Art avant la lèttre

Art eludes definition. The heterogeneity of what counts as art, especially taking into account contemporary conceptual art, poses difficulties for any ‘internal’ definition which imposes substantial conditions on what artworks have to be like to be eligible as artworks. Hence it is tempting to settle for an ‘external’ definition which avoids such substantial conditions and refers exclusively to common practices of treating things as artworks. It has been noted that such a definition has difficulties with primordial art. Primordial art arguably precedes the practice of treating artworks as such. I argue that, for this practice to figure in the definition of art, it does not have to be cotemporaneous with the art it is used to define. Our present-day practice may determine what art was all along, just as our experts determine what our common word ‘whale’ referred to all along, although people using the word in former times were not in the know.