The nature of art practice questions.

Against Plato's complaint about imitation, Aristotle's Poetics defends poetry mainly by arguing that

• poetry is exempt from criticism because its subject matter is invented rather than real
• a poem's value lies in the beauty of its language rather than in what it represents
• tragedy should be judged by the size of the audience it succeeds in moving to tears
• imitation is natural to human beings and is one of the ways in which they learn

Answer: imitation is natural to human beings and is one of the ways in which they learn

Aristotle accepts that poetry imitates and denies that imitation is therefore worthless: it gives a kind of understanding, and tragedy achieves a katharsis of pity and fear. Plato's objection is metaphysical, about distance from what is real, so Aristotle is rejecting the evaluation rather than disputing the description.

A museum displays a hand-woven ceremonial blanket made for a funeral and never intended for exhibition. A curator calls it art; a weaver from the community says it is not. Which distinction does the disagreement turn on?

• Whether the blanket was made by hand or with the help of machinery
• Whether a definition of art should cite how an object is treated or what it is for
• Whether the weaver enjoyed making the blanket more than the curator enjoys looking at it
• Whether the object is older than the museum that now displays it

Answer: Whether a definition of art should cite how an object is treated or what it is for

Procedural definitions, such as the institutional theory, make status depend on how an object is handled within a practice; functional definitions make it depend on what the object is for. Cases from outside the European artworld press the question of whose practice confers the status, which is the standard objection a procedural account has to answer.

On Dickie's institutional theory, an object is a work of art when it is an artefact upon which some person acting on behalf of the artworld has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation. The claim that this theory does NOT make is that

• the status is conferred by people occupying roles within a practice rather than found in the object
• something can be a work of art without possessing any particular perceptible property
• the artworld is an informal practice with no membership list, so the conferring is not a formal procedure
• an object counts as art when a sufficient number of people happen to enjoy looking at it

Answer: an object counts as art when a sufficient number of people happen to enjoy looking at it

Popularity plays no part: conferral is done by those acting on behalf of a practice, and it makes the object a candidate for appreciation rather than a success. Reading the theory as 'art is whatever people like' is the standard misconception, and it makes the theory look far weaker than it is.

Levinson defines art historically: something is art if it is intended for regard in some way in which earlier works of art have been correctly regarded. The chief advantage claimed for this definition is that

• it identifies a perceptible feature that all works of art share and non-art objects lack
• it settles disputes about the value of individual works as well as their classification
• it makes the concept depend on nothing but the preferences of the person making the object, so that no shared practice is needed at all
• it can accommodate radical novelty, since a new work links to the past through a way of being regarded rather than a style

Answer: it can accommodate radical novelty, since a new work links to the past through a way of being regarded rather than a style

The definition buys openness by making the connection to the past a matter of intended regard, not resemblance. Its standard difficulty is the first artworks: if every work must refer back to earlier ones, the chain needs a beginning that the definition itself cannot supply.

Beardsley defines a work of art as an arrangement of conditions intended to be capable of affording an experience with marked aesthetic character. The counterexample most often pressed against this definition is

• a conceptual work made to be thought about rather than to afford any experience of that kind
• a painting that a large number of gallery visitors report finding unpleasant to look at
• a piece of music which its composer never heard performed during her own lifetime
• a sculpture that was produced with the assistance of a workshop rather than by the named artist alone

Answer: a conceptual work made to be thought about rather than to afford any experience of that kind

Conceptual work is designed to make a point, and its aesthetic character may be deliberately negligible, so a definition tied to affording aesthetic experience excludes what the artworld treats as central. Unpopularity is no counterexample, since the definition requires only the capacity to afford such experience.

A performance of a symphony can be rushed, badly tuned or cut short, yet none of these faults belongs to the symphony itself. Which distinction in the ontology of art does the observation rely on?

• The distinction between a work as a type and its particular instances
• The distinction between the classificatory and the evaluative use of 'art'
• The distinction between representing a subject and expressing a feeling
• The distinction between a work's aesthetic and its artistic value

Answer: The distinction between a work as a type and its particular instances

A symphony is a type whose performances are its tokens, so a property of one performance need not be a property of the work. The classificatory/evaluative distinction concerns two uses of the word 'art', not two kinds of object, and neither the representation/expression nor the aesthetic/artistic distinction bears on how one work relates to its many performances.