Scene, not herd : the evanescent underground

In his 1968 book Languages of Art, American philosopher Nelson Goodman carried out a characteristic 20th century philosophical move: he addressed a difficult question not by answering it, but by denying it was legitimate to ask. Since the ancient Greeks, philosophers had agonised over the question ‘what is art?’ Goodman threw a curveball at philosophical aesthetics by suggesting that a better question might be not what is art, but when. His reframing, even as minimally expressed as I have done here, represents a valuable ontological shift which gets us closer to the object of analysis.