There is the fact that it is possible to treat something badly or to damage it, whether or not it is sentient. A pair of shoes can be badly or well looked after, and it is wrong not to look after a good pair of shoes properly. A living thing like a hedge can be properly maintained or attended to, but something more is involved. Sometimes, it seems to me, the aesthetics of the "art object" (horrible phrase) can reflect what it actually is. So it is natural to trim a box hedge in one way, and a mixed hedge in another way, perhaps a less formal and more undulating, the shapes reflecting the different kinds of growth - hawthorn, or privet or beech. (A hedge that is full of straggly and unwanted sycamore looks awful, and the holes soon begin to show.) Pugs and poodles may be perfectly happy qua sentient beings, though often there are specific health problems with specific breeds, but it is perfectly coherent to object to the whole process of breeding and thinking of living things as being objects for our use - manipulation - and enjoyment only. Much the same comments can be made about the wilderness, and your question and suggestion raise profound and important questions of ecological ethics and aesthetics. For some, the ethics of GM foods has a spiritual dimension too.

I am not a philosopher of art, so I will defer to another panel member who is, but I do remember once visiting a museum in New York City that had an exhibit titled "The Baker's Art", consisting of elegantly decorated cakes and breads.

Well, Kant for one, seemed to rank landscape gardening very highly, defining it as in essence a kind of painting (see section 51 of the Critique of Judgement). The point is that such gardening is about form, order, harmony and relationships – it is, let us say, akin to abstract painting (although of course Kant couldn't have said this). Certainly, also, gardens can have affective and symbolic power, and they participate in a dialogue with their own tradition. Obviously, for every criterion I come up with, someone could come up with a counter-example that is widely considered art but lacks this feature; so listing criteria is a risky business. Nevertheless, I'm having trouble thinking of a defensible reason why gardening should be necessarily excluded from the domain of art – other than the fact that it is not widely considered to be so by the people (artists, gallery owners, critics) whose job it is to tell us what is art. And there's the rub. In the absence of relatively stable traditions that define for us what art is, this task has had to be turned over to the industry. And, in this arena, gardening doesn't really count – indeed, even painting and sculpture as traditionally practised are rarely found. If an already acknowledged artist created a garden as one of their works, then that would be art, but not because of what it was, but because of the reputation of the person who did it.

I think we have some pretty good discussion of this question already from earlier Questions 729, 1497, 1806, 2111. It's a fascinating question certain musicians and artists have raised through their work (just as you imagine), and all the more interesting for there being no compelling way of reaching an answer.

If Olla Fritzharold were to give a scat-singing performance whose syllables accidentally added up to something that sounded just like calling one of the audience members a shiftless monkey in his own native language, would that qualify as an insult?

No. There's nothing like the relevant intention anywhere in the ballpark (or the auditorium.) Art and insults aren't the same thing, but it's part of the conventions that go with what counts as art that typically, at least, there had to be some sort of relevant intention behind the object.

Of course, this isn't airtight. After all, there's such a thing as "found art," and then there's Duchamp's famous "Fountain," which was a factory-made urinal. But in cases like these, there's a good case for saying that what makes the thing art as opposed to merely an interesting(?) object is the fact that someone who stands in the right relation to the "Artworld" declares it to be art. And so we still have an art-relevant intention.

The larger point is that "art" isn't a natural kind. (Good thing; artifacts are supposed to stand in contrast to natural kinds.) The fact that there is art as opposed to various objects that provoke certain reactions in us rests on the fact that there is a complicated set of practices, institutions and so on that we call the artworld. The classic statement of this idea is in the work of Arthur Danto. The detailed account is in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.

What this means is that there's no natural fact, so to speak, about whether the "sonnet" by your shiftless monkey (I'm assuming he types entirely in lower-case...) is a work of art. Close enough for poetry, it would be a work of art if "the artworld" treated it as such.

