What Is Art? (And Who Gets to Decide?)

Imagine you’re walking through a museum. You see a painting of a woman with a mysterious smile. You see a sculpture carved from marble. You see a blank white canvas hanging on the wall. Then you turn a corner and find a urinal sitting on a pedestal. It’s clean, white, and looks exactly like the ones in the museum’s bathroom.

This actually happened. In 1917, an artist named Marcel Duchamp bought a plain urinal from a plumbing store, signed it with a fake name, and submitted it to an art exhibition. The exhibition organizers were furious. They hid the urinal behind a curtain and eventually refused to show it at all. But today, that urinal—called Fountain—is considered one of the most important artworks of the twentieth century.

So here’s the puzzle: What made that urinal art, when the identical urinal in the bathroom isn’t? And more generally: What makes anything art? Philosophers have been arguing about this for thousands of years, and they still don’t agree.

The Old Answers That Don’t Quite Work

For a very long time, philosophers thought art was basically about three things: representing things, expressing feelings, or having beautiful form. Plato, writing in ancient Greece, thought art was imitation—a painting of a bed is just an imitation of a real bed, which is itself an imitation of the perfect “idea” of a bed. So for Plato, art was a copy of a copy, and therefore not very important.

Later philosophers thought art was about expressing emotions. A sad song makes you feel sadness. A joyful dance makes you feel joy. That seems right for a lot of art, but it also seems to fit things that aren’t art—your friend’s face can express sadness without being a work of art.

Other philosophers said art was about formal properties—the way colors, shapes, and sounds are arranged. A painting is art because of how its colors balance each other, not because of what it depicts. But again, a nicely arranged kitchen counter has formal properties too, and nobody calls it art.

None of these old answers can handle Duchamp’s urinal. It doesn’t represent anything interesting. It doesn’t express much emotion. Its formal properties are just… a urinal. So if it’s art, something else must be going on.

A New Kind of Answer: It’s About the Institution

In the 1960s and 1970s, philosophers started proposing a radically different idea. Maybe what makes something art has nothing to do with how it looks or what it expresses. Maybe it’s all about where it is and who says so.

The philosopher George Dickie developed what’s called the “institutional theory” of art. His idea was roughly this: Something becomes art when people who work in the “artworld”—museum curators, critics, art historians, other artists—treat it as art. They “confer the status” of art upon it, the way a judge confers the status of marriage on two people.

This theory explains Duchamp’s urinal pretty well. What made it art wasn’t anything special about the object itself. What made it art was that Duchamp (an artist) put it in an art context (an exhibition), and eventually the artworld accepted it. The same urinal in the hardware store was just plumbing. The same urinal in the museum was art.

This idea has two big strengths. First, it explains why art changes over time—because the artworld changes its mind. Second, it explains why some things that don’t look “artistic” can still be art. A blank canvas, a recording of silence, a pile of candy on the floor—if the artworld says they’re art, they’re art.

Problems with the Institutional Theory

But the institutional theory has problems too. For one thing, it’s circular. Think about it: “Art is whatever the artworld says is art.” But what is the artworld? It’s the group of people who deal with art. So art is defined by the people who deal with art, and those people are defined by the fact that they deal with art. That’s like saying “A doctor is someone who does doctoring” and leaving it at that.

There’s a deeper problem too. The institutional theory seems to say that art could be anything. If the artworld decides that a pile of trash is art, it’s art. If they decide that your math homework is art, it’s art. But is there really nothing that limits what can be art? Most people feel like there has to be some reason why something is art—it can’t just be arbitrary.

And what about art that exists completely outside the Western artworld? What if there’s a civilization on another planet that makes objects that look and function exactly like our paintings and sculptures, but they have no connection to our museums and critics? Would those objects be art? The institutional theory seems to say no, which might be wrong.

Historical Definitions: It’s About the Family Tree

Another group of philosophers tried a different approach. Instead of looking at what art is, they looked at how art connects to earlier art. On this view, something is art if it’s related in the right way to artworks that came before it.

The philosopher Jerrold Levinson proposed that something is art if it was “seriously intended for regard in any way prior artworks are or were correctly regarded.” In plain language: If you make something and you want people to look at it the way they look at other art, it’s art.

This handles Duchamp’s urinal too. Duchamp intended people to look at his urinal the way they looked at paintings and sculptures in museums. He wanted them to think about it, interpret it, judge it. So it became art.

But this theory has its own problems. It seems to require that there was a very first artwork, with no predecessors to connect to. How did that become art? And like the institutional theory, it makes it hard to talk about art from completely separate traditions.

The Old Answers Strike Back

Some philosophers never gave up on the idea that art has something to do with beauty, or aesthetic experience. They just made their definitions more sophisticated.

The philosopher Monroe Beardsley said art is something made with the intention of providing an experience with “marked aesthetic character”—an experience that’s intense, unified, and complete. This doesn’t mean the art has to be beautiful. It means the experience of encountering it is somehow special, different from ordinary experience.

Another philosopher, Nick Zangwill, said art happens when someone has an insight that certain aesthetic properties will come from certain non-aesthetic properties, and makes the thing on purpose to have those aesthetic properties. So a painter doesn’t just splash paint randomly; she sees that certain colors and shapes will create a feeling of tension or calm, and she arranges them to do exactly that.

