We considered Noel Carroll's ideas about how we identify artifacts as works of art, based on 'Identifying Art' Reading 39 of the set book. This is from his book Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction.
His main thought is that even though we don't have a watertight definition of art we are still able to identify art. He doesn't rule out the possibility that one day someone will come up with a conventional definition. In the meantime, we identify art and defend our decisions by giving a historical narrative of how a work of art came to be produced in the context of earlier art practice. Andy Warhol's Brillo Box makes sense to us as a work of art as part of an ongoing dialogue with the art world. Carroll's point is that when sceptics challenge us to show why a particular artifact is a work of art, we don't need a definition, just an explanation that relates the new work to art world precedents and practices.
Where Morris Weitz (with his neo-Wittgensteinian approach to definition) emphasised resemblances between new works and paradigm works, Carroll emphasizes descent - the causal links between the present work and those of the recent past.
(Carroll acknowledges that he has a problem explaining how we identify art outside of our own tradition - tribal art perhaps. His solution - make sure that you can recognize some works in the tradition as functionally artistic in the ways some works have historically in our own (e.g. in terms of representation, decoration, signification etc.).
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