Reddit reviews A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics

Art does not describe a discrete set of objects, it describes a method or a way of evaluating something. A chair can be art just as much as a TV show just as much as a urinal.


Your use of "art" is a modern colloquialism, synonymous with "aesthetics/visual communication". The latter is a coincidence of cultural coagulation and is not accepted by any academic sources as a sensible distinction. The aesthetic quality of something is generally understood to be the ineffable experience of an identity encountering another or many. There are many accepted treatises and schools that describe art theory and aesthetic function.


All that aside, I was not discussing the aesthetics of the works in question - that requires agreeing on a desired aesthetic experience from a work. Judging artisanship does not explicitly require prior consensus. It simply requires a familiarity with the materials and the difficulty of their manipulation relative to the skill of the artisan.