Is artistic merit necessary for a work of art to be considered art and how can it be assessed? Is a thirty minute pornographic clip of two people having sex merely bad art or is not art at all? If I consider it better than Schindler's List and Roger Ebert does not, how do we determine which view is "right?"

Dear sir/madam I'm a phd student of philosophy of art in Iran. as it's a new field of study here, we, all the students, are not completely familiar with recent topics and new approaches in this field at the latest decade. i would appreciate it if you could tell me please how can i get to know these topics or you just suggest some new approaches or books that opened a new look to aesthetics. best regards, Hana H.

I'm curious what moral distinctions (if any) exist between, for example, the Venus de Milo or the Birth of Venus and "soft" pornography like Playboy?

Is there an essence of Art that all art shares, or is art just a category into which we lump a contingent collection of cultural pursuits?

I recently read a text by Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in which he rather vehemently opposes "theatricality," suggesting that it is the antithesis of modernist art (or the "art of our time"). He never really seems to explain why he is so opposed to it, but he uses extremely aggressive language (to my mind), talking about the perversion of art sensibilities, the corruption of art by theatricality, the "problem" with Minimalism (without saying what kind of problem he's talking about), etc. I was wondering if someone could shed some light on what is so terrible about theatricality, such as to merit such strong language.

One of the formulation of Kant's Categorical Imperative is that we should never treat humanity as a mere means to an end. I wonder, then, whether this means that horror film directors are behaving unethically. After all, in a horror film, terrible things are made to happen to human beings, solely for the purpose of frightening/pleasing the audience. The human beings may be fictional, but it is nevertheless the fact that they are fictional *humans* that makes horror films effective (as opposed to a horror film where the victims are all robots). It seems to me that the humanity of the fictional characters is being used as a tool to manipulate the audience's emotions. Does this fall under the umbrella of the humanity formulation of the Categorical Imperative? If not, why not? It certainly seems that it is the humanity of the victims (including their emotions, their aspirations, their mortality, their ability to suffer) that is key to the function of horror films.

This semester I started attending a seminar on (I'm translating from German hear) "The Meaning of Art". The professor began with a long-winded speech about how most people, hearing the title, would no doubt assume the topic is the role of art in our lives. He then went on to say that the question of art's role in society/our lives is incoherent if we don't first develop an understanding of the nature of art itself (particularly to what extent it is communicative), and that we will therefore focus more on the question of the nature of art rather than its role. This seems, to me, to be backwards. Art doesn't exist in presocial a void. How are we supposed to understand the nature of art without looking at the role it plays in society? I would think that especially the question of whether art is communicative can only be answered by looking at whether it is used to communicate, i.e. its role in society. Am I misunderstanding the claim, or is the professors approach genuinely backwards?

What role does a museum play in determining the status of an art object? That is, if a painting, installation, etc. is shown in a museum, surrounded by other art, selected by a curatorial authority for exhibit (like a peer reviewed article in a scinece journal), do we experience or confer aesthetic values differently than if we encountered the same piece displayed on a neighbor's wall?

Are certain artistic mediums more adept at expressing human experience than others?

Is there any discussion about how art is highly individualistic with respect not to its content but the fact that most works of art, at least traditional art like painting, sculpture, etc., are created by single individuals, rather than groups? I've heard it said that Western art is highly individualistic while Eastern is not, and that this is a reflection of cultural differences; however, with respect to the artist as a single person, Eastern and Western art seem the same. Why is art such an individual creation? Perhaps one person has great vision and another great technique; why haven't there been numerous pairs like this throughout history who've worked together on creating paintings?