Thread: What is art?

Originally Posted by Think

What a Socratic thread. I'm going to go all Wittgenstein on you all and say that "Art" is not delineated by a definitional "essence" of some kind. Like the concept of a "game", things collected together as "Art" bear only a family resemblance to each other (i.e. one is connected to another which is in turn similar to another) so that they don't all share one trait but rather each shares a trait with some of the others, and consequently that art is a contingent rather than an essential category, determined by culture and by reciprocal reference.
In terms of the actual relations between pieces I would go with Levi-Strauss style structuralism and argue that each art piece is related to previous ones by inversion and interplay of themes that ultimately derives from the structure of human thought.
To prevent this descending into total nihilistic postmodern contingency, though, I would add as a footnote that art is ultimately an invocation of the sublime, revolving around but never touching the Real (i.e. the Zizekian view of Art, where the Kantian Sublime is a sublimated reference to the Lacanian Real)

God I'm cool

EDIT: Apparently Morris Weitz already used Family Resemblance as a theory of art
He gets to be in my club of awesome

Isn't the aforementioned invocation of the sublime itself the essence then? Or if not that, then the "family resemblance" to other pieces of art? The essence of X is that which is necessary to X, so to define art in any certain (necessary) terms is to name its essence.