Art

Ancient Greek

Art is imitation (mimesis), and imitation is doubly removed from reality: the painter copies the bed the carpenter made, which itself only copies the eternal Form. Because it feeds the passions and can pass off falsehood as truth, poetry is dangerous to the soul and the city, and Plato famously banishes most poets from the ideal state. Yet he treats beauty itself as a genuine rung on the ladder that leads the soul toward the Good.

Republic, Books II–III and X; Ion; Symposium.

Ancient Greek (Peripatetic)

Imitation is natural to us and a source of learning and delight, so art is not a fall from truth but a way of grasping the universal in the particular. Poetry is more philosophical than history because it shows what could happen according to necessity and probability, not merely what did. Tragedy in particular works by arousing pity and fear so as to accomplish their catharsis, purifying the emotions through structured plot.

Poetics.

German idealism / critical philosophy

The judgment of taste is disinterested: we call something beautiful when it pleases apart from any concept or use, in the free play of imagination and understanding. Such a judgment claims universal validity without resting on a rule, and fine art is the product of genius, through which nature gives the rule to art. Art thus stands between nature and freedom, purposive yet without a determinate purpose.

Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790).

German idealism / Weimar Classicism

Art educates humanity through the 'play drive', which reconciles the sensuous and the rational sides of our nature. In aesthetic play we are neither compelled by appetite nor bound by duty but wholly free, and only through beauty does one make the passage to freedom. Aesthetic culture is therefore the precondition of a genuinely moral and political community.

On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795).

German idealism

Art is the sensuous appearing of the Idea — spirit giving itself concrete form in stone, colour, sound and word. Its history unfolds through symbolic, classical and romantic phases as the Idea strains against and finally outgrows sensuous embodiment. In the modern age art is, 'on the side of its highest vocation, a thing of the past': it no longer satisfies our deepest need for truth, which now passes to religion and philosophy.

Lectures on Aesthetics (delivered 1820s).

Post-Kantian idealism / pessimism

Art lifts us out of the ceaseless striving of the will by presenting the timeless Platonic Ideas to pure, will-less contemplation, granting a brief release from suffering. The visual arts and poetry rank by how directly they show these Ideas, but music stands highest of all: it is a copy not of any Idea but of the will itself. In aesthetic contemplation the knowing subject becomes a 'pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge'.

The World as Will and Representation (1818/1844), Book III.

Existential / genealogical critique

Art arises from the tension of two drives, the Apollonian of form, measure and dream and the Dionysian of intoxication, dissolution and ecstasy, fused supremely in Attic tragedy. Against Schopenhauer's resignation, art is the great affirmer of life: 'we have art in order not to perish from the truth'. It is 'the truly metaphysical activity of man', a stimulant that justifies existence as an aesthetic phenomenon.

The Birth of Tragedy (1872); notes in The Will to Power.

Russian moral realism

Art is the communication of feeling: the artist, having lived an emotion, transmits it by external signs so that others are infected by the same feeling. Its value is measured not by beauty or pleasure but by the sincerity and universality of the feeling and by whether it draws people together in brotherhood. By this test most of what passes for high culture is counterfeit, while a simple folk song or a peasant's tale may be true art.

What Is Art? (1897).

British idealism / expression theory

Art proper is the expression of emotion, sharply distinct from craft, which uses means to reach a preconceived end. The artist does not know the emotion in advance and then encode it; expressing it is the very act of clarifying and coming to know it. Mere arousal of feeling in an audience is not art but 'amusement' or 'magic', a technical exercise rather than genuine imaginative creation.

The Principles of Art (1938).

Phenomenology / hermeneutics

The work of art is not an object with aesthetic properties but a happening of truth: it sets up a world and sets forth the earth, letting beings show themselves as what they are. Truth here is aletheia, unconcealment — the Greek temple opens a world for a people, Van Gogh's shoes disclose the being of equipment. Great art is a founding origin, an 'ereignis' in which a historical people's understanding of being is instituted.

'The Origin of the Work of Art' (1935–36).

Western Marxism / critical theory

Mechanical reproduction strips the artwork of its 'aura' — the unique presence, distance and ritual authority of the original. This loss is ambivalent: it destroys the cultic value that tied art to tradition, but it also democratises art and opens political possibilities, as in film. He warns that fascism aestheticises politics while communism should respond by politicising art.

'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1935–36).

Frankfurt School / critical theory

Authentic art is autonomous: by refusing to be useful or immediately pleasing, it stands as the determinate negation of a false, administered society. Its truth lies in form, not message; the dissonances of Schoenberg register real suffering that affirmative culture smooths over. Against this, the 'culture industry' turns art into standardised commodity, manufacturing pseudo-satisfaction and reinforcing the very order it seems to escape.

Aesthetic Theory (1970); Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Horkheimer, 1947).

American pragmatism

Art should be understood not as the rarefied object in the museum but as experience raised to fullness and coherence — 'an experience' that unifies doing and undergoing into a satisfying whole. Aesthetic quality is continuous with ordinary life, growing out of the rhythms of tension and resolution that structure all lived activity. The museum conception, by isolating art from life, obscures its roots in shared human experience.

Art as Experience (1934).

Analytic philosophy of art

Warhol's Brillo Boxes, indistinguishable from the supermarket cartons, showed that what makes something art cannot be a visible property. To see an object as art requires 'an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld'. Once art could look like anything, its philosophical self-consciousness was complete, and in this sense art history reached its 'end' — not its cessation but its liberation into pure pluralism.

'The Artworld' (1964); The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981).