Art and Its Objects

Wollheim approaches the question 'What is art?' by asking what kind of thing a work of art is. He tests the hypothesis that works of art are physical objects, which seems plausible for paintings and sculptures but fails for novels and pieces of music, which can exist in many copies and performances. He develops the idea that many works are types with tokens, discusses how art expresses emotion and how we see representations in pictures, and examines the role of the artist's intention and the spectator's response. He argues that art should be understood as, in Wittgenstein's phrase, a form of life, bound up with the practices and institutions in which it is made and received. The second edition of 1980 adds six supplementary essays, including one on 'seeing-in', Wollheim's influential account of pictorial representation, and one criticising the institutional theory of art.

It is a classic of analytic aesthetics written by someone who was also a serious art critic, and it shows why defining art is harder than it looks.