Eve Tushnet has some musings (inspired by Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics) about what art is. Her analysis is mostly along the lines of what makes art good, or at least satisfying to her, but when it comes to defining art she mostly shrugs; she knows she doesn't like Scott McCloud's super-broad definition designed to cut off endless debate about whether comics (or anything else) counts as art, but admits that she doesn't really have an alternative in mind...a reasonable enough approach, but I think we can do a little better. I propose the following: art is anything that intends communication by evocation. I think that's pretty broad--broad enough to include all the performing arts as well as the plastic and even architecture and decorative arts, but narrow enough to eliminate most of the things that are clearly non-art such as natural phenomena, compilations of data and so forth, while allowing wiggle room for things that aren't primarily intended as art but may be done in an artful way. For instance, a rainbow is beautiful, and may well evoke certain feelings and memories, but isn't communication; Pride and Prejudice is art because the intent of the communication from Jane Austen to the reader is to evoke certain feelings and memories that cause the reader to recognize types of people and human situations and not merely to convey certain information and fictional facts about the Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy. Similarly an ordinary dictionary isn't art, but Bierce's Devil's Dictionary is. The thing that I like about this definition is that it does a bit more than just match certain brute intuitions about what we call art: it suggests reasons for why certain kinds of things are likely to be contentious--for instance in Dadaism or found art where the either the intent to communicate or the ability to evoke anything specific or both are missing.