art is an expression essay

Why Is Art Important? – The Value of Creative Expression

The importance of art is an important topic and has been debated for many years. Some might think art is not as important as other disciplines like science or technology. Some might ask what art is able to offer the world in terms of evolution in culture and society, or perhaps how can art change us and the world. This article aims to explore these weighty questions and more. So, why is art important to our culture? Let us take a look.

Table of Contents

1.1 The Definition of Art
1.2 The Types and Genres of Art
2.1 Art Is a Universal Language
2.2 Art Allows for Self-Expression
2.3 Art Keeps Track of History and Culture
2.4 Art Assists in Education and Human Development
2.5 Art Adds Beauty for Art’s Sake
2.6 Art Is Socially and Financially Rewarding
2.7 Art Is a Powerful (Political) Tool
3 Art Will Always Be There
4.1 What Is the Importance of Arts?
4.2 Why Is Art Important to Culture?
4.3 What Are the Different Types of Art?
4.4 What Is the Definition of Art?

What Is Art?

There is no logical answer when we ponder the importance of arts. It is, instead, molded by centuries upon centuries of creation and philosophical ideas and concepts. These not only shaped and informed the way people did things, but they inspired people to do things and live certain ways.

We could even go so far as to say the importance of art is borne from the very act of making art. In other words, it is formulated from abstract ideas, which then turn into the action of creating something (designated as “art”, although this is also a contested topic). This then evokes an impetus or movement within the human individual.

This impetus or movement can be anything from stirred up emotions, crying, feeling inspired, education, the sheer pleasure of aesthetics, or the simple convenience of functional household items – as we said earlier, the importance of art does not have a logical answer.

Before we go deeper into this question and concept, we need some context. Below, we look at some definitions of art to help shape our understanding of art and what it is for us as humans, thus allowing us to better understand its importance.

The Definition of Art

Simply put, the definition of the word “art” originates from the Latin ars or artem , which means “skill”, “craft”, “work of art”, among other similar descriptions. According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, the word has various meanings; art may be a “skill acquired by experience, study, or observation”, a “branch of learning”, “an occupation requiring knowledge or skill”, or “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects”.

We might also tend to think of art in terms of the latter definition provided above, “the conscious use of skill” in the “production of aesthetic objects”. However, does art only serve aesthetic purposes? That will also depend on what art means to us personally, and not how it is collectively defined. If a painting done with great skill is considered to be art, would a piece of furniture that is also made with great skill receive the same label as being art?

Thus, art is defined by our very own perceptions.

Art has also been molded by different definitions throughout history. When we look at it during the Classical or Renaissance periods , it was very much defined by a set of rules, especially through the various art academies in the major European regions like Italy (Academy and Company for the Arts of Drawing in Florence), France (French Academy of Fine Arts), and England (Royal Academy of Arts in London).

In other words, art had an academic component to it so as to distinguish artists from craftsmen.

The defining factor has always been between art for art’s sake , art for aesthetic purposes, and art that serves a purpose or a function, which is also referred to as “utilitarianism”. It was during the Classical and Renaissance periods that art was defined according to these various predetermined rules, but that leaves us with the question of whether these so-called rules are able to illustrate the deeper meaning of what art is?

If we move forward in time to the 20 th century and the more modern periods of art history, we find ourselves amidst a whole new art world. People have changed considerably between now and the Renaissance era, but we can count on art to be like a trusted friend, reflecting and expressing what is inherent in the cultures and people of the time.

During the 20 th century, art was not confined to rules like perspective, symmetry, religious subject matter, or only certain types of media like oil paints . Art was freed, so to say, and we see the definition of it changing (literally) in front of our very own eyes over a variety of canvases and objects. Art movements like Cubism , Fauvism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, among others, facilitated this newfound freedom in art.

Artists no longer subscribed to a set of rules and created art from a more subjective vantage point.

Additionally, more resources became available beyond only paint, and artists were able to explore new methods and techniques previously not available. This undoubtedly changed the preconceived notions of what art was. Art became commercialized, aestheticized, and devoid of the traditional Classical meaning from before. We can see this in other art movements like Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, among others.

The Types and Genres of Art

There are also different types and genres of art, and all have had their own evolution in terms of being classified as art. These are the fine arts, consisting of painting, drawing, sculpting, and printmaking; applied arts like architecture; as well as different forms of design such as interior, graphic, and fashion design, which give day-to-day objects aesthetic value.

Other types of art include more decorative or ornamental pieces like ceramics, pottery, jewelry, mosaics, metalwork, woodwork, and fabrics like textiles. Performance arts involve theater and drama, music, and other forms of movement-based modalities like dancing, for example. Lastly, Plastic arts include works made with different materials that are pliable and able to be formed into the subject matter, thus becoming a more hands-on approach with three-dimensional interaction.

Top Reasons for the Importance of Art

Now that we have a reasonable understanding of what art is, and a definition that is ironically undefinable due to the ever-evolving and fluid nature of art, we can look at how the art that we have come to understand is important to culture and society. Below, we will outline some of the top reasons for the importance of art.

Art Is a Universal Language

Art does not need to explain in words how someone feels – it only shows. Almost anyone can create something that conveys a message on a personal or public level, whether it is political, social, cultural, historical, religious, or completely void of any message or purpose. Art becomes a universal language for all of us to tell our stories; it is the ultimate storyteller.

We can tell our stories through paintings, songs, poetry, and many other modalities.

Art connects us with others too. Whenever we view a specific artwork, which was painted by a person with a particular idea in mind, the viewer will feel or think a certain way, which is informed by the artwork (and artist’s) message. As a result, art becomes a universal language used to speak, paint, perform, or build that goes beyond different cultures, religions, ethnicities, or languages. It touches the deepest aspects of being human, which is something we all share.

Art Allows for Self-Expression

Touching on the above point, art touches the deepest aspects of being human and allows us to express these deeper aspects when words fail us. Art becomes like a best friend, giving us the freedom and space to be creative and explore our talents, gifts, and abilities. It can also help us when we need to express difficult emotions and feelings or when we need mental clarity – it gives us an outlet.

Art is widely utilized as a therapeutic tool for many people and is an important vehicle to maintain mental and emotional health. Art also allows us to create something new that will add value to the lives of others. Consistently expressing ourselves through a chosen art modality will also enable us to become more proficient and disciplined in our skills.

Art Keeps Track of History and Culture

We might wonder, why is art important to culture? As a universal language and an expression of our deepest human nature, art has always been the go-to to keep track of everyday events, almost like a visual diary. From the geometric motifs and animals found in early prehistoric cave paintings to portrait paintings from the Renaissance, every artwork is a small window into the ways of life of people from various periods in history. Art connects us with our ancestors and lineage.

When we find different artifacts from all over the world, we are shown how different cultures lived thousands of years ago. We can keep track of our current cultural trends and learn from past societal challenges. We can draw inspiration from past art and artifacts and in turn, create new forms of art.

Art is both timeless and a testament to the different times in our history.

Art Assists in Education and Human Development

Art helps with human development in terms of learning and understanding difficult concepts, as it accesses different parts of the human brain. It allows people to problem-solve as well as make more complex concepts easier to understand by providing a visual format instead of just words or numbers. Other areas that art assists learners in (range from children to adults) are the development of motor skills, critical thinking, creativity, social skills, as well as the ability to think from different perspectives.

Art subjects will also help students improve on other subjects like maths or science. Various research states the positive effects art has on students in public schools – it increases discipline and attendance and decreases the level of unruly behavior.

According to resources and questions asked to students about how art benefits them, they reported that they look forward to their art lesson more than all their other lessons during their school day. Additionally, others dislike the structured format of their school days, and art allows for more creativity and expression away from all the rules. It makes students feel free to do and be themselves.

Art Adds Beauty for Art’s Sake

Art is versatile. Not only can it help us in terms of more complex emotional and mental challenges and enhance our well-being, but it can also simply add beauty to our lives. It can be used in numerous ways to make spaces and areas visually appealing.

When we look at something beautiful, we immediately feel better. A piece of art in a room or office can either create a sense of calm and peace or a sense of movement and dynamism.

Art can lift a space either through a painting on a wall, a piece of colorful furniture, a sculpture, an ornamental object, or even the whole building itself, as we see from so many examples in the world of architecture. Sometimes, art can be just for art’s sake.

Art Is Socially and Financially Rewarding

Art can be socially and financially rewarding in so many ways. It can become a profession where artists of varying modalities can earn an income doing what they love. In turn, it becomes part of the economy. If artists sell their works, whether in an art gallery, a park, or online, this will attract more people to their location. Thus, it could even become a beacon for improved tourism to a city or country.

The best examples are cities in Europe where there are numerous art galleries and architectural landmarks celebrating artists from different periods in art history, from Gothic cathedrals like the Notre Dame in Paris to the Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Art can also encourage people to do exercise by hiking up mountains to visit pre-historic rock art caves.

Art Is a Powerful (Political) Tool

Knowing that art is so versatile, that it can be our best friend and teacher, makes it a very powerful tool. The history of humankind gives us thousands of examples that show how art has been used in the hands of people who mean well and people who do not mean well.

Therefore, understanding the role of art in our lives as a powerful tool gives us a strong indication of its importance.

Art is also used as a political medium. Examples include memorials to celebrate significant changemakers in our history, and conveying powerful messages to society in the form of posters, banners, murals, and even graffiti. It has been used throughout history by those who have rebelled as well as those who created propaganda to show the world their intentions, as extreme as wanting to take over the world or disrupt existing regimes.

The Futurist art movement is an example of art combined with a group of men who sought to change the way of the future, informed by significant changes in society like the industrial revolution. It also became a mode of expression of the political stances of its members.

Other movements like Constructivism and Suprematism used art to convey socialist ideals, also referred to as Socialist Realism.

Other artists like Jacques-Louis David from the Neoclassical movement produced paintings influenced by political events; the subject matter also included themes like patriotism. Other artists include Pablo Picasso and his famous oil painting , Guernica (1937), which is a symbol and allegory intended to reach people with its message.

The above examples all illustrate to us that various wars, conflicts, and revolutions throughout history, notably World Wars I and II, have influenced both men and women to produce art that either celebrates or instigates changes in society. The power of art’s visual and symbolic impact has been able to convey and appeal to the masses.

Art Will Always Be There

The importance of art is an easy concept to understand because there are so many reasons that explain its benefits in our lives. We do not have to look too hard to determine its importance. We can also test it on our lives by the effects it has on how we feel and think when we engage with it as onlookers or as active participants – whether it is painting, sculpting, or standing in an art gallery.

What art continuously shows us is that it is a constant in our lives, our cultures, and the world. It has always been there to assist us in self-expression and telling our story in any way we want to. It has also given us glimpses of other cultures along the way.

Art is fluid and versatile, just like a piece of clay that can be molded into a beautiful bowl or a slab of marble carved into a statue. Art is also a powerful tool that can be used for the good of humanity good or as a political weapon.

Art is important because it gives us the power to mold and shape our lives and experiences. It allows us to respond to our circumstances on micro- and macroscopic levels, whether it is to appreciate beauty, enhance our wellbeing, delve deeper into the spiritual or metaphysical, celebrate changes, or to rebel and revolt.

Take a look at our purpose of art webstory here!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the importance of arts.

There are many reasons that explain the importance of art. It is a universal language because it crosses language and cultural barriers, making it a visual language that anyone can understand; it helps with self-expression and self-awareness because it acts as a vehicle wherein we can explore our emotions and thoughts; it is a record of past cultures and history; it helps with education and developing different skill sets; it can be financially rewarding, it can be a powerful political tool, and it adds beauty and ambiance to our lives and makes us feel good.

Why Is Art Important to Culture?

Art is important to culture because it can bridge the gap between different racial groups, religious groups, dialects, and ethnicities. It can express common values, virtues, and morals that we can all understand and feel. Art allows us to ask important questions about life and society. It allows reflection, it opens our hearts to empathy for others, as well as how we treat and relate to one another as human beings.

What Are the Different Types of Art?

There are many different types of art, including fine arts like painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking, as well as applied arts like architecture, design such as interior, graphic, and fashion. Other types of art include decorative arts like ceramics, pottery, jewelry, mosaics, metalwork, woodwork, and fabrics like textiles; performance arts like theater, music, dancing; and Plastic arts that work with different pliable materials.

What Is the Definition of Art?

The definition of the word “art” originates from the Latin ars or artem , which means “skill”, “craft”, and a “work of art”. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary offers several meanings, for example, art is a “skill acquired by experience, study, or observation”, it is a “branch of learning”, “an occupation requiring knowledge or skill”, or “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects”.

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Why Is Art Important? – The Value of Creative Expression.” Art in Context. July 26, 2021. URL: https://artincontext.org/why-is-art-important/

Meyer, I. (2021, 26 July). Why Is Art Important? – The Value of Creative Expression. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/why-is-art-important/

Meyer, Isabella. “Why Is Art Important? – The Value of Creative Expression.” Art in Context , July 26, 2021. https://artincontext.org/why-is-art-important/ .

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One comment.

It’s great that you talked about how there are various kinds and genres of art. I was reading an art book earlier and it was quite interesting to learn more about the history of art. I also learned other things, like the existence of online american indian art auctions.

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“Without Art Mankind Could Not Exist”: Leo Tolstoy’s Essay What is Art

In his essay “What is Art?” Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, defines art as a way to communicate emotion with the ultimate goal of uniting humanity.

How can we define art? What is authentic art and what is good art? Leo Tolstoy answered these questions in “What is Art?” (1897), his most comprehensive essay on the theory of art. Tolstoy’s theory has a lot of charming aspects. He believes that art is a means of communicating emotion, with the aim of promoting mutual understanding. By gaining awareness of each other’s feelings we can successfully practice empathy and ultimately unite to further mankind’s collective well-being.

Furthermore, Tolstoy firmly denies that pleasure is art’s sole purpose. Instead, he supports a moral-based art able to appeal to everyone and not just the privileged few. Although he takes a clear stance in favor of Christianity as a valid foundation for morality, his definition of religious perception is flexible. As a result, it is possible to easily replace it with all sorts of different ideological schemes.

Personally, I do not approach Tolstoy’s theory as a set of laws for understanding art. More than anything, “What is art?” is a piece of art itself. A work about the meaning of art and a fertile foundation on which truly beautiful ideas can flourish.

Most of the paintings used for this article were drawn by realist painter Ilya Repin. The Russian painter created a series of portraits of Tolstoy, which were exhibited together at the 2019 exhibition “Repin: The Myth of Tolstoy” at the State Museum L.N. Tolstoy. More information regarding the relationship between Tolstoy and Repin can be found in this article .

Who was Tolstoy?

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Leo Tolstoy ( Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy) was born in 1828 in his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, some 200km from Moscow. His family belonged in the Russian aristocracy and thus Leo inherited the title of count. In 1851 he joined the tsarist army to pay off his accumulated debt but quickly regretted this decision. Eventually, he left the army right after the end of the Crimean War in 1856.

After traveling Europe and witnessing the suffering and cruelty of the world, Tolstoy was transformed. From a privileged aristocrat, he became a Christian anarchist arguing against the State and propagating non-violence. This was the doctrine that inspired Gandhi and was expressed as non-resistance to evil. This means that evil cannot be fought with evil means and one should neither accept nor resist it.

Tolstoy’s writing made him famous around the world and he is justly considered among the four giants of Russian Literature next to Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev. His most famous novels are War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). However, he also wrote multiple philosophical and theological texts as well as theatrical plays and short stories. Upon completing his masterpiece Anna Karenina , Tolstoy fell into a state of insufferable existential despair.

Charmed by the faith of the common people, he turned to Christianity. Eventually, he dismissed the Russian Church and every other Church as corrupted and looked for his own answers. His theological explorations led to the formulation of his own version of Christianity, which deeply influenced his social vision. He died in 1910 at the age of 82 after suffering from pneumonia.

Art Based On Beauty And Taste

Tolstoy wrote “What is art?” in 1897. There, he laid down his opinions on several art-related issues. Throughout this essay , he remains confident that he is the first to provide an exact definition for art:

“…however strange it may seem to say so, in spite of the mountains of books written about art, no exact definition of art has been constructed. And the reason of this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.”

So, what is art for Tolstoy? Before answering the question, the Russian novelist seeks a proper basis for his definition. Examining works of other philosophers and artists, he notices that they usually assume that beauty is art’s foundation. For them beauty is either that which provides a certain kind of pleasure or that which is perfect according to objective, universal laws.

Tolstoy thinks that both cases lead to subjective definitions of beauty and in turn to subjective definitions of art. Those who realize the impossibility of objectively defining beauty, turn to a study of taste asking why a thing pleases. Again, Tolstoy sees no point in this, as taste is also subjective. There is no way of explaining why one thing pleases someone but displeases someone else, he concludes.

Theories that Justify the Canon

Theories of art based on beauty or taste inescapably include only that type of art that appeals to certain people:

“First acknowledging a certain set of productions to be art (because they please us) and then framing such a theory of art that all those productions which please a certain circle of people should fit into it.”

These theories are made to justify the existing art canon which covers anything from Greek art to Shakespeare and Beethoven. In reality, the canon is nothing more than the artworks appreciated by the upper classes. To justify new productions that please the elites, new theories that expand and reaffirm the canon are constantly created:

“No matter what insanities appear in art, when once they find acceptance among the upper classes of our society, a theory is quickly invented to explain and sanction them; just as if there had never been periods in history when certain special circles of people recognized and approved false, deformed, and insensate art which subsequently left no trace and has been utterly forgotten.”

The true definition of art, according to Tolstoy, should be based on moral principles. Before anything, we need to question if a work of art is moral. If it is moral, then it is good art. If it is not moral, it is bad. This rationale leads Tolstoy to a very bizarre idea. At one point in his essay, he states that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and his own War and Peace are immoral and therefore bad art. But what does Tolstoy exactly mean when he says that something is good or bad art? And what is the nature of the morality he uses for his artistic judgments?

What is Art?

Art is a means of communicating feelings the same way words transmit thoughts. In art, someone transmits a feeling and “infects” others with what he/she feels. Tolstoy encapsulates his definition of art in the following passages:

“To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling – this is the activity of art. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hand on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”

In its essence, art is a means of union among men brought together by commonly experienced feelings. It facilitates access to the psychology of others fostering empathy and understanding by tearing down the walls of the Subject. This function of art is not only useful but also necessary for the progress and wellbeing of humanity.

The innumerable feelings experienced by humans both in past and present are available to us only through art. The loss of such a unique ability would be a catastrophe. “Men would be like beasts”, says Tolstoy, and even goes as far as to claim that without art, mankind could not exist. This is a bold declaration, which recalls the Nietzschean aphorism that human existence is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.

Art in the Extended and Limited Sense of the Word

Tolstoy’s definition expands to almost every aspect of human activity way beyond the fine arts. Even a boy telling the story of how he met a wolf can be art. That is, however, only if the boy succeeds in making the listeners feel the fear and anguish of the encounter. Works of art are everywhere, according to this view. Cradlesong, jest, mimicry, house ornamentation, dress and utensils, even triumphal processions are all works of art.

This is, in my view, the strongest point of Tolstoy’s theory. Namely, that it considers almost the totality of human activity as art. However, there is a distinction between this expanded art, and art in the limited sense of the word. The latter corresponds to the fine arts and is the area that Tolstoy investigates further in his essay. A weak point of the theory is that it never examines the act of creation and art that is not shared with others.

Real and Counterfeit Art

The distinction between real and counterfeit, good and bad art is Tolstoy’s contribution to the field of art criticism. Despite its many weaknesses, this system offers an interesting alternative to judging and appreciating art.

Tolstoy names real art (i.e. authentic, true to itself) the one resulting from an honest, internal need for expression. The product of this internal urge becomes a real work of art, if it successfully evokes feelings to other people. In this process, the receiver of the artistic impression becomes so united with the artist’s experience, that he/she feels like the artwork is his/her own. Therefore, real art removes the barrier between Subject and Object, and between receiver and sender of an artistic impression. In addition, it removes the barrier between the receivers who experience unity through a common feeling.

“In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.” Furthermore, a work that does not evoke feelings and spiritual union with others is counterfeit art. No matter how poetical, realistic, effectful, or interesting it is, it must meet these conditions to succeed. Otherwise it is just a counterfeit posing as real art.

Emotional Infectiousness

Emotional infectiousness is a necessary quality of a work of art. The degree of infectiousness is not always the same but varies according to three conditions:

The individuality of the feeling transmitted: the more specific to a person the feeling, the more successful the artwork.
The clearness of the feeling transmitted: the clearness of expression assists the transition of feelings and increases the pleasure derived from art.
The sincerity of the artist: the force with which the artist feels the emotion he/she transmits through his/her art.

Out of all three, sincerity is the most important. Without it, the other two conditions cannot exist. Worth noting is that Tolstoy finds sincerity almost always present in “peasant art” but almost always absent in “upper-class art”. If a work lacks even one of the three qualities, it is counterfeit art. In contrast, it is real if it possesses all three. In that case, it only remains to judge whether this real artwork is good or bad, more or less successful. The success of an artwork is based firstly on the degree of its infectiousness. The more infectious the artwork, the better.

The Religious Perception of Art

Tolstoy believes that art is a means of progress towards perfection. With time, art evolves rendering accessible the experience of humanity for humanity’s sake. This is a process of moral realization and results in society becoming kinder and more compassionate. A genuinely good artwork ought to make accessible these good feelings that move humanity closer to its moral completion. Within this framework, a good work of art must also be moral.

But how can we judge what feelings are morally good? Tolstoy’s answer lies in what he calls “the religious perception of the age”. This is defined as the understanding of the meaning of life as conceived by a group of people. This understanding is the moral compass of a society and always points towards certain values. For Tolstoy, the religious perception of his time is found in Christianity. As a result, all good art must carry the foundational message of this religion understood as brotherhood among all people. This union of man aiming at his collective well-being, argues Tolstoy, must be revered as the highest value of all.

Although it relates to religion, religious perception is not the same with religious cult. In fact, the definition of religious perception is so wide, that it describes ideology in general. To this interpretation leads Tolstoy’s view that, even if a society recognizes no religion, it always has a religious morality. This can be compared with the direction of a flowing river:

If the river flows at all, it must have a direction. If a society lives, there must be a religious perception indicating the direction in which, more or less consciously, all its members tend.

It is safe to say that more than a century after Tolstoy’s death, “What is Art?” retains its appeal. We should not easily dismiss the idea that (good) art communicates feelings and promotes unity through universal understanding. This is especially the case in our time where many question art’s importance and see it as a source of confusion and division.

