make a decision as to whether we're going to modify the conditions of applying the concept or not. He says we could, of course, close the concept. We could decide that's it. No more conditions. But Vite says we shouldn't make that decision.
It is up to us. And he's recommending against it because he thinks this would foreclose on the conditions of creativity in the arts, as he puts it. And he thinks that past definitions of art, such as the expression theory, fail as definitions. But they do point to some of the conditions that are involved in our concept of art.
They're not necessary conditions, but they point to some of these conditions and in particular, they point to some of the things that these theories have regarded as valuable things to pay attention to in artworks such as its form and such as its expressive character. OK. Now, I see we don't have any more time, but I've listed some of the considerations to think about with reference device on the handout.
Some of the objections to it. And of course, the main objection would be if we can find an actual definition of art that would show that Bite's is mistaken about the character of art here. Thank you very much.