Who decides if it's '...beautiful or interesting...'? An expert or you?
The viewer decides. If some people find it beautiful or interesting then it is art. If you do not then it is still art, just art that you personally do not like.
Not if 'beauty (aesthetic) and interesting..' is in the definition of the thing. If the thing (art) has a definition that is subjective, then who decides if something is art?
From Britannica on part of a def of art:
'
The aesthetic recipient
Whichever
approach we take, however, there is an all-important question upon the
answer to which the course of aesthetics depends: the question of the
recipient. Only beings of a certain kind have aesthetic interests and
aesthetic experience, produce and appreciate art, employ such concepts
as those of beauty, expression, and form. What is it that gives these
beings access to this realm? The question is at least as old as Plato but received its most important modern exposition
in the philosophy of Kant, who argued, first, that it is only rational
beings who can exercise judgmentâthe faculty of aesthetic interestâand,
second, that until exercised in aesthetic judgment rationality is incomplete. It is worth pausing to examine these two claims.
'
I'm not sure that that is saying only an expert has that faculty. far from it - and the link Dov posted implies that art must be seen across any culture (see below - terrestrial or otherwise).
I find all this very odd, as I suppose you (other readers) do, but it is not MY idea that art is decided by the perceiver, but art's (or the artworld's). I repeat again, that if anyone has a definition of art that is not subjective (like the extract above) - then please show me it. But all the time that the definition of art depends on how people perceive things individually, then it's the artworld that is saying that all is art. I'm the opposite of that - I do NOT think Emin's bed is art simply because somebody tells me it is.
@Dovefromabove - please - what makes Emin's bed (nobody apparently) art, and my unmade bed not? What criteria are you applying that differentiates between the two? And can I always apply that criteria to all things to determine if they are art or not - and does it then mean that ALL things become art at the whim of......who...?
If I leave my door ajar - and on one side place an article that was my mother's and on the other articles of my children - and call the door Temporal Portal does it become a work of art as it denotes my past and future? Do all the objects at Charleston farmhouse becomes works of art because they were painted by the members of the Bloomsbury group? What if a member of that group then painted a plain white door using dulux - is that then also art?
As for the poetry Dove, it is still up to me to decide. If I want to learn japanese to undestand Japanese in general and their poetry in particular that is up to me - if I think a Haiku is art is up to me (I understand that that model exists). Isn't Chinese music based on a different scale? It may sound discordant to me, but I would not dispute it was music - as I can have a definiion of music. But therein lies my issue with the def of art - if you use aesthetic in the def - then do we hear the same beauty or ugliness here that someone in Asia does with chinese music? Doesn't this western view of art become part of it's definition? It must be if you take the opening page of the doc you linked, which said:
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 â
they are neither opaque nor completely transparent; (iii) such
entities sometimes have non-aesthetic â ceremonial or religious or
propagandistic â 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) artâs
normative dimension â the high value placed on making and
consuming art â 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 â for example, natural entities
(sunsets, landscapes, flowers, shadows), human beings, and abstract
entities (theories, proofs, mathematical entities) â have
interesting aesthetic properties.
...'
My highlight. The art definition today then doesn't agree with what it may have been in the past or will be in the future. That is the definition itself changes. No one can define art. That paper you linked to concludes with:
Conventionalist definitions account well for modern art, but have
difficulty accounting for artâs universality â especially
the fact that there can be art disconnected from âourâ
(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 artâs
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 âbloated, unwieldyâ concept of art
which institutional definitions aim to capture, needs to be taken
seriously, even if it turns out to be ungrounded: âIt is not at
all clear that these words â âWhat is
art?â â express anything like a single question, to which
competing answers are given, or whether philosophers proposing answers
are even engaged in the same debateâŠ. 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 âŠ
clarify the same cultural practices, or address the same issueâ
(Walton 2007).
@plant pauper. If you could hang your wet sock in a gallery you could become famous,  it obviously means a lot to you,  therefore it should mean a lot to other people too.  (If an expert says  so of course)Â
Gardening on the wild, windy west side of Dartmoor.Â
Otherwise I think we should leave this subject for now. Others are understandably finding your repetition and my having to find fresh ways of saying the same thing, very tedious.Â
Folks thatâs my lot. đÂ
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Posts
The aesthetic recipient
Whichever approach we take, however, there is an all-important question upon the answer to which the course of aesthetics depends: the question of the recipient. Only beings of a certain kind have aesthetic interests and aesthetic experience, produce and appreciate art, employ such concepts as those of beauty, expression, and form. What is it that gives these beings access to this realm? The question is at least as old as Plato but received its most important modern exposition in the philosophy of Kant, who argued, first, that it is only rational beings who can exercise judgmentâthe faculty of aesthetic interestâand, second, that until exercised in aesthetic judgment rationality is incomplete. It is worth pausing to examine these two claims.
1. Constraints on Definitions of Art
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 â they are neither opaque nor completely transparent; (iii) such entities sometimes have non-aesthetic â ceremonial or religious or propagandistic â 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) artâs normative dimension â the high value placed on making and consuming art â 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 â for example, natural entities (sunsets, landscapes, flowers, shadows), human beings, and abstract entities (theories, proofs, mathematical entities) â have interesting aesthetic properties.
...'
'...,
5. Conclusion
Conventionalist definitions account well for modern art, but have difficulty accounting for artâs universality â especially the fact that there can be art disconnected from âourâ (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 artâs 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 âbloated, unwieldyâ concept of art which institutional definitions aim to capture, needs to be taken seriously, even if it turns out to be ungrounded: âIt is not at all clear that these words â âWhat is art?â â express anything like a single question, to which competing answers are given, or whether philosophers proposing answers are even engaged in the same debateâŠ. 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 issueâ (Walton 2007).
...'
Again my highlights.
Otherwise I think we should leave this subject for now. Others are understandably finding your repetition and my having to find fresh ways of saying the same thing, very tedious.Â
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Â