What is Art? A Pragmatic Perspective

Scott-Phillips, T.

Abstract

What is art? Marcel Duchamp made this question pertinent when he developed his ‘Readymades’: ordinary, manufactured objects that he presented as art. In this paper, I use pragmatics – the branch of linguistics concerned with language use in context, and which has its historical roots in the philosophy of language – to argue that, if we accept that art is a form of communication, from artist to audience, then Duchamp was correct to claim that anything can be art, so long as it is presented as such.

Citation

Scott-Phillips, T. (2015). What is Art? A Pragmatic Perspective. Think, 14(40), 87-91. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1477175615000093

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jun 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Nov 11, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 13, 2015
• Journal: Think
• Print ISSN: 1477-1756
• Electronic ISSN: 1755-1196
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 14
• Issue: 40
• Pages: 87-91
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/s1477175615000093
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1418369