(By the way: I somehow misread your first sentence on first glance, and took it to be asking if a team of donkeys with typewriters might accidentally make a work of art. The answer would be the same, but the donkeys would have a much harder time working the keys.)

Suppose I happen to get great pleasure from something that more or less no one else cares about. Maybe I really enjoy writing poems that avoid using the letter "p." I know that there's no cosmic importance to poems of this sort, and I know that it's just a quirk of my psychology that I enjoy writing them so much. This activity has no "objective" value if that means value from some point of view that doesn't take me into account. But it still has value for me, and as long as I don't spend all my time doing it, there's nothing irrational about my using this odd little hobby as a pleasant pastime. I don't need to be worried about the fact that in the larger scheme of things, "p"-less poems don't count.

The point is more or less obvious, I hope: if I dont' need to be bothered by the fact that some things have value for me alone, artists don't need to be bothered by the fact that some things have value only for a wider circle of creatures: creatures with the sorts of cognitive and perceptual capacities that go into making and appreciating art.

But we can say more: it's not clear that anything has any value apart from some sort of relationship to sentient creatures. It may not be a matter of any creature's actual experience, but it may well be that the idea of value part from all possible experience doesn't make any sense. (I'll confess that I can't make a lot of sense of it.)

Art is something that particular kinds of creatures make and appreciate. It may not just be humans, but suppose it is. Nonetheless, the appreciation of art is a many-layered, complex activity that weaves together various skills, themes and concerns. It's something that humans find meaningful, even if other kinds of creatures don't.

And so I could work myself into a state of needless anomie because art doesn't have some sort of absolute, human-independent value. Or I could stand in front of the Matisse and revel in the deliciousness of those wonderful forms and colors. Which reminds me: it's been way too long since I've been to the museum. Perhaps later this week...

My answer to this is a firm "Yes". Novels, for example, "tell the

truth" better than any other written material, with the exception

things like diaries and letters, unless you think of the relevant

passages of diaries and letters as though they were mini-novels. But

diaries and letters are no better at telling the truth in the

appropriate sense than the skills of their authors. What sense is the

sense in which novels (or more generally imaginative writing) can "tell

the truth" better than any other "Areas of Knowledge", as you call

them? (I imagine that you might have the sciences in mind.) The sense

is one in which telling the truth has to do with getting the details of

a description absolutely right, and getting the overal balance and

colour and mood of what one is describing absolutely right. Here

psychology for example (which might be thought to give "tell the truth"

better than the novel) is no better than the sensibility (the

eighteenth and nineteenth century word) of the individual working

psychologist. And psychology as a whole can be worse, because its

collective or institutional scientific structure blots out the most

personal and individual aspects of its subjects' lives. 'What an

intelligent man knows is hard to know', as Goethe observed. But I agree

with Kalynne Pudner that there is a rich and rewarding philosophical

literature that exists exactly on this topic. My philosophical guides in

the area, who share the view I have sketched above, are Iris

Murdoch and Vladimir Nabokov.

I'm hard pressed to answer this question (and I suspect I'm not the only one, seeing as it's been so long unanswered) without knowing more precisely what you mean by "tell the truth." A work of literature can be said to have various meanings, some of them mutually exclusive, and few (if any) constraints on viable interpretations. So in that sense, it would tell the truth, because the range of what it "tells" is so very broad. But it would be the same with the visual arts, wouldn't it?

If "telling the truth" is understood to be some kind of correspondence with an external state of affairs, then it seems other areas of knowledge (mathematics, for instance) would "tell the truth" better.

Aesthetics isn't my area, and so far I'm only dabbling in Phil of Literature; I'm afraid I can't do better than this for an answer. But it is an intriguing start to a conversation. I hope you pursue it.

Well, if by 'the new art forms' you mean such things as video games and web pages, then it looks like you have answered your own questions in the affirmative. To me that seems the right answer.

A video game could be both art and entertainment, a web page could be both a work of art and a means of communication, just as a building designed by Gaudi could be a work of art and a house.

Sell also Question 406.