Is Art a Form of Life?

Abstract

Basic to Richard Wollheim's theory of art in Art and Its Objects is the proposition that “art is, in Wittgenstein's sense, a form of life”. This sense of the expression “a form of life” (“ein Lebensform”) is elusive; Wittgenstein uses it only a few times in his Investigations, leaving such mysteries as how to interpret the famous gnomicism, “What has to be accepted, the given, is—so one could say—forms of life.” Wollheim's way of dispelling some of the mystery is to draw two fairly sharp implications from the thought that art is a form of life. It implies that artistic social institutions neither dominate artists in virtue of the stuffs and processes that they sanction and accredit, nor suffer them to work within languages or media which are arbitrary. I will be denying both implications.