Tolstoy, L.N. 1902. What is Art? In the Novels and Other Works of Lyof N. Tolstoy . translated by Aline Delano. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. pp. 328-527. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43409
Jahn, G.R. 1975. ‘The Aesthetic Theory of Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art?’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 34, No. 1. pp. 59-65. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/428645
Morson, G.S. 2019. ‘Leo Tolstoy’. Encyclopædia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Tolstoy

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By Antonis Chaliakopoulos MSc Museum Studies, BA History & Archaeology Antonis is an archaeologist with a passion for museums and heritage and a keen interest in aesthetics and the reception of classical art. He holds an MSc in Museum Studies from the University of Glasgow and a BA in History and Archaeology from the University of Athens (NKUA) where he is currently working on his PhD.

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Art as a Path to Emotion

Art, one's own or another's, is emotionally and psychologically healing..

Posted August 12, 2020 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

Our recent posts have addressed the importance of getting in touch with one’s feelings and communicating these to selected confidantes. What is ever clear, however, is the great effort such openness requires of those of us skilled at keeping our emotional lives under control. In these cases, we aren’t interested in knowing what feelings reside beneath our awareness; we work hard to keep them from awareness; in fact, we construct lives/personas that have little resemblance to the person we are emotionally. For some, emotions are virtually non-existent — except on call.

But such inhibition requires great effort and stresses the mind and body. Problems erupt. Health problems: psychological and/or physical. Our doctors tell us to reduce the stress in our lives. Sports, relaxation, time with family, reduced work hours are all ways of doing this. But until we release the forbidden feeling that the stress is generating, these other efforts are rendered far less successful.

Towards that end, art offers a powerful tool for accessing feelings—be they unconscious or just beneath the surface.

All arts do that.

I come to you today wearing four hats—psychologist, poet, publisher, and patient — all of which inform my belief in the importance of the arts in wellness. Psychological research unequivocally supports this connection: documenting the effectiveness of art in reducing the stress, anxiety , depression , even pain, associated with physical and/or psychological illness, in particular, but life in general as well. So involvement with art is important to all of us.

The reason that art is healing is simple: It helps people get in touch with and express feelings that might otherwise remain buried or ignored. There’s a long roster of feelings that we’re "told," either explicitly or implicitly, not to feel. That is in addition to our natural resistances, which are fed from early life by parents and authority figures. Society is equally powerful; for example, certain religious and spiritual affiliations chastise us for the feelings we have, as if it's a sin to be angry, envious , greedy, self-involved, or proud. We’ve so introjected these principles that at all costs, we don’t want to see them in ourselves. We aim to be a better person than one who is.

The problem is intensified for the ill and their caregivers: the population I want to spotlight in today’s post. Doctors and caregivers also inhibit what we feel. They warn us that attending to painful (often referred to as "negative") feelings is to inhibit treatment/cure — despite the fact that psychology teaches us that repressed or suppressed feelings of anger , depression, loss of control, isolation, fear , and anxiety intensify over time, become toxic and interfere with health, treatment, and cure. On the other hand, when expressed, their intensity is reduced, and healing is enhanced.

In my work with cancer patients, I’ve been struck by how stridently they‘re instructed to "stay positive!" As in, deny all but "positive" feelings regarding their illness. Avoid fear, anxiety, anger; focus on hope, faith, acceptance; believe in prayer, doctors, medicine. On the other hand, physicians and medical staff too are encouraged to suppress their conflicted feelings about illness and patients; as a result, many hide out, focusing on tests and symptoms rather than the person. Clearly, no one would argue that it is important for the patient to remain positive, but the road to hope is paved by first addressing the reality of its opposite. Art helps us do that.

And there is hope! Despite the fact that significant strides towards more humanistic care are being made in the medical community, specifically the emergence of narrative medicine, which focuses on the whole person rather than simply the disease, medicine’s/society’s prevailing focus on suppressing painful feelings is that these feelings do not disappear. They’re simply unattended to and unspoken. Even for the most defended, they hover at the edge of consciousness — intensifying the more we try to negate/ignore them.

The fact is that illness is painful, physically, and emotionally — and unattended pain increases with neglect. One of the greatest of these is loneliness — the person "in solitary confinement" tortured, terrified by what is happening to his/her body. As has been discussed in an earlier post, the compassionate listener (doctor, partner, family, friend) can lighten that burden such that the person gains renewed strength to continue fighting. They know that they are understood. They are no longer alone with their terrors. That sharing/unburdening in turn helps to lift their spirits. No longer imprisoned, the terror is released and reduced (albeit temporarily).

Not only do we need permission from our loved ones and our doctors to feel what we feel, but we also need help — using techniques and interests that will help us to open up to those feelings. Art is one of the most substantial of these — be it active (making our own) involvement in art — music, painting, dance, photography, or creative writing. Likewise, research emphasizes its effectiveness where involvement is passive — specifically, involvement with art made by another, i.e. reading literature, listening to music, or viewing visual art and dance.

Art concerns itself with life—the underbelly of it, the glory. The beauty, the mess, the truth. It says what we cannot say. Art’s subject matter is emotion ; its purpose is expression. Thus, art communicates — artist to audience. While active involvement with making art involves creative expression of what one feels — consciously and unconsciously, so too participation in another’s experience helps us to access those feelings in ourselves.

Think of what you felt when you listened to your favorite piece of music. Did it bring you to tears? Make you feel sad or happy? Were you transported to another place — perhaps more peaceful and serene? How did you feel when you read your last book and a character became ill/well/successful/frightened/anxious? The likelihood is that you felt that as well. You were involved with your characters (friends eventually) to the extent that you were happy for them, sad, frightened. You were feeling what they felt. You empathized.

What makes that possible is that artists dedicate their creative lives to the authentic expression of emotion, to the lived life. He/she reaches down into themselves to find that experience/feeling and express it, thereby communicating it to us, their audience. In so doing, he/she triggers that emotion in us. How fortunate, then, to discover one’s own artistic gift; how fortunate to be visited by that of another.

Creative writing may well be the most expressive of the arts because it is the most direct and the least subject to interpretation. As such, its message is more directly communicated. Writers and readers alike need literary art to help them process their feelings about life in general, and specifically, illness.

Literary art, and poems in particular, name things for us. Sometimes they name what we feel—what we cannot express on our own. They tell us that we are not alone. But for the writer, writing carries greater risk. Unlike the musician, dancer, or visual artist who uses notes, movement, paint, and symbols to make their art, and as such, maintain some anonymity, the writer risks complete exposure because the tool he/she uses is a language which is common to all of us. To write openly then is to undress in public.

Consequently, to defend against the threat implicit in self-revelation, much of what is written about illness tends to be censored — resulting in work that is preachy, glib and cavalier, or stoic and devoid of the emotional pain that naturally accompanies serious illness. In keeping with our mission to serve art and community and to bring poetry to the underserved, the press I founded identified yet another underserved community —the ill — and another category of book that we wanted to publish, specifically those that dealt openly and honestly with the profound psychological, emotional, and physical issues connected to illness.

But it was not enough for us to reach the ill and caregivers. We needed to reach the medical community as well. For us to make a difference in the lives of patients, we needed to educate doctors (and medical students) also. Given our commitment to publish work that focuses on the emotional and psychological terrain of everyday life and to bring it to wider/underserved populations, our books about illness are grounded in the belief that literature provides, and is a powerful window into the human psyche and thereby a rich clinical/teaching tool in that they combine fine art with an honest revelation of the "lived" experience of illness and pain—presented in accessible language and syntax.

Literature exposes the underbelly of all life and death in ways that we are seldom privy to — even in a clinical setting. Yet it is just that understanding of human behavior and frailty that informs the most humane of us — be we doctors/teachers/artists/everyday human beings. More specifically, to understand physical and mental suffering, one must be aware of the internal emotional/psychological landscape that illness creates — in the patient, in the family, in caregivers, in doctors. Such understanding forms the bedrock of the most humanistic and enlightened minds.

In keeping with our commitment to bring poetry to underserved communities in places where they live, work, and receive services, we dreamed of placing books of poetry and other fine literature in hospital waiting rooms. Waiting, even for the most benign care, often produces anxiety and stress in patients and caregivers. To date, over 19,000 copies of the first two volumes of our waiting room reader have been gifted to over 150 hospitals nationally. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Patients and medical staff agree that the books significantly enhance patient care.

Lately, I catch myself dreaming of Volume III.

Note to Reader: As a licensed psychologist, I strictly adhere to the ethics of confidentiality; therefore, I do not use/make reference to any patient/client information in the pieces I write. The only data I use to explore these psychological issues is my own.

Joan Cusack Handler, Ph.D., is a poet, memoirist, and psychologist. Her widely published poems have won five Pushcart nominations.

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How Art Makes Us More Human: Why Being Creative is So Important in Life

Art is an important part of life, as it helps us to explore our creativity and express ourselves in unique ways. Art is more than just a form of expression - it’s a way of understanding the world and our place in it. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the psychological, social, and cognitive benefits of creating art and how it can bring joy and purpose to our lives.

What is art?

Art is a form of expression that values creativity and self-expression. It can take many forms, from paintings and sculptures to photography and even digital art. Art has the power to move us, to make us feel something, and to tell stories. Art can be used as a way of connecting with ourselves and with each other, and its power lies in its ability to inspire, create joy, and provoke thought. Art is an expression of the human experience, and its value lies in its ability to bring people together.

The connection between art and emotion

The value of art lies in its ability to evoke emotion. Whether you’re looking at a painting, watching a performance, or listening to music, art allows us to experience a range of emotions from joy to sorrow and everything in between. Art can help us make sense of our own emotions and gain a better understanding of how other people are feeling. It can even bring us closer together as it enables us to feel connected with the artist, even if we have never met them. When we interact with art, it can often spark a dialogue, creating a feeling of understanding and empathy within us.

One way in which art can be especially powerful is when it reflects our personal experiences and values. By connecting with a piece of art that speaks to our values, we can often feel a strong emotional connection with it, enabling us to recognize ourselves in the work and appreciate its beauty and meaning.

The link between art and mental health

Art can be an incredibly powerful tool in helping us to manage our mental health and well-being. Studies have found that art can reduce stress, increase self-esteem, and improve our ability to cope with difficult emotions. Art provides a safe space for us to express our thoughts and feelings, allowing us to connect with ourselves on a deeper level.

One of the main ways that art benefits mental health is through its ability to help us process and make sense of our emotions. Art enables us to externalize our inner struggles, allowing us to make sense of them in a new way. By engaging in creative activities, we can gain insight into our own feelings, giving us the opportunity to recognize patterns and reflect on them in a non-judgmental manner. This can help us to gain a better understanding of our emotions and allow us to find healthier ways of managing them.

Art can also help to decrease symptoms of depression and anxiety. Studies have found that engaging in creative activities such as painting, drawing, or sculpting can reduce symptoms of both depression and anxiety. It also can increase positive moods and overall life satisfaction. In addition, engaging in art can give us a sense of control over our lives, providing us with the opportunity to express ourselves without fear of judgment.

Finally, creating art can provide a sense of purpose and accomplishment, helping us to feel connected to something larger than ourselves. Art gives us a way to channel our energy into something meaningful, allowing us to have a tangible outcome at the end of our creative journey. The act of creation itself can be incredibly empowering, giving us the confidence to take on new challenges and set goals for ourselves.

Overall, engaging in art has been proven to have a positive impact on mental health. Through its ability to help us process emotions, decrease symptoms of depression and anxiety, and provide us with a sense of purpose and accomplishment, art has the power to truly transform our lives.

The benefits of creating art

Creating art can be an immensely rewarding experience that has both psychological and physical benefits. It can provide a sense of purpose, satisfaction, and accomplishment. Art can also help reduce stress, build self-confidence, and improve problem solving skills.

Art can be used to express feelings and emotions, helping to better understand and cope with difficult experiences. It can also be used to relieve anxiety, improve mental health, and enhance positive self-image. Additionally, engaging in creative activities encourages creative thinking, which can foster innovation and creativity in other areas of life.

Creating art can also improve physical well-being. It has been linked to reducing chronic pain and boosting the immune system. It can also help with motor coordination, providing relief for conditions such as carpal tunnel syndrome. Furthermore, it can help with hand-eye coordination, increasing dexterity and making everyday tasks easier.

Finally, creating art is a great way to relax and unwind after a long day. It can provide an outlet for pent-up emotions and help to restore a sense of balance and wellbeing. Even if your work is not immediately appreciated, it’s important to remember that art is subjective and it should be created for yourself, not for the approval of others.

The power of art in storytelling

Storytelling is a powerful tool for communication, and art is an important part of this process. Through art, we can express ourselves in ways that words alone cannot do justice to. Art allows us to show the emotion behind our stories, to add nuance and depth to our tales, and to create visuals that can leave a lasting impression.

Stories told through art have a special power. Whether it's through painting, drawing, sculpture, or even film, art has the potential to bring our stories to life in a way that words simply cannot do. With art, we can bring our characters and stories to life in vivid detail, making them more vivid and alive than if we were to tell the story with just words. We can also add layers of symbolism and meaning to our stories which can make them more meaningful and powerful.

Art has been used as a storytelling device for thousands of years. Ancient cultures used drawings and sculptures to tell their stories, and today, the tradition continues with all forms of visual arts. From street art to museum installations, art is used to tell stories of cultures, histories, beliefs, and emotions. By using art to tell stories, we can move people emotionally and capture their attention in a unique way.

In today's world, where we are bombarded with information from all sides, it can be hard to stand out. Art gives us the chance to do that in a powerful way. By creating art, we can tell stories that resonate with people, inspiring them and showing them something new. The power of storytelling through art is immense and should not be underestimated.

The importance of art in education

Art plays an important role in education, as it encourages creative thinking and provides a platform for students to express their feelings and ideas. It can also be used as a form of communication, allowing students to interpret and create meaning from what they observe. Additionally, the visual representation of art helps children to develop skills such as analyzing information, forming arguments, and making connections.

In the classroom, art can help to introduce new concepts, convey complex topics, and build relationships between students. By incorporating art into lesson plans, teachers are able to engage students in learning and make the material more interesting. Art also helps students to identify patterns and practice critical thinking skills by exploring how elements interact to create a bigger picture.

Furthermore, art allows for students to practice collaboration, problem-solving, and social interaction. Through group projects, students can work together to plan, organize, and execute a project from start to finish. This helps to teach kids essential teamwork skills while also giving them the opportunity to explore their individual strengths and weaknesses.

Overall, art is an integral part of education that helps students develop important skills and encourages creative expression. It is an important tool for teaching and can be used in various ways to make learning more engaging and meaningful.

The role of art in social change

The power of art in creating social change is undeniable. It has been used throughout history as a tool to inspire, educate, and challenge the status quo. Art can be used to bring attention to injustices, advocate for different perspectives, and to create positive cultural shifts.

One example of how art has been used to inspire social change is through protest art. This type of art is often seen at protests and marches, or used to create powerful visuals for political campaigns. Protest art can be anything from signs and banners to sculptures, graffiti, or public installations. It can also take the form of music, film, theater, and literature. By combining art and activism, people are able to communicate their message in an effective way that captures the attention of the public.

Another example of how art can be used to create social change is through digital media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. These platforms allow anyone with an internet connection to share their creative works and connect with other like-minded individuals. Art has been used on these platforms to raise awareness about important issues, tell stories that inspire change, and even challenge oppressive systems.

Finally, art can be used to help those who are oppressed find strength and resilience. Art provides a platform for those who are marginalized to tell their stories and express their experiences in a safe space. Through art, people are able to connect with each other and find solidarity in the face of adversity.

Art plays an important role in social change and is an invaluable tool for anyone looking to create positive impact in the world. Whether it’s used to create powerful visuals for a protest or to tell stories that inspire action, art has the power to bring people together and spark meaningful conversations about important topics.

Art is essential for all our lives

No matter who you are or where you come from, art plays a vital role in helping us make sense of our lives and the world around us. Art helps us to express our emotions, to communicate our thoughts and feelings, and to explore the depths of our imaginations. By engaging with art, we can discover more about ourselves and the world around us, and cultivate empathy and understanding.

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Essay on Art

500 words essay on art.

Each morning we see the sunshine outside and relax while some draw it to feel relaxed. Thus, you see that art is everywhere and anywhere if we look closely. In other words, everything in life is artwork. The essay on art will help us go through the importance of art and its meaning for a better understanding.

What is Art?

For as long as humanity has existed, art has been part of our lives. For many years, people have been creating and enjoying art. It expresses emotions or expression of life. It is one such creation that enables interpretation of any kind.

It is a skill that applies to music, painting, poetry, dance and more. Moreover, nature is no less than art. For instance, if nature creates something unique, it is also art. Artists use their artwork for passing along their feelings.

Thus, art and artists bring value to society and have been doing so throughout history. Art gives us an innovative way to view the world or society around us. Most important thing is that it lets us interpret it on our own individual experiences and associations.

Art is similar to live which has many definitions and examples. What is constant is that art is not perfect or does not revolve around perfection. It is something that continues growing and developing to express emotions, thoughts and human capacities.

Importance of Art

Art comes in many different forms which include audios, visuals and more. Audios comprise songs, music, poems and more whereas visuals include painting, photography, movies and more.

You will notice that we consume a lot of audio art in the form of music, songs and more. It is because they help us to relax our mind. Moreover, it also has the ability to change our mood and brighten it up.

After that, it also motivates us and strengthens our emotions. Poetries are audio arts that help the author express their feelings in writings. We also have music that requires musical instruments to create a piece of art.

Other than that, visual arts help artists communicate with the viewer. It also allows the viewer to interpret the art in their own way. Thus, it invokes a variety of emotions among us. Thus, you see how essential art is for humankind.

Without art, the world would be a dull place. Take the recent pandemic, for example, it was not the sports or news which kept us entertained but the artists. Their work of arts in the form of shows, songs, music and more added meaning to our boring lives.

Therefore, art adds happiness and colours to our lives and save us from the boring monotony of daily life.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Art

All in all, art is universal and can be found everywhere. It is not only for people who exercise work art but for those who consume it. If there were no art, we wouldn’t have been able to see the beauty in things. In other words, art helps us feel relaxed and forget about our problems.

FAQ of Essay on Art

Question 1: How can art help us?

Answer 1: Art can help us in a lot of ways. It can stimulate the release of dopamine in your bodies. This will in turn lower the feelings of depression and increase the feeling of confidence. Moreover, it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Question 2: What is the importance of art?

Answer 2: Art is essential as it covers all the developmental domains in child development. Moreover, it helps in physical development and enhancing gross and motor skills. For example, playing with dough can fine-tune your muscle control in your fingers.

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Defining ‘Art’

For a practice that has followed humanity since the dawn of consciousness, the question ‘What is Art?’ is notoriously difficult to answer. The Oxford English Dictionary, typically an authority when it comes to definition, calls art “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”

When asked to ‘think of an artwork’ there’s a pretty good chance that Oxford’s definition covers what you imagined. Oxford’s definition establishes some crucial distinctions: art is created by humans, so a beautiful tree is not art unless a human has applied their creativity to it, as with a bonsai tree. Also, art may be appreciated for its beauty or emotional power. While many artworks are visually pleasing, ugly or disturbing work is valid, and can be appreciated for its emotional power. So if Oxford has the definition nailed, why have generations of aestheticians, philosophers, writers, artists and academics defined and redefined what they think art is? First, some examples. We’ll begin with the pragmatic. In 1957, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright wrote: “Art is a discovery and development of elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms suitable for human use.” Another practical definition comes to us from Charles Eames: “Art resides in the quality of doing; process is not magic.”

For many artists and writers art is an intensely personal and difficult act, with Oscar Wilde calling art a mode of individualism , the French writer André Gide saying it’s “the point where resistance is overcome” and Italian film director Federico Fellini called art “autobiography . “

For Leo Tolstoy art was something greater than the individual. In his essay What is Art he wrote: “Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.” And this is the crux of why art is difficult to define. The Oxford English defines art as an object created with intention, but generations of artists have seen art as many things. And they are all correct, because art is as complicated, diverse and contentious as human nature. No one definition will ever properly encapsulate what art is. So here, in no particular order are Obelisk’s definitions of art:

— Art is a process — Art is communication — Art is an expression of humanness

Reed Enger, "Defining ‘Art’," in Obelisk Art History , Published August 15, 2019; last modified October 12, 2022, http://www.arthistoryproject.com/essays/defining-art/.

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The Concept of Art as Expression and Communication

Categories: Interpersonal Communication

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Question of the Month

What is art and/or what is beauty, the following answers to this artful question each win a random book..

Art is something we do, a verb. Art is an expression of our thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and desires, but it is even more personal than that: it’s about sharing the way we experience the world, which for many is an extension of personality. It is the communication of intimate concepts that cannot be faithfully portrayed by words alone. And because words alone are not enough, we must find some other vehicle to carry our intent. But the content that we instill on or in our chosen media is not in itself the art. Art is to be found in how the media is used, the way in which the content is expressed.

What then is beauty? Beauty is much more than cosmetic: it is not about prettiness. There are plenty of pretty pictures available at the neighborhood home furnishing store; but these we might not refer to as beautiful; and it is not difficult to find works of artistic expression that we might agree are beautiful that are not necessarily pretty. Beauty is rather a measure of affect, a measure of emotion. In the context of art, beauty is the gauge of successful communication between participants – the conveyance of a concept between the artist and the perceiver. Beautiful art is successful in portraying the artist’s most profound intended emotions, the desired concepts, whether they be pretty and bright, or dark and sinister. But neither the artist nor the observer can be certain of successful communication in the end. So beauty in art is eternally subjective.

Wm. Joseph Nieters, Lake Ozark, Missouri

Works of art may elicit a sense of wonder or cynicism, hope or despair, adoration or spite; the work of art may be direct or complex, subtle or explicit, intelligible or obscure; and the subjects and approaches to the creation of art are bounded only by the imagination of the artist. Consequently, I believe that defining art based upon its content is a doomed enterprise.

Now a theme in aesthetics, the study of art, is the claim that there is a detachment or distance between works of art and the flow of everyday life. Thus, works of art rise like islands from a current of more pragmatic concerns. When you step out of a river and onto an island, you’ve reached your destination. Similarly, the aesthetic attitude requires you to treat artistic experience as an end-in-itself : art asks us to arrive empty of preconceptions and attend to the way in which we experience the work of art. And although a person can have an ‘aesthetic experience’ of a natural scene, flavor or texture, art is different in that it is produced . Therefore, art is the intentional communication of an experience as an end-in-itself . The content of that experience in its cultural context may determine whether the artwork is popular or ridiculed, significant or trivial, but it is art either way.

One of the initial reactions to this approach may be that it seems overly broad. An older brother who sneaks up behind his younger sibling and shouts “Booo!” can be said to be creating art. But isn’t the difference between this and a Freddy Krueger movie just one of degree? On the other hand, my definition would exclude graphics used in advertising or political propaganda, as they are created as a means to an end and not for their own sakes. Furthermore, ‘communication’ is not the best word for what I have in mind because it implies an unwarranted intention about the content represented. Aesthetic responses are often underdetermined by the artist’s intentions.

