Art and the Category of Being Aesthetic: A Neo-Wittgensteinian Account

Abstract

For centuries, in the Western world, it was usually clear whether or not something was art, but this is no longer the case. Modern art has been put forward to raise the issue of what art is, leaving both art experts and average people in need of a definition of ‘‘art.’’ If Marcel Duchamp can make a urinal art by titling it Fountain and putting it on display, then what is art? Modern artworks such as Fountain expose the shortcomings in traditional ways of defining art with necessary and sufficient conditions in terms of form, imitation, representation, expression, or aesthetic appeal. Art is an open concept, subject to ongoing development. Realizing this, Morris Weitz proposed accounting for art in terms of Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance. But because nearly everything resembles nearly everything else to at least some degree, family resemblance has long been considered a dead-end way of accounting for art. If Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm is a work of art, then so is a shovel in a garage. Duchamp defies the tradition but he cannot escape the resemblance, and in fact he draws nearly everything else into the resemblance. Daniel A. Kaufman, however, has resurrected the notion of family resemblance against the New Wave of theorists who trot out ever more technically sophisticated definitions of art, specifying necessary and sufficient conditions. Likewise, Berys