I got a "That comment was too long" for the first time so I'll split it in 2.

1/2

First I'd like to say I enjoy communicating with you even if it seems like I'd disagreeing or being obtuse or combative. It's much easier to write about what I disagree with than what I agree with, besides "I agree" or "I get it" so the disagreeing portion is naturally longer.

> What it means, that things become very complex to the point when sciences still can't take over the discourse and philosophy needs to fill the gap.

> ...

> But in any case, what I'm trying to say, sciences try to answer the question "what is art", it just happens that people are not content with the existing answers, and different scientific approaches to the question do not add up into a theory of art.

I understand now, thanks. Although it appears we're much, much closer to solving this than ethics (especially meta-ethics), metaphysics and the hard problem of consciousness. It's solvable even if it's not solved. Are the other 3 examples even solvable? Who knows. We may never get a scientific answer for meta-ethics. Even if we "solve" physics, the underlying questions like "but why are these equations the way they are" or "is there anything besides our universe" or "are we in a simulation" may never have a satisfying answer from science. Even if we map the brain and understand it like we understand a Hello World! program, we may never have a satisfactory answer to what qualia are. There are many other examples of topics likely-unsolvable by science that are studied by philosophers. OTOH, there are many things that will likely take decades with or without AI until they get solved - lots of questions in biology (incl. neuroscience and psychology), in physics and in math. But we don't say "philosophy of $unanswered_problem" for many such problems that are almost surely going to be solved this century. Anyway, that was a question I turned into a small rant as I often see "philosophy of $relatively_easy_problem", not just "art" and get very confused about why it's still in the philosophical realm.

> I like the idea that art is based on the contradiction between form and content (and a kind of a cognitive dissonance triggered by it

Maybe "art" isn't 1 thing but many things. Take music as it's one type of "art" I consume the most. Maybe some of it is "entertainment" or "a way to focus", not "art". But I feel very different things when listening to soft rock or trance or glitchy electronic music ("IDM" which a lot of people dislike as a term) or rap or techno or metal or whatever. I imagine most people who listen to different genres do so for different reasons. They do so when they're in a different mood or when they want to get into a different mood. Some tracks I can listen carefully to 100s of times. Others I play as background noise and rarely focus on them. A lot of them can serve both purposes. Yada yada, you hopefully get the point I'm trying to make.

> The sculpture touched you, it triggered your emotions and thoughts. This is the goal of a modern artist. Their goal not to annoy, but to trigger emotions. I laugh at such things, you become angry, we are both influenced by art.

I get that, too. But a lot people might elicit laughter or anger from us that we'd have a hard time categorizing as art. Maybe someone broke a bench. A case of simple vandalism? You may laugh at the person who felt it necessary to destroy property, I might get angry about it. 30 Wordpress addons bought and turned into malware? Same reaction (although I laugh about this, too). We might witness someone kill someone else over a few bucks. Those were most likely not intended as art. So are they art if you laugh but I get annoyed?

The philosophers might argue further. I say it doesn't matter - "art" is ill-defined to begin with and we could never hope to say whether something is art definitively. Even a chair is not well-defined as I could sit on a rock and call it a chair, you may disagree. Yet we don't have "philosophy of chairs". We discuss the broad idea if what kind of definitions we can have and what properties they have in metaphysics and in other fields related to semantics. I haven't read much about this as it's obvious that there's no universal or definitive "chair" we can agree on. But I at least understand such broad fields, such as those that deal with what a definition is, what properties does it have an so on. But no with specific ones like "art" or "chair".

> You remember the caged rocks, so they are not like the others, the artist succeeded.

I literally saw them 2 days ago. There were other BS "art" installations/sculptures but the dumbest one IMHO were the rocks. I guess if someone had deliberately lumped several hundred people's shit in the middle of the park, I would remember that more. Future artists - people don't put a pile of shit in the middle of the park. A note with "imagine a ton of shit here" would be funnier.

> The sculpture touched you, it triggered your emotions and thoughts. This is the goal of a modern artist. Their goal not to annoy, but to trigger emotions. I laugh at such things, you become angry, we are both influenced by art.

If that's the goal, then it's relatively easy to achieve it, isn't it? What wouldn't trigger emotions if it was big enough? If I saw (rolls a mental dice) a blue Santa with GPUs for ears, wearing Geordi's VISOR sitting in a bathtub made of scrap electronics, I'd get annoyed. You might smirk like "wtf...?!" and so on.