Mike Mallory, Everett, WA

The fundamental difference between art and beauty is that art is about who has produced it, whereas beauty depends on who’s looking.

Of course there are standards of beauty – that which is seen as ‘traditionally’ beautiful. The game changers – the square pegs, so to speak – are those who saw traditional standards of beauty and decided specifically to go against them, perhaps just to prove a point. Take Picasso, Munch, Schoenberg, to name just three. They have made a stand against these norms in their art. Otherwise their art is like all other art: its only function is to be experienced, appraised, and understood (or not).

Art is a means to state an opinion or a feeling, or else to create a different view of the world, whether it be inspired by the work of other people or something invented that’s entirely new. Beauty is whatever aspect of that or anything else that makes an individual feel positive or grateful. Beauty alone is not art, but art can be made of, about or for beautiful things. Beauty can be found in a snowy mountain scene: art is the photograph of it shown to family, the oil interpretation of it hung in a gallery, or the music score recreating the scene in crotchets and quavers.

However, art is not necessarily positive: it can be deliberately hurtful or displeasing: it can make you think about or consider things that you would rather not. But if it evokes an emotion in you, then it is art.

Chiara Leonardi, Reading, Berks

Art is a way of grasping the world. Not merely the physical world, which is what science attempts to do; but the whole world, and specifically, the human world, the world of society and spiritual experience.

Art emerged around 50,000 years ago, long before cities and civilisation, yet in forms to which we can still directly relate. The wall paintings in the Lascaux caves, which so startled Picasso, have been carbon-dated at around 17,000 years old. Now, following the invention of photography and the devastating attack made by Duchamp on the self-appointed Art Establishment [see Brief Lives this issue], art cannot be simply defined on the basis of concrete tests like ‘fidelity of representation’ or vague abstract concepts like ‘beauty’. So how can we define art in terms applying to both cave-dwellers and modern city sophisticates? To do this we need to ask: What does art do ? And the answer is surely that it provokes an emotional, rather than a simply cognitive response. One way of approaching the problem of defining art, then, could be to say: Art consists of shareable ideas that have a shareable emotional impact. Art need not produce beautiful objects or events, since a great piece of art could validly arouse emotions other than those aroused by beauty, such as terror, anxiety, or laughter. Yet to derive an acceptable philosophical theory of art from this understanding means tackling the concept of ‘emotion’ head on, and philosophers have been notoriously reluctant to do this. But not all of them: Robert Solomon’s book The Passions (1993) has made an excellent start, and this seems to me to be the way to go.

It won’t be easy. Poor old Richard Rorty was jumped on from a very great height when all he said was that literature, poetry, patriotism, love and stuff like that were philosophically important. Art is vitally important to maintaining broad standards in civilisation. Its pedigree long predates philosophy, which is only 3,000 years old, and science, which is a mere 500 years old. Art deserves much more attention from philosophers.

Alistair MacFarlane, Gwynedd

Some years ago I went looking for art. To begin my journey I went to an art gallery. At that stage art to me was whatever I found in an art gallery. I found paintings, mostly, and because they were in the gallery I recognised them as art. A particular Rothko painting was one colour and large. I observed a further piece that did not have an obvious label. It was also of one colour – white – and gigantically large, occupying one complete wall of the very high and spacious room and standing on small roller wheels. On closer inspection I saw that it was a moveable wall, not a piece of art. Why could one piece of work be considered ‘art’ and the other not?

The answer to the question could, perhaps, be found in the criteria of Berys Gaut to decide if some artefact is, indeed, art – that art pieces function only as pieces of art, just as their creators intended.

But were they beautiful? Did they evoke an emotional response in me? Beauty is frequently associated with art. There is sometimes an expectation of encountering a ‘beautiful’ object when going to see a work of art, be it painting, sculpture, book or performance. Of course, that expectation quickly changes as one widens the range of installations encountered. The classic example is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), a rather un-beautiful urinal.

Can we define beauty? Let me try by suggesting that beauty is the capacity of an artefact to evoke a pleasurable emotional response. This might be categorised as the ‘like’ response.

I definitely did not like Fountain at the initial level of appreciation. There was skill, of course, in its construction. But what was the skill in its presentation as art?

So I began to reach a definition of art. A work of art is that which asks a question which a non-art object such as a wall does not: What am I? What am I communicating? The responses, both of the creator artist and of the recipient audience, vary, but they invariably involve a judgement, a response to the invitation to answer. The answer, too, goes towards deciphering that deeper question – the ‘Who am I?’ which goes towards defining humanity.

Neil Hallinan, Maynooth, Co. Kildare

‘Art’ is where we make meaning beyond language. Art consists in the making of meaning through intelligent agency, eliciting an aesthetic response. It’s a means of communication where language is not sufficient to explain or describe its content. Art can render visible and known what was previously unspoken. Because what art expresses and evokes is in part ineffable, we find it difficult to define and delineate it. It is known through the experience of the audience as well as the intention and expression of the artist. The meaning is made by all the participants, and so can never be fully known. It is multifarious and on-going. Even a disagreement is a tension which is itself an expression of something.

Art drives the development of a civilisation, both supporting the establishment and also preventing subversive messages from being silenced – art leads, mirrors and reveals change in politics and morality. Art plays a central part in the creation of culture, and is an outpouring of thought and ideas from it, and so it cannot be fully understood in isolation from its context. Paradoxically, however, art can communicate beyond language and time, appealing to our common humanity and linking disparate communities. Perhaps if wider audiences engaged with a greater variety of the world’s artistic traditions it could engender increased tolerance and mutual respect.

Another inescapable facet of art is that it is a commodity. This fact feeds the creative process, whether motivating the artist to form an item of monetary value, or to avoid creating one, or to artistically commodify the aesthetic experience. The commodification of art also affects who is considered qualified to create art, comment on it, and even define it, as those who benefit most strive to keep the value of ‘art objects’ high. These influences must feed into a culture’s understanding of what art is at any time, making thoughts about art culturally dependent. However, this commodification and the consequent closely-guarded role of the art critic also gives rise to a counter culture within art culture, often expressed through the creation of art that cannot be sold. The stratification of art by value and the resultant tension also adds to its meaning, and the meaning of art to society.

Catherine Bosley, Monk Soham, Suffolk

First of all we must recognize the obvious. ‘Art’ is a word, and words and concepts are organic and change their meaning through time. So in the olden days, art meant craft. It was something you could excel at through practise and hard work. You learnt how to paint or sculpt, and you learnt the special symbolism of your era. Through Romanticism and the birth of individualism, art came to mean originality. To do something new and never-heard-of defined the artist. His or her personality became essentially as important as the artwork itself. During the era of Modernism, the search for originality led artists to reevaluate art. What could art do? What could it represent? Could you paint movement (Cubism, Futurism)? Could you paint the non-material (Abstract Expressionism)? Fundamentally: could anything be regarded as art? A way of trying to solve this problem was to look beyond the work itself, and focus on the art world: art was that which the institution of art – artists, critics, art historians, etc – was prepared to regard as art, and which was made public through the institution, e.g. galleries. That’s Institutionalism – made famous through Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades.

Institutionalism has been the prevailing notion through the later part of the twentieth century, at least in academia, and I would say it still holds a firm grip on our conceptions. One example is the Swedish artist Anna Odell. Her film sequence Unknown woman 2009-349701 , for which she faked psychosis to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital, was widely debated, and by many was not regarded as art. But because it was debated by the art world, it succeeded in breaking into the art world, and is today regarded as art, and Odell is regarded an artist.

Of course there are those who try and break out of this hegemony, for example by refusing to play by the art world’s unwritten rules. Andy Warhol with his Factory was one, even though he is today totally embraced by the art world. Another example is Damien Hirst, who, much like Warhol, pays people to create the physical manifestations of his ideas. He doesn’t use galleries and other art world-approved arenas to advertise, and instead sells his objects directly to private individuals. This liberal approach to capitalism is one way of attacking the hegemony of the art world.

What does all this teach us about art? Probably that art is a fleeting and chimeric concept. We will always have art, but for the most part we will only really learn in retrospect what the art of our era was.

Tommy Törnsten, Linköping, Sweden

Art periods such as Classical, Byzantine, neo-Classical, Romantic, Modern and post-Modern reflect the changing nature of art in social and cultural contexts; and shifting values are evident in varying content, forms and styles. These changes are encompassed, more or less in sequence, by Imitationalist, Emotionalist, Expressivist, Formalist and Institutionalist theories of art. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), Arthur Danto claims a distinctiveness for art that inextricably links its instances with acts of observation, without which all that could exist are ‘material counterparts’ or ‘mere real things’ rather than artworks. Notwithstanding the competing theories, works of art can be seen to possess ‘family resemblances’ or ‘strands of resemblance’ linking very different instances as art. Identifying instances of art is relatively straightforward, but a definition of art that includes all possible cases is elusive. Consequently, art has been claimed to be an ‘open’ concept.

According to Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1976), capitalised ‘Art’ appears in general use in the nineteenth century, with ‘Fine Art’; whereas ‘art’ has a history of previous applications, such as in music, poetry, comedy, tragedy and dance; and we should also mention literature, media arts, even gardening, which for David Cooper in A Philosophy of Gardens (2006) can provide “epiphanies of co-dependence”. Art, then, is perhaps “anything presented for our aesthetic contemplation” – a phrase coined by John Davies, former tutor at the School of Art Education, Birmingham, in 1971 – although ‘anything’ may seem too inclusive. Gaining our aesthetic interest is at least a necessary requirement of art. Sufficiency for something to be art requires significance to art appreciators which endures as long as tokens or types of the artwork persist. Paradoxically, such significance is sometimes attributed to objects neither intended as art, nor especially intended to be perceived aesthetically – for instance, votive, devotional, commemorative or utilitarian artefacts. Furthermore, aesthetic interests can be eclipsed by dubious investment practices and social kudos. When combined with celebrity and harmful forms of narcissism, they can egregiously affect artistic authenticity. These interests can be overriding, and spawn products masquerading as art. Then it’s up to discerning observers to spot any Fads, Fakes and Fantasies (Sjoerd Hannema, 1970).

Colin Brookes, Loughborough, Leicestershire

For me art is nothing more and nothing less than the creative ability of individuals to express their understanding of some aspect of private or public life, like love, conflict, fear, or pain. As I read a war poem by Edward Thomas, enjoy a Mozart piano concerto, or contemplate a M.C. Escher drawing, I am often emotionally inspired by the moment and intellectually stimulated by the thought-process that follows. At this moment of discovery I humbly realize my views may be those shared by thousands, even millions across the globe. This is due in large part to the mass media’s ability to control and exploit our emotions. The commercial success of a performance or production becomes the metric by which art is now almost exclusively gauged: quality in art has been sadly reduced to equating great art with sale of books, number of views, or the downloading of recordings. Too bad if personal sensibilities about a particular piece of art are lost in the greater rush for immediate acceptance.

So where does that leave the subjective notion that beauty can still be found in art? If beauty is the outcome of a process by which art gives pleasure to our senses, then it should remain a matter of personal discernment, even if outside forces clamour to take control of it. In other words, nobody, including the art critic, should be able to tell the individual what is beautiful and what is not. The world of art is one of a constant tension between preserving individual tastes and promoting popular acceptance.

Ian Malcomson, Victoria, British Columbia

What we perceive as beautiful does not offend us on any level. It is a personal judgement, a subjective opinion. A memory from once we gazed upon something beautiful, a sight ever so pleasing to the senses or to the eye, oft time stays with us forever. I shall never forget walking into Balzac’s house in France: the scent of lilies was so overwhelming that I had a numinous moment. The intensity of the emotion evoked may not be possible to explain. I don’t feel it’s important to debate why I think a flower, painting, sunset or how the light streaming through a stained-glass window is beautiful. The power of the sights create an emotional reaction in me. I don’t expect or concern myself that others will agree with me or not. Can all agree that an act of kindness is beautiful?

A thing of beauty is a whole; elements coming together making it so. A single brush stroke of a painting does not alone create the impact of beauty, but all together, it becomes beautiful. A perfect flower is beautiful, when all of the petals together form its perfection; a pleasant, intoxicating scent is also part of the beauty.

In thinking about the question, ‘What is beauty?’, I’ve simply come away with the idea that I am the beholder whose eye it is in. Suffice it to say, my private assessment of what strikes me as beautiful is all I need to know.

Cheryl Anderson, Kenilworth, Illinois

Stendhal said, “Beauty is the promise of happiness”, but this didn’t get to the heart of the matter. Whose beauty are we talking about? Whose happiness?

Consider if a snake made art. What would it believe to be beautiful? What would it deign to make? Snakes have poor eyesight and detect the world largely through a chemosensory organ, the Jacobson’s organ, or through heat-sensing pits. Would a movie in its human form even make sense to a snake? So their art, their beauty, would be entirely alien to ours: it would not be visual, and even if they had songs they would be foreign; after all, snakes do not have ears, they sense vibrations. So fine art would be sensed, and songs would be felt, if it is even possible to conceive that idea.

From this perspective – a view low to the ground – we can see that beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. It may cross our lips to speak of the nature of beauty in billowy language, but we do so entirely with a forked tongue if we do so seriously. The aesthetics of representing beauty ought not to fool us into thinking beauty, as some abstract concept, truly exists. It requires a viewer and a context, and the value we place on certain combinations of colors or sounds over others speaks of nothing more than preference. Our desire for pictures, moving or otherwise, is because our organs developed in such a way. A snake would have no use for the visual world.

I am thankful to have human art over snake art, but I would no doubt be amazed at serpentine art. It would require an intellectual sloughing of many conceptions we take for granted. For that, considering the possibility of this extreme thought is worthwhile: if snakes could write poetry, what would it be?

Derek Halm, Portland, Oregon

[A: Sssibilance and sussssuration – Ed.]

The questions, ‘What is art?’ and ‘What is beauty?’ are different types and shouldn’t be conflated.

With boring predictability, almost all contemporary discussers of art lapse into a ‘relative-off’, whereby they go to annoying lengths to demonstrate how open-minded they are and how ineluctably loose the concept of art is. If art is just whatever you want it to be, can we not just end the conversation there? It’s a done deal. I’ll throw playdough on to a canvas, and we can pretend to display our modern credentials of acceptance and insight. This just doesn’t work, and we all know it. If art is to mean anything , there has to be some working definition of what it is. If art can be anything to anybody at anytime, then there ends the discussion. What makes art special – and worth discussing – is that it stands above or outside everyday things, such as everyday food, paintwork, or sounds. Art comprises special or exceptional dishes, paintings, and music.

So what, then, is my definition of art? Briefly, I believe there must be at least two considerations to label something as ‘art’. The first is that there must be something recognizable in the way of ‘author-to-audience reception’. I mean to say, there must be the recognition that something was made for an audience of some kind to receive, discuss or enjoy. Implicit in this point is the evident recognizability of what the art actually is – in other words, the author doesn’t have to tell you it’s art when you otherwise wouldn’t have any idea. The second point is simply the recognition of skill: some obvious skill has to be involved in making art. This, in my view, would be the minimum requirements – or definition – of art. Even if you disagree with the particulars, some definition is required to make anything at all art. Otherwise, what are we even discussing? I’m breaking the mold and ask for brass tacks.

Brannon McConkey, Tennessee Author of Student of Life: Why Becoming Engaged in Life, Art, and Philosophy Can Lead to a Happier Existence

Human beings appear to have a compulsion to categorize, to organize and define. We seek to impose order on a welter of sense-impressions and memories, seeing regularities and patterns in repetitions and associations, always on the lookout for correlations, eager to determine cause and effect, so that we might give sense to what might otherwise seem random and inconsequential. However, particularly in the last century, we have also learned to take pleasure in the reflection of unstructured perceptions; our artistic ways of seeing and listening have expanded to encompass disharmony and irregularity. This has meant that culturally, an ever-widening gap has grown between the attitudes and opinions of the majority, who continue to define art in traditional ways, having to do with order, harmony, representation; and the minority, who look for originality, who try to see the world anew, and strive for difference, and whose critical practice is rooted in abstraction. In between there are many who abjure both extremes, and who both find and give pleasure both in defining a personal vision and in practising craftsmanship.

There will always be a challenge to traditional concepts of art from the shock of the new, and tensions around the appropriateness of our understanding. That is how things should be, as innovators push at the boundaries. At the same time, we will continue to take pleasure in the beauty of a mathematical equation, a finely-tuned machine, a successful scientific experiment, the technology of landing a probe on a comet, an accomplished poem, a striking portrait, the sound-world of a symphony. We apportion significance and meaning to what we find of value and wish to share with our fellows. Our art and our definitions of beauty reflect our human nature and the multiplicity of our creative efforts.

In the end, because of our individuality and our varied histories and traditions, our debates will always be inconclusive. If we are wise, we will look and listen with an open spirit, and sometimes with a wry smile, always celebrating the diversity of human imaginings and achievements.

David Howard, Church Stretton, Shropshire

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The Definition of Art

The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated.

Contemporary definitions can be classified with respect to the dimensions of art they emphasize. One distinctively modern, conventionalist, sort of definition focuses on art’s institutional features, emphasizing the way art changes over time, modern works that appear to break radically with all traditional art, the relational properties of artworks that depend on works’ relations to art history, art genres, etc. – more broadly, on the undeniable heterogeneity of the class of artworks. The more traditional, less conventionalist sort of definition defended in contemporary philosophy makes use of a broader, more traditional concept of aesthetic properties that includes more than art-relational ones, and puts more emphasis on art’s pan-cultural and trans-historical characteristics – in sum, on commonalities across the class of artworks. Hybrid definitions aim to do justice to both the traditional aesthetic dimension as well as to the institutional and art-historical dimensions of art, while privileging neither.

1. Constraints on Definitions of Art

2.1 some examples, 3.1 skepticisms inspired by views of concepts, history, marxism, feminism, 3.2 some descendants of skepticism, 4.1 conventionalist definitions: institutional and historical, 4.2 institutional definitions, 4.3 historical definitions.

4.4 Functional (mainly aesthetic) definitions

4.5 Hybrid (Disjunctive) Definitions

5. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

Any definition of art has to square with the following uncontroversial facts: (i) entities (artifacts or performances) intentionally endowed by their makers with a significant degree of aesthetic interest, often greatly surpassing that of most everyday objects, first appeared hundreds of thousands of years ago and exist in virtually every known human culture (Davies 2012); (ii) such entities are partially comprehensible to cultural outsiders – they are neither opaque nor completely transparent; (iii) such entities sometimes have non-aesthetic – ceremonial or religious or propagandistic – functions, and sometimes do not; (iv) such entities might conceivably be produced by non-human species, terrestrial or otherwise; and it seems at least in principle possible that they be extraspecifically recognizable as such; (v) traditionally, artworks are intentionally endowed by their makers with properties, often sensory, having a significant degree of aesthetic interest, usually surpassing that of most everyday objects; (vi) art’s normative dimension – the high value placed on making and consuming art – appears to be essential to it, and artworks can have considerable moral and political as well as aesthetic power; (vii) the arts are always changing, just as the rest of culture is: as artists experiment creatively, new genres, art-forms, and styles develop; standards of taste and sensibilities evolve; understandings of aesthetic properties, aesthetic experience, and the nature of art evolve; (viii) there are institutions in some but not all cultures which involve a focus on artifacts and performances that have a high degree of aesthetic interest but lack any practical, ceremonial, or religious use; (ix) entities seemingly lacking aesthetic interest, and entities having a high degree of aesthetic interest, are not infrequently grouped together as artworks by such institutions; (x) lots of things besides artworks – for example, natural entities (sunsets, landscapes, flowers, shadows), human beings, and abstract entities (theories, proofs, mathematical entities) – have interesting aesthetic properties.

Of these facts, those having to do with art’s contingent cultural and historical features are emphasized by some definitions of art. Other definitions of art give priority to explaining those facts that reflect art’s universality and continuity with other aesthetic phenomena. Still other definitions attempt to explain both art’s contingent characteristics and its more abiding ones while giving priority to neither.

Two general constraints on definitions are particularly relevant to definitions of art. First, given that accepting that something is inexplicable is generally a philosophical last resort, and granting the importance of extensional adequacy, list-like or enumerative definitions are if possible to be avoided. Enumerative definitions, lacking principles that explain why what is on the list is on the list, don’t, notoriously, apply to definienda that evolve, and provide no clue to the next or general case (Tarski’s definition of truth, for example, is standardly criticized as unenlightening because it rests on a list-like definition of primitive denotation; see Field 1972; Devitt 2001; Davidson 2005). Corollary: when everything else is equal (and it is controversial whether and when that condition is satisfied in the case of definitions of art), non-disjunctive definitions are preferable to disjunctive ones. Second, 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 (Davies 1991 and 2006; Stecker 2005).

Whether any definition of art does account for these facts and satisfy these constraints, or could account for these facts and satisfy these constraints, are key questions for aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

2. Definitions From the History of Philosophy

Classical definitions, at least as they are portrayed in contemporary discussions of the definition of art, take artworks to be characterized by a single type of property. The standard candidates are representational properties, expressive properties, and formal properties. So there are representational or mimetic definitions, expressive definitions, and formalist definitions, which hold that artworks are characterized by their possession of, respectively, representational, expressive, and formal properties. It is not difficult to find fault with these simple definitions. For example, possessing representational, expressive, and formal properties cannot be sufficient conditions, since, obviously, instructional manuals are representations, but not typically artworks, human faces and gestures have expressive properties without being works of art, and both natural objects and artifacts produced solely for homely utilitarian purposes have formal properties but are not artworks.

The ease of these dismissals, though, serves as a reminder of the fact that classical definitions of art are significantly less philosophically self-contained or freestanding than are most contemporary definitions of art. Each classical definition stands in close and complicated relationships to its system’s other complexly interwoven parts – epistemology, ontology, value theory, philosophy of mind, etc. Relatedly, great philosophers characteristically analyze the key theoretical components of their definitions of art in distinctive and subtle ways. For these reasons, understanding such definitions in isolation from the systems or corpuses of which they are parts is difficult, and brief summaries are invariably somewhat misleading. Nevertheless, some representative examples of historically influential definitions of art offered by major figures in the history of philosophy should be mentioned.

Plato holds in the Republic and elsewhere that the arts are representational, or mimetic (sometimes translated “imitative”). Artworks are ontologically dependent on, imitations of, and therefore inferior to, ordinary physical objects. Physical objects in turn are ontologically dependent on, and imitations of, and hence inferior to, what is most real, the non-physical unchanging Forms. Grasped perceptually, artworks present only an appearance of an appearance of the Forms, which are grasped by reason alone. Consequently, artistic experience cannot yield knowledge. Nor do the makers of artworks 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, properly understood, more humanly important than, beauty. The arts are not, for Plato, the primary sphere in which beauty operates. The Platonic conception of beauty is extremely wide and metaphysical: there is a Form of Beauty, which can only be known non-perceptually, but it is more closely related to the erotic than to the arts. (See Janaway 1998, the entry on Plato’s aesthetics , and the entry on Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry .)

