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.

Thanks for your message. Most aestheticians today would, I think, say that there is usually not an aesthetic difference between these two things, but that there may well be other important differences. For instance, a genuine and a fake Vermeer will, by your hypothesis, look exactly the same, and if that is the case then (on the more common definition of "the aesthetic" as having primarily to do with primarily how an object appears to the senses) they will have the same aesthetic properties. On the other hand, the two works will differ drastically in other dimensions, such as historical interest, monetary value, originality, and so on.

Above I said 'usually', and here's why: In some cases the aesthetic value of a work does seem to depend on its actual provenance. Imagine a work that literally contains a piece of the artist's flesh, and that was intended to be known to do so. (Supppose he cut off his hand, and preserved it in fluid of some kind in an installation for all to see.) Most likely part of your experience of the work should depend on your knowledge of the fact that it contains part of the artist's flesh, and it's plausible that this is part of your aesthetic experience of the work as well. If that's right, then an indistinguishable fake (which, let's assume, didn't contain anyone else's flesh) would not have the same aesthetic value (to say nothing of artistic value) as the original.

By the way the case I've imagined is not so far-fetched. There have been artists who have made "works" out of shooting themselves, setting themselves on fire, locking themselves in cages with wolves, and so on. Regardless of what you may think of such cases, in all of them, having a real person involved in genuine events is crucial to their interpretation, and to their value.

An excellent question. One can imagine two very different types of enjoyment that would lead to two very different answers to your question. We might enjoy something because it is familiar, and thus serves to comfort or even reinforce our sense of who we are, and the value of who we are. (If I had a choice, I would call this the 'pizza and beer' theory, after my personal paradigm of what is familiar and enjoyable.) This line of thinking would lend itself to the position you express in your last question: human productions, even from long ago or far away, rest on a baseline of distinctly human beliefs, values or modes of thought that make them in some way 'familiar' and thus enjoyable.

On the other hand, it also seems reasonable to argue that something alien to me can be enjoyed precisely because it is alien, new, different, or challenging. This suggests that Gilgamesh is enjoyable because it is unfamiliar and continues to resist assimilation into the familiar.

These two modes of enjoyment have a certain dependency upon one another. What is familiar tends to be found enjoyable as a refuge from the alien, as a 'home-coming'; in order for the alien to continually resist assimilation I have to be constantly trying to bring it into the range of what is familiar to me. Familiar and alien are not just static states of consciousness, but are part of a movement back and forth, a dialectic.

I've never thought of this issue in terms of 'enjoyment' before. I've always looked at it from the point of view of understanding: how is it that Gilgamesh can be read at all and make sense to me? The two questions are formally similar, since both suggest this dialectic between the familiar and the alien. Accordingly, partly under the influence of Hegel, this dialectic has often been considered central to the nature of interpretation and especially our relationship with cultural artefacts and specifically art. Accordingly, it is often argued (and this is one of the key arguments behind a liberal arts education) that part of the purpose of the study of foreign cultures or history is to enlarge my sense of the familiar, to make me a more complete person with a richer sense of my self and my world.

Yes and no, though perhaps most importantly no. Saying that something is an art is sometimes a way of saying that it's an exercise of skill, not least of a skill that isn't simply a matter of following a set of instructions. In that sense, cosmetic surgery is an art. Cosmetic surgery also has an obvious aesthetic dimension and no doubt calls on many of the same skills that a good sculptor needs. So all of that is on the "yes" side.

But there's another obvious sense in which cosmetic surgery isn't an art, or better, perhaps, an Art. Painting, sculpture, poetry, etc. are Arts in this sense not just by virtue of being skills whose practitioners may have aesthetic goals. They also fit into a familiar set of cultural practices and institutions (museums, galleries, performances, reviews, critical studies, sales, auctions...) that determine what we count as "Art" with a capital "A." Cosmetic surgery isn't an "Art" in that sense, and this is almost certainly a very good thing.

