Stephanie Roldan- What Is Art?

Throughout this course we have spent the majority of our time focusing on the ways in which people analyze art. Sometimes the question comes up: What is art? This question seems to be just as difficult to come to a single conclusion as the purpose of art. Our textbook, The Nature of Art addresses this issue in the first chapter. The author presents some possible criteria for what qualifies as a possible work of art. These include the artist's intention, the treatment of art as art, taste vs objectivity, and aesthetic judgements, among a few others.

In my personal opinion, I think art is mostly dependent on the involvement of another person. It may not necessarily be restricted to the artist's intention, because an emotional response can be found in pieces that were not intended to be art to begin with. I am tempted to say that art is only art when some being has a response to the piece and/or is interacting with it (kind of like, when a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?). However, this may be too narrow a view, since a painting is still art even after a museum has been closed for the night. It's another difficult question in the study of aesthetics.