Art is used in design and decorations of objects

The argument

One of art's purposes is functional: not to be contemplated apart from use but to beautify the objects that are used in life. Functional art for decoration and design takes something made for a practical end and makes it worth looking at as well, without the practical end being set aside. The range is wide, taking in ceramics, glassware, basketry, jewelry, metalware, furniture, textiles and clothing, categories defined by what the objects do rather than by any artistic intention, and which are decorated nonetheless. The case for treating this as a genuine purpose of art rather than a marginal application rests partly on its age. This purpose of art is among the oldest. Decoration of Japanese ceramics goes back to about 14,500 BCE, and a number of Mediterranean civilizations have also used art for decoration of ceramics. These are separate traditions arriving at the same practice, which suggests the impulse to decorate a useful object is not a local convention but something people do generally. Continuity reinforces the point. Decorative art did not belong to an early phase that later gave way to art proper; it continued to be used throughout history and until today. A practice that has persisted from prehistory to the present, across unconnected cultures and through every change in what art was otherwise taken to be, is not incidental to art but part of what art has always been for. If a purpose is this old, this widely arrived at and this continuous, it cannot be treated as a lesser use of something whose real work lies elsewhere. Art is used in the design and decoration of objects, and on this view that is one of the things art is for: art has a functional purpose.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Showing that art beautifies useful objects establishes that art can accompany a function, not that function is the purpose of art. The examples cut the other way as easily: a decorated vase is functional as a vessel, but its decoration is precisely the part that serves no utilitarian end — the aesthetic surplus added on top of a use the ornament does not perform. That surplus is what most theories of art point to as the point of art, with the object's utility incidental to it. The antiquity of the practice, from Japanese ceramics onward, shows only that people have long combined beauty with useful things; longevity of a use is not evidence that it is the purpose. The argument at most demonstrates that decoration is one purpose art can serve among several, which is compatible with expression, beauty, imitation or communication being primary and function being marginal. It does not show that art is functional in nature rather than aesthetic, so it under-determines the position it is meant to support.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That art beautifies useful objects shows art can accompany a function; the decoration is typically the non-utilitarian surplus on an object whose function the ornament itself does not serve. [Rejecting P2] The antiquity of decorative art establishes that the practice is old, not that function is the purpose of art rather than one use among several.