Kant has a definition of art, and of fine art; the latter, which Kant calls the art of genius, is “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” (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment , Guyer translation, section 44, 46).) When fully unpacked, the definition has representational, formalist and expressivist elements, and focuses as much on the creative activity of the artistic genius (who, according to Kant, possesses an “innate mental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art”) as on the artworks produced by that activity. Kant’s aesthetic theory is, for architectonic reasons, not focused on art. Art for Kant falls under the broader topic of aesthetic judgment, which covers judgments of the beautiful, judgments of the sublime, and teleological judgments of natural organisms and of nature itself. So Kant’s definition of art is a relatively small part of his theory of aesthetic judgment. And Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment is itself situated in a hugely ambitious theoretical structure that, famously, aims, to account for, and work out the interconnections between, scientific knowledge, morality, and religious faith. (See the entry on Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology and the general entry on Immanuel Kant .)

Hegel’s account of art incorporates his view of beauty; he defines beauty as the sensuous/perceptual appearance or expression of absolute truth. The best artworks convey, by sensory/perceptual means, the deepest metaphysical truth. The deepest metaphysical truth, according to Hegel, is that the universe is the concrete realization of what is conceptual or rational. That is, what is conceptual or rational is real, and is the imminent force that animates and propels the self-consciously developing universe. The universe is the concrete realization of what is conceptual or rational, and the rational or conceptual is superior to the sensory. So, as the mind and its products alone are capable of truth, artistic beauty is metaphysically superior to natural beauty (Hegel, Lectures , [1886, 4]). A central and defining feature of beautiful works of art is that, through the medium of sensation, each one presents the most fundamental values of its civilization. [ 1 ] Art, therefore, as a cultural expression, operates in the same sphere as religion and philosophy, and expresses the same content as they. But art “reveals to consciousness the deepest interests of humanity” in a different manner than do religion and philosophy, because art alone, of the three, works by sensuous means. So, given the superiority of the conceptual to the non-conceptual, and the fact that art’s medium for expressing/presenting culture’s deepest values is the sensual or perceptual, art’s medium is limited and inferior in comparison with the medium that religion uses to express the same content, viz., mental imagery. Art and religion in turn are, in this respect, inferior to philosophy, which employs a conceptual medium to present its content. Art initially predominates, in each civilization, as the supreme mode of cultural expression, followed, successively, by religion and philosophy. Similarly, because the broadly “logical” relations between art, religion and philosophy determine the actual structure of art, religion, and philosophy, and because cultural ideas about what is intrinsically valuable develop from sensuous to non-sensuous conceptions, history is divided into periods that reflect the teleological development from the sensuous to the conceptual. Art in general, too, develops in accord with the historical growth of non-sensuous or conceptual conceptions from sensuous conceptions, and each individual art-form develops historically in the same way (Hegel, Lectures ; Wicks 1993, see also the entries on Hegel and on Hegel’s Aesthetics ).

For treatments of other influential definitions of art, inseparable from the complex philosophical systems or corpuses in which they occur, see, for example, the entries on 18th Century German Aesthetics , Arthur Schopenhauer , Friedrich Nietzsche , and Dewey’s Aesthetics .

3. Skepticism about Definitions of Art

Skeptical doubts about the possibility and value of a definition of art have figured importantly in the discussion in aesthetics since the 1950s, and though their influence has subsided somewhat, uneasiness about the definitional project persists. (See section 4, below, and also Kivy 1997, Brand 2000, and Walton 2007).

A common family of arguments, inspired by Wittgenstein’s famous remarks about games (Wittgenstein 1953), has it that the phenomena of art are, by their nature, too diverse to admit of the unification that a satisfactory definition strives for, or that a definition of art, were there to be such a thing, would exert a stifling influence on artistic creativity. One expression of this impulse is Weitz’s Open Concept Argument: 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; all open concepts are indefinable; and there are cases calling for a decision about whether to extend or close the concept of art. Hence art is indefinable (Weitz 1956). Against this it is claimed that change does not, in general, rule out the preservation of identity over time, that decisions about concept-expansion may be principled rather than capricious, and that nothing bars a definition of art from incorporating a novelty requirement.

A second sort of argument, less common today than in the heyday of a certain form of extreme Wittgensteinianism, urges that the concepts that make up the stuff of most definitions of art (expressiveness, form) are embedded in general philosophical theories which incorporate traditional metaphysics and epistemology. But since traditional metaphysics and epistemology are prime instances of language gone on conceptually confused holiday, definitions of art share in the conceptual confusions of traditional philosophy (Tilghman 1984).

A third sort of argument, more historically inflected than the first, takes off from an influential study by the historian of philosophy Paul Kristeller, in which he argued that the modern system of the five major arts [painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music] which underlies all modern aesthetics … is of comparatively recent origin and did not assume definite shape before the eighteenth century, although it had many ingredients which go back to classical, mediaeval, and Renaissance thought. (Kristeller, 1951) 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 eighteenth century, Kristeller’s work may be taken to suggest that our concept of art differs from that of the eighteenth century. As a matter of historical fact, there simply is no stable definiendum for a definition of art to capture.

A fourth sort of argument suggests that a definition of art stating individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a thing to be an artwork, is likely to be discoverable only if cognitive science makes it plausible to think that humans categorize things in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. But, the argument continues, cognitive science actually supports the view that the structure of concepts mirrors the way humans categorize things – which is with respect to their similarity to prototypes (or exemplars), and not in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. So the quest for a definition of art that states individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions is misguided and not likely to succeed (Dean 2003). Against this it has been urged 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, and that, even if relevant, prototype theory and other psychological theories of concepts are at present too controversial to draw substantive philosophical morals from (Rey 1983; Adajian 2005).

A fifth argument against defining art, with a normative tinge that is psychologistic rather than sociopolitical, takes the fact that there is no philosophical consensus about the definition of art as reason to hold that no unitary concept of art exists. Concepts of art, like all concepts, after all, should be used for the purpose(s) they best serve. But not all concepts of art serve all purposes equally well. So not all art concepts should be used for the same purposes. Art should be defined only if there is a unitary concept of art that serves all of art’s various purposes – historical, conventional, aesthetic, appreciative, communicative, and so on. So, since there is no purpose-independent use of the concept of art, art should not be defined (Mag Uidhir and Magnus 2011; cf. Meskin 2008). In response, it is noted that some account of what makes various concepts of art concepts of art is still required; this leaves open the possibility of some degree of unity beneath the apparent multiplicity. The fact (if it is one) that different concepts of art are used for different purposes does not itself imply that they are not connected in ordered, to-some-degree systematic ways. The relation between (say) the historical concept of art and the appreciative concept of art is not an accidental, unsystematic relation, like that between river banks and savings banks, but is something like the relation between Socrates’ healthiness and the healthiness of Socrates’ diet. That is, it is not evident that there exist a mere arbitrary heap or disjunction of art concepts, constituting an unsystematic patchwork. Perhaps there is a single concept of art with different facets that interlock in an ordered way, or else a multiplicity of concepts that constitute a unity because one is at the core, and the others depend asymmetrically on it. (The last is an instance of core-dependent homonymy; see the entry on Aristotle , section on Essentialism and Homonymy.) Multiplicity alone doesn’t entail pluralism.

A sixth, broadly Marxian sort of objection rejects the project of defining art as an unwitting (and confused) expression of a harmful ideology. On this view, the search for a definition of art presupposes, wrongly, that the concept of the aesthetic is a creditable one. But since the concept of the aesthetic necessarily involves the equally bankrupt concept of disinterestedness, its use advances the illusion that what is most real about things can and should be grasped or contemplated without attending to the social and economic conditions of their production. Definitions of art, consequently, spuriously confer ontological dignity and respectability on social phenomena that probably in fact call more properly for rigorous social criticism and change. Their real function is ideological, not philosophical (Eagleton 1990).

Seventh, the members of a complex of skeptically-flavored arguments, from feminist philosophy of art, begin with premises to the effect that art and art-related concepts and practices have been systematically skewed by sex or gender. Such premises are supported by a variety of considerations. (a) The artworks the Western artistic canon recognizes as great are dominated by male-centered perspectives and stereotypes, and almost all the artists the canon recognizes as great are men – unsurprisingly, given economic, social, and institutional impediments that prevented women from making art at all. Moreover, the concept of genius developed historically in such a way as to exclude women artists (Battersby, 1989, Korsmeyer 2004). (b) The fine arts’ focus on purely aesthetic, non-utilitarian value resulted in the marginalization as mere “crafts” of items of considerable aesthetic interest made and used by women for domestic practical purposes. Moreover, because all aesthetic judgments are situated and particular, there can be no such thing as disinterested taste. If there is no such thing as disinterested taste, then it is hard to see how there could be universal standards of aesthetic excellence. The non-existence of universal standards of aesthetic excellence undermines the idea of an artistic canon (and with it the project of defining art). Art as historically constituted, and art-related practices and concepts, then, reflect views and practices that presuppose and perpetuate the subordination of women. The data that definitions of art are supposed to explain are biased, corrupt and incomplete. As a consequence, present definitions of art, incorporating or presupposing as they do a framework that incorporates a history of systematically biased, hierarchical, fragmentary, and mistaken understandings of art and art-related phenomena and concepts, may be so androcentric as to be untenable. Some theorists have suggested that different genders have systematically unique artistic styles, methods, or modes of appreciating and valuing art. If so, then a separate canon and gynocentric definitions of art are indicated (Battersby 1989, Frueh 1991). In any case, in the face of these facts, the project of defining art in anything like the traditional way is to be regarded with suspicion (Brand, 2000).

An eighth argument sort of skeptical argument concludes that, insofar as almost all contemporary definitions foreground the nature of art works , rather than the individual arts to which (most? all?) artworks belong, they are philosophically unproductive (Lopes, 2014). [ 2 ] The grounds for this conclusion concern disagreements among standard definitions as to the artistic status of entities whose status is for theoretical reasons unclear – e.g., things like ordinary bottleracks (Duchamp’s Bottlerack ) and silence (John Cage’s 4′33″ ). If these hard cases are artworks, what makes them so, given their apparent lack of any of the traditional properties of artworks? Are, they, at best, marginal cases? On the other hand, if they are not artworks, then why have generations of experts – art historians, critics, and collectors – classified them as such? And to whom else should one look to determine the true nature of art? (There are, it is claimed, few or no empirical studies of art full stop, though empirical studies of the individual arts abound.) Such disputes inevitably end in stalemate. Stalemate results because (a) standard artwork-focused definitions of art endorse different criteria of theory choice, and (b) on the basis of their preferred criteria, appeal to incompatible intuitions about the status of such theoretically-vexed cases. In consequence, disagreements between standard definitions of art that foreground artworks are unresolvable. To avoid this stalemate, an alternative definitional strategy that foregrounds the arts rather than individual artworks, is indicated. (See section 4.5.)

Philosophers influenced by the moderate Wittgensteinian strictures discussed above have offered family resemblance accounts of art, which, as they purport to be non-definitions, may be usefully considered at this point. Two species of family resemblance views will be considered: the resemblance-to-a-paradigm version, and the cluster version.

On the resemblance-to-a-paradigm version, 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. (The “is identifiable” qualification is intended to make the family resemblance view something more epistemological than a definition, although it is unclear that this really avoids a commitment to constitutive claims about art’s nature.) Against this view: since things do not resemble each other simpliciter , but only in at least one respect or other, the account is either far too inclusive, since everything resembles everything else in some respect or other, or, if the variety of resemblance is specified, tantamount to a definition, since resemblance in that respect will be either a necessary or sufficient condition for being an artwork. The family resemblance view raises questions, moreover, about the membership and unity of the class of paradigm artworks. If the account lacks an explanation of why some items and not others go on 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.

The cluster version of the family resemblance view has been defended by a number of philosophers (Bond 1975, Dissanayake 1990, Dutton 2006, Gaut 2000). The view typically provides a list of properties, no one of which is a necessary condition for being a work of art, but which are jointly sufficient for being a work of art, and which is such that at least one proper subset thereof is sufficient for being a work of art. Lists offered vary, but overlap considerably. Here is one, due to Gaut: (1) possessing positive aesthetic properties; (2) being expressive of emotion; (3) being intellectually challenging; (4) being formally complex and coherent; (5) having the capacity to convey complex meanings; (6) exhibiting an individual point of view; (7) being original; (8) being an artifact or performance which is the product of a high degree of skill; (9) belonging to an established artistic form; (10) being the product of an intention to make a work of art (Gaut 2000). The cluster account has been criticized on several grounds. First, given its logical structure, it is in fact equivalent to a long, complicated, but finite, disjunction, which makes it difficult to see why it isn’t a definition (Davies 2006). Second, if the list of properties is incomplete, as some cluster theorists hold, then some justification or principle would be needed for extending it. Third, the inclusion of the ninth property on the list, belonging to an established art form , seems to regenerate (or duck), rather than answer, the definitional question. Finally, it is worth noting that, although cluster theorists stress what they take to be the motley heterogeneity of the class of artworks, they tend with surprising regularity to tacitly give the aesthetic a special, perhaps unifying, status among the properties they put forward as merely disjunctive. One cluster theorist, for example, gives a list very similar to the one discussed above (it includes representational properties, expressiveness, creativity, exhibiting a high degree of skill, belonging to an established artform), but omits aesthetic properties on the grounds that it is the combination of the other items on the list which, combined in the experience of the work of art, are precisely the aesthetic qualities of the work (Dutton 2006). Gaut, whose list is cited above, includes aesthetic properties as a separate item on the list, but construes them very narrowly; the difference between these ways of formulating the cluster view appears to be mainly nominal. And an earlier cluster theorist defines artworks as all and only those things that belong to any instantiation of an artform, offers a list of seven properties all of which together are intended to capture the core of what it is to be an artform, though none is either necessary or sufficient, and then claims that having aesthetic value (of the same sort as mountains, sunsets, mathematical theorems) is “what art is for ” (Bond 1975).

4. Contemporary Definitions

Definitions of art attempt to make sense of two different sorts of facts: art has important historically contingent cultural features, as well as trans-historical, pan-cultural characteristics that point in the direction of a relatively stable aesthetic core. (Theorists who regard art as an invention of eighteenth-century Europe will, of course, regard this way of putting the matter as tendentious, on the grounds that entities produced outside that culturally distinctive institution do not fall under the extension of “art” and hence are irrelevant to the art-defining project (Shiner 2001). Whether the concept of art is precise enough to justify this much confidence about what falls under its extension claim is unclear.) Conventionalist definitions take art’s contingent cultural features to be explanatorily fundamental, and aim to capture the phenomena – revolutionary modern art, the traditional close connection of art with the aesthetic, the possibility of autonomous art traditions, etc. – in social/historical terms. Classically-flavored or traditional definitions (also sometimes called “functionalist”) definitions reverse this explanatory order. Such classically-flavored definitions take traditional concepts like the aesthetic (or allied concepts like the formal, or the expressive) as basic, and aim to account for the phenomena by making those concepts harder – for example, by endorsing a concept of the aesthetic rich enough to include non-perceptual properties, or by attempting an integration of those concepts (e.g., Eldridge, section 4.4 below) .

Conventionalist definitions deny that art has essential connection to aesthetic properties, or to formal properties, or to expressive properties, or to any type of property taken by traditional definitions to be essential to art. Conventionalist definitions have been strongly influenced by the emergence, in the twentieth century, of artworks that seem to differ radically from all previous artworks. Avant-garde works like Marcel Duchamp’s “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″ , have seemed to many philosophers to lack or even, somehow, repudiate, the traditional properties of art: intended aesthetic interest, artifactuality, even perceivability. Conventionalist definitions have also been strongly influenced 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 (Kristeller, Shiner, Carroll, Goehr, Kivy).

Conventionalist definitions come in two varieties, institutional and historical. Institutionalist conventionalism, or institutionalism, a synchronic view, typically hold that to be a work of art is to be an artifact of a kind created, by an artist, to be presented to an artworld public (Dickie 1984). Historical conventionalism, a diachronic view, holds that artworks necessarily stand in an art-historical relation to some set of earlier artworks.

The groundwork for institutional definitions was laid by Arthur Danto, better known to non-philosophers as the long-time influential art critic for the Nation . Danto coined the term “artworld”, by which he meant “an atmosphere of art theory.” Danto’s definition has been glossed as follows: 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). Clause (iv) is what makes the definition institutionalist. The view has been criticized for entailing that art criticism written in a highly rhetorical style is art, lacking but requiring an independent account of what makes a context art historical , and for not applying to music.

The most prominent and influential institutionalism is that of George Dickie. Dickie’s institutionalism has evolved over time. According to an early version, 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 1974). Dickie’s more recent version consists of 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 versions have been widely criticized. Philosophers have objected that art created outside any institution seems possible, although the definition rules it out, and that the artworld, like any institution, seems capable of error. It has also been urged that the definition’s obvious circularity is vicious, and 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 (D. Davies 2004, pp. 248–249, notes that both the artworld and the “commerceworld” seem to fall under that definition). Early on, Dickie claimed that anyone who sees herself as a member of the artworld is a member of the artworld: if this is true, 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 are), which appears overly expansive. Finally, Matravers has helpfully distinguished strong and weak institutionalism. Strong institutionalism holds that there is some reason that is always the reason the art institution has for saying that something is a work of art. Weak institutionalism holds 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 (Matravers 2000). Weak institutionalism, in particular, raises questions about art’s unity: if absolutely nothing unifies the reasons that the artworld gives for conferring art-hood on things, then the unity of the class of artworks is vanishingly small. Conventionalist views, with their emphasis on art’s heterogeneity, swallow this implication. From the perspective of traditional definitions, doings so underplays art’s substantial if incomplete unity, while leaving it a puzzle why art would be worth caring about.

Some recent versions of institutionalism depart from Dickie’s by accepting the burden, which Dickie rejected, of providing a substantive, non-circular account of what it is to be an art institution or an artworld. One, due to David Davies, does so by building in Nelson Goodman’s account of aesthetic symbolic functions. Another, due to Abell, combines Searle’s account of social institutions with Gaut’s characterization of art-making properties, and builds an account of artistic value on that coupling.

Davies’ neo-institutionalism holds that making an artwork requires articulating an artistic statement, which requires specifying artistic properties, which in turn requires the manipulation of an artistic vehicle. Goodman’s “symptoms of the aesthetic” are utilized to clarify the conditions under which a practice of making is a practice of artistic making: on Goodman’s view, a symbol functions aesthetically when it is syntactically dense, semantically dense, relatively replete, and characterized by multiple and complex reference (D. Davies 2004; Goodman 1968; see the entry on Goodman’s aesthetics ). Manipulating an artistic vehicle is in turn possible only if the artist consciously operates with reference to shared understandings embodied in the practices of a community of receivers. So art’s nature is institutional in the broad sense (or, perhaps better, socio-cultural). By way of criticism, Davies’ neo-institutionalism may be questioned on the grounds that, since all pictorial symbols are syntactically dense, semantically dense, relatively replete, and often exemplify the properties they represent, it seems to entail that every colored picture, including those in any catalog of industrial products, is an artwork (Abell 2012).

Abell’s institutional definition adapts Searle’s view of social kinds: what it is for some social kind, F , to be F is for it to be collectively believed to be F (Abell 2012; Searle 1995, 2010; and see the entry on social institutions ). On Abell’s view, more specifically, an institution’s type is determined by the valued function(s) that it was collectively believed at its inception to promote. The valued functions collective belief in which make an institution an art institution are those spelled out by Gaut in his cluster account (see section 3.1, above). That is, something is an art institution if and only if it is an institution whose existence is due to its being perceived to perform certain functions, which functions form a significant subset of the following: promoting positive aesthetic qualities; promoting the expression of emotion; facilitating the posing of intellectual challenges, and the rest of Gaut’s list. Plugging in Gaut’s list yields the final definition: something is an artwork if and only if it is the product of an art institution (as just defined) and it directly effects the effectiveness with which that institution performs the perceived functions to which its existence is due. One worry is whether Searle’s account of institutions is up to the task required of it. Some institutional social kinds have this trait: something can fail to be a token of that kind even if there is collective agreement that it counts as a token of that kind. Suppose someone gives a big cocktail party, to which everyone in Paris invited, and things get so out of hand that the casualty rate is greater than the Battle of Austerlitz. Even if everyone thinks the event was a cocktail party, it is possible (contrary to Searle) that they are mistaken: it may have been a war or battle. It’s not clear that art isn’t like this. If so, then the fact that an institution is collectively believed to be an art institution needn’t suffice to make it so (Khalidi 2013; see also the entry on social institutions ). [ 3 ] A second worry: if its failure to specify which subsets of the ten cluster properties suffice to make something an artwork significantly flaws Gaut’s cluster account, then failure to specify which subsets of Gaut’s ten properties suffice to make something an art institution significantly flaws Abellian institutionalism.

Historical definitions hold that what characterizes artworks is standing in some specified art-historical relation to some specified earlier artworks, and disavow any commitment to a trans-historical concept of art, or the “artish.” Historical definitions come in several varieties. All of them are, or resemble, inductive definitions: they claim that certain entities belong unconditionally to the class of artworks, while others do so because they stand in the appropriate relations thereto. According to the best known version, Levinson’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 (Levinson 1990). A second version, historical narrativism, comes in several varieties. On one, 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). On another, more ambitious and overtly nominalistic version of historical narrativism, something is an artwork if and only if (1) there are internal historical relations between it and already established artworks; (2) these relations are correctly identified in a narrative; and (3) that narrative is accepted by the relevant experts. The experts do not detect that certain entities are artworks; rather, the fact that the experts assert that certain properties are significant in particular cases is constitutive of art (Stock 2003).

The similarity of these views to institutionalism is obvious, and the criticisms offered parallel those urged against institutionalism. First, historical definitions appear to require, but lack, any informative characterization of art traditions (art functions, artistic contexts, etc.) and hence any way of informatively distinguishing them (and likewise art functions, or artistic predecessors) from non -art traditions (non-art functions, non-artistic predecessors). 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. So, too, there could be entities that for adventitious reasons are not correctly identified in historical narratives, although in actual fact they stand in relations to established artworks that make them correctly describable in narratives of the appropriate sort. Historical definitions entail that such entities aren’t artworks, but it seems at least as plausible to say that they are artworks that are not identified as such. Second, 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. Third, nominalistic historical definitions seem to face a version of the Euthyphro dilemma. For either such definitions include substantive characterizations of what it is to be an expert, or they don’t. If, on one hand, they include no characterization of what it is to be an expert, and hence no explanation as to why the list of experts contains the people it does, then they imply that what makes things artworks is inexplicable. On the other hand, suppose such definitions provide a substantive account of what it is to be an expert, so that to be an expert is to possess some ability lacked by non-experts (taste, say) in virtue of the possession of which they are able to discern historical connections between established artworks and candidate artworks. Then the definition’s claim to be interestingly historical is questionable, because it makes art status a function of whatever ability it is that permits experts to discern the art-making properties.

