The cluster account of art: A historical dilemma

The cluster account, one of the best attempts at art classification, is guilty of ahistoricism. While cluster theorists may be happy to limit themselves to accounting for what is art now rather than how the term was understood in the past, they cannot ignore the fact that people now seem to apply different clusters when judging art from different times. This paper shows that allowing for this kind of historical relativity might be necessary to save the account, however, doing so might result in incorporating an essentially institutional component, or making the theory extremely complex and virtually impossible to use.