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WHAT IS ART? A PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2015

Thomas C. Scott-Phillips
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Think , Volume 14 , Issue 40 , Summer 2015 , pp. 87 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2015 

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