Defining Art

[CAP]

Bit of interest around this old chestnut just now over on The Brooklyn Rail Critics' Page. Another curious assortment of interested parties take shots at the topic. You might recall at the end of last year, a similar forum on the state of art criticism was discussed on WWR. My favourite in the current squad (I suppose the one I agree with most) is by Noah Dillon - who I'd never heard of.

But mainly I read most of these articles because I'd recently reviewed Arthur Danto's latest book - What Art Is - and got almost zero response in terms of hits, confirming my suspicion that the topic or author are pretty much past it. That's the reason I didn't publish it here. Whereas my preceding review of Jacques Ranciere's current book (which is actually just as stale) did really well on Google searches, even when Google searches are heavily weighted toward commerce and hype. A version of the Ranciere review is on WWR.