Artworks are objects that express human creative skill and imagination. They are usually visually appealing and may evoke emotions in the viewer. Artworks can also be used as tools to communicate ideas and inspire others. For instance, artworks can be created for political or religious reasons. They can also be a form of social commentary or subversion.
An artwork can be an object, performance, film, or book. It can also be a sculpture or painting. In addition to expressing creativity and imagination, art can also help promote health and wellness. Studies have shown that people who regularly view artworks feel less stressed and more calm than those who do not view artworks. Artwork can also provide a sense of community and belonging. This is particularly true for public art, such as statues, sculpture parks, murals, and ephemeral art installations.
Traditionally, the definition of art has focused on function(s) or intended function(s). These include art for beauty, or simply the pleasure derived from it; artistic exploration, such as that of forms and nature of perception; communication of ideas, such as in politically or religiously motivated art; and/or entertainment. Artworks are often considered to be important because they allow humans to have unmediated experiences of those essential things that cannot be fully characterized in words, such as love and faith.
More recently, philosophers have shifted the focus to what makes something an artwork. A central idea in this approach is that art is a kind of culture and, like all cultures, art is always changing. Consequently, there is no such thing as an objective definition of what is art (Davies 2010). Instead, a set of criteria are proposed to determine whether a particular work is an artwork: it must occupy a certain line of descent from prehistoric art ancestors; it must have a subject that projects some attitude or point of view, or convey some information about the world (art theory); and it must be created by an artist. This approach is known as neo-institutionalism.
Other philosophers have argued that any attempt to find a definition of art that specifies individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions is misguided. They argue that cognitive science suggests that the way humans categorize things is by resemblance to exemplars, and not in terms of what they are. They further argue that this explains why experts are able to confer the status of art on mere real things: the experts’ say-so establishes a new category that brings with it a new universe of discourse.
A related view is that an artwork is an object that resembles, or is identifiable as, certain paradigm works — a kind of family resemblance view. This view avoids a commitment to constitutive claims about art’s nature, but is vulnerable to the same criticisms as the resemblance-to-a-paradigm view.