This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com. It used to be so easy. Rembrandt painted art, so did da Vinci, butter jelly, rubans, constable

Vermeer. Beautiful paintings were art. No argument. But then came Marshall Duchar and what he called fountain, a

urinal, a so-called ready-made, which appeared in a 1917 show. In more

recent times, British artist Tracy Emmin exhibited an unmade bed.

Damien Hurst immersed a tiger shark in formaldehyde.

Are these art?

It seems absurd to deny that they are, since they were exchanged for eye-watering sums of money and were displayed in respected

art galleries. But if so, were they art merely because they were somehow linked to the art

world and because the art world deemed them art. Is that good enough?

Not according to Derek Matrevers of the Open University, author of art and emotion.

Derek Matravers, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thanks, it's nice to be here. The topic we're Derek Matravers, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thanks, it's nice to be here.

The topic we're going to focus on today is the definition of art.

The definition of art has a history.

I wonder if you could give us a little bit of background on where the idea of art came from in the first place.

Well, the fine arts, as we now know them, which are things like painting and sculpture and music,

prior to about the 1740s they were scattered conceptually so for example music was

often linked to mathematics what we now know as the fine arts were linked to

engineering board equivalent of engineering those days.

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