Defining Art as Phenomenal Being

At the beginning of the 20th century, the definition of art became one of the difficult topics of aesthetics and art theory. The emergence of the institutional approach and the debates surrounding it provoked many responses. This article proposes one possible response that uses Kant’s example of cat...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Ivan Kolev
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-05-01
Series:Arts
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/12/3/100
Description
Summary:At the beginning of the 20th century, the definition of art became one of the difficult topics of aesthetics and art theory. The emergence of the institutional approach and the debates surrounding it provoked many responses. This article proposes one possible response that uses Kant’s example of category deduction as a productive analogy that can serve as a “deduction of art categories”. Art is seen as a phenomenal entity constituted by multiple meaning perspectives, each of which has a figure representing it (author, spectator, patron, collector, curator, connoisseur, critic, historian, typologist, theorist, aesthetician, and metaphysician). The position of each of these figures legitimates a categorical definition that participates in the constitution of the “phenomenal being of art”.
ISSN:2076-0752