Categories of art

Abstract

A category in the most general sense is a principle for grouping things, a way in which particulars can be brought under a universal. The categorization of things operates hierarchically in that we may ask how things belonging to a given category are themselves to be categorized. But philosophers, following in the tradition of Immanuel Kant (1929) whose "categories" were fundamental principles for the understanding of the experienced world, tend to be more selective in applying the label "category." To characterize a way of grouping xs as a category of xs is to ascribe some signi�?cance to this way of grouping for our understanding of, or practical engagement with, such things. Furthermore, what we take to be signi�?cant ways of grouping xs depends in part upon our more general ways of categorizing things, and how, relative to these more general categories, we classify xs themselves. In general, the differences and the similarities between things that we mark in our classi�?cations reflect the various purposes that we have in our theoretical and practical commerce with the world. Some of those classi�?cations are attempts to, as it is sometimes said, "carve the world at its joints," to capture, in our classi�?cations, ways of grouping things that accord with natural processes whereby the experienced world exhibits the features that it does. The notion of a "natural kind" is central to this conception of signi�?cant classi�?cation – and thus of categorization – for the purposes of natural science. A natural kind groups things in ways that, it is assumed, �?nd expression in powerful empirical generalizations that hold of things so grouped. It is because we take there to be powerful true empirical generalizations applicable to all and only samples of gold, for example, but not to all and only the stones to be found in a given stretch of river, that we take gold, but not such stones, to be a natural kind. It makes sense to think in these terms about signi�?cant ways of grouping things when those things are taken to be part of a natural order whose features do not depend in any essential way upon our practices, interests and purposes. The interest that leads us to seek out natural kinds is precisely an interest in understanding and being able to predict the behavior of things taken to be independent of us in this sense. But other things that we seek to categorize do depend for their features upon us, and our principles of grouping reflect this fact. For example, we group some things by reference to purposes that we ourselves confer upon them through our creative intentions and our uses of them. Such principles govern artifactual kinds like "chair" or "table." It is in virtue of something's intended or actual function that it falls into such a category. Artworks, like tables and chairs, are artifacts, and our ways of grouping them reflect our practices and interests rather than "joints" in nature that we take such groupings to register. Our classi�?cation of certain artifacts as artworks, and our subclassi�?cations of those artifacts as artworks of particular kinds, are ultimately accountable to our practices rather than to practice-independent facts about the world (see Davies 2004: ch. 1; Thomasson 2005). Nonetheless, some ways of grouping artworks seem more basic in that they capture something more signi�?cant about those works and the practices in which they �?gure, and thereby promise to sustain more interesting generalizations about, or insights into, those works and practices. It is such groupings that most obviously merit the label "categories of art." This is evident if we consider what seem, on reflection, to be less basic ways of grouping artworks, such as " street art," "outsider art," "child art," "tribal art" and "pornographic art." The things that are rightly grouped under such labels seem to differ signi�?cantly from one another as artworks. "Outsider art," for example, groups together paintings, drawings, texts, large installations, quilts and sculptures made up of constructions out of bottles, inter alia. We �?nd a similar diversity among the things classi�?ed under the other labels just listed. In saying that the things comprised by such groupings differ "as artworks," we are taking as given another way of grouping and differentiating artworks. A natural way of putting this is to say that, in distinguishing between paintings, drawings and sculptures, for example, we are grouping artworks according to their medium. It is these groupings that are most naturally thought of as the basic categories of art that bear more fundamentally than the other principles of grouping just canvassed upon our understanding of things as artworks. But if we are to sustain this intuition, we need to answer at least the following questions: (1) What is a "medium" in the sense that bears upon such groupings? (2) Why should we take classi�?cation of artworks in terms of their mediums to be more fundamental than the other ways of grouping artworks just cited – why, in other words, does the grouping of artworks according to medium matter for our understanding of them as artworks? (3) What is it for a given artwork to belong to a particular medium? (4) Can there be artworks that are not in a particular medium, and that therefore fail to fall within a category of art so conceived, or artworks that belong to more than one such category of art, or "basic" categories of art, so conceived, that comprise more than one medium?