Book: The Problem of Art

Overview
Nicola Abbagnano's The Problem of Art analyzes the nature, purpose, and conditions of artistic activity through a rigorous philosophical lens. Rooted in his existential-positivist orientation, the book challenges metaphysical and romantic accounts of art, seeking instead to clarify what art is by examining its structures, functions, and relations to human life. Abbagnano treats artistic creation as an intentional, historically situated practice that demands both conceptual analysis and attention to lived experience.

Core questions
The central questions concern what distinguishes art from other human practices, how artistic objects acquire meaning and value, and what role the artist plays in shaping cultural forms. Abbagnano interrogates traditional binaries, subjective versus objective, form versus content, beauty versus truth, and reframes them as problems requiring empirical and conceptual investigation rather than appeals to absolute ideals. He asks how aesthetic judgment is possible and what grounds claims about artistic merit.

Artistic creation and the artist
Artistic creation is presented as a human undertaking that combines technique, imagination, and decision. Rather than portraying the artist as a solitary genius inspired by mystical forces, Abbagnano emphasizes the artist's freedom within constraints: historical inheritances, material possibilities, and communicative aims. The creative act is both a response to given conditions and an inventive re-shaping of them, a mediation between individual intentionality and collective cultural forms.

Form, content, and expression
A central theme is the interplay of form and content. Abbagnano argues that form is not merely decorative but constitutive of meaning: the way an artwork is made shapes what it means and how it is received. Expression is analyzed as neither purely subjective feeling nor mere external sign; it is an intentional structuring of experience that makes aspects of reality salient. Beauty and aesthetic value emerge from this dynamic rather than from fixed, transcendental properties.

Aesthetic experience and judgment
Aesthetic experience is described as a distinct mode of engagement that combines perception, reflection, and emotional attunement. Abbagnano examines how judgments about artworks are formed, stressing the role of shared criteria, historical knowledge, and communicative norms. He rejects purely relativistic readings while acknowledging that standards evolve; critical evaluation depends on interpretive frameworks that are public and revisable rather than private and absolute.

Historical and social dimensions
Art is inseparable from its historical and social contexts. Abbagnano traces how genres, styles, and artistic problems change in response to wider cultural transformations and technological developments. He highlights the way societies assign functions to art, ritual, cognitive, moral, or critical, and how those functions shape artistic practices. Modern crises in representation and the avant-garde are treated as expressions of shifting conditions rather than as isolated aesthetic revolutions.

Relation to truth and knowledge
The work explores the tension between art and knowledge, questioning simplistic equations of art with truth or mere illusion. Abbagnano suggests that art can disclose aspects of reality and human existence that elude scientific description, yet it does so through modes of presentation that are particular to aesthetic media. Art's cognitive contribution is therefore distinctive: it offers perspectives and possibilities rather than propositional truths.

Legacy and significance
By combining analytic clarity with existential sensitivity, Abbagnano offers a model of aesthetics attentive to both conceptual rigor and human practice. The Problem of Art influenced subsequent debates in Italian and European aesthetics by steering attention toward the practical conditions of artistic life and the public character of aesthetic judgment. The book remains a resource for anyone seeking a non-idealist, philosophically disciplined account of what art is and what it does.