Defining Art

There exist hardly any foundational, systematically developed essays or books that—moving beyond more or less traditional artistic genres (e.g., the novel, the feature film)—integrate popular objects and phenomena into their definitions of art, as has been done in the field of modern art, e.g., with the emergency of ‘Readymade,’ automatic writing, and aleatoric music. Still, there are several important aspects that we can readily adapt to develop such an approach. These include, above all, the following concepts and phenomena: useful artifacts; entertainment; event, environment, performance; show; and laypeople/amateurs.