What is art?

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Paper dealing with art today: what is it?

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[...] Gallimard Arthur C. Danto. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton University Press Linda Nochlin. Realism. Style and civilization. Ed. Penguin Howard Gardner, Philosophy in a New Key R. G. Collingwood. Outlines of a Philosophy of Art. Ed. [...]

[...] What is Art? Retrieved from http://www.moodbook.com/history/articles/what-is-art.html 22 Finally, we can say that, obviously, anything can be art, and if it wasn't the case until the emergence of contemporary art, today human beings are in face of a total lack of rules in terms of art. As a conclusion, to sum up what have been demonstrated below, and to provide a relevant guideline of what art have been and what it will always be about, we can respectively quote three major artists from different periods, who strongly marked the art world and history, to wit the French writer Stendhal, the Italian painter Modigliani and the French artist Jean Dubuffet : “within arts, nothing is alive except what continually gives pleasures”70 ; intent of art is to fight against obligations”71 ; does not lie down in the bed we made for it ; it runs away as soon as we pronounce its name : what it likes is the incognito [and its] best moments are when it forgets its name [because] real art is always where we are not waiting for Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir. [...]

[...] A work is art when somebody is looking at it. Each individual looks at a work in its own, interprets it, or tries to understand it, giving to the artwork a special value and artistic interest. For Kant we label an object beautiful because it promotes an internal harmony or 'free play' of our mental faculties ; we call something 'beautiful' when it elicits this pleasure »(Ibid. p.12) and that for Kant, the aesthetic is experienced when a sensuous object stimulates our emotions, intellect and imagination (Ibid. [...]

[...] What is an artwork? It seems that focusing on past theories is currently impossible because of the radical evolution of art through times. Finding a definition for art has always been a crucial problem, as Paul Gauguin tried with his very last essay What is Art?. In this book, the artist explains that art refers to something skilfully created by artists. However, artists also require to be defined to understand the value dedicated to art. Nevertheless, these attempts of definitions are limited to a plurality of conceptions, challenging the general public perceptions and philosophers, psychologists and critics theories. [...]

[...] Nevertheless, as Cynthia Freeland explains the art world is a competitive place, and artists need any edge they can get, including shock value which means that artists have to introduce novelties in their works in response to the market. Dewey sum up this idea into the notion of mass production (Ibid. p.6) Cynthia Freeland. But is it Art? Oxford University Press, Ed. Arthur C. Danto Ibid Globalization implies a new international cultural context and it is because art has always been affected by cultural contact [that evolved] into distinctive art forms (Cynthia Freeland, p88)28. [...]