Duplicate this page before you start, and write your answers in your own copy.

📋 1. Starting point

Last lesson you worked through a set of images and built a list on the board: the reasons you gave for calling something art, and the reasons you gave for refusing to. Things like skill, intention, audience, meaning, beauty, context, recognition by others.

✍️ Write here: open your notes from last lesson and copy out your list of criteria for calling something art.

Today we will put that list under pressure. By the end of the lesson, you will have met three cases that most students find genuinely hard to classify. Your criteria will probably not survive all three unchanged. That is the point.

🎨 2. Case 1: Pierre Brassau

In 1964 a new avant-garde painter called Pierre Brassau exhibited at Gallerie Christinae in Göteborg, Sweden. Critics and collectors came to see the work. At least one critic praised it in print, describing the brush strokes as performing "with the delicacy of a ballet dancer."

Look at the paintings. Using the criteria your class built last lesson, decide: Is this art?

✍️ Write here: is this art? Which of your criteria did you use to decide?

When you have written your answer, open the toggle below.

• The reveal

🐘 3. Case 2: Painting elephants

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfVV19Z1o5c

In several elephant camps across Thailand, elephants are trained to hold a paintbrush in their trunks and produce paintings for tourists. Some of the paintings are sold for significant sums. Some show recognisable images: flowers, trees, even other elephants.

Watch the clip. The elephant you will see is called Hong. She has been trained by her mahout, Noi, for several years. By the time the video was filmed, Hong could paint the picture with very little help from Noi.

Here are the two things most worth knowing:

1. Each of the painting elephants at the camp has mastered a single work. Hong paints this elephant with a flower. Another elephant paints something different. They do not improvise. The same image, over and over.
2. Two experts in the clip watched the same footage and disagreed. One said Hong's deliberate movements suggested she was reconstructing a picture in her mind. The other said that being trained to paint an elephant does not make Hong any more aware it is an elephant than if she had been trained to paint a tiger.

Think through these questions:

• If Hong produces the brushstrokes herself but only ever paints the one image she was trained to paint, is that closer to an artist making a painting, or to a printer making copies?
• The two experts watched the same clip and reached opposite conclusions. What are they actually disagreeing about?
• Tourists buy the paintings believing the elephant is expressing itself. If they are wrong about that, does it change what the painting is?

✍️ Write here: answer at least two of these questions.

⬛ 4. Case 3: Malevich's Black Square