A good question. If we go off looking for what all artworks have in common, we may find ourselves baffled. Of course, as many people have pointed out, definitions are generally a lot harder to come by than we naively think. Wittgenstein's example of game is still a good example. Try coming up with a definition that captures all and only the things we call games. Still, it might be possible to say a little more about art. For some time now (at least since 1964) many philosophers have taken a different approach: what makes something a work of art isn't any intrinsic property of the work itself. Roughly and over-simply, an artwork is something that the "artworld" takes to be art. The prototype of this view was introduced by Arthur Danto, who would find the way I've put it far too crude. George Dickie formalized the approach along the lines of the rough formula that I've given.

This approach may sound a little silly at first, but it actually explains a good deal. Although it would be hard to draw the boundaries sharply, there really is a collection of people and institutions who make up what sometimes gets called the artworld. Recognized artists belong, of course, as do critics, curators, galleries, art dealers, art shools, art historians and on and on. As a first stab, we can put it this way: if the members of the artworld recognize something as a work of art, then it is. Marcel Duchamp's 1917 "Fountain", a ready-made urinal was controversial when it was first introduced, but it is now considered by many critics to be one of the most influential artworks of the 20th century. (See this story from the BBC.) Duchamp, of course, was challenging pre-conceived notions of what counts as art, but Fountain gradually became accepted by the artworld, and that, arguably, is what makes it a work of art. (Note, by the way: on this approach there will be plenty of borderline cases.)

Partly in the wake of Duchamp and others with his sensibility, artists have taken it as part of their role to challenge and question the ways we think of art itself. Perhaps paradoxically, when they succeed in bringing the artworld along, their new vision gets absorbed into the practices and traditions of the artworld. So-called "instititutional" and related approaches to defining art may be the best way to account for this. If you want to read more, try looking at this essay by Robert J. Yanal.

Consider these lines; perhaps you know them:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough

I first came across this poem 35 years ago. Though tastes may vary, it still works for me. But as you may well know, it's by Ezra Pound, who was a propagandist for Mussolini and a virulent anti-Semite. If I bring that to mind as I think about the poem, it leaves an unpleasant taste. But I don't think this shows that the poem itself is less valuable, and I also don't think it means that one can't legitimately take pleasure in it.

Whether all cases work this way is another matter. Pound was trying to present a pure image. A good deal of art isn't like that. Outside the context of art, knowing how to interpret someone's words or gestures sometimes calls for knowing something about the person. It doesn't seem crazy to think that this could also be true for certain works of art, though there is a large and long-standing debate here.

On the main question, however, it's hard to see why the answer shouldn't be yes. Sometimes we can say: the artist was wicked. But few people, if any, are wicked through and through, and it would take a good deal of argument to show that that everything a wicked person does expresses wickedness. Indeed, the fact that someone whom one can't admire all things considered can still produce beauty might well evoke compassion rather than revulsion.

1. Yes, there is much interesting philosophical work on modern art. I would start with Arthur Danto, who has written many interesting essays (often for the Nation) and a few fascinating books on the topic.

2. The term aesthetics is certainly applied to music -- see Theodor Adorno and currently Lydia Goehr and Peter Kivy for example -- as well as to poetry. Less frequently to literature, but this is presumably because there aesthetic quality is typically a less important component of overall quality (esp. outside fiction).

3. "Logic" is perhaps not quite the right word for what you have in mind here. Perhaps "rules"? I would think that aesthetic judgments are intuitive judgments, and that any rules laid down for composition or appreciation have standing only insofar as they are confirmed by intuitive judgments. (Intuitive judgments may differ, as they did in respect to the atonal works of Arnold Schönberg, for instance, and judgments about rules will then differ correspondingly.) To what extent can our intuitive aesthetic judgments be expressed in rules? This question has been quite interestingly addressed in modern times by reference to the apparently quite fundamental distinction between objects that are and objects that are not works of art. Is there a rule for drawing this distinction? Marcel Duchamp raised this question dramatically when, in 1917, he took an ordinary white gentlemen's urinal, called it Fountain, signed it, and put it on display. In 1962, Andy Warhol began displaying Campbell soup cans. The debate about what is art, and what is good art, is ongoing; and Arthur Danto's work offers an excellent entry into this debate.

