At least since the appearance of Marcel Duchamp’s fountain, gallery audiences have been plagued by the question: why is this art? The problem originates in people’s adoption of an 18^th century understanding of art as beautiful, pleasing to the senses and the intellect.  From that perspective, most contemporary artworks fail to even count as art. But according to a different line of thought, starting with Plato and continuing in Hegel, art is the embodiment of meaning, and contemporary art fulfills that criterion in spades, writes Jonathan Loesberg.   

A number of recent artworks, most famously, perhaps, Banksy’s shredded painting (first named “Girl With a Balloon, but renamed, post-shredding, “Love is in the Bin”) and Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” (almost always identified by its description, banana taped to a wall), have re-raised the issue of what constitutes an artwork, and, more to the point, what people are buying when they buy it.

This question, of course, has kept recurring for more than a century with the appearance, and prompt disappearance, of Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” the mounted urinal, in 1917. Then, of course, Andy Warhol created multiple copies of “Brillo Box”, and conceptual art became an art movement. The problem of why these works are artworks might be one that has been plaguing audiences since Duchamp’s “Fountain,” but ultimately it’s a philosophical question, and one that only aesthetic theory can answer.