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t even if its technique is ostensibly poor. Attributing too high a value to the making of art is clearly what lies beneath frequently heard objections like ‘my five-year-old daughter could do that’, but these are not complaints that have been levelled solely at contemporary art. The nineteenth-century sculptor Harriet Hosmer was criticised for her figures of heroines from history and literature because she did not make the final stone versions of her sculptures with her own hands. She defended herself by explaining that art is not the design but the technique – that what makes art ‘art’ is its ‘craft’, glorifying the means over the end.A related faulty assumption is that because the art of the last century is almost invariably accompanied and explained by words, the meaning of the piece resides in the words rather than the object itself. This position fails to recognise that traditional art was often accompanied by words and that the words themselves are merely a part of the context in which the piece exists. More will be said about this context presently. As for class-based mistrust, yes, there are those who traffic in very expensive art less as expressions of an artist’s motives than as trophies of their own status, but this is also true of other signs of material wealth and it has no bearing on the meaning or intrinsic value of the art itself. In other words, this too is merely an expression of a contextual matrix surrounding the art.



What is art and what is art for?

We must begin by asking several questions about context, the most basic of which are ‘What is art?’ and ‘What is art for?’. The average person might say, ‘Art is a decoration’ or, more awkwardly, ‘Art is the technically skilful representation of something absent in such a way as to create an illusion of its presence.’ However, these answers ignore a host of important pieces that are not particularly attractive, realistic or well made. The history of art is filled with brilliant examples of disturbing and violent imagery, stylised or inaccurate likenesses, and objects that require constant care in order to prevent deterioration.

All the definitions of art offered over the centuries include some notion of human agency, whether through manual skills (the art of sailing, painting or photography), intellectual manipulation (the art of politics) or public or personal expression (the art of conversation). As such, the word is related to ‘artificial’ – that is, produced by human beings rather than nature. But it doesn’t stop there: this definition of art is correct in a limited way but it is also essentially flawed because it does not allow one to distinguish the defined term from something else that correctly exemplifies the definition.

‘A vacuum cleaner is a household appliance’ is insufficient as a definition of a vacuum cleaner because ‘vacuum cleaner’ can be correctly replaced with ‘refrigerator’, and a vacuum cleaner is not a refrigerator. Saying ‘Art equals artificial equals human-made things’ fails to distinguish art from other things produced by human beings. It gives us a start, however, for it makes clear that infinitely realistic painting would simply replicate the world. In so doing, realistic painting says nothing much about human agency and thereby ceases to be art in all but the most bankrupt way. It would be similarly unsatisfactory to try to understand art while limiting oneself to only 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。