Quotes for �What is Art?�

�If only the spectators or auditors are infected by the feelings which the author has felt, it is art.
 To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling�this is the activity of art.
 Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.�
  Tolstoy, �What is Art?�

�The problem here lies not so much with the feminist�s concept of what femininity is , but rather with their misconception of what art is; with the naïve idea that art is the direct , personal expression of individual emotional experience, a translation of personal life into visual terms. Art is almost never that, great art certainly never. The making of art involves a self-consistent language of form, more or less dependent upon, or free form, given temporally defined conventions, schemata, or systems of notation, which have to be learned or worked out, either through teaching, apprenticeship, or a long period of individual experimentation.�
  Linda Nochlin, �Why are there no Great Women Artists?�

�What Warhol did was this: Starting from the assumption that Brillo Box is a work of art while its �perceptually indiscernible� cousin�the ordinary Brillo Box that one could find on a supermarket shelf�is not, Warhol demonstrated that since there is nothing in Brillo Box that is meant to distinguish it from its ordinary cousin, what makes Brillo Box a work of art rather than its cousin must depend on its nonmanifest properties, or in a property residing �outside� the art object itself. This �abstract� property residing outside Brillo Box that makes it art and not merely another supermarket cleanser, Danto identifies as a historically evolving theory of art held by the art world.�
  Daniel Herwitz, �Arthur Danto,� in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics

�Art is a quality of doing and of what is done�.Since it adheres to the manner and content of doing, it is adjectival in nature. When we say that tennis-playing, singing, acting, and a multitude of other activities are arts, we engage in an elliptical way that there is art in the conduct of these activities, and that his art so qualifies what is done and made as to induce activities in those who perceive them in which there is also art. The product of art�temple, painting, statue, poem�is no the work of art. The work takes place when a human being cooperates with a product so that the outcome is an experience that is enjoyed because of its liberating and ordered properties.�
  John Dewey, Art as Experience, Chapter 10

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