Great question. It might be made even more vexing if we compare the sound of wind with a musical piece in which musicians play instrumental music that resembles almost exactly the sound of wind. The chief reason why most of us would distinguish the two is because it is long held that works of art are artifactual: things (events or sounds) that are produced intentionally. The term "art" actually comes from the word "ars" which refers to the technique (techne) that is used to produce something. So, for most of history and today, the term "art" is short for "work of art" and because the sound of wind is (typically) not an intentionally produced to be a work (of art), the two are different. Still, we can imagine someone recording the sound of wind and then using this in an overall musical production. We can also imagine musical compositions intended only to be performed on windy day or during extreme weather conditions in which there is thunder and lightning. In such ways, artists might attune their...

Great questions. Today, standard reference works e.g. the Blackwell Companion to Aesthetics will offer a dozen variations of definitions of art that are of historical and contemporary interest. In my view, none of them are highly restrictive. The idea that works of art are mimetic or imitations or that art is expressive or a form of communication or it embodies emotions or works of art are intended to prompt aesthetic experiences or works of art are objects that make-up the art world, and so on, can each recognize and possibly inspire multiple, almost limitless kinds of works of art. There will be cases, however, when some works of art fit some definitions or philosophies of art better than others. There are works of art today that seem so conceptual and austere from an aesthetic point of view that the aesthetic account of art and art-making is stressed. For the record, I defend an aesthetic account of works of art --see Aesthetics: A beginner's guide. I suggest that the whole undertaking by...

I wish you all the best in your research and thinking about art and ethics. Here are some contemporary thinkers you would find engaging: Noel Carroll --his "Moderate Moralism" (originally published in the British Journal of Aesthetics in 1996 is not the "latest" but Carroll is a clear, engaging writer and he references some of the contributors to the issues at hand. Jerrold Levinson has an excellent anthology on aesthetics and ethics, Berys Gaut is another philosopher of interest, and Martha Nussbaum has probably been the most well published contributor seeking to tie moral education together with literature. In terms of early modern work, the "sentimentalists" (those who sought to understand both beauty and goodness) such as Hutchison would be good to investigate. I have a short book "Aesthetics: A Beginner's Guide" that addresses the relationship of ethics, beauty and excellence or the value of art. One reason for thinking that ethics trumps our concept of the autonomy of art (that is,...

You and your friend are on to a great topic that has a long and important history. The term art is derived from the Latin term for a principled way of making thing or in Greek from the term techne ... from this standpoint in the ancient world the term art would be shorthand for a work of art ore that which is produced through principled activity ... In the ancient world, art was understood to involve imitation a painting of a horse should in some way offer us an image that imitates what it would be like to see a horse. As time moved on, we started to think of works of art as not imitations but as expressions of feelings or ideas. Your friend is on to something important: some works of art are intended to be and actually are making statements and to do so with creativity. One of the two most famous, well known paintings in the world are Michaelangelos ceiling painting of the creation. One may see this as both a work of creativity and expressing a doctrine ...

Greetings to you. For the last decade, you might want to logon to the British Journal of Aesthetics and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. The latest topics seem to be a continuation of the classical questions: what is beauty? what is the meaning of a work of art (does the intention of the artist bear on this question)? The difference between art and non-art continues to be vexing, there is new work on the theory of the meaning of music (on this point, I highly recommend the work of Lydia Goehr at Columbia University--perhaps check out her home page for references). Noel Carroll continues to do brilliant work exploring almost every area of the art world and experimenting with what might be called beyond aesthetics in terms of works of art. There is an interesting cross-over in philosophy of art and philosophy of religion in such books as The Image in Mind and Turning Images, and in the work of David Brown, Mark Wynn, and Douglas Hedley. Pragmatism in art has made something of a come-back...

Excellent question! There are a number of theories of art over the centuries that philosophers have proposed. For Plato and Aristotle art involved what they called techne (technique) and imitation (mimisis), for romantics (and this was especially advanced by Tolstoy), art involved the expression of emotions under certain conditions, for others works of art involve the embodiment of emotions, and there are still other theories. A view of art that comes closest to your suggestion about our lumping together "a contingent collection of cultural pursuits" is called the institutional theory of art --introduced in different forms by George Dickie and Arthur Danto. A very crude version is that a work of art is whatever is identified as a work of art by the artworld. I personally think the latter is not the best way to go philosophically, as it leaves one without any guidance as to what someone in the art world should recognize as a work of art, and it also seems somewhat circular, like defining science as...

This is a central question in the philosophy of art! There is what is known as the institutional theory of art advanced by George Dickie, according to which a work of art is an artifact that is recognized as art by what he called the Artworld (a world that would definitely include museums and galleries). I suggest that the institutional theory is not the most promising, for it does not speak to what it is about artifacts that makes them interesting to museums. (For Dickie's views, see his book Art and the Aesthetic for an early version of the institutional account). But beyond that, I do think that settings such as a museum or gallery can make a difference to one's aesthetic experience of an object, partly because these institutions generate certain expectations and often convey information about the history of the objects. But there does not have to be a difference. Some works of art on a neighbor's wall might look just as beautiful or ugly, original or derivative, witty or flat footed, as they...

There is quite a good literature on aesthetics that gets at spirituality. I co-authored a recent book (out last year) with the American artist Jil Evans: The image in mind (Continuum) that gets at the aesthetic dimension of different ways of viewing the world (principally theism and naturalism) and we have a co-edited book Turning Images with Oxford that deals with aesthetics and religion / spirituality. An older book which has an excellent collection of different thinkers is: Art, Creativity, and the Sacred edited by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona. Gordon Graham has a good book: The Re-enchantment of the Word (OUP 2007), and Oxford has published an amazing series of five books on aesthetics and theology or the sacred by David Brown. It is disappointing that the Routledge volume did not include more on spirituality, as many of those who contributed to aesthetics historically and quite recently have had spiritual concerns. Plato's dialogue on beauty, the Symposium, is partly about the ascent of the soul to...

HIstorically and today, most who practice aesthetics treat the aesthetic as involving more than works of art. The term "aesthetics" was introduced in the 19th cedntury to stand for sensory experience and only later came to be used in a way that was specific to works of art, but most of the important works in the field of aesthetics (like Kant's Critique of Judgment) think of (for example) treat the natural world in aesthetic terms. The definition of "aesthetic" is not air tight, however, but I suggest its most common usage denotes the emotive features of objects. An excellent book on the aesthetic in general, and works of art in particular, is Gary Iseminger's The Aesthetic Function of Art (Cornell University Press, 2004). While Dewey did a great job in highlighting the aesthetics of life outside the world of art (he was highly critical of some of the museum cultures of his day), some philosophers are swayed by what they see as non-aesthetic features of artwork. On this front, you might want to...

Great question. 'Aesthetics' is usually used as a term to refer to two things: a field of inquiry and a type of experience. The field of aesthetics covers the philosophy of beauty and the philosophy of art. In the philosophy of art you cover questions about the very concept of art (what is the difference between art and non-art), the meaning and evaluation of artwork, and more. 'Aesthetics' is also used to refer to experiences that are emotive: an object has aesthetic properties insofar as it is experienced as gloomy, joyful, confused, angry, seductive, and so on. Some people connect art and aesthetics when they claim that an art object, X, is that which has been made with the intention that X be the object of aesthetic experience. There are all kinds of arguments about this.... Someone may object that given such a definition of a work of art, this reply to you is a work of art for I am intending it to be experienced aesthetically (I hope, for example, you find this reply friendly and helpful,...