110 Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 3, No. 3, December 2006 DICKIE’S INSTITUTIONAL THEORY AND THE “OPENNESS” OF THE CONCEPT OF ART ALEXANDRE ERLER LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFORD In this paper, I will look at the relationship between Weitz’s claim that art is an “open” concept and Dickie’s institutional theory of art, in its most recent form. Dickie’s theory has been extensively discussed, and often criticized, in the literature on aesthetics, yet it has rarely been observed – to my knowledge at least – that the fact that his theory actually incorporates, at least to some extent, Weitz’s claim about the “openness” of the concept of art, precisely accounts for what I take to be the main flaws in the theory. In what follows I present arguments for that claim, looking briefly at the position of both authors with respect to the concept of art, then showing how they relate to each other, and what implications this has for Dickie’s institutional theory, and more generally for the traditional project of characterising art. Let me begin with a brief reminder of Weitz’s argument against definitions of art, as it appears in his famous essay “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” (Weitz, 1956). It is a well-known fact that a great number of philosophers, since the time of Plato up to our own day, have attempted to give a “correct” enunciation of the nature of art. They have notably maintained that art consists for example in “significant form” (Bell and Fry’s Formalism), or in the communication of emotion through some sensuous public medium (Emotionalism), or in the clarification and externalization of a certain kind of “intuition” (Croce’s and Collingwood’s Intuitionism), to give but a few examples. Yet Weitz thought that such attempts at capturing the nature of art were all fundamentally flawed. First of all, it seems that one can always find a counterexample to any such proposed definition of art. But furthermore, Weitz said, such definitions simply cannot but fail to achieve their aim, because of the very nature of the concept of art. “Art”, he argued, is an open concept – that is, it is possible to extend its meaning in unpredictable and even unimaginable ways, in order to apply it to new entities that were not formerly included under that concept. For that reason, no set of necessary and sufficient