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Consider the cross-cultural practice of cooking. Suppose there a tribe whose only way of cooking food—any food, ever—was it in water. Everything this tribe ever prepared and ate was either or boiled. Would we say, “They have a different concept of cooking from us”? No; they cook food, though within a more limited repertoire techniques than ours. But a greater range of techniques for a practice not in itself change the concept of that practice. The invention microwave oven did not change the concept of cooking; it provided new way to do it: our great-grandparents had our concept of cooking, if they never used microwave ovens. Suppose, however, that discovered a tribe that never heated food, had never heard of heating always passed a spirit wand over it before eating it. Would we authorizing the occasion of its being eaten—they are not cooking it with spirit wand. (Nor could they be symbolically cooking it: the wand could act to cook symbolically only if they knew what cooking was, but that would mean they already had the concept.)

In parallel fashion, suppose some culture’s concept of art included objects that, although sculpted out of wood, were never looked at with amazement, plea sure, or fascination of any kind, in public or in private were expected to be looked at even by nonhuman entities, as by gods), were the subject of no critical vocabulary, were never admired for their skill, did not represent anything, were crafted in no discernibly regular style, and, although employed as doorstops, were never accorded any attention beyond what was required to place them before open doors or to remove them in order to shut doors. Could we say that this tribe has “a different concept of art from ours”? No; on the evidence so far supplied, what ever else these objects are (doorstops, evidently), they are not “art in sense different from the Western sense.” They are not works of art at all. order to qualify as a work of art, in what ever attenuated, distant, strange, or obscure sense we might want to capture, a mysterious object new to our experience would have to share in some of those aspects— giving sensuous pleasure in experience, being created in (or against) a traditional style, involving intense imaginative attention, being skillfully made or performed, being symbolic or representative, expressing emotion feeling, and so forth—that art shares not only in Western culture but also in the great art traditions of Asia and the rest of the world, including tribal cultures of Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. If there is no discernible connection with this established complex of ideas, the mysterious object is not a new kind of art: it is not art at all.

VI

However illuminating or defective their interpretations, anthropologists at least fancy that they approach art from the standpoint of ethnographic evidence. philosophers, on the other hand, are given professional leave to concoct purely imaginary thought experiments. Analysis in the mode of devised by Arthur Danto to test the question of whether an exotic tribe might have a completely different concept of art from ours. Could imagine a set of aesthetic values in another culture—its aesthetic sensibility or aesthetic universe—that is unavailable to our aesthetic perception, matter how hard we apply our mind to it? Might there exist in a foreign culture a whole genre of art that we could not directly perceive as such except being told by a cultural insider that it is art?

Danto asks us to imagine two African tribes who live out of contact with each other on either side of a mountain divide. Each of these imaginary tribes produces both pots and baskets that are, whichever tribe produces them, indistinguishable to our eyes. Yet despite the external similarity of the two tribes’ pots and baskets, there is all the difference world between them. In the culture of the Pot People, as one of the tribes is known, pots are rich with significance. God, in their cosmology, pot-maker, and pots for the