The introduction to Noel Carroll's Art in Three Dimensions is as good a summary of the development of the philosophy of art as one is likely to find. Follow Paul Kristellar and others, he notes that Art-with-a-capital-A didn't exist prior to the eighteenth century. Rather, there were various forms of art; there were arts, plural and with a humble lower-case “a.” 

The highest arts were the cerebral ones, the ones that were suitable to freemen of leisure - poetry, rhetoric, grammar; the mechanical arts involved interaction with brute materiality. They were lower on the scale, as technicians and laborers were lower than freemen, but they were arts. There was an art to medicine, statesmanship, archery, navigation. Under the classical and medieval scheme, painting, sculpture, and architecture were lower-scale arts, involving manual labor. 

The creation of the Modern System of Arts involved elevating some manual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture) to the level of the higher arts, especially poetry. Charles Batteux argued that painting, sculpture, dance, music and poetry were all forms of mimesis, whether of the beauty of the world or of the beautiful itself. Carroll writes that “Comparison between painting and poetry and between sculpture and poetry were ways of socially enfranchising these visual arts as something more than mechanical or manual arts and of raising the symbolic capital of those who practiced them” (5). This was presented not only as an elevation of status for certain kinds of activities and the artists who performed them, but as a discovery of something true about the arts themselves. It was discovered that all possessed qualities analogous to poetry.

But the Modern System was undermined nearly as soon as it was formulated.  At the time, the arts were indeed mimetic, but music rapidly departed from the mimetic norm: “Internal to the System, the growing popularization of absolute music, as explicitly distinguished from program music, threatened the unity of the System, since most absolute music imitates nothing. That is why it is called absolute music” (8). And music wasn't alone in pressing the boundaries of the Modern System. It was hard to discover mimetic qualities to many forms of dance; this was solved by excluding folk dance from the realm of fine art. As painting and sculpture moved away from representational mimesis, they too put pressure on the System. Besides, the System was posited on the assumption that Art offered a path to knowledge of the world, and in this realm Science quickly outstripped it.

What Carroll calls “expressive” and “aesthetic” theories of art moved in to replace mimesis. Neither worked very well. It is hard to demonstrate that art works are expressive of the feelings of the artists; only a determined Romantic would take that as a given. 

Aesthetic theories - at the extreme, art for art's sake - had a more plausible claim, but didn't work either. In a rather delicious moment in his summary, Carroll points to the inner connection between consumer capitalism and aestheticism: In earlier eras “patrons commissioned art works to serve important social purposes: to honor the king, to instill loyalty or obedience, to preach the commandments, to commemorate historical achievements and sacrifices, etc. In contrast, the rising bourgeois classes, with increasing amounts of leisure at their disposal, frequently looked to the arts as a delightful way of passing time.” The notion that the arts existed to give aesthetic pleasure “fitted the new patterns of consumption nicely” (11).

But Art isn't just for pleasure. And it's “vacuous,” Carroll says to insist that Art exists to provide something called “aesthetic experience.” Besides, the aesthetic theories of art excluded many of the dimensions of real-life art: “many of the unexplored, under-examined, or forbidden aspects of art under the analytic dispensation - such as authorial intention, art history, emotional arousal, morality, politics, etc., - have been exiled exactly because they are irrelevant from the perspective of the aesthetic theory of art” (12). As Cornelius van Til liked to quip, “What my theory doesn't catch isn't fish.”

Carroll argues for pluralism, not “the autonomy of art” but “heteronomy”: instead of a definition of art, like the aesthetic definition, we need genealogies; instead of the philosophy of art with a ‘Capital A,' more attention should be paid to the philosophies of the arts, their effects, and the special problems they raise; rather than searching for uniformity across all the arts, respect differences. In short, let us endorse not merely pluralism, but pluralisms” (14).

Is sounds trendy, but in important ways this is return to the common sense of art before the Modern System, a common sense in which all human poiesis could be dignified as a form of art if done with excellence.