One important thing to remember about art is that it’s a social kind, and that means that the things that count as art can change over time. In the early days of the human race, for example, people often painted religious scenes. Later, the rise of secular art meant that painters focused more on events in everyday life and less on spiritual and mythical figures. This shift also coincided with the growth of a new kind of artwork, one that featured portraits and classical busts of rulers and other dignitaries.
Then came a period when many artists decided that they had to be original, and they reevaluated what art could do. This led to a period of Modernism, when artists started to think about abstraction and movement in a new way. They also began to experiment with using new materials, such as photography and video.
These kinds of changes can be hard to see and even harder to explain. But they have helped to shape the way that art is defined today.
The question of what makes something a work of art has never been easy to answer, and it’s even harder now that the art world has become more diverse than ever. In some cases, the differences are so great that it’s difficult to see how art can have anything in common with each other. In other cases, the differences are less extreme but still significant. For example, some artists have argued that gender is a crucial factor in what makes something art (Mag Uidhir and Magnus, 2011).
Another important thing to remember about art is that it’s sometimes used as a way of promoting or validating certain ideas. For example, if an artist is considered to be a “hot” or “trendy” art maker, this can help to secure his or her status in the cultural hierarchy. And this, in turn, can make or break his or her career.
This is why the idea of a canon has become so controversial. Some people think that a canon should be created, while others believe that a canon should not exist. The main problem with a canon, as some critics have pointed out, is that it would tend to exclude women from art history.
Some philosophers have tried to solve this problem by advocating a kind of hybrid definition of art. This approach includes both the enumerative definitions and the cladistic definitions that advocate a list of central art forms for any given time. But this can be problematic, because the list is usually arbitrary and there’s no real unity beneath it. In addition, a category can fail to be a token of that kind if it doesn’t achieve any of its identifying functions. For example, a work of art may not make anyone feel like it is a good or important piece of work. This is why it’s so important to take the concerns of some critics seriously and to think about what might be wrong with the current definition of art.