Defenders of historical definitions have replies. First, as regards autonomous art traditions, it can be held 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 this principle entails, implausibly, that every concept is purely historical. Suppose that we discovered 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. The reason we would credit them with having a scientific tradition might well be that our own scientific tradition has since its inception focused on explaining things. It does not seem to follow that science is a purely historical concept with no essential connection to explanatory aims. (Other theorists 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 (Davies 1997).) Second, 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. 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 1997 and 2005). Whether relocating the list at a different, albeit deeper, level in the definition renders the definition sufficiently informative is an open question. Third, as to the Euthyphro -style dilemma, it might be held that the categorial distinction between artworks and “mere real things” (Danto 1981) explains the distinction between experts and non-experts. Experts are able, it is said, to create new categories of art. When created, new categories bring with them new universes of discourse. New universes of discourse in turn make reasons available that otherwise would not be available. Hence, on this view, it is both the case that the experts’ say-so alone suffices to make mere real things into artworks, and also true that experts’ conferrals of art-status have reasons (McFee 2011).

4.4 Traditional (mainly aesthetic) definitions

Traditional definitions 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. See the entry on aesthetic judgment .

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 what it seems pointless to deny, that abstracta like mathematical entities and scientific laws possess aesthetic properties.)

Monroe Beardsley’s definition holds that an artwork: “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” (Beardsley 1982, 299). (For more on Beardsley, see the entry on Beardsley’s aesthetics .) 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 (see the entry on Dewey’s aesthetics ). 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 (Zangwill 1995a,b). 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 build in different accounts of the aesthetic. Eldridge’s aesthetic definition holds that the satisfying appropriateness to one another of a thing’s form and content is the aesthetic quality possession of which is necessary and sufficient for a thing’s being art (Eldridge 1985). Or 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 (De Clercq 2002), and construct an aesthetic definition incorporating that view.

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) (Iseminger 2004).

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. Moreover, aesthetic views have been held to have trouble making sense of bad art (see Dickie 2001; Davies 2006, p. 37). Finally, more radical doubts about aesthetic definitions center on the intelligibility and usefulness of the aesthetic. Beardsley’s view, for example, has been criticized by Dickie, who has also offered influential criticisms of the idea of an aesthetic attitude (Dickie 1965, Cohen 1973, Kivy 1975).

To these criticisms several responses have been offered. First, the less restrictive conception of aesthetic properties mentioned above, on which they may be based on non-perceptual formal properties, can be deployed. On this view, conceptual works would have aesthetic features, much the same way that mathematical entities are often claimed to (Shelley 2003, Carroll 2004). Second, a distinction may be drawn between time-sensitive properties, whose standard observation conditions include an essential reference to the temporal location of the observer, and non-time-sensitive properties, which do not. Higher-order aesthetic properties like drama, humor, and irony, which account for a significant part of the appeal of Duchamp’s and Cage’s works, on this view, would derive from time-sensitive properties (Zemach 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. Or, fourth, it might be held that (Zangwill’s “second-order” strategy) works like ready-mades lack aesthetic functions, but are parasitic upon, because meant to be considered in the context of, works that do have aesthetic functions, and therefore constitute marginal borderline cases of art that do not merit the theoretical primacy they are often given. Finally, it can be flatly denied that the ready-mades were works of art (Beardsley 1982).

As to the over-inclusiveness of aesthetic definitions, a distinction might be drawn between primary and secondary functions. Or it may be maintained that some cars, lawns, and products of industrial design are on the art/non-art borderline, and so don’t constitute clear and decisive counter-examples. Or, if the claim that aesthetic theories fail to account for bad art depends on holding that some works have absolutely no aesthetic value whatsoever, as opposed to some non-zero amount, however infinitesimal, it may be wondered what justifies that assumption.

Hybrid definitions characteristically disjoin at least one institutional component with at least one aesthetic component, aiming thereby to accommodate both more traditional art and avant-garde art that appears to lack any significant aesthetic dimension. (Such definitions could also be classified as institutional, on the grounds that they make provenance sufficient for being a work of art.) Hence they inherit a feature of conventionalist definitions: in appealing to art institutions, artworlds, arts, art functions, and so on, they either include substantive accounts of what it is to be an art institution/world/genre/-form/function, or are uninformatively circular.

One such disjunctive definition, Longworth and Scarantino’s, adapts Gaut’s list of ten clustering properties, where that list (see 3.5 above) includes institutional properties (e.g., belonging to an established art form) and traditional ones (e.g., possessing positive aesthetic properties); see also Longworth and Scarantino 2010. The core idea is that art is defined by a disjunction of minimally sufficient and disjunctively necessary conditions; to say that a disjunct is a minimally sufficient constitutive condition for art-hood, is to say that every proper subset of it is insufficient for art-hood. An account of what it is for a concept to have disjunctive defining conditions is also supplied. The definition of art itself is as follows: ∃ Z ∃ Y (Art iff ( Z ∨ Y )), where (a) Z and Y , formed from properties on Gaut’s cluster list, are either non-empty conjunctions or non-empty disjunctions of conjunctions or individual properties; (b) there is some indeterminacy over exactly which disjuncts are sufficient; (c) Z does not entail Y and Y does not entail Z ; (d) Z does not entail Art and Y does not entail Art. Instantiation of either Z or Y suffices for art-hood; something can be art only if at least one of Z , Y is instantiated; and the third condition is included to prevent the definition from collapsing into a classical one. The account of what it is for concept C to have disjunctive defining conditions is as follows: C iff ( Z ∨ Y ), where (i) Z and Y are non-empty conjunctions or non-empty disjunctions of conjunctions or individual properties; (ii) Z does not entail Y and Y does not entail Z ; (iii) Z does not entail C and Y does not entail C. A worry concerns condition (iii): as written, it seems to render the account of disjunctive defining conditions self-contradictory. For if Z and Y are each minimally sufficient for C , it is impossible that Z does not entail C and that Y does not entail C . If so, then nothing can satisfy the conditions said to be necessary and sufficient for a concept to have disjunctive defining conditions.

A second disjunctive hybrid definition, with an historical cast, Robert Stecker’s historical functionalism, holds 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). A question for Stecker’s view is whether or not it provides an adequate account of what it is for a function to be an art function, and whether, consequently, it can accommodate anti-aesthetic or non-aesthetic art. The grounds given for thinking that it can are that, while art’s original functions were aesthetic, those functions, and the intentions with which art is made, can change in unforeseeable ways. Moreover, aesthetic properties are not always preeminent in art’s predecessor concepts (Stecker 2000). A worry is that if the operative assumption is that if x belongs to a predecessor tradition of T then x belongs to T , the possibility is not ruled out that if, for example, the tradition of magic is a predecessor tradition of the scientific tradition, then entities that belong to the magic tradition but lacking any of the standard hallmarks of science are scientific entities.

A third hybrid definition, also disjunctive, is the cladistic definition defended by Stephen Davies. who holds that 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 (Davies, 2015). (In biology, a clade is a segment in the tree of life: a group of organisms and the common ancestor they share.) Artworlds are to be characterized in terms of their origins: they begin with prehistoric art ancestors, and grow into artworlds. Hence all artworks occupy a line of descent from their prehistoric art ancestors; that line of descent comprises an art tradition that grows into an artworld. So the definition is bottom-up and resolutely anthropocentric. A worry: the view seems to entail that art traditions can undergo any changes whatsoever and remain art traditions, since, no matter how distant, every occupant of the right line of descent is part of the art tradition. This seems to amount to saying that as long as they remain traditions at all, art traditions cannot die. Whether art is immortal in this sense seems open to question. A second worry is that the requirement that every art tradition and artworld stand in some line of descent from prehistoric humanoids makes it in principle impossible for any nonhuman species to make art, as long as that species fails to occupy the right location in the tree of life. While the epistemological challenges that identifying artworks made by nonhumans might pose could be very considerable, this consequence of the cladistic definition’s emphasis on lineage rather than traits raises a concern about excessively insularity.

A fourth hybrid definition is the “buck-passing” view of Lopes, which attempts an escape from the stalemate between artwork-focused definitions over avant-garde anti-aesthetic cases by adopting a strategy that shifts the focus of the definition of art away from artworks. The strategy is to recenter philosophical efforts on different problems, which require attention anyway: (a) the problem of giving an account of each individual art, and (b) the problem of defining what it is to be an art, the latter by giving an account of the larger class of normative/appreciative kinds to which the arts (and some non-arts) belong. For, given definitions of the individual arts, and a definition of what it is to be an art, if every artwork belongs to at least one art (if it belongs to no existing art, then it pioneers a new art), then a definition of artwork falls out: x is a work of art if and only if x is a work of K, where K is an art (Lopes 2014). When fully spelled out, the definition is disjunctive: x is a work of art if and only if x is a work belonging to art 1 or x is a work belonging to art 2 or x is a work belonging to art 3 …. Most of the explanatory work is done by the theories of the individual arts, since, given the assumption that every artwork belongs to at least one art, possession of theories of the individual arts would be necessary and sufficient for settling the artistic or non-artistic status of any hard case, once it is determined what art a given work belongs to. As to what makes a practice an art, Lopes’ preferred answer seems to be institutionalism of a Dickiean variety: an art is an institution in which artists (persons who participate with understanding in the making of artworks) make artworks to be presented to an artworld public. (Lopes 2014, Dickie 1984) Thus, on this view, it is arbitrary which activities are artworld systems: there is no deeper answer to the question of what makes music an art than that it has the right institutional structure. [ 4 ] So it is arbitrary which activities are arts. Two worries. First, the key claim that every work of art belonging to no extant art pioneers a new art may be defended on the grounds that any reason to say that a work belonging to no extant artform is an artwork is a reason to say that it pioneers a new artform. In response, it is noted that the question of whether or not a thing belongs to an art arises only when, and because, there is a prior reason for thinking that the thing is an artwork. So it seems that what it is to be an artwork is prior, in some sense, to what it is to be an art. Second, on the buck-passing theory’s institutional theory of the arts, which activities are arts is arbitrary. This raises a version of the question that was raised about the cladistic definition’s ability to account for the existence of art outside our (Hominin) tradition. Suppose the connection between a practice’s traits and its status as an art are wholly contingent. Then the fact that a practice in another culture that although not part of our tradition had most of the traits of one of our own arts would be no reason to think that practice was an art, and no reason to think that the objects belonging to it were artworks. It is not clear that we are really so in the dark when it comes to determining whether practices in alien cultures or traditions are arts.

Conventionalist definitions account well for modern art, but have difficulty accounting for art’s universality – especially the fact that there can be art disconnected from “our” (Western) institutions and traditions, and our species. They also struggle to account for the fact that the same aesthetic terms are routinely applied to artworks, natural objects, humans, and abstracta. Aesthetic definitions do better accounting for art’s traditional, universal features, but less well, at least according to their critics, with revolutionary modern art; their further defense requires an account of the aesthetic which can be extended in a principled way to conceptual and other radical art. (An aesthetic definition and a conventionalist one could simply be conjoined. But that would merely raise, without answering, the fundamental question of the unity or disunity of the class of artworks.) Which defect is the more serious one depends on which explananda are the more important. Arguments at this level are hard to come by, because positions are hard to motivate in ways that do not depend on prior conventionalist and functionalist sympathies. If list-like definitions are flawed because uninformative, then so are conventionalist definitions, whether institutional or historical. Of course, if the class of artworks, or of the arts, is a mere chaotic heap, 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. In that case the worry articulated by one prominent aesthetician, who wrote earlier of the “bloated, unwieldy” concept of art which institutional definitions aim to capture, needs to be taken seriously, even if it turns out to be ungrounded: “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” (Walton 2007).

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11 Expression in Art

Aaron Ridley is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Southampton in England.

Published: 02 September 2009
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It is natural to assign a significant role to artists in artistic expression, and perhaps to do so by extrapolating from the role we assign to people when they express themselves in everyday, non-artistic contexts. When, for instance, we say of someone's face that it expresses pleasure, we ordinarily take it that the pleasure revealed there is the person's own pleasure, and that the expression on their face is to be explained by the pleasure that they feel. In ordinary, non-artistic cases, then, we take the expression to reveal the state of the person, and the state of the person to explain the expression. The temptation is to suppose that the same must be true of artistic expression. The temptation, that is, is to suppose that a work of art expressing anguish both reveals and is to be explained by the artist's own anguish. But things may not be as straightforward as that.

1. Introduction

That the expression of emotion is among the principal purposes or points of art is a thought with a pedigree stretching back at least as far as the Ancient Greeks. Nor, so stated, is it a thought that many have wanted to oppose. Even the staunchest cognitivist or moral improver has granted that expression is one of the points of at least some art, however much he or she may have wanted to insist on the pre-eminence of other points. Serious disagreement arises only when an attempt is made to say what is actually meant by ‘expression’.

For the purposes of this essay, I want to set up an Everyman figure. He believes what I imagine more or less anyone would believe upon thinking about artistic expression for the first or second time. His view is this. As far as the artist is concerned, expressive art arises because the artist feels something. Perhaps he feels it now, at the moment of creation; or perhaps he creates out of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, as Wordsworth put it; or perhaps he just feels an urge to give vent to something that he knows is ‘in there’ somewhere. Whichever of these it is, though, artistic expression expresses something about the way the artist feels. In expressing what he feels, the artist creates an object of a certain sort, a work of art—and this object shows in some way what that feeling is or was. It does this, perhaps, by describing the feeling; or perhaps it does it by evoking the occasion for the feeling—by being what T. S. Eliot called the ‘objective correlative’ of the feeling; or perhaps it does it by sharing some property or set of properties with the feeling. However it does it, though, the art object somehow indicates or exhibits what the artist felt. The object that the artist creates is then experienced by an audience. Often, the audience is moved or made to feel things by the object. Perhaps the audience's feelings are directed to the artist (in sympathy, say, or in admiration); or perhaps the audience feels what the artist felt—perhaps, in Leo Tolstoy's words, the audience is ‘infected’ by the artist's feeling; or perhaps the audience is stirred by the object into feelings entirely its own. Whichever way it is, the experience of an expressive work of art is standardly or frequently a moving one. Taken together, these thoughts capture Everyman's position, or proto-position, perfectly well: artistic expression involves an artist's feeling something, embodying it in his work, and often moving his audience as a result.

Everyman is entirely right, of course—even if his position as it stands is unacceptably vague. I'll try to suggest towards the end of this essay how his position should be taken. But first it will be useful to attribute to him a more problematic way of understanding his view, a way that has a good deal in common, to put it no higher, with at least one canonical position in the literature. Leo Tolstoy, in militantly Christian retirement from writing two of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century, defended the following claim in his short book, What Is Art?

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and… then by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling so that others experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art… Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them… Art is [thus] a means of union among men joining them together in the same feelings … (Tolstoy 1996 : 51)

Tolstoy's statement here is flat and apparently unambiguous. The function of art is to transmit feelings from artist to audience; the role of the artwork is simply that of a conduit through which the artist's feelings, as it were, flow. Elsewhere in What Is Art? there are indications that Tolstoy might have had something rather subtler than this in mind, and there are passages in the book that barely make sense except on the assumption that he did have. But for present purposes these details can be put aside. Let us simply take it that Tolstoy did indeed mean what, in the quoted passage, he appears to say.

This way of understanding expression—call it the transmission model—is clearly consistent with Everyman's main intuitions. But he may find on reflection that it offends, or at least grates against, some of his other intuitions. As it stands, the transmission model construes the work of art as a mere vehicle for the feeling transmitted through it, as no more than a means to the end of getting the feeling from the artist to the audience. In principle, then, the work of art could be replaced by anything else that got the feeling through as effectively. If Edvard Munch had been a gifted chemist, for instance, he might, instead of painting The Scream , have concocted a drug which produced in those who took it feelings identical to the ones expressed in the picture: The Scream need never have been painted.

Everyman's intuitions should begin to rebel at this point, for several reasons. First, the present way of describing things leaves one with no reason at all to value The Scream for itself, as a painting. Second, it strikes one as odd to think that any other painting, let alone a drug, could possibly have made available the exact experience to be had from looking at The Scream . And third, when one looks at The Scream , the anguish one sees is the anguish of that face, of that figure, captured in just those lines and colours. To think of the anguish as being somehow detachable from what Munch painted would surely be to falsify at least one important aspect of the experience that his picture offers. In each of these respects, it seems, the transmission model construes the relation between the artwork and the feeling it expresses in far too extrinsic and contingent a manner, a thought sometimes put by saying that one cannot, in the end, understand or do justice to a work of art if one insists on treating it simply as an instrument of some kind—for instance, an instrument for conveying feelings from artist to audience.

The transmission model is to be resisted, then. But its shortcomings are instructive, and they tell us quite a lot about what an acceptable way of cashing out Everyman's intuitions would have to look like. Above all, they tell us that an acceptable account of artistic expression must relate the work of art to the feelings expressed in such a way as to make the work's role in expressing those feelings an essential rather than an incidental feature of the sort of communication between artist and audience that artistic expression consists in. In the next three sections I shall attempt to spell out that constraint by considering, first, the relation of artist to expressive artwork, second, the relation of audience to expressive artwork, and third and most briefly, the artwork itself.

Here is a commonly offered reason why the temptation should be resisted, stated by Peter Kivy in the context of musical expression:

many, and perhaps most, of our emotive descriptions of music are logically independent of the states of mind of the composers of that music, whereas whether my clenched fist is or is not an expression of anger is logically dependent upon whether or not I am angry. It is unthinkable that I should amend my characterization of the opening bars of Mozart's G-minor Symphony (K.550) as somber, brooding, and melancholy, if I were to discover evidence of Mozart's happiness… during its composition. But that [on the present hypothesis] is exactly what I would have to do, just as I must cease to characterize a clenched fist as an expression of anger if I discover that the fist clencher is not angry. This is a matter of logic. (Kivy 1980 : 14–15)

Kivy's point here (following Tormey 1971 : 39–62) is partly to distinguish between something's express ing an emotion and its being expressive of that emotion: in the former case, the expression stands to the state of the person whose expression it is in the kind of relation I sketched out above (it reveals it, and is explained by it), whereas in the second case it does not. In the second case, where something is expressive of an emotion (Kivy invites us to think of the sad face of a St Bernard dog), the characterization we offer is ‘logically independent’ of the state of mind of the person (or dog) whose expression it is. The fact that he would not withdraw his description of the opening bars of Mozart's 40th Symphony upon discovering that its composer was happy when he wrote it, any more than he would withdraw his description of the St Bernard's face as ‘sad’ upon finding that the dog was cheerful, is taken by Kivy to indicate that musical expression—and artistic expression more generally—must standardly be of this latter, ‘logically independent’, sort: that such expression is not, in other words, to be understood by simply extrapolating from ordinary, non-artistic cases of expression.

By itself, this argument is hard to assess, since it is unclear how strong the conclusion is meant to be. Specifically, it is unclear what Kivy's talk of logical independence is supposed to amount to. The argument can be read in either of two ways: a weaker, which claims only that artistic expression is sometimes ‘logically independent’ of the state of the artist, and a stronger, which claims that artistic expression is essentially , or in its paradigm cases, logically independent of the state of the artist. Let's take the weak reading first (perhaps encouraged by Kivy's remark that it is only ‘many, perhaps most’, cases that exhibit the logical independence that he has in mind).

Imagine someone who successfully feigns a sombre expression upon hearing of a not wholly unwelcome death. To say that his pretence is successful is to say, first, that his expression does not reveal what he feels, but suggests something else instead, and second, that his expression, although perhaps to be explained by what he feels (by his reluctance to appear callous, say), is not to be explained by his being in the sombre state that his expression indicates. Thus, while his face is certainly expressive of sombreness, it does not express any sombreness of his, since he feels none. Here one might say that his expression is ‘logically independent’ of his state of mind, and decline to withdraw one's characterization of his face as ‘sombre’ even once his pretence has been discovered. In saying this, however, one would certainly not be saying that sombre facial expressions are, in general, logically independent of the states of mind of their owners. For what makes pretence of this sort possible is the background of genuine instances of expression against which it takes place. It is only because genuinely sombre people genuinely do look sombre that a feigned sombre expression can be mistaken for one genuinely expressing sombreness. In the present case, then, we are dealing with a thoroughly parasitical, atypical instance—one that is atypical precisely in exhibiting a disjunction between facial expression and state of mind. So, whatever degree of logical independence this instance shows, it shows also a background of logical dependence that is both more extensive and logically prior: it shows, that is, that people's expressions are not typically or standardly independent of their states of mind. The question for Kivy is now this: why prefer to assimilate Mozart's G-minor Symphony to a dog than to a person? Why understand the sombre expression of the symphony as analogous to a ‘sad’ St Bernard's face rather than as analogous to the ‘sombre’ face of a person who feigns melancholy? Why not suppose, in other words, that the sombreness of the Mozart symphony as written by a happy Mozart points up and exploits a background of sombre music written by sombre composers in exactly the way that the sombre face of the feigner points up and exploits a background of sombre people looking sombre? Kivy offers no reason for his preference. He therefore gives no grounds to believe that musical or artistic expression is ‘logically independent’ of the states of mind of artists, except, perhaps, in atypical, parasitic cases. The weak reading, then, fails to yield a conclusion of any general significance at all; and it is certainly far too weak to establish the impossibility of understanding artistic expression by extrapolating from ordinary, non-artistic cases of expression.

Despite claiming that it is only ‘many, perhaps most’, cases that exhibit a ‘logical independence’ of expression from the artist, it is clear that Kivy really has in mind the stronger reading of his argument: in the remainder of his book he treats ‘logical independence’ as standard or paradigmatic. It is also clear that, to have a chance of going through, the stronger reading must somehow circumvent the difficulty posed by the expressive feigner. What the stronger reading needs to establish is this: that a happy Mozart could have written a sombre G-minor Symphony even if no sombre music had ever been written by a sombre composer. If this can be established, there will be no warrant for supposing, as one must suppose in the feigning case, that any apparent instance of ‘logical independence’ really trades for its point on a deeper and logically prior background of dependence. Kivy himself, as I have already said, gives us nothing to go on here. But the claim that there could be sombre art even if none had ever been created by a sombre artist does have a certain prima facie plausibility that any corresponding claim made of feigned facial expressions would, at least on the face of it, lack. It is worth asking why that might be.

