What makes something an artwork rather than an ordinary object? Aesthetic, formalist, and expression theories each offer criteria, yet counterexamples abound (Duchamp's readymades, silent compositions, blank canvases). Contemporary aesthetics increasingly treats art definition as a philosophical problem without a single essential answer. Some argue the question itself is misconceived; others pursue institutional, historical, or conceptual frameworks that avoid essentialism while still making meaningful distinctions.
Test various definitions against borderline cases: Is a urinal art if signed 'Duchamp'? Is silence music? Is a found object sculpture? Examine what work each definition does.
You have already studied expression theory (art as the communication of emotion) and the relationship between form and content in aesthetics. These theories offer partial answers to a question that turns out to be deceptively hard: what makes something an artwork at all, rather than just an ordinary object? You might think the answer is obvious — paintings and symphonies are art; chairs and urinals are not. But the history of avant-garde art in the 20th century systematically broke every obvious criterion.
Marcel Duchamp's readymades are the canonical challenge. In 1917, Duchamp submitted a mass-produced porcelain urinal — signed "R. Mutt" and titled "Fountain" — to an exhibition. It was rejected, but the question it posed has never gone away: if a urinal placed in a gallery by an artist is art, then what exactly does it share with Beethoven's symphonies that makes both qualify? It is not beauty — many found it ugly. It is not skilled craftsmanship — Duchamp made nothing. It is not emotional expression in any obvious sense. Yet something about the context, the intention, and the framing transformed an industrial object into an artwork.
This observation motivated two influential contemporary theories. Arthur Danto argued that what makes something art is its relationship to the "artworld" — the network of theories, institutions, and practices that constitute art as a cultural practice. The same object (a Brillo box) is art when Warhol makes it and not art when the warehouse stocks it, because the artworld has accepted Warhol's version into its ongoing conversation. George Dickie formalized this as the institutional theory: an artifact is art when a person acting on behalf of the artworld confers the status of candidate for appreciation upon it. Both theories shift the question from intrinsic properties to relational and contextual ones.
Ontology enters when we ask not just "is this art?" but "what kind of thing is this artwork?" A symphony is not identical to any particular performance of it, nor to the score; a painting seems more tied to the physical object; a conceptual artwork may exist primarily as an idea. These are questions about the metaphysics of art — whether artworks are types or tokens, physical objects or abstract structures, single things or kinds. They matter practically for questions of forgery, reproduction, and restoration. A Beethoven symphony played on period instruments is still the same symphony; a Vermeer painting with an undetectable forgery substituted is no longer the real Vermeer — why?
The deeper lesson of this territory is that "art" may not be a natural kind with a single essence discoverable through analysis. Morris Weitz argued influentially that art is an "open concept" — like "game" (Wittgenstein's example), it is held together by family resemblances rather than necessary and sufficient conditions, and it is always being extended to new cases in ways that no prior definition anticipated. This is not a failure of philosophy; it is a substantive finding about how certain human concepts work.
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