The Trouble With (The Term) Art By Carolyn Dean

While reading “The Trouble with (the Term) Art,” written by Carolyn Dean in the summer of 2006, we are taken through an array of different scenarios that lead us to questions what art really is. Dean explores the idea that the word “art” is used far too often and too habitually, and that as we study the non-Western cultures we need to use much more discretion regarding what we call the different pieces of their culture. Throughout the essay, Dean supports her thesis that we too often categorize non-Western pieces as art by using different examples of how certain non-art pieces were deemed as art throughout the course of their history. Dean does this by using four key examples of how these ancient pieces are inappropriately called art to successfully support her thesis and avoid biases. In order to successfully follow through with the support of her thesis statement in her essay, I found four main categories of mistakes that many use to categorize non-art as art. The first argument Dean uses to support her thesis is the mistake of art by appropriation, that being categorizing different ancient pieces into the categories

Because Dean uses many different sources coming from people of many different professions, not just art historians, she successfully avoids any traces of biases throughout her essay. She shows how all different types of people, including archaeologists, anthropologists, and just an average person, often succumb to the use of these four different mistakes to incorrectly identify pieces as art. A bias is often formed when the argument is supported by only a small window of evidence, and in this essay, Dean successfully avoids that mistake, and there for creates an argument with no