>>2992465So, despite being a physical thing, the frame's objective presence (with all its experiential or sensory effects) is subsumed by the abstract function it serves as a sign that delimits meaning, circumscribes context. (It's outgrowth into the institutional "frame" perfectly shadows the disciplinary divisions of academia.) This is the basic "postmodern" critique of modern art in the 20th century. (A critique which was moreover impelled by the appearance of photography--photography transformed "Art" in a historically-significant way twice: first with its emergence in the late 19th century, and with its institutional legitimization as a commercially and ideologically valuable "art form" in the 1970s--also as an aside, this is why it's cancerous to put white frames around your photos when posting them online like isi does). As an "epistemological operation," "art" thus comprises the artwork and its frame (now understood more broadly as the contextual conditions of its appearance). In so far as the relationship between these two elements witnesses a formal reflexivity (i.e. each aspect exerts an influence over the other) that is contingent and specific, it cannot be reduced to a linguistic "closed concept."
To recapitulate the basic point, the meaning or definition of "art" cannot be disentangled or distinguished from the real-world conditions that sustain its representational function, and as such any attempt to fix its universal definition is naive and foolish.
