Should art be defined?

How do you define "defined"? Like, should there be little plaques like in museums absolutely everywhere that say "This is Art!"? What about the part where it says "Medium"? And the price! If you don't know it's art, much less what it's made of, how can you put a retail value on this "Art"?

This looks good to me...

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I agree, Marina. "Should" works.

Shall we go with "Should art be defined?," then? It's a perfectly reasonable direction for this issue.

I think the very fact that we're debating on whether it can be defined provides evidence that it cannot be clearly and universally defined. It depends on each person's own frame of reference, personal taste and how or if something emotionally touches them.

"Should it be defined" is a a different argument altogether, but I have to admit that I like it. It gets us away from the technicality of "Can it..." that Marina pointed out.

i like "should art be defined?"

I like this, actually. It gets to the bottom of all "...but is it art?" questions.

Do we have the old semantic problem with "Can," though? We know that art can technically be defined (in a dictionary), but we also know what this question is asking.

"Should art be defined?" isn't quite the same. "Is art definable?" Uh...

Is this kind of a negative framing?

I don't believe that art can be defined. The opinions on art are so varied.

this is what i'm getting at ...

There are many related theories of art. Aesthetics is the philosophy of beauty; aesthetic discussions engage us in disputes about the best way to define art. One theoretical point of view, for example, is that it is a mistake even to try to define art or beauty, insofar as they have no essence, and therefore can have no definition. Another is that art is a cluster of related concepts rather than a single concept. Examples of this approach include Morris Weitz and Berys Gaut.

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