My previous entry about the aesthetics of photography got such a nice response that I decided to do another one. This time I'll try to explain some basics of the field of philosophy that is concerned with defining art, aesthetics that is, and briefly outline my own views about the matter and explain how they relate to photography.

The Stanford Encyclopedia entry about The Definition of Art starts appropriately by noting that The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated. Nothing to be alarmed about, this is the typical situation in any philosophical topic! Anyway, the basic question for me is whether art can be defined, that is, whether we could somehow, in theory, determine how many pieces of art there are in the world at any given time. To do this we would need to be able to say of each object in the world whether it is a piece of art or not. Of course we couldn't actually do this, but the question is whether it is possible in theory.

I'd like to think that we can define art. That's my intuition and provisionally I'm holding on to it because if the case was that we cannot, then I think that art criticism would have no (objective) value and this would be quite unfortunate. Now, how might we go about defining art? Well, there are a number of ways, but I will outline only one here (take a look at the Stanford link for more).

The most promising option from my point of view is some sort of a weak institutional theory of art. I sympathise with a lot that Arthur C. Danto says (1981, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Cambridge: Harvard University Press), but another contemporary proponent of this sort of view is George Dickie (1984, The Art Circle, New York: Haven). His view, according to the The Stanford Encyclopedia article, goes as follows:

(1) An artist is a person who participates with understanding in the making of a work of art.
(2) A work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public.
(3) A public is a set of persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to understand an object which is presented to them.
(4) The artworld is the totality of all artworld systems.
(5) An artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public.

Now, this might be criticised in a number of ways, but I will just elaborate on a few points which I think are right about a weak institutional theory of art. Firstly, I think that there has to be a public which has access to a piece of art for that piece of art to qualify as art in any meaningful sense. A Mona Lisa which no one ever sees is not art - it has to go through some sort of a process by which the public recognizes it as art. Most often this means that it is displayed at an art gallery of some sort (when talking about tradional arts, at least). Secondly, there has to be a critical element in the process. I do not want to put too much weight on art critics, but if no one who is an experienced art appreciator thinks that a piece of work is art, then I think that it should not count as art. It's not enough if the artist thinks so.

There is an interesting application of the above in deviantArt. I do not think that, generally, everything uploaded to dA counts as art, far from it. But some clubs here might qualify as an institution in the above sense: if the club is run by reputable people who know about, say, photography, and choose to submit only quality photos, then these photos have gone thourgh a critical process and could perhaps be classified as art.

Further to the institutional theory of art, or as an addition to it, if you like, I think that the intrinsic properties of a piece of art have to come into play. Generally, the group of experts responsible of deciding what is displayed in, say, an art gallery, will judge the work of art by its internal qualities (and I think that they should do exactly this instead of judging the work of art by the artist's merit etc.). I do not claim to have thought about this much at all, but in terms of photography, at least the following should be considered: composition, lighting, technical quality (e.g. no noise), expressiveness (if it is a conceptual piece at least), and subject and its originality. These are just some of the criteria. Look at my features for example, I believe that they all posess something in terms of these criteria.

That's it for now, I'm afraid that my ramblings are getting too long, but I might continue on this if there is interest.


Recently, =JRd1st put into words what I'm sure many of us have felt for a long time: it doesn't make sense to waste time copy pasting "thank you" notes for every single . Now that this idea is getting some momentum, I will officially start acting accordingly. What this means is that I will not post the usual thanks etc. for every favourite, but will instead do what I have been doing before: visit the gallery of whoever faves my shots, and possibly or comment on some of the person's work, provided I find something I really like. This also means that I don't expect anyone to thank me for faves either, it is more than enough if you take the trouble to visit my gallery!

I've always liked photography, but before I bought my precious 400D in June 2007 I couldn't have called myself even an amateur photographer. I've learned a lot since, but I'm still far from being able to take full advantage of my equipment. Hopefully the day will come when I can - the support and advice from this community have certainly helped me approach that target.

In my "civil" life, I'm a philosopher. I'm based at Durham University, where I am about to complete my PhD. Philosophy is and will always be my first love and my profession, but photography, hill walking (or the outdoors in general), literature, music, films and food&drink are also very important for me. A couple of other random facts about me: I'm originally from Finland and have lived most of my life in Helsinki. I moved to England to do my PhD in October 2005. Presumably I will stay, I like many things British. I'm also a vegetarian, have been for some eight years. I'd be more than glad to hear from anyone who shares my interests, especially if you're local!

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