There is often no consensus on whether something is an artwork or not. Nevertheless, people often judge whether an item qualifies as artwork. Here, laypeople’s views on artworks and the impact of these views on judgments were investigated.

The term artwork cannot be generally defined. However, it can be approached from different perspectives (in our study, we included reception-aesthetic intentionalism, production-aesthetic intentionalism, historicism, essentialism, institutionalism and functionalism).

To investigate laypeople’s opinions on the term artwork, 100 laypeople were asked how important the six perspectives are to decide whether an item is an artwork. Out of the six possible attributes (i.e., equal distribution would result in 16.7%), reception-aesthetic intentionalism (26.4%) and production-aesthetic intentionalism (19.8%) received the highest values. All other perspectives were below the equal distribution value.

Consecutively, the same laypeople were presented with images of 50 selected items and asked, whether it is an artwork or not (binary decision).

People who valued reception-aesthetic intentionalism highest were more likely to categorize certain items as artworks than those who did not value reception-aesthetic intentionalism. Examples for those items are Spiderman comics by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, and the movie “2001 – A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick. The same was true for production-aesthetic intentionalism. Here, examples are an indigenous rain dance and the art installation “Irrational Geometrics” by Pascal Dombis. Overall, laypeople consider intentions as the most important aspect of artworks and, furthermore, their individual view on the term artwork influences personal categorization of objects as artworks.