Can We Define Art
Can we define art? Of course we can define art. According to dictionary, art is the quality, production, expression, or realm of what is beautiful appealing or of more than ordinary significance. But in the eye of some artist included Morris Weits, they believe art is undefined for many reason. According to Morris Weitz, he point out a few theories of art and argues in his article “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics”, that they are lacking to the extent that they cannot satisfactorily cover all of the range of things we would like to consider artworks. In addition, they don’t accurately capture the concept of art. Weitz argues that where previous theories go wrong is in their attempts to establish a set of necessary and sufficient condition of art, when in fact what we should do is ask about art the concept. Once this concept is understood, he argues that it will make clear the logical impossibility of defining art in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Furthermore, Weitz’s main argument for why theories of art fail comes from his application of Wittgenstein’s thoughts about language, specifically the word “game”, to art. In fact, according to Wittgenstein, he highlighted the difficulty of defining the word “games”, he said “let us consider what we call games: I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic Games, and so on. What is common to them all? – Don’t say: there must be something common to all.- For if you look at them you will not see something that common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that…”. He was showing there is no one common feature to all games. And the word “games” cannot be simply defined; he argues that games have family resemblances to each other. Some games resemble other games in some respects; there is no more to it, no necessary and sufficient condition. In addition, Weitz argues, this same resemblance principle may apply to art. “The problem of the nature of art is like that of