Art has a powerful impact on the health of individuals, communities and entire societies. It can improve our ability to problem solve, increase social cohesion and empathy, and reduce stress. It is also a great way to relieve boredom and depression, build self-esteem, and boost creativity. Whether it’s a piece of music or an architectural design, the arts bring people together and help us find new ways to look at the world.
There are many different definitions of artwork, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. A more conventionalist view holds that a work of art must exhibit certain properties: it must be in a special category (art), created by a human artist, and intended to be enjoyed as a piece of entertainment or beauty. This definition is criticized for underplaying the fact that art can have many other functions, including communication, healing, and social change.
More contemporary philosophical views take a more hybrid approach that attempts to do justice to both the aesthetic and the institutional dimensions of art. These tend to be more akin to the traditional notion of an artwork and put greater emphasis on art’s pan-cultural and trans-historical characteristics. They may even attempt to reclaim aspects of the definition that have been lost in recent art practice, such as the idea that an artwork is a meaningful object.
Some philosophers of art argue that it is impossible to say what distinguishes an artwork from “mere real things,” so instead they suggest that experts can create categories for which there are reasons to confer art status. A popular example of this is Hegel’s account of beauty: beauty conveys the deepest metaphysical truth, which is that the rational or conceptual is genuinely real and ultimately superior to the sensory/perceptual.
Another approach is one that takes an inductive approach to defining what art is: it holds that an artwork must stand in some art-historical relation with preexisting artworks. The most famous example of this is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a readymade urinal signed R. Mutt, but there are several other examples in the history of art.
A final, cladistic, view of what defines an artwork is one that tries to identify it in terms of its phylogenetic lineage. This entails that every artwork must be part of an art tradition that grows into an artworld, and that it is therefore possible for nonhuman artworks to exist, provided that they belong to the right clade in the art-tree-of-life. However, this view is criticized for being excessively anthropocentric and unnecessarily restrictive in its claims about what constitutes an artworld. It is also problematic because it seems to imply that, as long as an art tradition remains a tradition in any sense at all, it cannot die (Danto and Carroll).