18Requisitos legales y

The reader's initial response to the cultural theory might be that through its partial re- lativism it becomes vacuous and uninteresting. If, as I argue, x can be art in, say, liberal

Western post-Avantgarde context, but not in communist China context, what is there to stop one from starting to break things down further and say that x is art in the cultural

context of all the Scots who still speak Gaelic, or all to 80's pop fans, or just my next door neighbour an his pals? Surely the fact that my grandmother's cross stitches are treated as art by her family and friends is of little interest to anyone who wants to give an account of what `art' means yet it seems that the cultural theory would require us to consider exactly such small and unimportant issues. In fact, it seems that anything can be art in some context, and there are innitely many contexts in which any object can be placed, being art in some but not others. If this is the case, then it seems that the denition I oered becomes very diluted, gets lost in details instead of providing a comprehensive picture, and as such is basically quite useless.

The simple answer to this point is that the fact that accepting my denition means that one can consider an object's arthood in pretty much any context one wishes, does not mean that one should do so, or that doing so will yield any interesting knowledge about the object. To oer a parable, Einsteinian physics allows one to calculate the motion of Alpha Centauri relative to my left hand, and do all sorts of completely irrelevant and useless things but this does not mean that one actually should go and do them, and even less go on to complain that modern physics can tell us nothing about Alpha Centauri, because instead of providing one universal measurement of its motion it provides multiple relative ones. Instead, what we do in the case of physics is choose those frames of reference which actually for some reason or another matter to us. The cultural theory is exactly the same, and cultural contexts are its frames of reference. It is not necessary to determine a work's arthood in all possible contexts instead what a cultural theorist should do is determine its arthood in those contexts which matter, for one reason or another.

One could further argue here that such an approach does not actually solve the issue, it merely pushes it back a little. For how are we to choose the contexts which matter? Wouldn't it result in making completely arbitrary choices, or perhaps even biased ones? Pretty much any context matters to someone and it is unclear how and why we should choose some over the other. If the choice of contexts that matter is arbitrary, the objection would go, then either we do need to consider all contexts anyway, just in case they are important after all (thus coming back to the initial point), or the whole theory is arbitrary and once again, uninformative.

There are several answers to this issue. Firstly, it seems simply somewhat naive to ag it as a problem. Most philosophers of art are pretty arbitrary as it is, choosing to only speak about modern Western understanding of art, and often implicitly assuming their own cultural context for the basis of their theories.4 _{There is no reason why one should} not ask institutionalists, or functionalists why they choose to focus on a fraction of what

`art' can mean. The likely answer would be we choose to focus on what art means for the modern Western audience because this context is important to us. Yet this is exactly as arbitrary as any choice a cultural theorist would need to make, the only dierence is that it is a choice others make once, while a cultural theorist can choose again if they wish to. It seems that there is no essential dierence in how arbitrary those selections are, and a theory which allows one to choose again does not introduce a new problem, but simply repeats the same one. Obtaining a good deal of new information for the price of falling into a problem one has already fallen into anyway, may not be such a bad thing after all.

Secondly, there are other areas of aesthetics in which exactly the same kind of choices are called for, which do not suer from similar criticism. It is commonly agreed that artworks can have dierent properties depending on the context of their creation, or more broadly, depending on which category of art they fall into (Walton 1970). However, at least according to Walton's analysis of this issue, a single artwork can legitimately fall into many categories one can consider Raphael's The School of Athens in the category of painting, or the category of Renaissance painting, or Raphael's paintings, or paintings located in the Apostolic Palace, or all frescoes depicting Socrates, etc. Interpreted in any of those categories the work will have slightly dierent properties than when interpreted in any other category. Of course, Walton provides four suggestions for choosing the correct category, thus limiting the freedom of interpreting works in any context one wishes (ibid.: 357-8). However, (1) he still allows that a work can legitimately be judged in more than one category (in the above example, `painting' and `Raphael's works' seem both perfectly appropriate); (2) there is nothing preventing a cultural theorist from applying similar restrictions: one can say that the arthood of x can be determined for any context, but

should be determined for the contexts of which (we have good reasons to believe) it was intended, which are recognised as important by the society in which it was produced, etc. It seems now that the choice of a cultural context is no more arbitrary than a choice of a

category, and thus if the latter does not present any serious problems to a theory which requires it, neither should the former.

Thirdly, it is simply not the case that the aesthetician's choice of a context in which to judge a work is completely arbitrary. In fact, I would like to claim that it is not an aesthetician's choice at all. Instead of choosing whatever context one thinks is import- ant, one should ask the anthropologists and sociologists about it. A good part of what social scientists do is determining the characteristics of various social groups and cultural contexts, assessing their importance and the importance of various divisions within the societies. The most important divisions include those based on race, nation, religion, dom- inating mode of production, social status, or government type, while others may focus on education, access to and use of media, dominating ideologies, or attitude to environmental issues (Giddens 2006: 33-43, 295-300, 485-90, 534-6, 608-13, 704-14, 844-50, 939-40). It is possible to distinguish particular cultural contexts based on such criteria, at least par- tially, by nding out whether the beliefs and practices of a given society match the model of, say, a racially mixed and (largely) unprejudiced, multinational, mostly secular, indus- trial and democratic society composed of mostly middle and upper classes, reasonably well educated and environmentally conscious people with mostly liberal views and access to modern media i.e., the modern Western art audience.

A philosopher need not guess where to place divisions between various cultural contexts, or arbitrarily choose the contexts he thinks are important all he needs to do is to check the data available from the studies conducted by the cultural anthropologists. Thus it is simply not the case that a cultural theorist can get lost in the myriads of possibilities, determining arthood for all possible contexts without being able to tell one from the other. Instead, all he needs to do is acknowledge the ndings of the cultural anthropologists which determine the borderlines and distinctive features of various cultural contexts, and point at contexts which are more important, inuential or interesting than others and provide classication of works into art and non-art in those contexts.