In stimulating work 1 George Dickie has advanced the thesis that 'art' can be defined, and he proposes a definition based upon the idea of art as a social institution. In this paper I shall examine some issues raised by Dickie's definition. Dickie's views must be understood against the background of discussion among a number of philosophers of art in recent years, some of which I shall now briefly recapitulate. Morris Weitz's influential argument, that art is an open concept which cannot be closed without succumbing to the "ludicrous since it forecloses on the very conditions of creativity in the arts", has been one important factor in the discussion. Appealing to Wittgenstein's discussion of games in the Philosophical Investigations, Weitz argued that 'art' and 'game' are parallel in that "If we actually look and see what it is that we call 'art' we will also find no common properties -only strands of similarities". Weitz went on to describe the concept of art as open in the following sense.
A concept is open if its conditions of application are emendable and corrigible; i.e., if a situation or case can be imagined or secured which would call for some sort of decision on our part to extend the use of the concept to cover this, or to close the concept and invent a new one to deal with the new case and its new property. If necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a concept can be stated, the concept is a closed one. 2 Weitz's arguments, and their supposed Wittgensteinian assumptions, drew criticism, notably from Maurice Mandelbaum, a who suggested that 'art' might after all be definable in terms not of 'exhibited' attributes (an exhibited attribute being "some characteristic at which one could directly point and say: 'It is this particular feature of the object which leads me to designate it as a work of art' ") but of other, presurhably 'non-exhibited', possibly relational attributes. I think it is fair enough to say Dickie conceives of his proffered definition of 'art' as a payoff on Mandelbaum's suggestion.