Countless figures throughout history have tried to explain this incredibly complex question: What is art? And more importantly, what isn’t art?

But still the institutions have no real answer, no common ground upon which they could define a normative of what defines art. Brut art is a problem, so are other outsider artists, and home schooled creatives that defy or just never become part of the institutional system. 

It’s the carpenters that put more than the usual love and attention to detail in building their “consumer objects”. It’s the iPhones and iPads and other designer products that always walk the thin line between art and function.

Then you have others that do not agree with the institutional idea that one needs to even be part of the system to be considered an artist. You only need to have ideas and communicate them with the world via your production.

And in the philosophy of aesthetics — the field that studies this question ontologically — there is even more confusion.

LINKS TO THE ARTICLES MENTIONED:

The first one is by Thomas Nagel, titled What It Is Like To Be A Bat.

The next story, written by Frank Jackson is titled What Mary Didn’t Know. 

Titled The Chinese Room, this wonderful tale of speaking Asian walls stirred the lines of cognitive scientists when first presented in 1980 by John Searle.