ABSTRACT
Although the thought experiment represents one of many moves intended to vitiate contextualism in contemporary aesthetics, this chapter focuses on the distinction it invokes between artworks and ordinary functional objects. Lurking in the background here is an important historical issue: the distinction between art and craft. Under the influence of a pair of papers by Paul Oskar Kristeller, it has long been the orthodox opinion among art historians and philosophers of art that ‘art’ is a comparatively new concept in the West, which arose in the eighteenth century. The upshot is that most of the works produced in the history of Western art were not produced under the concept of art as people recognize it today, meaning that many of the most famous works in our galleries are the products of a different kind of activity—one with more immediate practical purposes, such as the religious.
