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A theory of art is intended to contrast with a definition of art. Traditionally, definitions are composed of necessary and sufficient conditions, and a single counterexample overthrows such a definition. Theorizing about art, on the other hand, is analogous to a theory of a natural phenomenon like gravity.
Aestheticians and art philosophers often engage in disputes about how to define art. By its original and broadest definition, art (from the Latin ars, meaning "skill" or "craft") is the product or process of the effective application of a body of knowledge, most often using a set of skills; this meaning is preserved in such phrases as "liberal ...
Barry Clarke suggested that, in order to determine whether a particular dispute was a consequence of true polysemy or inadvertent homonymy, one should seek to "locate the source of the dispute"; and in doing so, one might find that the source was "within the concept itself", or "[within] some underlying non-conceptual disagreement between the contestants".
By definition, the arts themselves are open to being continually redefined. The practice of modern art, for example, is a testament to the shifting boundaries, improvisation and experimentation, reflexive nature, and self-criticism or questioning that art and its conditions of production, reception, and possibility can undergo.
Today, the term is used both to describe artistic practices and as a way to analyze artwork. Critic N. Katherine Hayles , for example, speaks of "media specific analysis." [ 5 ] As discussed by critic Marshall Soules, medium specificity and media specific analysis are playing an important role in the emergence of new media art forms, such as ...
Dewey's theory is an attempt to shift the understandings of what is essential and characteristic about the art process from its physical manifestations in the ‘expressive object’ to the process in its entirety, a process whose fundamental element is no longer the material ‘work of art’ but rather the development of an ‘experience’.
Goethe famously said in 1807 that painting "lacks any established, accepted theory as exists in music". [2] [3] Kandinsky in 1911 reprised Goethe, agreeing that painting needed a solid foundational theory, and such theory should be patterned after the model of music theory, [2] and adding that there is a deep relationship between all the arts, not only between music and painting.
Significant form refers to an aesthetic theory developed by English art critic Clive Bell which specified a set of criteria for what qualified as a work of art. [1] In his 1914 book, Art, Bell postulated that for an object to be deemed a work of art it required potential to provoke aesthetic emotion in its viewer, a quality he termed ...