The answer, I think, is this. A feigned facial expression of gloom depends upon a background of genuine facial expressions of gloom, where a ‘genuine’ expression is one that someone wears because he feels gloomy (his expression both reveals his gloom and is explained by it). That much is surely true. But it is easy to move from this thought to a second: that a feigned facial expression depends upon a background, not merely of genuine facial expressions, but of natural facial expressions—a slippage, if it is one, perhaps facilitated by the fact that the ‘artificial’ is opposed to both the ‘natural’ and the ‘genuine’. It is this second thought, which may or may not be true, that is responsible for making it seem as if artistic and everyday expression must be radically different in kind. For art—unlike a person's face, one might say, or its configurations—is artificial, heavily dependent upon convention, and so not, one might think, a ‘natural’ mode of expression at all. To the extent, then, that expressive feigning depends upon a background of expressive ‘naturalness’, feigned artistic expression, unlike feigned facial expression, would appear to be impossible; it would therefore also appear—unlike, say, the face of a St Bernard dog—to be of no use in an explanation of how an artist, feeling one thing, might create a work of art expressive of something else. Which seems to put us quite close to the claim made by the strong reading, that artistic expression is essentially, or in its paradigm cases, ‘logically independent’ of the feelings of artists, and so to the more general claim that artistic expression cannot be understood by extrapolating from ordinary, everyday cases of non-artistic expression.

None of this, in my view, is at all persuasive. If the move from the genuine to the natural is, as I suspect, unwarranted—if, that is, there is no reason to think that expressive feigning depends upon a background of, as it were, naturally genuine expression rather than (merely) genuine expression—then we are no closer than before to the conclusion required by the strong reading. But even if the move is warranted—and suppose for a moment that it is—it still could not secure the required conclusion without major additional argumentation. Two things would have to be shown: first, that every kind of ordinary, non-artistic expression that can be feigned is, in the relevant sense, natural; and, second, that no paradigm or standard case of artistic expression is natural in that sense. I strongly doubt that either, and still less both together, could be shown in a non-vacuous way. The first argument, for instance, would have to account for the fact that a good deal of ordinary, everyday—and eminently feignable—expression is linguistic, leaving it to the second argument, presumably, to explain why, if the conventions that define a spoken language are indeed, and despite appearances, ‘natural’ in the relevant sense, those governing artistic expression are not. Or, to put the point the other way round, if the second argument were to succeed in showing that artistic conventions are somehow conventional ‘all the way down’, the first argument would have to have shown that no feignable piece of everyday expression is conventional except within certain, permissibly natural, limits. It isn't hard to see how such arguments are bound to degenerate into circular, question-begging exercises in stipulation: the ordinary just is the natural; the artistic just is the conventional; and so on.

There is nothing in any of this, I suggest, to offer the smallest hope of rescue to the strong reading of Kivy's position. There is nothing, in other words, to encourage the thought that what a work of art expresses is, in the standard or paradigm case, ‘logically independent’ of the state of the artist. I have laboured this point for a number of reasons, but chief among them has been a concern to head off the idea that, because artistic expression is a special case of expression, it must be a very special case indeed, perhaps even sui generis . Nothing in the discussion so far suggests that that is true. And certainly, the mere fact that, as Kivy puts it, ‘It is unthinkable that I should amend my characterization of the opening bars of Mozart's G-minor Symphony… as somber… if I were to discover evidence of Mozart's happiness… during its composition’ has no such extravagant consequence. Nor, except for the purpose of defusing talk of logical independence, need that fact drive one to wonder whether Mozart might not have been feigning. For the truth is that there is a perfectly ordinary, everyday explanation for Kivy's (quite rightly) declining to withdraw his characterization: that the evidence of the symphony itself trumps whatever imaginary evidence Kivy thinks of himself as discovering—just as, for instance, the publicly manifest evidence of Hitler's megalomania would trump any imagined ‘discovery’ about his modest, self-effacing nature in private. And, just as no discovery about Hitler's private life would make one think that his megalomania was somehow ‘logically independent’ of him, so there is no sort of discovery about Mozart—and what could it be? a letter? a diary entry?—that would make plausible the radical splitting off of him from the expressive properties of his work. What Kivy has overlooked, in short, is the homely possibility that an artwork itself may be evidence—and perhaps the best sort of evidence there is—of what an artist really felt (or of what emotional/imaginative state he was in).

The reason that Kivy doesn't take up this possibility, I suspect, is not any deep desire to assimilate Mozart's symphony to a dog's face. It is, rather, a wariness about deflecting appreciative and critical attention away from the work of art, where it belongs, and on to the historical person of the artist. The worry, crudely, is that if one takes a work of art to express—to reveal and to be explained by—an artist's state of mind, then the question ‘What is expressed here?’ may look as if it has to be answered in the light of evidence about the artist's state of mind, which might have nothing whatever to do with the work of art that he has actually produced. And this worry is fuelled by some of the things that artists have said about what they do. Tolstoy, as we have seen, talks of art as a set of ‘external signs’ intended to convey to an audience feelings that the artist ‘has lived through’, so encouraging the thought that the question ‘What do these external signs stand for?’ is best settled by asking what feelings the artist has, as a matter of fact, lived through. And here is Wordsworth, in the preface to Lyrical Ballads : poetry, he says,

takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins…. (Wordsworth 1995 : 23)

And T. S. Eliot in his essay on Hamlet :

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (Eliot 1932 : 145)

If Wordsworth tempts one to ask not what a poem expresses, but what emotion existed ‘in the mind’ of the poet before composition of the poem began, then Eliot, in much the same way, tempts one to ask just what the ‘particular emotion’ was, for which the artist may or may not have succeeded in finding an ‘objective correlative’. Like Tolstoy, Wordsworth and Eliot are here deep inside transmission territory, and so are both in real danger of minimizing or misconstruing the role of the work of art in artistic expression.

To this extent, Kivy is right to be wary of the role assigned in expression to the artist. But what is needed to keep the artist in his place, as it were, is a good deal less than—indeed, just about the opposite of—a demonstration of the logical independence of what a work of art expresses from what an artist felt. What is needed, as we have seen, is simply a reminder of the ordinary, everyday fact that actions speak louder than words—that what one does, how one behaves, reveals how one feels in a way that nothing else can. From the fact that the making of a work of art is standardly a peculiarly rich, reflective and elaborate sort of action, therefore, one should conclude that, standardly, a work of art offers the best possible (‘logical’) evidence of an artist's state, and so that, standardly, what a work of art expresses reveals that state, and is to be explained by it. This conclusion places the following constraint on any attempt to cash out Everyman's intuitions in a plausible way: that the artist must be seen as present in his work, much as a person must be seen as present in his behaviour, rather than as separate from it, behind it, or, above all, as ‘logically independent’ of it.

3. Audiences

Everyman's proto-position envisages artistic expression as involving an audience's being moved in some way. There is at least one thing that he had better not mean by this. He had better not mean that a work of art expresses whatever it makes its audience feel. Many considerations point to this prohibition, but the following is the simplest and most direct: a work of art can make one feel X precisely because one recognizes that it expresses Y, where X and Y are different. Suppose I feel an odd sense of uplift upon looking at The Scream (things could be worse); nothing in this makes The Scream expressive of such uplift. No more than in an ordinary, everyday case of expression, then, is what is felt by a witness of an expression to be taken, automatically, as what is expressed. (Your expression of gladness might sadden me, after all.) If an audience's feelings are indeed involved in artistic expression, then their involvement is going to have to be accounted for in some more subtle way than this.

It is possible, of course, that the proper response to the role of audiences' feelings in artistic expression is one of scepticism. One might acknowledge that people are, as a matter of fact, frequently moved by the experience of expressive art, and yet still deny that this has any significance for an understanding of artistic expression. It may be, for instance, that what a person feels upon experiencing a particular work of art is determined in some way by the associations that that work has for him: so, for example, Beethoven's 6th Symphony makes someone feel vulnerable because it reminds him of his nanny, while Apocalypse Now makes him smirk because he remembers what went on in the back row when he first saw it. In cases such as this, it is clear that the person's responses, however significant they may be for him, are altogether extrinsic to any issues concerning the expressive characteristics of the works that occasion them, and so are irrelevant to any attempt to understand artistic expression.

The same may be true, if somewhat less obviously, in a different kind of example. It may be the case, as a number of people have argued (see e.g. Feagin 1996 ), that, unless one's experience of a given work of art is coloured and informed by one's emotional responses to it, one will not be in a position fully to understand it. So, for instance, it might plausibly be suggested that a person at a good performance of King Lear who was not appalled by Gloucester's blinding would have failed to appreciate the true character of the events portrayed. If this is right, it would suggest that a certain kind of emotional engagement may be essential to some kinds of aesthetic appreciation. But nothing in the example shows that such engagement or response need have any bearing on expression specifically. It may well be, in other words, that audiences are moved in a host of diverse and valuable ways by expressive works of art without that fact being such as to contribute to an understanding of artistic expression. To the extent that that is the case, Everyman's intuitions about audiences will have to be set aside.

How, then, might a place be secured in an account of expression for an audience's responses? The foregoing suggests this: what an audience feels will be relevant to an account of artistic expression, first, if what it feels is related in some intrinsic way to what a work of art expresses, and, second, if its feeling that way is essential to its grasping the feeling expressed by the work. The first requirement rules out the second and third of the cases just discussed. Not only are responses based on private association not intrinsically related to what works of art express, they are not intrinsically related to works of art in any way at all; while responses that help one to see what a work is about, although related in the right sort of way to the work of art, need not be related to it as an expressive object. The second requirement serves, among other things, to rule out the example discussed at the beginning of this section. My imagined response of uplift is certainly intrinsically related to The Scream 's expression of anguish: but I need not feel uplifted in order to grasp the anguish expressed there. But the second requirement is also meant to do more. It is meant to rule out the following kind of possibility.

Suppose that whenever I experience an expressive work of art I feel the feelings it expresses. I feel anguish whenever I look at The Scream , for example, and am seized by a sombre, brooding melancholy whenever I listen to the opening bars of Mozart's G-minor Symphony. I am, in fact, exactly the sort of person that Tolstoy has in mind: I am invariably ‘infected’ by the feelings that works of art express. There is no question here that my responses satisfy the first requirement. I feel what I feel because of the feelings expressed in the works. But nothing in the example as it stands suggests that this fact about me, however much it might make my aesthetic experiences interesting or intense, is integral to an analysis of artistic expression. There are two reasons for this. First, my response may be peculiar to me; it may, in the end, be no less idiosyncratic to respond in this way than to respond on the basis of private association. So no conclusions of a general sort about expression can be drawn from the fact that that is how my responses are. Second, there is no reason to think that someone who responded differently, or who did not respond by feeling at all, would be missing anything. Their experience of expressive art would not be the same as mine, but that shows nothing about their capacity to notice or appreciate the features of artworks to which I respond by feeling what they express. This example, therefore, fails to satisfy the second requirement set out above—that what an audience feels must be essential to its grasping what an artwork expresses.

The only way in which an audience's responses can possibly be integral to an analysis of artistic expression, therefore, is if at least some of those responses are integral to grasping at least some of what, or at least some aspects of what, works of art can express. This is effectively to envisage a corollary of the position outlined in the previous section: a kind of response that (i) reveals the expressive properties of a work for what they are, and (ii) is explained by the work's having those properties. The idea here is close to something John Dewey once said:

Bare recognition is satisfied when a proper tag or label is attached, ‘proper’ signifying one that serves a purpose outside the act of recognition—as a salesman identifies wares by a sample. It involves no stir of the organism, no inner commotion. But an act of perception proceeds by waves that extend serially throughout the entire organism. There is, therefore, no such thing in perception as seeing or hearing plus emotion. The perceived object or scene is emotionally pervaded throughout. (Dewey 1980 : 55–6)

To respond without feeling might be to ‘recognize’ certain of a work's expressive properties; but to grasp those properties in their full richness and particularity is to ‘perceive’ them. A position of this general sort has been gestured towards recently by a number of writers, most often perhaps in the context of musical expression. So, for instance, Malcolm Budd has suggested that an imaginative engagement with music can enable ‘the listener to experience imaginatively (or really) the inner nature of emotional states in a peculiarly vivid, satisfying and poignant form’ (Budd 1995 : 154); Jerrold Levinson has remarked that perceiving ‘emotion in music and experiencing emotion from music may not be as separable in principle as one might have liked. If this is so, the suggestion that in aesthetic appreciation of music we simply cognize emotional attributes without feeling anything corresponding to them may be conceptually problematic as well as empirically incredible’ (Levinson 1982 : 335); and Roger Scruton has pointed out that ‘there may be a sense of “what it is like”… When I see a gesture from the first person point of view then I do not only see it as an expression; I grasp the completeness of the state of mind that is intimated through it’ (Scruton 1983 : 96, 99) (see also Ridley 1995 : 120–45, and Walton 1997 : 57–82).

There is little consensus in the current literature about the significance, or even the possibility, of such responses. Many prefer to regard an audience's feeling as essentially independent of the feelings expressed by artworks, and so as incidental to any account of artistic expression. The discussion in the present section suggests that that position is considerably more plausible than its analogue concerning the feelings of artists. For what it's worth, though, I want to cleave to Everyman's position. Just as I may sometimes have to put myself in your shoes—try to feel the expression on your face from the inside, as it were—in order to grasp how things really are with you, so, it seems to me, I sometimes get the full expressive point of a work of art only by responding emotionally to it—by resonating with it, even. Again, then, I am inclined to think that extrapolation from ordinary, everyday cases of expression is the most promising way of attempting to understand artistic expression.

4. Artworks

I argued in the introductory section that an acceptable account of artistic expression must relate a work of art to the feelings expressed there in such a way as to make the work's role in expressing those feelings an essential rather than an incidental feature of the transaction between artist and audience. With respect to the artist, this comes to the thought that, in standard cases, the expressive properties of a work of art both reveal the artist's state and are to be explained by it. With respect to the audience the position is perhaps less clear, but I have suggested that, in certain cases at least, the expressive properties of a work of art are both revealed by, and explanatory of, the responses of an audience.

These considerations give us a good overall indication of what is required in order to make Everyman's position a plausible account of artistic expression. They also, of course, tell us the kinds of things that need to be said about artworks in such an account, namely, that artworks must be understood as objects having expressive properties capable of revealing and of being explained by the feelings of artists and (perhaps) of explaining and of being revealed by the feelings of audiences. Beyond that, however, there is very little of a general nature to be said. The various forms of art differ hugely from one another in the kinds of resources they make available for artistic manipulation, and so differ hugely from one another in the kinds of property that, in one context or another, can be expressive, and in what way. At this point, then, the attempt to arrive at a full understanding of artistic expression must devolve on to the theories of the individual arts, where, for instance, one might give an account of the expressive nature of dance by relating the gestures it contains to the gestures of human beings when they express their feelings; or one might give an account of the expressive nature of certain paintings by appealing to atmosphere or ambience—to features that have an expressive charge whether in or out of art; or one might give an account of the expressive nature of music by relating its movements to the movements of people in the grip of this or that feeling—for example rapid, violent music for frenzy or for rage; or one might give an account of the expressive nature of poetry by highlighting locutions or rhythms that are characteristic of ordinary, spoken expressions of feeling; and so on. The problems and possible solutions are quite distinct for each of the various arts, even if, with respect to each of them, one is essentially trying to answer the same questions: in virtue of what features is this artwork expressive? And: what is it that someone might attend to, recognize, or perceive in a work of this kind that would lead him to characterize it in expressive terms?

5. Expression Proper

So how, finally, might Everyman's proto-position be filled out so as to give a satisfactory—and suitably general—account of artistic expression? The answer, it seems to me, lies in R. G. Collingwood's treatment of the issue in his wonderful, though wonderfully uneven, book, The Principles of Art .

Collingwood's basic claim is that what is involved in artistic expression is nothing more than what is involved in ordinary, everyday instances of expression. Indeed, he goes so far at one point as to say that ‘Every utterance and every gesture that each one of us makes is a work of art’ (1938: 285); and this, while surely overstating the case, is indicative of the seriousness with which he takes the continuity between the artistic and the non-artistic. For him, the purpose of expression—in or out of art—is self-knowledge. One finds out what one thinks or feels by giving expression to it. At the beginning of the process of expression, Collingwood holds, the artist knows almost nothing of what he feels:

all he is conscious of is a perturbation or excitement, which he feels going on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While in this state, all he can say about his emotion is ‘I feel… I don't know what I feel.’ From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates himself by doing something which we call expressing himself. (Collingwood 1938 : 109)

The artist attempts to extricate himself from his ‘helpless and oppressed condition’, then, by trying to answer the question ‘What is it I feel?’ When he first asks this question, there is no answer to be given: his state is inchoate, and nothing specific can be said about it. If he is successful in his efforts, however, the question eventually receives its answer, and this is given in the expression that the artist produces. The feeling that the artist expresses, therefore, is both clarified and transformed in the process of being expressed, so that ‘Until a man has expressed his emotion, he does not yet know what emotion it is’ (Collingwood 1938 : 111); which is why ‘the expression of emotion is not [something] made to fit an emotion already existing, but is an activity without which the experience of emotion cannot exist’ (1938: 244). On this account, then, an emotion is not so much revealed for what it is by receiving expression: it becomes what it is by receiving expression.

The emotion becomes what it is through being given form, through being developed into something specific. In this way, the fully formed emotion and the expression it receives are indistinguishable from one another—indeed, they are one and the same: it is in virtue of having been given that form that the emotion is the emotion it is. It follows from this that the identity of an emotion expressed in a work of art is inextricably linked to the identity of the work of art. There is no possibility, in other words, of regarding the emotion expressed as something essentially detachable from the work in which it is manifest; there is no possibility, that is, of thinking of the emotion expressed as something that might just as well have been expressed in some other way or in some other work of art (or captured, indeed, in some chemist's cocktail).

Collingwood's insistence on this point marks his position off in the strongest way from that of the transmission theorists (with whom he has been oddly often confused); and he develops the point further: ‘Some people have thought,’ he says, that

a poet who wishes to express a great variety of subtly differentiated emotions might be hampered by the lack of a vocabulary rich in words referring to the distinctions between them… This is the opposite of the truth. The poet needs no such words at all… To describe a thing is to call it a thing of such and such a kind: to bring it under a conception, to classify it. Expression, on the contrary, individualises. (Collingwood 1938 : 112)

Expression, then, distinguishes between feelings that might be described in exactly the same terms as one another, and transforms them into the highly particularized feelings we encounter in successful works of art:

The artist proper is a person who, grappling with the problem of expressing a certain emotion, says, ‘I want to get this clear.’ It is of no use to him to get something else clear, however like it this other thing may be. He does not want a thing of a certain kind, he wants a certain thing. (Collingwood 1938 : 114)

Description, by contrast, would yield only ‘a thing of a certain kind’. The distinction between expression and description, therefore, between arriving at ‘a certain thing’ and arriving at ‘a thing of a certain kind’, serves both to make a point that is important in itself and also to emphasize the distance between Collingwood's conception of what an artist expresses and the conceptions suggested in the remarks of Tolstoy, Wordsworth, and Eliot considered earlier. Tolstoy's ‘feeling’ that an artist ‘has lived through’, Wordsworth's emotion ‘actually exist[ing] in the mind’, and Eliot's ‘particular emotion’ are each, because construed as graspable independently of the work of art in which they are to be expressed, the stuff of description; not one of them is more than ‘a thing of a certain kind’.

On Collingwood's account, the artist arrives at self-knowledge in the relevant sense when he succeeds in transforming an unformed jumble of unclarified feeling into ‘a certain thing’. The fact that he does not—cannot—specify in advance what that thing is to be is not an indication that the business of expressing oneself is somehow random or accidental:

There is certainly here a directed process: an effort, that is, directed upon a certain end; but the end is not something foreseen and preconceived, to which an appropriate means can be thought in the light of our knowledge of its special character. (Collingwood 1938 : 111)

Knowledge of its ‘special character’ is precisely the end upon which that process is directed. The artist feels his way; he says to himself ‘This line won't do’ (Collingwood 1938 : 283), until, at last, he gets it right, and can say ‘There—that's it! That's what I was after.’ Nor is this kind of ‘directed process’ an unusual one, special in some way to the creative artist. It is an entirely familiar and everyday sort of process. Anyone who struggles to say clearly what he means, for example, is engaged in it: the struggle is directed to the end of clarifying a thought; but until the struggle has been won, no one, including the person doing the struggling, can say what, precisely, that thought is—if he could say what it was, the process of expression would already have been completed (an insight that Collingwood owes to Croce, 1922 ). This is perhaps the most significant of the ways in which Collingwood regards artistic expression as continuous with ordinary, everyday acts of expression: both may be deliberate, yet neither aims at an independently specifiable goal.

It will be apparent that Collingwood's account as I have sketched it here exactly satisfies the requirements outlined in the above section on artists. It is because the artist has succeeded in expressing himself that the work of art has the expressive character it does have; and the artist's emotion is revealed, uniquely, for the ‘certain thing’ it is by the expressive character of the work he produces. Collingwood also intends to satisfy the requirements relating to audiences, although his efforts here are expectedly more equivocal. He insists, for instance, that artists and audiences are in ‘collaboration’ with one another: the artist treats ‘himself and his audience in the same kind of way; he is making his emotions clear to his audience, and that is what he is doing to himself.’ And he cites approvingly Coleridge's remark that ‘we know a man for a poet by the fact that he makes us poets’, suggesting that when ‘someone reads and understands a poem, he is not merely understanding the poet's expression of his, the poet's, emotions, he is expressing emotions of his own in the poet's words, which have thus become his own words’ (Collingwood 1938 : 118). These thoughts culminate in the following passage: no man, he says, is ‘a self-contained and self-sufficient creative power’. Rather, ‘in his art as in everything else’,

[man] is a finite being. Everything that he does is done in relation to others like himself. As artist, he is a speaker; but a man speaks as he has been taught; he speaks the tongue in which he was born… The child learning his mother tongue… learns simultaneously to be a speaker and to be a listener; he listens to others speaking and speaks to others listening. It is the same with artists. They become poets or painters or musicians not by some process of development from within, as they grow beards; but by living in a society where these languages are current. Like other speakers, they speak to those who understand. (Collingwood 1938 : 316–17)

If these comments, taken together, do not quite add up to a picture in which an audience's feelings reveal and are to be explained by the expressive character of the artwork that prompts them, they do at least come close; and it is certainly consistent with Collingwood's overall account that he should have endorsed such a picture. It is hard, after all, to see what else he might have had in mind when he said that someone might express ‘emotions of his own in [a] poet's words, which have thus become his own words’.

