The distinction that modern artists and art critics make between the arts, on the one hand, and crafts, on the other, was foreign to classical antiquity. Both arts and crafts were regarded by the ancient Greeks as “productions according to rule” and both were classified as techne, which can be translated “organized knowledge and procedure applied for the purpose of producing a specific preconceived result.” This concept runs directly counter to the deeply ingrained insight of modern aesthetic thought that art cannot be reduced to rule and cannot be evaluated using a set of rules reducible to a formula. The Greek concept predominated until the middle of the eighteenth century, when the French aesthetician Charles Batteux heralded the idea that what distinguishes the arts from the crafts and the sciences is the arts’ production of beauty. This idea lasted until the beginning of the twentieth century when some critics argued that “beauty” was a highly ambiguous term, far too broad and indefinite for the purpose of defining or evaluating art. Since 1900, a large number of definitions of art have emerged, each covering a sector of accepted creative and critical practice but none, apparently, applicable to the whole of what is accepted as art by the art world.

Not only do contemporary definitions of art fail to agree on any common approach to art or on common areas of concern, but individually many of them do not even serve to differentiate those works that are conventionally accepted as art by many artists and critics from those that are not. For example, the “mimetic” theory holds that art reproduces reality; but although amateurs’ photographs reproduce reality, most artists and art critics do not consider them art. The inadequacy of these definitions suggests a strong element of irrationality, because it suggests that the way in which artists and art critics talk and think about works of art does not correspond with the way in which they actually distinguish those things that they recognize as works of art from the things that they do not so recognize.

1) In his treatment of contemporary definitions of art, the author expresses

A) praise for their virtues
B) concern about their defects
C) approval of their strengths
D) indifference to people who take them seriously
E) ridicule for people who ignore them

2) The passage is most relevant to which of the following areas of study?

A) The history of aesthetics
B) The history of literature
C) The sociology of art
D) The psychology of art
E) The sociology of aesthetics

3) The passage suggests that, compared to the conceptions of art of earlier eras, twentieth century conceptions are more

A) ambiguous and amateurish
B) skeptical and irrational
C) diverse and fragmented
D) conventional and didactic
E) realistic and relevant