When Athens developed, so did its culture. It went through a classical period of innovative growth in the subjects of poetry, music, theatre, architecture, and art. It was the same time great philosophical thinkers were emerging in Athens. Some of them failed to recognize the excellence in art, others questioned on what criteria do we base our judgment of true art, while the rest simply enquired about what is really is.
Plato – in line with his theory of Forms – regarded art as distracting and a poor imitation of the true Forms of goodness and beauty. In its approach, however, the philosophy of art is distinguished from art criticism, which is concerned with the analysis and evaluation of particular works of art. The task of the philosopher of art is more fundamental than that of the art critic in that the critic’s pronouncements presuppose answers to the questions set by the philosopher of art. The critic says that a given work of music is expressive, but the philosopher of art asks what is meant by saying that a work of art is expressive and how one determines whether it is. It’s the same fundamental questions encountered in the field of aesthetics that form the basis of how philosophers ascertain how they should judge a piece of art, or whether they should judge it at all. In its most cardinal form, the question prepositioned by all philosophers of art to this day, is simply ‘What is art?’.
