Optional theme: Aesthetics practice questions.

Two boxes look exactly alike: one is a stack in a supermarket storeroom, the other stands in a gallery as a work by an artist. Danto uses such pairs to argue that

• art must be defined by the formal arrangement of lines, colours and volumes
• an object is art only if it was made by hand rather than manufactured
• what makes something art cannot be a property that the eye can detect in the object
• the value of an artwork is fixed by how many people are willing to queue to look at it

Answer: what makes something art cannot be a property that the eye can detect in the object

If two indiscernible objects differ in status, the difference cannot lie in anything visible, so it must lie in an interpretation and a history, which Danto calls the artworld. That is a direct argument against formalists such as Bell, who locate the mark of art in perceptible form.

A curator selects a mass-produced coat rack, gives it a title and exhibits it; the firm that made the rack had no artistic aim whatever. Which account best explains how the object can count as a work of art?

• Dickie's institutional theory: a status is conferred on an artefact by someone acting for the artworld
• Tolstoy's expression theory: the object transmits to its viewers the very feeling that its maker lived through
• Bell's formalism: the object counts because its lines and volumes stir an aesthetic emotion
• Plato's account: the object counts because it imitates the appearance of something real

Answer: Dickie's institutional theory: a status is conferred on an artefact by someone acting for the artworld

The institutional theory locates art in a social practice rather than in a property of the object, which is exactly what lets it accommodate readymades and found objects. The usual misreading is to hear it as 'art is whatever anyone likes', when it in fact requires a recognised role within an established practice.

In the Republic, Plato's central complaint against the painter is that

• the painter's work cannot be judged at all, since what pleases one spectator will displease another
• the painter works from a plan and therefore never expresses a genuine emotion
• the painter uses materials that decay, so the work cannot outlast what it depicts
• the painter copies appearances, and so stands at a third remove from what is truly real

Answer: the painter copies appearances, and so stands at a third remove from what is truly real

The objection is metaphysical before it is moral: the carpenter's bed already imitates the form, and the painting imitates the carpenter's bed. Aristotle answers by treating mimesis as a way of learning and as the source of a valuable katharsis, not as a further step away from reality.

A critic settles a dispute about what a poem means by quoting a letter in which the poet explains what she intended. Wimsatt and Beardsley would object that

• the letter counts as evidence only if the poet wrote it before rather than after the poem
• the author's private aim is not the standard by which the finished work is to be judged
• poems have no meaning at all until a reader supplies one out of their own experience
• the poet cannot be a reliable witness, because writers habitually misremember the circumstances of their own work

Answer: the author's private aim is not the standard by which the finished work is to be judged

The intentional fallacy is a claim about what may count as evidence for the meaning of a work, not the psychological claim that authors are forgetful. Barthes reaches a similar verdict by another route, transferring authority to the reader rather than to the public language of the text.

A designer fixes in advance the effect she wants, chooses materials known to produce it and carries out the plan exactly. On Collingwood's distinction, this describes

• art proper, because the maker's emotion is discovered only in the course of making
• art proper, because the plan was carried out with unusual technical skill
• craft, because the end is fully worked out before the means are chosen
• art proper, because the finished object will arouse an emotion in those who see it

Answer: craft, because the end is fully worked out before the means are chosen

For Collingwood the mark of craft is a means-end structure in which the end is known before the work begins. Arousing emotion in an audience is not art proper either but craft: amusement if the feeling is discharged for its own sake, magic if it is aroused for a practical or social purpose.

In Plato's Ion, Socrates concludes that the rhapsode performs well not through a mastery he could teach, but through

• divine inspiration, as one link in a chain of possession running from the Muse
• long practice, which has turned a technique into an unreflective habit
• a grasp of the subject matter itself, since he must know what generals and doctors know
• the taste of the audience, whose applause selects the passages he performs best

Answer: divine inspiration, as one link in a chain of possession running from the Muse

Ion cannot give an account of what he does or extend it to other poets, so on Socrates' criterion it is not techne but possession. Later Romantic celebrations of inspiration invert Plato's verdict while keeping his premise that inspiration is not knowledge.