The meaning of art has changed significantly over time and evolved. Today, art could be defined as the mastery of acquiring a skill. Art itself is always developing, through institutions and/or artists who have broken rules and disrupted norms.
Art is constantly redefining itself. The question of beauty has always been fundamental to art, sometimes seen as inseparable ideas. So we will ask an important question that continues this search to define art: Why define art? We will define the terms of this issue. The word "define" means "to state the nature, qualities, essential properties of the thing the word refers to; give its definition", or more simply "precisely determine a concept or idea". Defining the word "Art" is much more complex: "Creation of specific objects or settings intended to evoke a particular state of sensitivity, more or less linked to aesthetic pleasure" or "Skill, talent, gift for doing something". This last definition highlights technicality and accurately representing reality. There are different types of art, like the liberal arts in the Middle Ages. We will first examine defining art to help us grasp its complexity and limits, to better understand the role and implications of defining it. We will try to define art to better grasp the complexity and get closer to the key question: why define art? When a concept (the aesthetic experience) is clear, we can easily organize and categorize it. Defining art means knowing what is and isn't art, being able to outline what art and aesthetic experience are. Institutions can better understand what they include when we determine what is art, which helps document, inform, exhibit, etc. So in several ways, art will be defined and institutions will set limits on where beauty begins and ends. Although 20th century artistic innovations make art harder to define, as it's no longer linked to a technique. Today's art is distinct from artisan skills, even if art requires technical skill too. But for a long time, "art" broadly meant a process yielding a result, synonymous with technique. Artisan works weren't seen as artworks but manufactured products, like Rembrandt's (often workshop productions).
"Art" took on its current meaning in the 17th century thanks to Descartes, who freed it from meaning skill/technique and distinguished it by "beauty".
Charles Baudelaire said “Beauty has an eternal, invariable element that is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, in turn or all together, the era, fashion, passion.” This leads us to reflect on why we feel the need to define beauty when we don't simply recognize what beauty is, not really a common exercise. For now, we'll say art is the aesthetic function which makes an object exist as an artwork. Aesthetics sees realism as a rigorous idea that in the 19th century stated works must only easily represent reality, posing a definition of art where resemblance is key. So realism seems to just reflect reality. But we can already see limits to this definition - it's restricted to the human viewpoint, to what the eye perceives. © Fine Art Expertises LLC
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