What is art good for

The beginning of the search for a definition of art can be found in § 43 of the Critique of Judgment, entitled 'On Art in General.' The opening words read: “Art is distinguished from nature, just as making (facere) is distinguished from acting in general (agere), and the product or consequence of the former is distinguished as a work (opus) from the product of the latter, understood as an effect (effectus).” The paragraph goes on to distinguish art from science and from the production of mere artifacts, ideas that are now part of our common sense. This passage by Kant is notable for the paucity of arguments used, characterizing itself rather as a record of linguistic usages that diverge from the two-thousand-year-old assimilation of art and technique in Western culture. Since then, reflections on art have not produced a reasonably limited number of shared theoretical positions. However, in almost all of them, the notion of artwork plays a central role. The ontology of artworks, a discipline younger than aesthetics, has in fact become of strategic importance for general theories of art. Unfortunately, the ontology of artworks seems doomed to produce ad hoc theories for different art forms, which has recently generated widespread dissatisfaction. Restricting myself to musical aesthetics, I will observe how the notion of musical work is a historically contingent "normative concept" (Goehr), indicative of a cultural bias rather than the result of eminently philosophical developments. The stereotypical notion of artwork, in my view, should therefore be discarded in favor of a deflationary and pragmatic theory of art. Ultimately, this proposal could be extended to other regional ontologies of art and reorient the currently professed general metaphysical theories of art.