Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

The Art Issue

The Hard Case of Duchamp’s Fountain

Launt Thompson argues that some popular trends in art criticism are fallacies.

Aestheticians are a fractured lot. A survey of the many thousands of papers and books published on aesthetics will confront the reader with a cacophony of ideas from philosophers who are described as Functionalists or Proceduralists or Institutionalists, even as Expressionalists and Representationalists – each earnestly seeking to offer the penultimate word on the question ‘What is Art?’ I say ‘penultimate’ because even philosophers recognize they are only human and subject to error. They offer their ideas so that they may be extended and advanced by others of like mind. Nevertheless, aesthetics, which was once simply defined as the exercise of taste and the appreciation of beauty [‘aisthetikos’ is old Greek for ‘perception’, Ed], has been kneaded, twisted, turned, flailed and even sautéed in an effort to cook up a theory that will account for all the many permutations of art that contemporary artists produce. Of course, in order to maintain their personal theories, some of the more traditional aestheticians merely deny that many of the oddities offered as art are examples of art.

…