| I begin by noting a lost sense of redemption in postmodern art. While High Art and Low Art seem like discredited terms, something like them may be necessary to redeem art. Seeking a solution, I examine the evolution of descriptions of art and, at the end, propose a new one. I begin with traditional theories, which took certain properties to be essential to defining art. Three such theories are examined: representation, expression, and formal theories. These theories have explanatory power concerning the phenomena of artworks, but suffer philosophical weaknesses. They came under attack for their essentialism in the nineteen-fifties, and new kinds of theories were proposed. Two of the most important of these were relational theories and institutional theories, both of which include social contexts in their descriptions. Philosophically more robust, they lack explanatory power. Two others, proposed by Arthur Danto and Theodor Adorno, are examined in more detail, as they are most pertinent to my following proposal.;In my proposal, I seek both explanatory power and philosophical robustness. I begin with the difficulty of art's definition because of its radical diversity. I explain this diversity by noting that anything can be art: it is our relation to the object, the way we experience it. I call this way, "artistic engagement," where we experience the object as a meaningful exemplar of feeling and formal qualities. I regain explanatory power, while retaining robustness, by means of configuring art as an interaction between receptor and artworld. This is a generic definition of art, as it applies to art in general. Finally, I consider a reconfiguration of the subcategories of High Art and Low Art in a postmodern environment, based upon trends in postmodern ethics. These trends suggest that the appreciation of particularity can provide the necessary basis for morality previously lacking in postmodern thought, and I use this concept as a basis to reconfigure High Art and Low Art: Art which promotes particularity---and so is redemptive---I call Human Art, and that which reduces all to generalities, I call "art commodities.". |
