Quotep 36-37
. . . in what way did Andy's Factory-made boxes differ from factory-made boxes? That is, what differentiating visible properties separated them? . . . but . . . Externally, both sets were alike.
My sense is that, if there were no visible differences, there had to have been invisible differences--not invisible like the Brillo pads packed in the Brillo boxes, but properties that were always invisible.
Quotep 37-38
In my first book on the philosophy of art I thought that works of art are about something, and I decided that works of art accordingly have meaning. We infer meanings, or grasp meanings, but meanings are not at all material. . . . Semantics uses external relations like "denotation" or "extension." But the kind of relationship art depends on is internal. The art embodies the meaning, or partially embodies it. . . . The artwork is a material object, some of whose properties belong to the meaning, and some of which do not. What the viewer must do is interpret the meaning-bearing properties in such a way as to grasp the intended meaning they embody.
Quotep 20
Bringing reality into art, when reality had been what art was to represent, changed the way people through of art. It brings us to the substance of the question of "What art is" today. But there are issues I need to address before I can take on that question philosophically.
QuoteIt was basically decided by leading aestheticians that art was indefinable, since there is no overarching feature. My view is that it has to be a closed concept. There must be some overarching properties that explain why art in some form is universal. . . . I have tried, using Duchamp and Warhol to achieve my definition of art, to outline examples from the history of art to show that the definition always has been the same.