What is art? How people have tried to define it

Art is the name for things people make, or choose, to be looked at, listened to or read for their own sake: paintings, music, stories, dance, buildings, films. What is art, exactly, has no agreed answer. Philosophers have defined it as imitation, as the passing on of feeling, as form, and as whatever the art world presents as art, and every one of those definitions fails on some work that most people would call art.

In short

• The four best-known definitions say art imitates the world, passes on feeling, has a special kind of form, or is whatever the art world accepts.
• Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, a shop-bought urinal entered for an exhibition in 1917, breaks the first three and is the reason the fourth exists.
• People were drawing patterns at least 73,000 years ago and stenciling hands on cave walls at least 67,800 years ago, long before anyone had a word for art.

Why is art so hard to define?

Art is hard to define because the things called art share no single feature. A Bach fugue, a cave painting, a novel and an empty gallery room with the lights going on and off have no material, purpose or look in common. A definition that names a feature, such as beauty or skill, leaves some works out; a definition loose enough to let them all in lets in almost everything else too.

The word itself has moved. In ancient Greek and Latin, the words translated as "art" (techne, ars) meant any skilled making, from shoemaking to medicine. The idea of "fine art", a separate group of painting, sculpture, music, poetry and architecture made for contemplation rather than use, took shape in Europe in the 18th century. That is one reason the question belongs to philosophy as much as to art history: it asks what a concept people use every day actually picks out.

In 1956 the philosopher Morris Weitz argued that the search was a mistake. Art, he said, is an "open concept": artists keep making things no rule foresaw, so any definition is overtaken. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy traces how philosophers answered him, mostly by defining art not by how works look but by how they are made and received.

What are the main definitions of art?

Four answers have done most of the work. The best test of each is one object: in April 1917, a standard porcelain urinal, turned on its back and signed "R. Mutt 1917", was submitted under that false name to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. The show had promised to hang anything whose entry fee was paid. The board hid it instead. Marcel Duchamp, a member of that board, later said he had bought and sent it; some historians argue a friend of his, the artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, did. The original was soon lost; the Tate holds one of the replicas Duchamp approved in 1964.

Definition	Its main voices	What it says art is	Does Fountain pass?
Imitation (mimesis)	Plato, Aristotle, 4th century BC	A copy or representation of the world	No: it represents nothing, it is the thing
Expression	Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, 1897	A way of passing on a feeling the maker lived through	Hardly: Duchamp said he picked his readymades out of "visual indifference"
Form	Clive Bell, Art, 1914	Lines, shapes and colors arranged to move the viewer aesthetically	Doubtful: its shape came from a factory
Institutional	Arthur Danto, 1964; George Dickie, 1974	Something presented, within the art world's practices, for appreciation	Yes: the act of entering it is what made it art

Plato used imitation against art: in the Republic a painting of a bed is a copy of a real bed, itself a copy of the true idea of a bed, so the painter stands twice removed from the truth, a picture that connects to his allegory of the cave. Aristotle defended imitation as natural to people and a way of learning. Tolstoy's definition is the most quoted: art is the activity in which "one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings."

Fountain didn't so much fail the old definitions as show that a definition by appearance can't work. If an object identical to one in any hardware store can be a work of art, then what makes it art can't be visible in it. Danto made the same point in 1964 about Andy Warhol's Brillo Box, a copy of a supermarket carton. The institutional answer followed: art is what the "artworld" of artists, critics, galleries and audiences takes up as art. Its critics reply that it is circular, and that it can't explain art made far from any institution, like the cave paintings below.

When did people start making art?

People made images long before any civilization existed, and the record keeps getting older as dating improves. These are the dates as they stand in 2026.

When	What
About 73,000 years ago	Crosshatched lines drawn in ochre on a stone flake at Blombos Cave, South Africa
At least 67,800 years ago	A hand stencil in Liang Metanduno cave, Muna Island, Indonesia: the oldest reliably dated cave art, reported in Nature in January 2026
About 40,000 years ago	Carved ivory figures and bone flutes in the caves of the Swabian Jura, Germany
About 36,000 and 17,000 years ago	The painted animals of Chauvet and of Lascaux, France
1839	Photography is announced in Paris, and painting no longer has to record how things look
1917	Duchamp's Fountain
2022	An image made with the AI model Midjourney wins the digital-art category of the Colorado State Fair's fine-arts competition

Whether the oldest marks were art in any modern sense is unknowable: no one knows what a hand stencil meant to the person who blew pigment around it. That is the same problem in reverse. A definition built on intention can't be applied when the intention is lost.

Does art have to be beautiful or skillful?

No, though for most of history people expected both. Much of the art of the past was skilled and meant to please, and the Renaissance prized both so highly that skill became the measure of an artist. But a great deal of art aims to disturb rather than please. Francisco Goya's war etchings and Pablo Picasso's Guernica are meant to be hard to look at. A great deal of beauty, a sunset or a seashell, is not art at all, because no one made it.

The more useful distinction is between art and craft or design, and it is a matter of degree. A chair is made to be sat in; a chair in a museum is there to be looked at. Most works sit somewhere between, which is why the definitions that survive talk about how a thing is offered and received, not what it is made of.

Can a machine make art?

Generative AI tools, which make images, music and text from a typed prompt, have put the old question back on the table. In August 2022, Jason M. Allen's Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, made with Midjourney and then edited, won its category at the Colorado State Fair, and the protest that followed was mostly about whether he had made anything. The U.S. Copyright Office answered a narrower, legal version in its January 2025 report: material generated by AI from prompts alone can't be copyrighted, because the person doesn't control the expressive result, though their own selection, arrangement and edits can be.

Still argued

Whether AI output can be art is argued, and the four definitions split. On the expression view, a model has no feelings to pass on, so its output isn't art unless a person's feeling is carried through it. On the institutional view, anything the art world takes up is art, whoever or whatever produced it. Many artists also object on other grounds: that models are trained on their work without consent. The flood of cheap, unwanted output has its own name, AI slop, and the arguments over it are as much about quality and labor as about definition.

The question echoes an older one. When photography arrived, critics asked whether a picture taken by a machine could be art. A century later, in 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened a department of photography.

How do you look at a work of art?

A definition matters less, in front of a painting, than a way of looking. These steps work for a painting, a statue or a building, and most of them for a poem or a piece of music.

1. Look first, read the label later. Spend a full minute, which is longer than most visitors give any work.
2. Describe what is actually there: subject, colors, size, materials, where the eye goes first.
3. Notice how it was made. Brushstrokes, carving marks or a photograph's focus all show decisions.
4. Ask what it is doing to you, and how: calm, unease, curiosity, boredom.
5. Then find out when, where and for whom it was made. A portrait for a Florentine merchant and a protest poster ask to be read differently.
6. Ask what it leaves out, and what would change if one thing in it were different.

That last step is how artists themselves learn. It is also the point of a novel like Frankenstein, which asks what people owe to the things they make.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: why does Duchamp's Fountain cause trouble for any definition based on how a work looks?
• What does the institutional theory say makes something art, and what are the two main objections to it?
• How would Tolstoy and an institutional theorist each judge an image generated by AI?

Sources

• The Definition of Art — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Thomas Adajian, 2024
• What Is Art? — Leo Tolstoy, 1897, translated by Aylmer Maude, Project Gutenberg
• Fountain, Marcel Duchamp, 1917, replica 1964 — Tate
• Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi — Nature, Oktaviana and others, 2026
• Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability — U.S. Copyright Office, 2025