The Root of the Problem
Controversy is woven into the very fabric of intellectual discourse. Have
an opinion on a hot social or cultural issue? A full-blown theory per-
haps? Meet your adversary, who begs to differ and is eager to engage
you in debate. However contentious the topic—in areas ranging from
philosophy and religion to abortion and the war on terror—there is no
shortage of advocates on either side. Competing ideas pour forth and are
hotly debated in academia, as well as in mainstream periodicals.
Regarding the definition of art, however, virtually all philosophers, their
purported differences notwithstanding, agree in effect that anything and
everything can be art. On this issue there is no controversy and, there-
fore, no debate. Symptomatic of this tendency is the following open-
ended declaration by the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA), the
principal organization of philosophers of art:
The “arts” are taken to include not only the traditional forms such as music,
literature, landscape architecture, dance, painting, architecture, sculpture,
and other visual arts, but also more recent additions including photography,
film, earthworks, performance and conceptual art, the crafts and decorative
arts, contemporary technical innovations, and other cultural practices,
including work and activities in the field of popular culture.^13As “include” implies, the list of “recent additions” is far longer. Apart
from film (if by that term is meant feature films, including musicals and
comedies, and not action movies or documentaries), none of the exam-
ples cited above should be considered art in my view. In this, I agree
with Rand that the basic forms of art (painting, sculpture, music, dance,
drama, fiction, poetry) were all “born in prehistoric times” because they
“do not depend on the content of man’s consciousness, but on its
nature—not on the extent of man’s knowledge, but on the means by
which he acquires it.” Film, she persuasively argues, is a subcategory of
literature, by virtue of its basis in a screenplay.^14 ASA’s inclusion of
“landscape architecture” and “other visual arts” among the “traditional
forms” of art—not to mention its addition of “conceptual art” and “con-
temporary technical innovations”—suggests that other new forms will
follow ad infinitum).
Among philosophers of art, the “institutional theory” (which
holds, in effect, that something is art merely if the artworld says it is)
has long held sway as documented in Stephen Davies’s Definitions of
The Interminable Monopoly of the Avante-Garde 169