The Bottle of Anís del Mono

Today in “Wednesday’s Thoughts on Art” we want to talk about the term “art”. How best to define it is a subject of constant contention; many books and articles have been published arguing over even the basics of what we mean by the term “art”. Theodor Adorno claimed in 1969 “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident.” It is clear that even the basic meaning of the term “art” has changed several times over the centuries, and has continued to evolve into the 20th century as well. Even as late as 1912 it was normal in the West to assume that all artworks aimed at beauty, and thus that anything that wasn’t trying to be beautiful couldn’t be considered as art. The cubists, dadaists, Stravinsky and many later art movements struggled against the concept that beauty was central to the definition of art, with such success that, according to Danto, “Beauty had disappeared not only from the advanced art of the 1960’s but from the advanced philosophy of art of that decade as well.” This Juan Gris’ experiment with the truth and illusion of representation would never have been considered as art before 20th century.