Insights
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp submitted a porcelain urinal, signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt and titled Fountain, to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York. The work was rejected. It has since become the most discussed object in the history of twentieth-century art — not because of its formal properties, which are those of a mass-produced sanitary fixture, but because of what it did to the question that art had, until that moment, managed to avoid asking too directly: what makes something a work of art at all? The answer that Duchamp’s gesture forced into view was discomfiting. It was not the object. It was the context.
The philosopher Arthur Danto, reflecting on the explosion of conceptual and pop art in the 1960s, developed this intuition into a theory he called the institutional theory of art. What distinguishes a work of art from a mere object, Danto argued, is not any intrinsic property — not beauty, not skill, not expressive intention — but the object’s relationship to what he called the artworld: the historically situated network of theories, practices, institutions, and interpretive communities within which objects are presented and received as art.
Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, physically indistinguishable from its supermarket counterpart, is a work of art because the artworld has the resources to receive it as one. The supermarket box is not, because it lacks that relationship. The implication is vertiginous: aesthetic value is not in the object. It is in the web of relations within which the object is placed.
Walter Benjamin had reached a related but differently weighted conclusion three decades earlier, in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin’s central concept was the aura — the quality of authentic presence that attaches to an original work of art by virtue of its unique existence in a particular place and time, embedded in the tradition of its making and the history of its reception.
Mechanical reproduction, Benjamin argued, destroys the aura by detaching the reproduced image from its original location and making it available everywhere simultaneously. The Sistine Chapel ceiling exists in a specific place and carries the weight of its making, its history, and the experience of standing beneath it. The postcard reproduction carries none of this. What is lost in reproduction is not the visual information but the conditions of meaning.
The art critic John Berger extended Benjamin’s analysis in Ways of Seeing, his enormously influential 1972 work, arguing that the camera had fundamentally altered not just the reproduction of art but the way art is seen. Every painting is now surrounded by the accumulated meaning of all its reproductions — its appearances on book covers, in advertisements, as wallpaper and screensavers — so that the original is perceived through the lens of its own afterlife. The Mona Lisa, Berger argued, is now primarily a famous painting rather than a painting; what the visitor experiences in the Louvre is not the work but the confirmation that the work is there. The original has become the certificate of authenticity for all its reproductions.
These arguments together suggest a deeply uncomfortable conclusion: that the conditions under which a work of art is received are not incidental to its meaning but constitutive of it — that what we call aesthetic experience is inseparable from context, institution, history, and the socially transmitted frameworks through which we have learned to see.
The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer described this as the hermeneutic horizon: every act of interpretation takes place within a horizon of pre-understandings — assumptions about genre, tradition, value, and purpose — that the interpreter brings to the work and that shape what the work can mean. There is no view from nowhere in aesthetics, any more than there is in history or science.
The counterargument — associated with the formalist tradition running from Clive Bell through Clement Greenberg — insists that this conclusion is self-defeating. If aesthetic value is entirely contextual and institutional, then the distinction between great art and mere cultural fashion collapses entirely, and there is nothing left to say about why Beethoven’s late quartets are more valuable than advertising jingles except that the artworld has decided they are.
Greenberg’s response was to locate aesthetic value in the formal properties of the work itself — in the way form, composition, colour, and medium create an experience that is self-sufficient and irreducible to any external context. Formalism preserves the intuition that some works are genuinely better than others, but at the cost of being unable to account for the enormous class of works — from Duchamp’s urinal through Warhol’s boxes to contemporary installation and conceptual art — whose entire meaning is contextual.
The Indian aesthetic tradition offers a different resolution. The concept of rasa, developed by the theorist Bharata in the Natyashastra and refined over centuries of Sanskrit aesthetic philosophy, locates aesthetic value neither in the object nor in the institution but in the quality of experience produced in a prepared and cultivated receiver. Rasa — literally juice or essence — is not a property of the artwork and not a mere subjective response.
It is an intersubjective achievement: the product of the encounter between a work crafted with appropriate skill and intention and a rasika, a receiver who has cultivated the sensitivity to receive it. Aesthetic experience, on this account, is neither in the world nor in the mind but in the disciplined and cultivated relationship between them.
The question that all these traditions circle without fully answering is whether aesthetic value is discovered or constructed — whether great works are great because of what they are or because of what we have learned to do with them. The honest answer is probably that it is both, and that the difficulty of separating the two is not a failure of aesthetic theory but its most revealing finding.
