The Art in Contemporary Scholarship: A Narrative Review

Abstract

Art constitutes a polymorphous object of inquiry that contemporary scholarship examines from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including economics and markets, arts management and cultural policy, philosophy and aesthetics, education, and therapeutic and arts-based practice. This narrative review synthesizes a corpus of forty-one unique scholarly records with abstracts exported from the Web of Science. The corpus was screened to remove false-positive records in which “ART” referred to antiretroviral therapy or adaptive random testing, records lacking abstract text, and one duplicated entry. The resulting corpus is organized into seven thematic streams: art markets and the economics of art; arts management, cultural policy, and philanthropy; art theory and the definitional question; digital, computational, and AI art; art education, audiences, and measurement; art therapy and arts-based practice; and art history, criticism, and institutional mediation. Across these streams, four recurring tensions emerge: definition versus market legitimation, art for art’s sake versus art for society, human versus machine creativity, and aesthetic distance versus participatory engagement. The review also identifies several persistent gaps, particularly the limited dialogue between economic and market-oriented research and aesthetic and definitional scholarship, the unresolved conceptual and institutional status of machine-generated art, the scarcity of comparative and longitudinal research designs, and the prevalence of single-region or single-institution case studies. The review concludes that a more integrated research agenda is needed to understand art simultaneously as an economic good, a cultural institution, a conceptual category, and a mode of practical and experiential engagement.