I like to define "art" as "A display of intent". Example: the Voyager record. Any sufficiently-intelligent alien who comes across it is likely to conclude "Tha

I like to define "art" as "A display of intent". Example: the Voyager record. Any sufficiently-intelligent alien who comes across it is likely to conclude "That object probably wasn't an accident". Compare this to tabloid articles with stories like "The face of Jesus appeared in my toast this morning!". Regardless of whether you're an atheist or not, the Voyager record undeniably offers a higher standard of evidence that some intelligent entity intentionally produced it. Somebody spent time and energy to make it look exactly like that. I like this definition because it acts as an interesting litmus test. Fantasy novels? Art. A toilet? Definitely intentional, but how much thought went into every little aspect? How much of the design and production was left to chance? An extremely ergonomic and well-designed toilet? Inching more towards "art", because it's not just any old toilet -- it's that toilet. Plain white canvas in a fancy modern art museum? Debatable. Why does it look like that? Is the intent intrinsically obvious? Maybe it's obvious to serious art critics with a background in this stuff, but maybe it seems meaningless to everybody else. Random squiggles in a fancy modern art museum? Still debatable, but more obvious than the white canvas - even if it was all random, somebody decided that they really liked those squiggles, and made the call that the squiggles were "done", and they decided to put it up on a wall instead of trashing it. From the artist's perspective, this is definitely art - it encodes a number of judgement calls on the part of the artist. To everybody else, it might just look like squiggles, so everybody else doesn't have to agree that it's art.