Natura Instituţională a Artei: Arta Definită prin Reguli
The Institutional Nature of Art: Art Defined by Rules

Summary/Abstract: The issue concerning the definition of art has been very much discussed in the field of art philosophy, and especially in the field of analytic aesthetics, in the last 60 years. Mostly ignored in the first half of the XX century, the subject was revived by the anti-essentialist conception which considers that no real definition of art can be given because there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be art that can be found in all the artistic objects. The main argument the anti-essentialists use is that the concept of “art” is very similar to the concept of “game” and, following Wittgenstein, as the concept of “game” can’t be defined, and the identification of a game is made by it’s similarity with another game, in the same way the concepts of “art” and “work of art” can’t be defined, and works of art are recognized as such by their similarity with an artistic object which was previously established as such. This paper argues, using Dickie’s institutional theory of art and Graves’s new institutional theory of art, that, although the anti-essentialists were right about the similarity of the concepts of “game” and “art”, art can still be defined through some rules-definitions. These rules-definitions are uttered, developed and explained, revealing in the end what kind of institution the institution of art is.

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