Classificatory disputes about art

However, in the modern use of the word, which rose to prominence after 1750, "art" is commonly understood to be skill used to produce an aesthetic result (Hatcher, 1999).

Britannica Online defines it as "the use of skill or imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others".

Artists, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists all use the notion of art in their respective fields, and give it operational definitions that are not very similar to each other's.

In the Zhou dynasty of ancient China, excellence in the liù yì (六藝), or "Six Arts", was expected of the junzi (君子), or "perfect gentleman", as defined by philosophers like Confucius.

Because these arts spanned both the civil and military aspects of life, excelling in all six required a scholar to be very well-rounded and polymathic.

Each of the standard nine Muses symbolized and embodied one of nine branches of what the Greeks called techne, a term which roughly means "art" but has also been translated as "craft" or "craftsmanship", and the definition of the word also included more scientific disciplines.

This classification was popularized by Ricciotto Canudo, an early scholar of film who wrote "Manifesto of the Seventh Art" in 1923.

Whereas if exactly the same set of words was written by a journalist, intending them as shorthand notes to help him write a longer article later, these would not be a poem.

[8] Functionalists, like Monroe Beardsley argue that whether a piece counts as art depends on what function it plays in a particular context.

More recently, the "Young British Artists" (YBAs), led by Damien Hirst, came to prominence in the 1990s and their work is seen as conceptual, even though it relies very heavily on the art object to make its impact.

The following year, the Saatchi Gallery exhibits Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine.

[12] The Stuckist group of artists, founded in 1999, proclaimed themselves "pro-contemporary figurative painting with ideas and anti-conceptual art, mainly because of its lack of concepts."

They also called it pretentious, "unremarkable and boring" and on July 25, 2002, in a demonstration, deposited a coffin outside the White Cube gallery, marked "The Death of Conceptual Art".

[15] In a BBC2 Newsnight programme on 19 October 1999 hosted by Jeremy Paxman with Charles Thomson attacking that year's Turner Prize and artist Brad Lochore defending it, Thomson was displaying Stuckist paintings, while Lochore had brought along a plastic detergent bottle on a cardboard plinth.

At the end of the year, the Culture Minister, Kim Howells, an art school graduate, denounced the Turner Prize as "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit".

[18] In October 2004, the Saatchi Gallery told the media that "painting continues to be the most relevant and vital way that artists choose to communicate.

"[19] Following this, Charles Saatchi began to sell prominent works from his YBA (Young British Artists) collection.

Film critic Roger Ebert, for example, went on record claiming that video games are not art, and for structural reasons will always be inferior to cinema, but then admitted his lack of knowledge in the area when he affirmed that he "will never play a game when there is a good book to be read or a good movie to be watched".

[26] Wikipedia debates on the talk page of the List of most expensive artworks by living artists have been cited in this connection.