You are certainly not alone in having a little trouble! These terms are used by Nietzsche in his Birth of Tragedy, which was his first published book. It is important to keep a few things in mind when reading this book. First, Nietzsche’s explicit intent was not to talk about the Greeks at all, but rather to talk about the contemporary European scene by way of a complex historical analogy with Greece. Thus, it is not even clear whether any particular artists that Nietzsche may have had in mind are to found in ancient Greece, or 19^th Century Germany. Second, Nietzsche is employing a fairly conventional anthropological notion: that deities and myths are ideal representations of underlying cultural trends. Thus the Apollonian and Dionysian as concepts stand for trends or forces in Greek culture rather than specific cultural products. Third, Nietzsche is also not particularly interested in the Apollonian or Dionysian in themselves. He becomes interested only insofar as these two cultural forms work together in the specific phenomenon that is Greek tragic drama. Fourth, he is not even interested in tragedy as a genre, performances, or set of extant texts, but rather in that it deals with a set of metaphysical propositions (most of which are borrowed from Schopenhauer) and reveals in Greek culture (and perhaps in modern European culture) a capacity to understand and deal with the truth of this metaphysics. Nietzsche sees the Dionysian primarily in music and the Apollonian primarily in the plastic arts such as architecture or sculpture but, for the reasons we just suggested, he names few names. Shortly after writing this book, Nietzsche distances himself from both Schopenhauer and the artist he celebrated in the Birth of Tragedy (Richard Wagner). The concept of the Apollonian largely drops out of his philosophy leaving a substantially different notion of the Dionysian.

No, I doubt we should generally regard philosophy as art, though 'art' is such a wonderfully broad and diverse category that doubtless there can be overlaps. Certainly bits of philosophical text, and/or philosophical ideas can be part of an artwork (I remember seeing long passages of Wittgenstein reproduced as part of an artwork). I hear your question as invoking fascinating issues about the status of the discipline of philosophy. Firstly, (like art) it's not an empirical enterprise, and yet (unlike most art) it is answerable to matters empirical: if a patch of philosophy of mind turns out to be at odds with new discoveries in psychology or neuroscience about how the brain relates to psychological states, then the philosophy has to adjust); and philosophy's power to explain the phenomena it takes as its subject matter (linguistic, mental, ethical, political, metaphysical...) is surely dependent on its being empirically plausible at all those points where it purports to describe our practices and their point. Second, (unlike art) most philosophy is strictly bound by the discipline of rationality: philosophical positions are meant to be advanced as arguments, so that if their premises are false, that's a reason not to accept the conclusion, or if there is a false inference, that too is a reason not to accept.

On the other hand, it is philistine (in my view) to dichotomize philosophy and more artistic - notably, literary - aspects of culture. Some philosophy has conducted itself as if it purports to be like science, which is absurd. Philosophy is, or can be, a more creative enterprise and this can only be disguised by any attempt to model it on science. But I do not believe it is a creative enterprise in the manner of most art work. Philosophy's creativity is founded on the attempt to make explicit and make sense of naturally arising intellectual puzzles - puzzles that arise out of contradictions or tensions within our everyday concepts and practices (e.g. how come we take ourselves to know things, even while we also seem to take knowledge to require absolute certainty, and it also seems to us that we almost never possess absolute certainty?); or our everyday ethical interactions or attitudes (e.g. why do we accord humans special ethical status over animals? should we? why? or how far?). This kind of making-sense activity is the font of philosophy (in my view) and (a) art is not always aiming to make sense of things at all, and (b) even when it is aimed at making sense of things (as fiction very often is, for instance) I believe that the way it does that is fundamentally different because of the absense of what I described above as the discpline of rationality. Argumentation is a distinctive activity, a distinctive method of making sense of things, and that method is generally (happily) foreign to art.