The most general approach to define art is to view it as the deliberate creation of objects or experiences with formal, expressive, or imaginative value. As a rule, art is assessed for its creative qualities rather than its practical utility. Yet, this definition quickly becomes difficult to defend if you find yourself in a room with Duchamp’s urinal on a plinth. So, how have people tried to answer this question, and what are the limitations of their definitions?

Five Ways to Define Art

The history of defining art is a history of confident proposals, each challenged by criticism and unable to provide a complete answer.

Art as Imitation

One of the oldest approaches, associated with Plato and Aristotle and influential well into the Renaissance, viewed art as a representation or imitation of the world. This definition works well for portraiture, landscapes, and historical paintings, but becomes less convincing when applied to Rothko’s canvases or a Bach fugue.

Art as Expression

Leo Tolstoy and later R. G. Collingwood developed influential theories of art as the expression of feeling. They argued that instead of simply depicting a concrete object, an artist seeks to communicate an emotion or experience that the audience can encounter through the finished artwork. This approach works well for abstraction and music, but the emotional realm is much wider than art. Moreover, contemporary conceptual art, such as Sol LeWitt’s instruction-based drawings, does not necessarily depend on emotional expression.

Art as Significant Form

This approach to defining art was promoted by Clive Bell and Roger Fry. They argued that artistic value lies in the arrangement of formal elements, such as lines, colors, and shapes, into a particular aesthetic form. This kind of formalism gave modernism an important vocabulary, but it has also faced criticism for being circular: if significant form is what makes something art, the definition still leaves open the question of what makes a form significant.

Art as an Institutional Product

Arthur Danto’s theory emerged partly from his reflection on Brillo Boxes by Andy Warhol in 1964. Danto asked why one group of boxes could be considered art in a gallery while visually identical boxes in a stockroom were not. His answer, later developed into an institutional theory by George Dickie, emphasized the role of the art world in determining what counts as an artwork.

Art as a Cluster of Criteria

A more comprehensive attempt to define art was made by Berys Gaut, who described art through a cluster of criteria rather than a single essential property. These include emotional expressiveness, formal complexity, intellectual challenge, creativity, and skill. An object does not necessarily need to possess every characteristic to qualify as art.

All these approaches highlight an important dimension of art without defining it completely. That is why each remains valuable as a particular perspective rather than a final answer to the question of what art is.