Collingwood's account of artistic expression represents a rather full working out of Everyman's proto-position within the constraints that I have outlined. The expressive artist is indeed seen as present in his work, rather than as standing, complete with his independently specifiable feelings, behind his work; and the responsive audience, in discovering what Collingwood calls ‘the secrets of their own hearts’ in his work (1938: 336), are plausibly to be construed as feeling what they feel because of the work, and as grasping what the work expresses because of those feelings. Consistently with the generality of his account, moreover, Collingwood has very little to say in addition about artworks and their specific expressive properties. A defence of his reticence on this score has been provided in Section 4 above.

6. Conclusion

It has sometimes been claimed that expression is definitive of art, usually by a band of so-called Expression Theorists, discussed under that label in the secondary literature. Tolstoy is one of these, and so is Collingwood. The secondary literature standardly goes on to refute the ‘Expression Theory’ allegedly espoused by marshalling a set of counter-examples to show that something can be a work of art without being in the least expressive. It is possible that this tactic is effective against Tolstoy. He certainly appears to think that art can be defined as expression, and to think so, the ambiguities of his position notwithstanding, in a way that makes him at least apparently vulnerable to the sort of counter-example usually offered. Collingwood, however, is immune to this tactic. He does identify art with expression: ‘art proper’, as he calls it, simply is expression. But when one recalls that what he means by this is that ‘art proper’ is the clarification of an artist's thoughts and feelings—that a work of ‘art proper’ is ‘a certain thing’ rather than ‘a thing of a certain kind’—the character of his position becomes plain. What works of ‘art proper’ have in common is that they are indeed expressions: but this is just to say that their common feature is that each one is, uniquely, what it is—and beyond that, if the position outlined here is right, there is nothing more of a general character to be said. That this conclusion follows from Collingwood's version of Everyman's account of expression in art strikes me as yet another reason to think very highly of it.

See also : Art and Emotion ; Art and Knowledge ; Value in Art ; Music .

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The Skyline View

Art as a form of expression

Cristina Macz and Maria Isabel Del Castillo Schmidhuber | May 18, 2018

In the generations of art, it has served and continues to serve as a form of communication and expression, allowing artists to tell stories and spark revolutions through canvas, or a blank space.

While some artists use their tools as a means to showcase their ancestral roots, others use art as a response to political issues — this is known as art as activism or simply, artivism.

History of art as a form of expression

Across multiple platforms, including, but not limited to social media, the news, and text, artivism is a mix of art and activism.

Art as activism can be traced back to many historic events. One of its most expressive eras was the 1960s, in which many responded to the Vietnam War and civil rights movement through their music and art. This movement inspired young people of all backgrounds to speak up and has continued to do so in the present.

Whether it is through music, dance, art or physical murals, all different types of artists are forming a voice through their passions.

The stories of local artists

Globally, San Francisco is recognized for its street art. For some, these streets are a space for local artists to take their art beyond paper. These talented artists all have different stories to tell, and different expressions to share. Locally, we see artists express themselves in a number of ways.

One of the many well known areas in San Francisco is the Mission District, commonly referred to as the Mission, which is recognized for its vivid and colorful murals that embrace the Hispanic/Latino culture of the neighborhood’s people. The art has become a part of the community and adds an additional layer of personality. Many of the Mission’s art can be found in the Balmy and Clarion Alleys. Additionally, there are notable murals spread throughout the city, on places from businesses to schools.

Carlos Gonzalez

Carlos Gonzalez is a Bay Area-based muralist who shares his stories and life experiences as an artist. Throughout his lifetime, and during his career, Gonzalez has painted multiple pieces throughout San Francisco. Gonzalez identifies his art as broadly photorealism combined with impressionistic and geometric styles.

As a troubled young man, Gonzalez ended up on probation. During that time he was mentored by a teacher who helped him apply his skills into art as a form of expression. Because Gonzalez was inspired by so many people who did not give up on him, he continues to mentor youth as a prohibition officer, while also hoping to inspire them as an artist.

“I have led my life as a probation officer to see where a kid has a niche,” Gonzalez said. “Because a lot of these young delinquents that would get in trouble, some of them were good rappers, some were good at poetry, some were good artists, others had other talents.”

Gonzalez tries to acknowledge that people make mistakes, but for young artists, sometimes it is about putting that aside and moving forward. By inspiring others, Gonzalez is passing down the torch while at the same time teaching youth about “hustling.” Gonzalez considers the art industry a hustle because it ties back to the people you know and how you use the connects.

“You are going to navigate through who you can trust, who you can’t, who can help you versus who can’t and will bring you down, all that, you just got to learn that in life, in general,” Gonzalez said.

Now retired, Gonzalez does commercial art, incorporating different themes into his art. A prevalent theme in his pieces includes the stories of La Raza, or “The Race”, showcasing the cultural identity of his community.

“You could do whatever you want, and art could outrage people,” Gonzalez said. “Art can be controversial to where some people just love it and want the freedom to express themselves, and others wanna censor it because it offends. Art can be anything you want it to be. … Art can be outrageous and offensive, or it can be timid, and everybody loves it.”

Mel Waters, a Filipino- and African-American Bay Area-based muralist and fine artist, owns a Tattoo shop in the Bay Area. In his murals, Waters mainly focuses on black and white portraits with his most widely recognized being of Carlos Santana painted on 19th street and Mission street.

For Waters, it was his surroundings that inspired him. The stories that would form part of who he is as an artist would begin as a kid.

“It all starts out as a youth when I was a kid, art was my outlet,” Waters said. “It was always, I just always had it in me to be creative and expressive.”

However, as a teen and young adult, Waters put his soon-to-be-discovered passion to the side and began to get into sports. During his early 20’s, Waters had other things to worry about such as his a nine-to-five job at a hospital. But later, he decided to turn his side thing, art, into his work.

“Once I found my love for art I poured myself into it every time I did,” Waters said. “I realized there was something there and people liked it, and so I invested more time in it, and I guess more of my skills started to show as I kept going.”

Eventually, Waters realized that art was not only his job after leaving the hospital, but also his life.

“Art changed my life,” Waters said. “I’m here now and it’s a blessing and I’ve been blessed to have opportunities along the way.”

Waters has now dived deeper into his passion, and continues to work as a full-time artist. He compares art to music, in the sense that some music is happy and some music puts out a message that makes you think. Waters has continued to use art as an outlet in his adulthood, and while he doesn’t stick to any specific rules, he does constantly put what he is feeling at the moment into art.

“I’m not totally drawn into one thing. Sometimes it’s fun it’s about music and being happy,” Waters said. “And sometimes it’s about trying to paint something that involves the times of today. It’s just what I feel, whatever I’m feeling. I’m not totally drawn into one thing, as far as political. I’m just trying to express myself and hopefully, someone will feel a certain way ”

Alejandro Esquivias

Being an artist can mean many different things; to some, it means taking it to murals and communities and to others, its a canvas pad. Skyline College has produced some artists with one being former Skyline student Alejandro Esquivas.

Esquivias, from Jalisco, Mexico, drew as a child but wasn’t as exposed to art. When he came to Skyline, he wanted to be a teacher and was studying early childhood education; it wasn’t until he took a drawing class with professor Amir Esfahani that he realized that this was his calling.

“I realized that I was expressing my ideas when I took art history classes because I learned how the people of the caves expressed themselves through art, whether it was paintings or sculptures, even though they did not know the concept of art” Esquivias said.

His path to learn more about art in general gave him the understanding of what his mind and hands were doing.

Expressing yourself through dance, music or paintings is a form of unspoken communication that inspires others and lets many see someone for who they really are, to see them in their purest form. In some ways, it is a form of breathing.

Esquivas had a hard time finding a way with words in which he could express himself, especially since he was born in a culture where men are raised to be “macho” and to not cry or be sensitive. Art has been a way in which he was able to breathe and let others see him through his art.

“I can express my feelings through it. I can express that I’m sad happy, mad, into politics, gay, kind, sarcastic and much more things through art, without having people’s eyes on me, but on my art,” Esquivias said.

Art as expression today

Today’s society is going through challenging times across the globe and art has contributed into a reaction towards local, as well as national and international issues. With a range of talent, artists are painting ideas that many choose to ignore, using their art as their voice to react to the injustices they see in this world.

Within its nature, art has no rules. There are no guidelines to express yourself. Art is meant to be the way the artist wants it to be, and art could be a reaction to outrage to established systems. But just because art could be a reaction to what’s going on, does not mean it has to be. Different artists have different stories to tell and different ideas to get across through their art.

Art is controversial yet peaceful, simple yet bold. No matter what form art is manifested — be it through a painting, dance or music — it is up to the artist to choose how they express themselves, what expressions they’ll share, and which ones they will keep to themselves.

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Comments (1)

Patricia Pforte • May 19, 2018 at 6:28 pm

I saw this article and it is fantastic! I work at California Historical Society in downtown San Francisco and we have a murals exhibition, Murales Rebeldes: L.A. Chicana/o Murals Under Siege and the Skyline students might enjoy it! It is open now through September 16th.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Abstract expressionism.

Number 28, 1950

Jackson Pollock

The Glazier

Willem de Kooning

No. 13 (White, Red on Yellow)

Mark Rothko

The Flesh Eaters

William Baziotes

Black Reflections

Franz Kline

Clyfford Still

Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental

Richard Pousette-Dart

David Smith

Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 70

Robert Motherwell

Black Untitled

Barnett Newman

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)

Night Creatures

Lee Krasner

Stella Paul Department of Education, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art—and shifted the art world’s focus. Never a formal association, the artists known as “Abstract Expressionists” or “The New York School” did, however, share some common assumptions. Among others, artists such as Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Franz Kline (1910–1962), Lee Krasner (1908–1984), Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), William Baziotes (1912–1963), Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Barnett Newman (1905–1970), Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974), Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992), and Clyfford Still (1904–1980) advanced audacious formal inventions in a search for significant content. Breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, the artists made monumentally scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psyches—and in doing so, attempted to tap into universal inner sources. These artists valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process. Their work resists stylistic categorization, but it can be clustered around two basic inclinations: an emphasis on dynamic, energetic gesture, in contrast to a reflective, cerebral focus on more open fields of color. In either case, the imagery was primarily abstract. Even when depicting images based on visual realities, the Abstract Expressionists favored a highly abstracted mode.

Context Abstract Expressionism developed in the context of diverse, overlapping sources and inspirations. Many of the young artists had made their start in the 1930s. The Great Depression yielded two popular art movements, Regionalism and Social Realism, neither of which satisfied this group of artists’ desire to find a content rich with meaning and redolent of social responsibility, yet free of provincialism and explicit politics. The Great Depression also spurred the development of government relief programs, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a jobs program for unemployed Americans in which many of the group participated, and which allowed so many artists to establish a career path.

But it was the exposure to and assimilation of European modernism that set the stage for the most advanced American art. There were several venues in New York for seeing avant-garde art from Europe. The Museum of Modern Art had opened in 1929, and there artists saw a rapidly growing collection acquired by director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. They were also exposed to groundbreaking temporary exhibitions of new work, including Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–37), and retrospectives of Matisse , Léger , and Picasso , among others. Another forum for viewing the most advanced art was Albert Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art, which was housed at New York University from 1927 to 1943. There the Abstract Expressionists saw the work of Mondrian, Gabo, El Lissitzky, and others. The forerunner of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—the Museum of Non-Objective Painting—opened in 1939. Even prior to that date, its collection of Kandinskys had been publicly exhibited several times. The lessons of European modernism were also disseminated through teaching. The German expatriate Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) became the most influential teacher of modern art in the United States, and his impact reached both artists and critics.

The crisis of war and its aftermath are key to understanding the concerns of the Abstract Expressionists. These young artists, troubled by man’s dark side and anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, wanted to express their concerns in a new art of meaning and substance. Direct contact with European artists increased as a result of World War II, which caused so many—including Dalí, Ernst, Masson, Breton, Mondrian, and Léger—to seek refuge in the U.S. The Surrealists opened up new possibilities with their emphasis on tapping the unconscious. One Surrealist device for breaking free of the conscious mind was psychic automatism—in which automatic gesture and improvisation gain free rein.

Early Work Early on, the Abstract Expressionists, in seeking a timeless and powerful subject matter, turned to primitive myth and archaic art for inspiration. Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Newman, and Baziotes all looked to ancient or primitive cultures for expression. Their early works feature pictographic and biomorphic elements transformed into personal code. Jungian psychology was compelling, too, in its assertion of the collective unconscious. Directness of expression was paramount, best achieved through lack of premeditation. In a famous letter to the New York Times (June 1943), Gottlieb and Rothko, with the assistance of Newman, wrote: “To us, art is an adventure into an unknown world of the imagination which is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is critical.”

Mature Abstract Expressionism: Gesture In 1947, Pollock developed a radical new technique, pouring and dripping thinned paint onto raw canvas laid on the ground (instead of traditional methods of painting in which pigment is applied by brush to primed, stretched canvas positioned on an easel). The paintings were entirely nonobjective. In their subject matter (or seeming lack of one), scale (huge), and technique (no brush, no stretcher bars, no easel), the works were shocking to many viewers. De Kooning, too, was developing his own version of a highly charged, gestural style, alternating between abstract work and powerful iconic figurative images. Other colleagues, including Krasner and Kline, were equally engaged in creating an art of dynamic gesture in which every inch of a picture is fully charged. For Abstract Expressionists, the authenticity or value of a work lay in its directness and immediacy of expression. A painting is meant to be a revelation of the artist’s authentic identity. The gesture, the artist’s “signature,” is evidence of the actual process of the work’s creation. It is in reference to this aspect of the work that critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term “action painting” in 1952: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”

Mature Abstract Expressionism: Color Field Another path lay in the expressive potential of color. Rothko, Newman, and Still, for instance, created art based on simplified, large-format, color-dominated fields. The impulse was, in general, reflective and cerebral, with pictorial means simplified in order to create a kind of elemental impact. Rothko and Newman, among others, spoke of a goal to achieve the “sublime” rather than the “beautiful,” harkening back to Edmund Burke in a drive for the grand, heroic vision in opposition to a calming or comforting effect. Newman described his reductivism as one means of “freeing ourselves of the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend … freeing ourselves from the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, and myth that have been the devices of Western European painting.” For Rothko, his glowing, soft-edged rectangles of luminescent color should provoke in viewers a quasi-religious experience, even eliciting tears. As with Pollock and the others, scale contributed to the meaning. For the time, the works were vast in scale. And they were meant to be seen in relatively close environments, so that the viewer was virtually enveloped by the experience of confronting the work. Rothko said, “I paint big to be intimate.” The notion is toward the personal (authentic expression of the individual) rather than the grandiose.

The Aftermath The first generation of Abstract Expressionism flourished between 1943 and the mid-1950s. The movement effectively shifted the art world’s focus from Europe (specifically Paris) to New York in the postwar years. The paintings were seen widely in traveling exhibitions and through publications. In the wake of Abstract Expressionism, new generations of artists—both American and European—were profoundly marked by the breakthroughs made by the first generation, and went on to create their own important expressions based on, but not imitative of, those who forged the way.

Paul, Stella. “Abstract Expressionism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/abex/hd_abex.htm (October 2004)

Additional Essays by Stella Paul

Paul, Stella. “ Modern Storytellers: Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold .” (October 2004)

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Arts Academy

in the Woods

The Importance of Expressing Emotion through Art

The world is a strange place right now. Downright surreal even. And it’s hard to deny that there are a lot of emotions at play.

Interestingly enough, the Latin roots of the word emotion are e (out) + movere (move). In an ideal world, emotions create feelings that flow naturally. But oftentimes they get dammed up.

Whatever you’re feeling these days, it can be a lot to carry. Expressing emotion through art is an incredible way to release those feelings before they get too deep and begin to create other problems .

It Is Crucial to Release Emotions

It would seem as though they have the inside scoop on the research.

Because studies show that whenever we repress, deny, or disallow an emotion to be what it needs to be, our network pathways get blocked. Pretty soon, they’re gumming up the works and the vital feel-good unifying chemicals that dictate both our biology and behavior are unable to flow.

Nobody wants that.

Expressing Emotion through Art

Sometimes simply stating what you’re experiencing isn’t in enough.

In order for emotions to move through us freely, they must be accepted and expressed. Doing so enlivens us and fuels our creativity. Fortunately, experiencing emotions directly through art is fairly simple – if you allow for the process.

This could be done drawing, painting, sculpting, music, movement, writing, drama, whatever creative means allows you to open up and bare your soul. You needn’t be talented or skilled at any of these either. They are simply a means for expressing yourself.

And each time you create a work of art, you’re sharing new ideas, as well as different ways to express yourself. This can certainly serve as motivation for others.

Steps toward Self-Expression

Sometimes getting started can be the toughest part. You don’t need to create an original masterpiece though. You’re just finding a way to let emotions flow.

Pablo Picasso once said, “Art is theft.” So while each piece of art is different, the inspirations are shared. At Arts Academy in the Woods (AAW), we encourage the following as you attempt to express emotions through art:

1. Do Not Hold Back

Whether it’s painting or poetry, music or mixed media, it’s easy to start feeling stifled when facing a creative medium. You may feel you don’t understand “the rules” associated with that medium.

Forget about the rules. You’re trying to create something that’s a reflection of you – not striving to attain technical mastery of the medium. Just allow yourself to feel. Fully and completely.

Allow your emotions to guide you on how you create the art. You will feel cathartic as you utilize the art to let go of damaging emotions that have been bottled up for too long.

One of the single biggest obstacles is fear of failure. It can cause you to give up before you even start. But the true failure is not trying in the first place.

At AAW, we remind students that failure is one of the best ways to learn. Of course, we’re not encouraging intentional failing. But everyone makes mistakes when creating art. View it as a learning experience and keep going. What’s important is that you’re letting your creativity flow.

If you’re obsessing over staying “safe” with art or worried about what others think your art should be, you will end up not revealing much about yourself. So just keep in mind that when creating self-expressive art, you can be comfortable in taking risks. You want the art to mean something to you – regardless of what others think.

3. Question Your Actions

When engaged with self-expressive art, you have to be brave and dig deep. Ask yourself why you behave in certain ways. Even if you don’t like the answers. Doing so is going to allow you to release the emotions around those behaviors while also giving you insight into your thoughts and actions.

4. Be Spontaneous

Spontaneous art is incredibly liberating. It’s one of the best ways to release emotions. So be impulsive. Throw some paint on a canvas Jackson Pollock style. Or explore some experimental sounds on music tracks like Björk. You don’t have to rely on preexisting art forms. Give it a try. You might be surprised at how free you feel.

Don’t put a bunch of pressure on yourself. And certainly don’t let other’s pressure you. Stress and tension will harsh your creativity buzz. And they’ll just create more negative emotions – which is counterintuitive to the whole process.

Art As a Necessary Part of the Curriculum

Art educators understand the importance of learning through art. At arts-integrated schools, they even teach math, science, and social studies through art . Beyond that though, you learn a lot about yourself through art too.

Self-expressive art helps you find new depths to your thinking you may not have realized were there. And you can apply this to so many other areas of your life. That’s what makes art such an important part of education.

Art allows students to release stress in a healthy way. It gives them an alternative way to express themselves – either through a shared experience, or one that’s more private. Yet stripping funding for the arts in place of STEM subjects continues to happen.

And it’s a true disservice to students – and future adults – everywhere.

Want to Find out More about Expressing Emotion through Art?

At an arts academy middle school/high school like AAW, students are encouraged to grow and flourish by expressing emotion through art in a safe environment.

They learn the value of art and how it applies to every aspect of life. And most of all, they are taught to forget about the naysayers and overcome the obstacles when it comes to self-expression; to always move forward and do what they love.

If you feel like AAW could be the perfect place for your middle school or high school-aged child to thrive, contact us today to find out more. Expressing ourselves is more important now than ever.

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Turning Thoughts and Feelings into Art

Artists are primarily thought of as makers. And yes, of course we make stuff. But we are also thinkers and feelers. We think. And we feel. Deeply . And I believe the thinking and feeling are the most important parts of an artist. More important than the making. Because our thinking and feeling is what spurs the making and leads to what we make.

That’s why I write these essays and that’s why I draw in my sketchbook. I have all these thoughts and feelings swirling around in my mind, constantly bumping into each other and trying to connect with other things. It can be overwhelming if we don’t have an outlet for all those thoughts and feelings.

Seeing Our Thoughts + Feelings

Often, as artists, our thinking can run over the other aspects of being human; actually, it can run over all the other aspects of being human. It can run over the being part. We can get so focused on doing, on making, on thinking, that we lose our awareness of what’s going on. I’ve realized now that art (for me, and maybe for you), is the key to becoming aware.

Making art isn’t a direct way to change our thinking or change ourselves. Art is a way of seeing ourselves. A way of seeing our inner world—our thoughts and beliefs, our feelings and emotions, our loves and aversions. Through making art we can learn about our inner world.

Sometimes we’ll discover mundane or silly thoughts like, ‘hey, mushrooms are interesting’. Other times we’ll discover something profound, like thought patterns inside us that we never knew were there. Sometimes those thought patterns are destructive, narrow-minded, and so habitual that we were unaware of them for years. Art can illuminate this inner side of us, and make us more aware of ourselves.

Turning Thoughts + Feelings into Art

The thoughts and feelings in our minds are constantly flowing and surging. It can be exhausting, and sometimes we get swept away. But making art allows us to stand, even for a brief moment, in the middle of that river and see what’s flowing around us.

And that seeing is key. If we’re able to see these inner thought patterns, they can begin to change. We can weed out destructive beliefs and habits to bring in more acceptance and love. We can see our thoughts as just thoughts, and we can use those feelings to make art, instead of allowing them to set up camp in our brains and take over.

Drawing each day, looking into ourselves each day, we can see those parts inside we may have otherwise not noticed. We can become familiar with how our mind works and how our hands create from it. And this process leads to satisfaction in our art and more acceptance and confidence in ourselves.

A Real Life Example

Yesterday, I went through this entire process, unknowingly and perhaps unwillingly. I had been feeling off all day but didn’t really realize it. I was just floating through my day in a general state of “meh”. I tried to break out of the funk: I took a nap, went on a walk, ate a snack… nothing worked. The funk was still there. It was one of those times when you just don’t want to do anything—not even draw. The only thing I could put my finger on was that I felt “meh”, and nothing more specific than that. I was floating in a river of thoughts and feelings but completely unaware of what I was thinking or why I was feeling this way.

And so, not wanting to do anything else, I sat down to draw. The theme for #MightCouldDrawToday this week, chosen this morning by me, is Villains. That choice should have given me a little clue to how I was feeling that day, but ya know… unaware. So I sat down on the couch with my Posca markers and sketchbooks, and within a few minutes of considering what to draw, it came to me—Cruella De Vil. Something about that character clicked and I instantly went from not wanting to draw at all, to a deep desire to draw this character.

And so, for the next good while, I lost myself in drawing. I dropped out of the outer world and dropped into my sketchbook.

