Artists' Experiments and Our Issues with Them: Toward a Layered Definition of Art Practice

Abstract. It may seem that much contemporary art can be characterised as shock art – art whose sole aim is to shock the audience. The public indignation about such works is defendable yet misconceived. Yet predominant philosophical definitions of art do not correct this situation. Dickie's institutional conception and Gaut's cluster account are too lenient – too nominal – to allow us to sort out the issue at hand, and Levinson's historical definition is backward-looking and apparently incapable to deal with the new and shocking.
The layered definition proposed here starts from a distinction between art (the practice), art forms (such as painting, and music), and singular art works. It proposes that something can only be art if it conforms to the phenomenological characteristics of an art form which can be understood as procedures that allow instances, works, some of which have great artistic merit, masterworks. New artistic experiments may not yet be art because no shared procedure is identified, or, if a procedure was identified, the procedure's artisticity has not yet been established for lack of masterworks corresponding with the procedure.