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For over two millennia, philosophers have asked what distinguishes a painting from a wallpaper pattern, a symphony from random noise, or a novel from a shopping list. The question is deceptively simple: what makes something art? The history of the philosophy of art is the story of how that question has been asked, answered, and re-asked, with each generation of thinkers responding to the limits of earlier proposals. The central tension has been between essentialist accounts—which claim that art has a single necessary and sufficient property—and anti-essentialist accounts, which argue that art is too diverse for any one definition to capture. This overview traces ten major frameworks that have shaped the debate, from the ancient idea that art is imitation to the contemporary view that art is a cluster of overlapping features.
The earliest systematic framework in the Western tradition is the Mimetic Theory of Art, which dominated from roughly 400 BCE to 1800 CE. Plato and Aristotle both held that art is fundamentally imitation (mimesis) of the natural world or human action. For Plato, this made art a dangerous copy of a copy, twice removed from the Forms; for Aristotle, mimesis was a natural human impulse that could yield cognitive insight, especially in tragedy. Despite their disagreement about art's value, both thinkers shared the essentialist assumption that imitation is the defining feature of art. This framework remained largely unchallenged for over two thousand years, providing a stable foundation for thinking about painting, sculpture, poetry, and drama. Its long dominance meant that later frameworks would define themselves in explicit opposition to it.
The Mimetic Theory began to lose its grip in the late eighteenth century. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) shifted the focus from the object being imitated to the subject's experience of beauty. Kantian Aesthetics argued that aesthetic judgment is disinterested, universal, and based on a feeling of purposiveness without a purpose. For the philosophy of art, this meant that art's value no longer depended on its accuracy of representation but on its capacity to produce a free play of the understanding and imagination. Kant's framework did not replace mimesis entirely—it coexisted with it for decades—but it introduced a new essentialist candidate: art is defined by its relation to aesthetic judgment.
Shortly after Kant, G. W. F. Hegel offered a competing vision in his Lectures on Aesthetics (1820s). Hegelian Aesthetics placed art within a historical and spiritual narrative: art is the sensuous presentation of the Absolute Spirit, unfolding through symbolic, classical, and romantic forms. For Hegel, art's essence is not imitation or subjective judgment but the expression of a culture's deepest truths in material form. This framework narrowed the scope of the Mimetic Theory by absorbing it into a larger historical process: imitation was merely one stage in art's self-realization. Hegel's historicism also set the stage for later theories that would define art in terms of its historical context.
By the mid-nineteenth century, both Kantian and Hegelian frameworks faced a reaction from Aestheticism (1850–1900). The slogan "art for art's sake" captured the movement's core claim: art has no purpose beyond itself—it is neither imitation, nor moral instruction, nor the expression of a historical spirit. Aestheticism narrowed the Kantian emphasis on disinterestedness into a radical autonomy thesis. It coexisted uneasily with Hegelian Aesthetics, rejecting the idea that art serves a spiritual or historical function. While Aestheticism was more a cultural movement than a precise philosophical theory, its insistence on art's self-sufficiency influenced later formalist approaches and remains a live position in debates about artistic value.
The early twentieth century saw two rival essentialist frameworks that each claimed to have identified art's defining property. The Expression Theory of Art (1900–1960), associated with Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood, held that art is the expression of emotion. For Collingwood, the artist clarifies and articulates an emotion through the creative process, and the audience re-creates that emotion in their response. This framework revived the Romantic emphasis on the artist's inner life while rejecting the Mimetic Theory's focus on external representation. Expression Theory coexisted with Formalism but offered a fundamentally different account: art's essence lies in the artist's emotional expression, not in the object's formal properties.
Formalism (1900–1960), championed by Clive Bell and Roger Fry, argued that art is defined by "significant form"—the arrangement of lines, colors, and shapes that provoke aesthetic emotion. Bell explicitly rejected both mimesis and expression: a painting's subject matter is irrelevant; only its formal relations matter. Formalism absorbed Aestheticism's autonomy thesis while narrowing it to purely visual properties. It also competed directly with Expression Theory: where Collingwood looked inward to the artist's emotion, Bell looked outward to the object's form. Both frameworks were essentialist, but they disagreed sharply about which property was essential.
The mid-twentieth century brought a methodological revolution that reshaped the entire debate. Analytic Aesthetics (1950–present) is not itself a definition of art but a school of philosophical practice that emphasizes conceptual clarity, logical argument, and attention to ordinary language. Figures such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Monroe Beardsley, and Arthur Danto used analytic methods to scrutinize the assumptions of earlier frameworks. Wittgenstein's idea of "family resemblance" suggested that art might not have a single essence at all—a direct challenge to the essentialism shared by Mimetic, Kantian, Hegelian, Expression, and Formalist theories. Analytic Aesthetics provided the infrastructure for the anti-essentialist turn, reframing the question from "What is art?" to "How do we use the concept of art?"
Within this analytic context, two influential anti-essentialist frameworks emerged. The Institutional Theory of Art (1960–1990), developed by George Dickie, argued that something becomes art by being conferred that status by the "artworld"—the social institution of artists, critics, curators, and audiences. This framework replaced essentialist definitions with a sociological account: art is whatever the artworld says it is. It responded directly to the challenge of avant-garde works like Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, which seemed to lack any traditional artistic properties. The Institutional Theory coexisted with the Historical Definition of Art (1960–present), proposed by Jerrold Levinson, which held that something is art if it is intended to be regarded in ways that earlier artworks were correctly regarded. This framework preserved the anti-essentialist spirit while adding a historical dimension: art is defined by its relation to an ongoing tradition, not by a timeless property.
The Institutional and Historical definitions were competing responses to the same problem: how to account for avant-garde art without falling back on essentialism. The Institutional Theory emphasized social context; the Historical Definition emphasized intentional continuity. Both remained within the analytic tradition, using its tools to refine their positions.
Since the 1990s, the Cluster Concept Theory of Art has gained prominence as a pluralistic alternative. Developed by Berys Gaut and others, this framework holds that art is defined by a cluster of criteria—such as being an artifact, having aesthetic value, expressing emotion, being intended for appreciation, and belonging to an established art form—none of which is necessary or sufficient. A work qualifies as art if it satisfies enough of these criteria. This approach absorbs the insights of earlier frameworks without committing to any single essence: it preserves the Institutional Theory's attention to social context, the Historical Definition's emphasis on tradition, and Formalism's concern with aesthetic properties, while rejecting their exclusivity. The Cluster Concept Theory is now one of the leading frameworks in the field, especially suited to accommodating new media, conceptual art, and cross-cultural practices that resist neat categorization.
Contemporary philosophy of art is characterized by pluralism. The leading frameworks—Analytic Aesthetics (as a method), the Historical Definition, and the Cluster Concept Theory—agree that essentialist definitions are inadequate. They disagree, however, about the best alternative. Proponents of the Historical Definition argue that intentional connection to past art provides a principled boundary; advocates of the Cluster Concept Theory counter that no single relation is necessary and that a flexible set of criteria better captures art's diversity. Analytic Aesthetics continues to provide the methodological tools for these debates, while also engaging with empirical aesthetics, cognitive science, and the philosophy of specific arts. The Mimetic Theory, Expression Theory, and Formalism are no longer defended as complete definitions, but their insights survive within the cluster concept and in specialized discussions of representation, emotion, and form. The question "What is art?" remains open, but the history of the subfield shows that each framework has left a permanent mark on how the question is asked.