As I was drawing Cruella’s facial expression, it dawned on me. This is how I feel. I feel like Cruella de Vil right now. And not just any Cruella de Vil, because there are many sides of every villain—I feel like THIS one. This one that I just drew. And suddenly, it was as if I had seen what was inside me. All the vague feelings of “meh” and the thoughts swirling so fast I couldn’t catch them… everything came into focus.

I now had an awareness of how I was really feeling in that moment.

To be clear, art isn’t magic. My Cruella mood didn’t immediately transform into happy-puppy-mood just because I became aware of it. Awareness doesn’t solve all our problems unfortunately. But the drawing gave me a breather from the rush of thoughts and feelings, a moment of clarity, and a step in the right direction. Like people speak about meditation, I believe experiencing awareness of our thoughts over and over can lead to big changes, both in our art and in our lives.

Try it Yourself

The next time you feel down, discouraged, or “meh”, try using art to look inside. Take some time to draw your thoughts and feelings, if only for a few minutes. Don’t go in with expectations of a revelation and don’t judge your drawing as it goes along. Maybe you’ll realize something profound, and maybe you’ll just realize you’re grumpy.

Whatever it is, just draw. And let it all come out just the way it is.

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Art and Expression

Related Papers

Bryan J . Parkhurst

Aesthetic valuism maintains that aesthetic properties harbor an ineliminable evaluative component, and that to correctly and sincerely apply an aesthetic predicate to a thing just is to give an appraisal of its aesthetic goodness or badness. Anti-valuism denies this, and holds that even in the identification and ascription of evaluatively-loaded aesthetic properties, such as beautiful or graceful, we may identify a non-evaluative, purely descriptive, and patently aesthetic form of judgment or discrimination. In this essay, I formulate a new definition of aesthetic properties that is consistent with anti-valuism, in order to see how well it serves us, in comparison with a valuist definition that appears in the published philosophical literature. If my definition is at least as intuitively plausible as the valuist?s, it should be preferred. This is because the most complicated concept my definition asks you to understand is perceptual resemblance (a concept I spend a fair amount of time explaining). Value is harder to understand, and we don?t make it very easy on ourselves if we use one mystery (value) to define another (aesthetic properties). I end by reflecting on how my definition fits into wider aesthetic concerns.

University of Malta

Josette Attard

What makes us experience artworks and their aesthetic properties? Can all aesthetic properties be found in all artworks? What aesthetic qualities contribute in evaluating artworks? How do we differentiate between aesthetic value and artistic value and is there any relationship between them? The paper aims to answer these questions by examining influential arguments mainly about aesthetic concepts introduced by Frank Sibley and which were later developed by several other contemporary aestheticians including Robert Stecker, Peter Lamarque and Jerrold Levinson. This paper briefly glances at the historical development of aesthetic properties, from Classical to contemporary times. To avoid speculation and vagueness, the paper proceeds to define some of the aesthetic properties as opposed to non-aesthetic ones and applies them to different literary and visual artworks. Such aesthetic qualities are attributed to a particular experience especially when considering literary works. This aesthetic experience, which includes mainly pleasure, plays an important role in the process of judging and evaluating art. However it can also lead to several non-aesthetic values such as the cognitive value which is discussed in this paper. All these conceptions are open to perennial discussion. However one cannot deny that there is a close connection between aesthetic value and artistic value and that one does not exclude the other, especially in the process of identifying and evaluating artworks.

European Journal of Philosophy

Vid Simoniti

European Journal of Philosophy Realist positions about aesthetic properties are few and far between, though sometimes developed by analogy to realism about secondary properties such as colours. By contrast, I advance a novel realist position about aesthetic properties, which is based on a disanalogy between aesthetic properties and colours. Whereas colours are usually perceived as relatively steady features of external objects, aesthetic properties are perceived as unsteady properties: as powers that objects have to cause a certain experience in the observer. Following on from this observation, I develop a realist account of aesthetic properties as causally efficient powers. Beauty is not merely in the mind of the observer; it is a power of an object to bring about a certain effect, as much instantiated in the object as its fragility or poisonousness. To show how such a view can be made ontologically respectable, I draw on recent 'dispositionalist' accounts of powers in philosophical metaphysics. I then offer two arguments in favour of this view. First, the view matches the phenomenology of aesthetic judgement. Second, the view offers an explanation of how it is that critics can demand agreement with their aesthetic judgements. 1 Aesthetic Properties Consider the following properties: beautiful, dreamy, cute, sombre, lovely, dreadful, ugly, astounding, drab, elegant. What aesthetic properties such as these have in common is hard to define: they are often mentioned in critical discourse about art, though we also describe natural scenes, people, animals, and even scientific theories as having them.2 However we define the scope of the aesthetic, though, it has long been felt that such properties are rather curious. On the one hand, when we attribute an aesthetic property to an object, we seem to be merely saying how the object makes us feel. Praising a painting as dreamy, we seem to say that it makes us feel elated and lost in thought. And yet ascriptions of aesthetic properties are also ruled by palpable standards of correctness. To say that a funeral is cute or that Knut the Polar Bear is sombre would clearly miss the mark (Figure 1). In this paper, I will argue that developing a proper ontology of aesthetic properties is the key to elucidating this curious situation. The question we should ask is as follows: Do aesthetic properties exist, and if so, what kind of properties are they?

Sherri Irvin

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, no.46, 2013; 47-62.

Severin Schroeder

Exploring the Critical Issues of Beauty

Bart VANDENABEELE

Frederick Dolan

Seth D Thorn

A familiar way of starting to think about art is to submit it to the standard form of philosophical investigation defined by the sequence of an existential statement followed by a question. The existential statement concerns a particular class of things. The question concerns what makes these things possible. Let us say preliminarily: the question concerns the potential whose actualization is to be understood as a thing of that particular kind.

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Descriptive Essay on Art Appreciation

Read this essay on art to learn more about knowing, identifying, and understanding the qualities of art.

Art is an object that possesses beauty, admired and appreciated by the people, and cannot be found anywhere but in particular places where people can visit. Creating artwork, therefore, requires excellent imagination to give the piece of work the desired aesthetic value. The works of Art in the Ancient culture were of various forms which included architecture, sculpture, and graphic arts (Funch, 1999).

Architecture and sculpture are the oldest forms of art that existed and still exist in the present day. For example, the pyramids that are among the tallest structures in the world.

The primary materials used in architecture were stone, wood, and glass. The sculpture also used stone and wood. Other materials used in sculpture included bronze, marble, silver, copper, wood, and clay. The two techniques involved were carving and casting. Carving means subtracting material to get the desired figure while casting is adding material to obtain the desired figure (Carroll & Eurich, 1992).

Initially, a two-dimensional form of work was used for both architecture and sculpture, but as art advanced through the ages, the two-dimensional form of work was applied. The materials used for both architecture and sculpture included wood and stone. Sculptures also used marble, copper, bronze, silver, and clay.

Sculpture and architecture employed some techniques and processes that were similar to arrive at the final desired object. Carving and casting were mainly used in sculpture which was also practiced in some parts of architectural objects to obtain the shapes required.

The sculptures were painted using the colors of the natural things they represent, while architectural objects were painted according to their use, and the message they portrayed.

Materials were put together in a line to form the shape aimed at both architecture and sculpture. The texture is the roughness or smoothness of a surface as is seen when it is illuminated by light. Different materials have different textures so the artist can make materials of the textures he requires. Most sculptured objects have a smooth finish, while architectural objects are rough.

The value of an Art depends on the materials used to make it, its size, and the image it represents. The beauty and the natural appearance of an object are found in its symmetry(Art Through the Ages, n.d.).

This is used mainly in sculptures of animal or human images to display the true natural appearance. The artists obtained a balance by making symmetrical sculptures and some architectural objects like the pyramids in Egypt. The balance was achieved to give the art natural beauty and safety (Parker, 2003).

The work of art always carries a subject matter. Sculptures of animals by the people of the past appreciated the mysterious way that a supernatural being created the world. Architectural buildings were sacred places and symbolized the presence of God, a sign of adherence to traditional values and way of accompanying death after life.

Works of art such as sculptures represent the real natural environment and thus appreciate nature. The art’s message is to display the purity of nature and for the moral evaluation of the people. Sculptures of Gods and buildings like pyramids represented the presence of a supernatural being and a creator (Horovitz, 1995).

Functions of art are divided into personal, social and physical functions. Individual purposes include religious practices and a sense of control over the entire universe. Social functions dealt with aspects of the life of all the people not personally. It also covered the political functions of the people.

Physical functions were symbolized by architecture, crafts, and industrial design. Artists had a crucial role in ancient cultures. They served the interests of the people, appreciated nature and showed the changing times (Parker, 2003).

Art Through the Ages . Web.

Carroll, H. A., & Eurich, A. C. (1992). Abstract intelligence and art appreciation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 23(3), 214-220.

Funch, B. S. (1999). The psychology of art appreciation. London: Abm Komers.

Horovitz, B. L. (1995). Art Appreciation of Children. The Journal of Educational Research, 31(2), 17-23.

Parker, D. H. (2003). The Principles Of Aesthetics . Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 28). Descriptive Essay on Art Appreciation. https://ivypanda.com/essays/art-appreciation-2/

"Descriptive Essay on Art Appreciation." IvyPanda , 28 Oct. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/art-appreciation-2/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Descriptive Essay on Art Appreciation'. 28 October.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Descriptive Essay on Art Appreciation." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/art-appreciation-2/.

1. IvyPanda . "Descriptive Essay on Art Appreciation." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/art-appreciation-2/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Descriptive Essay on Art Appreciation." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/art-appreciation-2/.

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Student Opinion

How Should Colleges Handle Student Protests?

Where is the line between protecting students’ right to freedom of expression and ensuring their safety and ability to get an education?

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An aerial view of a large crowd gathered around a protester, who is standing on the Sundial and speaking into a bullhorn.

By Natalie Proulx

Since the Oct. 7 surprise attack in which Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took hostages — around 100 of whom remain in Gaza — and the start of an Israeli counteroffensive in Gaza that has killed over 33,000 Palestinians, colleges and universities across the United States have been struggling to handle the debate and protests over the war.

In recent weeks, many of those institutions have been clamping down on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, in which students have been seeking their universities’ divestment from companies with ties to Israel and a cease-fire in Israel’s war in Gaza. On Monday morning, nearly 50 people were arrested at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., following the arrests last week of more than 100 protesters at Columbia University in New York City. The arrests unleashed a wave of activism across other campuses, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan and Stanford University.

Have you been following this story? Have you witnessed demonstrations at college campuses near you? If not, before reading the article below, scroll through these photos and videos of the protests. What do you notice? What questions do you have? What is your initial reaction to what you see?

In “ Colleges Warn Student Demonstrators: Enough ,” Jeremy W. Peters writes about how some universities have begun to take harsher measures against student protesters:

After years of often loose enforcement of their own rules, some of the country’s most high-profile academic institutions are getting bolder, suspending and in some cases expelling students. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and Brown University have recently taken swift and decisive action against student protesters, including making arrests . And on Thursday, Columbia University hit its limit with student protesters who had set up dozens of tents on campus, sending in the New York Police Department to make arrests. The arrests followed congressional testimony on Wednesday, in which the president of Columbia, Nemat Shafik, said the school had delivered an unambiguous message to students that misconduct would not be tolerated. College officials are driven by criticism from alumni, donors and Republican lawmakers, but in interviews they also described a gnawing sense that civility on campus has broken down. They say that lately, some student protests have become so disruptive that they not only are interfering with their ability to provide an education, but they also have left many students, particularly Jewish ones, fearing for their safety. Recalibrating isn’t necessarily easy, as many universities are learning. Efforts by administrators to claw back some of their authority over campus demonstrations are being met with pushback from students, faculty and civil liberties groups who say a university’s role is to foster debate — even if it’s messy, rude and disruptive — not attempt to smother it. Campus activists said the aggressive enforcement of the student disciplinary process by universities is a new and concerning development. “This is an escalation,” said Rosy Fitzgerald of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a nonprofit that is tracking how schools are responding to student demonstrators. Suspensions and expulsions “didn’t used to be a tactic,” she said. “But now we’re seeing that as an immediate response.” In her congressional testimony, Dr. Shafik revealed that 15 Columbia students have been suspended in recent weeks. She also said the school had for the first time in 50 years made the decision to ask the N.Y.P.D. to assist with protests. Vanderbilt University issued what are believed to be the first student expulsions over protests related to the Israel-Hamas conflict. More than two dozen demonstrators stormed the university president’s office — injuring a security guard and shattering a window — and occupied it for more than 20 hours. Vanderbilt suspended every student involved in the demonstration. Three were expelled. Student protests have a history of being disruptive and occasionally violent, from the Vietnam War era to today. Since Donald J. Trump’s election in 2016, many campuses have become especially volatile places, seeing an increase in angry demonstrations over conservative speakers, some of whom have been disinvited out of fear for their safety. The Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel has sparked another wave of protests, which university administrators and free speech advocates say poses new challenges. In interviews, they described encountering students who were unwilling to engage with administrators when invited to do so, quick to use aggressive and sometimes physical forms of expression, and often wore masks to conceal their identities.

Students, read the entire article and then tell us:

Now that you’ve looked at images and read more about these protests, what are your reactions to the student demonstrations and schools’ attempts to clamp down on them?

Have there been protests or demonstrations at your school about the Israel-Hamas war or any other issues? If so, how did your administration respond? Do you think it handled the situation well? What, if anything, do you think your school should have done differently?

According to the article, some students, faculty and civil liberties groups say that “a university’s role is to foster debate — even if it’s messy, rude and disruptive — not attempt to smother it.” To what extent do you agree with that point of view? Why?

When, if ever, do you think a school or university should step in to manage or stop student protests, demonstrations or debates? For example, according to the article, college officials have said that some of the protests have left many students, particularly Jewish ones, fearing for their safety. And the federal government has opened discrimination investigations into half a dozen universities following complaints about antisemitic and anti-Muslim harassment. Where is the line between protecting students’ right to freedom of expression and ensuring their safety and ability to get an education?

Do you think suspensions, expulsions and arrests are an appropriate response from schools given the tenor of some of these protests? If you were a decision maker at one of these universities, what would you be weighing to decide how to respond?

Colleges, universities and schools have long been sites of protest and activism, over causes including the Vietnam War and, in recent years, gun violence and the Black Lives Matter movement . Why do you think that is? What role do young people have to play in political issues like these?

What would you want your teachers, school administrators, parents or other adults to know about what it’s like to be a student during this conflict and navigating the fraught emotions and passionate protests it has brought on?

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.

Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.

Natalie Proulx joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2017 after working as an English language arts teacher and curriculum writer. More about Natalie Proulx

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COMMENTS

Philosophy of art
Expression in the creation of art. The creation of a work of art is the bringing about of a new combination of elements in the medium (tones in music, words in literature, paints on canvas, and so on). The elements existed beforehand but not in the same combination; creation is the re-formation of these pre-existing materials.
Why Is Art Important?
Art is important to culture because it can bridge the gap between different racial groups, religious groups, dialects, and ethnicities. It can express common values, virtues, and morals that we can all understand and feel. Art allows us to ask important questions about life and society.
"Without Art Mankind Could Not Exist": Leo Tolstoy's Essay What is Art
The loss of such a unique ability would be a catastrophe. "Men would be like beasts", says Tolstoy, and even goes as far as to claim that without art, mankind could not exist. This is a bold declaration, which recalls the Nietzschean aphorism that human existence is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Art as a Path to Emotion
Thus, art communicates — artist to audience. While active involvement with making art involves creative expression of what one feels — consciously and unconsciously, so too participation in ...
How Art Makes Us More Human: Why Being Creative is So Important in Life
Art is an expression of the human experience, and its value lies in its ability to bring people together. The connection between art and emotion. The value of art lies in its ability to evoke emotion. Whether you're looking at a painting, watching a performance, or listening to music, art allows us to experience a range of emotions from joy ...
Essay On Art in English for Students
The essay on art will help us go through the importance of art and its meaning for a better understanding. ... people have been creating and enjoying art. It expresses emotions or expression of life. It is one such creation that enables interpretation of any kind. It is a skill that applies to music, painting, poetry, dance and more. Moreover ...
Defining 'Art'
In his essay What is Art he wrote: "Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of ...
PDF Art as Expression
one of the commonest beliefs about art is that it is essentially a form of expression what is more, the expression of feeling this view is so common that it is often simply assumed to be true by students, critics, and artists. Tolstoy's view: art is the communication of feelings from artist to viewer through certain external signs artist are ...
Expression and modern art (article)
Expression and modern art. Google Classroom. By Dr. Charles Cramer and Dr. Kim Grant. Pablo Picasso, The Old Guitarist, 1903-04 oil on panel, 122.9 x 82.6 cm (Art Institute of Chicago) In his painting The Old Guitarist, Picasso made a series of choices to evoke feelings of pity. The guitarist is an old man, with gray hair.
Tolstoy's "What Is Art?"
Leo Tolstoy, in his essay What Is Art? . ^ has provided us with a lively and influential defence of the view that art is the expression of emotion, a view now commonly referred to as the Expression Theory of Art or Emotionalism . Art, on this view, is the expression of a man's emotions in some artistic medium which beoomes the vehicle for
The Concept of Art as Expression and Communication
Published: Sep 7, 2023. Art is a powerful medium that has been used throughout human history to convey emotions, ideas, and messages. This essay delves into the concept of art as expression and communication, exploring how artists use their creative abilities to communicate thoughts and feelings to the world.
What is Art? and/or What is Beauty?
Beauty is rather a measure of affect, a measure of emotion. In the context of art, beauty is the gauge of successful communication between participants - the conveyance of a concept between the artist and the perceiver. Beautiful art is successful in portraying the artist's most profound intended emotions, the desired concepts, whether they ...
The Definition of Art
Art, therefore, as a cultural expression, operates in the same sphere as religion and philosophy, and expresses the same content as they. But art "reveals to consciousness the deepest interests of humanity" in a different manner than do religion and philosophy, because art alone, of the three, works by sensuous means. ...
Expression in Art
That the expression of emotion is among the principal purposes or points of art is a thought with a pedigree stretching back at least as far as the Ancient Greeks. Nor, so stated, is it a thought that many have wanted to oppose. Even the staunchest cognitivist or moral improver has granted that expression is one of the points of at least some art, however much he or she may have wanted to ...
Philosophy of art
philosophy of art, the study of the nature of art, including concepts such as interpretation, representation and expression, and form.It is closely related to aesthetics, the philosophical study of beauty and taste.. Distinguishing characteristics. The philosophy of art is distinguished from art criticism, which is concerned with the analysis and evaluation of particular works of art.
Art as a form of expression
History of art as a form of expression. Across multiple platforms, including, but not limited to social media, the news, and text, artivism is a mix of art and activism. Art as activism can be traced back to many historic events. One of its most expressive eras was the 1960s, in which many responded to the Vietnam War and civil rights movement ...
Art Is An Expression Of Human Emotions And Creativity Essay
The Importance of Art Essay. Art is a form of human expression. Art can be seen as the artist sleight of hand on his mood. Art is in various media from posters to public wall of which we call "graffiti". Art is elusive as the use of colors shapes and the surface used adds a new dimension. Art portrays various ideas, feelings such as triumph ...
Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionism. A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art—and shifted the art world's focus. Never a formal association, the artists known as "Abstract Expressionists ...
Art
art, a visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination. The term art encompasses diverse media such as painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, decorative arts, photography, and installation. (Read Sister Wendy's Britannica essay on art appreciation.) memorial board. Memorial board, wood.
The Importance of Expressing Emotion through Art
Art educators understand the importance of learning through art. At arts-integrated schools, they even teach math, science, and social studies through art. Beyond that though, you learn a lot about yourself through art too. Self-expressive art helps you find new depths to your thinking you may not have realized were there.
Art as Expression Essay
Art as Expression Essay. Artists are central to cultural, political and social discourses in the world. They are here not only to inspire us, but to provoke us as well. Four artists that broke social, political and cultural barriers were, Rene Magritte, John Heartfield Jackson Pollock and Otto Dix. While the artists were involved in different ...
Turning Thoughts and Feelings into Art
Art is a way of seeing ourselves. A way of seeing our inner world—our thoughts and beliefs, our feelings and emotions, our loves and aversions. Through making art we can learn about our inner world. Sometimes we'll discover mundane or silly thoughts like, 'hey, mushrooms are interesting'. Other times we'll discover something profound ...
Full article: Art makes society: an introductory visual essay
The scale, visibility, and accessibility of these objects and images are further sources of information about their cultural significance. In the rest of this essay, we present a range of examples to consider the varied ways in which art makes society. We consider: (1) the ways art can frame a setting; (2) art as participation; (3) art as ...
Art Is The Expression English Literature Essay
Art is the expression of the highest imaginative and emotional susceptibility of man. Literature is one amongst the fine arts which employs language as a medium of expression. It is an essentially associate degree expression of human feelings , emotions, sorrows and joys. Sensible literature is rarely outdated and identified no bounds of place ...
Art : Art Is A Form Of Self-Expression
Art is a form of self-expression from the artist to their audience. For the purpose of this essay, my definition of art, is any form of art that was inspired from within the artist. Self-expression is defined as, "the expression of one's feelings, thoughts, or ideas, especially in writing, art, music, or dance." (English Oxford Dictionary).
(PDF) Art and Expression
Expression, by contrast, belongs to the aesthetic character of a work of art if anything does. And this is borne out by an interesting distinction: you can appreciate the expression of a work only by attending to it, and hearing the 14 emotion of it. Turn your attention away and the experience vanishes".
Incredible essay about Magneto, Judaism, and the Holocaust
Over at Defector, writer Asher Elbein just published one of the single best pop culture-politics crossover essays I've read in a long time.In The Judgement of Magneto, Elbein expertly analyzes the ...
What is Art Appreciation? Essay Example
Architecture and sculpture are the oldest forms of art that existed and still exist in the present day. For example, the pyramids that are among the tallest structures in the world. The primary materials used in architecture were stone, wood, and glass. The sculpture also used stone and wood. Other materials used in sculpture included bronze ...
Blog
April 23, 2024. This entry is part of an ongoing series highlighting new collections. The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records, and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States.
How Should Colleges Handle Student Protests?
Student protests have a history of being disruptive and occasionally violent, from the Vietnam War era to today. Since Donald J. Trump's election in 2016, many campuses have become especially ...

Why Is Art Important? – The Value of Creative Expression

What Is Art?

The Definition of Art

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Art Assists in Education and Human Development

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Art Is Socially and Financially Rewarding

Art Is a Powerful (Political) Tool

Art Will Always Be There

Frequently Asked Questions

Why Is Art Important to Culture?

What Are the Different Types of Art?

What Is the Definition of Art?

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