These aesthetic definitions struggle with Duchamp’s urinal and other conceptual art. Duchamp himself said he chose the urinal specifically because it had no aesthetic interest—it was ordinary and ugly. So if art requires aesthetic properties, the urinal can’t be art. Some philosophers bite this bullet and say: fine, the urinal isn’t really art. Others say that conceptual works have aesthetic properties too—just different ones, like the aesthetic property of being surprising or thought-provoking.

Could Art Be a Family Resemblance?

Maybe the problem is that we’re looking for one single definition when there isn’t one. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out that some concepts work by “family resemblance.” Think about games. What do chess, soccer, solitaire, and tag all have in common? There’s no single feature they all share. Instead, they share overlapping features—some involve competition, some involve rules, some involve physical skill, some involve luck. They’re related like members of a family: one has the same nose as Grandma, another has the same chin as Uncle Joe, but no feature is shared by everyone.

Maybe art is like that. The philosopher Berys Gaut proposed a list of ten properties that artworks tend to have:

Having positive aesthetic properties (being beautiful, elegant, etc.)
Expressing emotion
Being intellectually challenging
Being formally complex and coherent
Having the capacity to convey complex meanings
Exhibiting an individual point of view
Being original
Being made with a high degree of skill
Belonging to an established art form
Being made with the intention to create art

No single property is necessary—an artwork could be missing any one of them. But if something has enough of them, it’s art. Different artworks have different combinations. A classical painting might have most of them. Duchamp’s urinal might only have a few (it’s intellectually challenging, original, and was intended as art). But that’s enough.

This approach is appealing because it matches how we actually talk about art. We don’t usually say “This is art because of exactly one thing.” We say things like “It’s expressive and original, even if it’s not beautiful.” But critics point out that this list might just be a disguised definition—a long, complicated one, but still a list of conditions. And it doesn’t tell us why these properties matter more than others.

So What’s the Right Answer?

Nobody knows. Philosophers still disagree. Some think a definition is possible and we just haven’t found it yet. Others think art is too diverse and changing to be captured by any definition. Still others think the whole project of defining art is misguided—maybe we should focus on understanding individual art forms (music, painting, poetry) instead of trying to define “art” in general.

This debate matters because it’s not just about a urinal in a museum. It’s about what we value, what we pay attention to, and why. If art is just whatever experts say it is, then creativity and experimentation are always at the mercy of people in power. If art is about beauty and skill, then we might ignore things that are ugly but important. And if art is a family resemblance, then we have to live with uncertainty about where the boundaries are.

Maybe the most honest answer is that “art” is a word we use to mark things that matter to us in a particular way—things we want to look at closely, think about, argue over, and return to. And maybe that’s as close to a definition as we’re going to get.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in the debate
Artworld	The network of people (artists, critics, curators, historians) who have the power to decide what counts as art
Institutional theory	The view that something is art because the artworld says it is
Aesthetic properties	Qualities like beauty, elegance, or ugliness that we perceive and judge in objects
Family resemblance	The idea that things in a category share overlapping features rather than one single feature
Cluster account	The view that art is defined by a list of properties, none of which is necessary, but enough of which are sufficient
Historical definition	The view that something is art because it connects in the right way to earlier artworks

Key People

Plato (c. 428–348 BCE): An ancient Greek philosopher who thought art was just imitation of imitation, and therefore not very valuable.
Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968): A French artist who made ordinary objects into art (like a urinal called Fountain), forcing philosophers to rethink what art could be.
George Dickie (1926–2020): An American philosopher who argued that art is whatever the artworld says it is—the most famous version of the institutional theory.
Jerrold Levinson (born 1948): An American philosopher who argued that something is art if it’s intended to be regarded the way earlier artworks were regarded.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951): An Austrian philosopher who suggested that many concepts, like “game” or “art,” work by family resemblance rather than by having one essential feature.
Berys Gaut (born 1941): A British philosopher who developed the cluster account of art—a list of ten properties that artworks tend to share.

Things to Think About

If the artworld decides what art is, could the artworld be wrong? Could they call something art that really isn’t? What would that even mean?
Think of something that isn’t considered art but seems artistic to you—a really cool skateboard design, a perfectly organized bookshelf, a video game level. What makes it feel artistic? What’s missing?
If an AI program makes an image that looks exactly like a painting by a famous artist, is it art? Does it matter whether anyone intended it to be art?
Some philosophers say art can only exist within human traditions. Others say art could exist anywhere—made by animals, aliens, or machines. Which view seems more right to you? What’s at stake in the disagreement?

Where This Shows Up

Museums and galleries: Curators and critics constantly make decisions about what to show and what to call art, which shapes what we think art is.
School art class: When teachers grade your art, they’re implicitly using some definition of what makes art good or valuable.
Debates about AI art: People argue about whether images generated by programs like DALL-E or Midjourney are “real art,” which is exactly the kind of debate philosophers have been having about Duchamp for a hundred years.
Copyright law: Courts sometimes have to decide whether something counts as “art” to determine whether it’s protected by law. These legal decisions often rely on philosophical ideas about what art is.