Video 25: What is Art?

• Art is to be understood as Representation: art imitates reality

• Plato: art is an imitation of an imitation; we should seek Truth, Goodness, Beauty
• Aristotle: art provides insights into the nature of reality and releases emotions
• Medieval: art gives a symbolic representation of social relations

• Art is to be understood as Expression

• Romantics: art expresses emotions
• Picasso: art puts us in touch with a deeper reality

• Formalism/Abstract art (Mondrian, Kandinsky): art arouses our distinctly aesthetic sensibility by drawing our attention to surfaces, colors, angles

• Conceptual art (Duchamps): art itself that asks what is art? In this sense, art that is philosophy

• Consensus (Dickie): art is what is identified by the art world as such

• Jean-François Lyotard: art puts us in touch with something deeper, the sublime: it makes the ordinary unfamiliar