An approach to aesthetics

Philosophy of Art
1

No sooner is a definition of Art given than some artist will seek to undermine it, in the name of art. Obvious examples include Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” and Flarf poetry. It’s a commonplace that art defies definition, quite literally - it openly refuses to comply with the insistence of the philosopher.

Must we accept that any definition of art may be immediately undermined? Is there a definition for which this might not be so?

Talk of art is talk of some individual, some item, be it a pot, a painting, a play, or a piece of poetry or prose. The item is crafted. A waterfall may be beautiful, but it takes the intrusion of Capability Brown before it is considered art. Could even this be subverted? Laurence Weiner’s Words on Walls or Many Colored Objects Placed Side by Side to Form a Row of Many Colored Objects remain items. Tino Sehgal’s Project 29: This is so contemporary, “seems to revel in its own contradictions”, leaving no trace. No physical object remains. Yet since there is art-talk, it seems there need be something about which to talk.

That something’s being crafted will not suffice. There is a normative aspect here, as Stanley Cavell noted, in that it will not do just for us to consider the item to be artistic - we expect them to consider it artistic, too. Failure on their part shows a failure to somehow grasp what is before them, to see what has been shown. Calling the item “art” makes a demand on others.

And art is about talk; a story, a narrative or exposition that places the item into a context in our discourse. Being embedded in the actions of people, it is a part of the communal structure of our lives.

Consider the logic: If an item were offered as art without some story, then that becomes its story. Fountain became art with Duchamp paying the fee, adding “R. Mutt” and displayed the urinal obliquely - in short, by his adding to its story. Flarf becomes poetry by actively rejecting that which the usual narratives tell us makes a text poetic.

This is not a paradox, not Russell’s liar, painted into The Treachery of Images. It’s the opposite, a certainty; we might only doubt that the item is art by considering it as part of an artistic narrative. The act of doubt confirms that which was doubted.

Art takes on a dimension over and above the mere item that gives it a place in our discourse. None of this should be a surprise. Meaning is not found in definitions, but is enacted in the doing. These items count as art because of the part they play in our discourse about art.

Notice that this approach is extensional. It’s not reliant on notions of beauty or of the sublime, not dependent on private reactions or ineffable impressions. Art is a game we play, even if one occasionally makes an object for one’s own enjoyment - it at least might be shared.

Saturn still engages us, Yves Klein’s The Void, less so. There’s less to say about a white room containing an empty vitrine than there is about Goya’s visceral betrayal.

For Lyotard the sublime moment is exactly the breaking of the definition, our very inability to judge the item resolves the indecision in the affirmative. Yet that break in continuity is also a point of discourse, the disruption of the game is yet another move in the game, the next step.

If anything, seeing art as an ongoing game is far too permissive; more than asking what is art, we might be informed by asking what isn’t art.

The point here might be not to close off the criteria we use. We have here a grammar for aesthetics, a logical space in which art takes place, without the demarcation of an explicit definition.

And as with all art, this item that you are now reading is just more pretentious shite. Yet another aesthetic judgement.

2 Likes
2

Pretentious indeed, Banno. Your “item” spins alone, like Wittgenstein’s unmeshed gears, doing no work. Sure, meaning is enacted in the doing, art enacted in talking about art - and that gets us exactly nowhere, no progress is made. If anything can be art, then art is nothing. The cost of your grammar is the demise of art itself, it becomes no different to any other activity.

You would have us say that art is embedded in discourse, but so is betting on football results, so is celebrity gossip. You would replace beauty with sociology. And to top it all you seal your argument off from critique - even anti-art becomes art.

You’ve not progressed the discussion.

3

Nice. I can’t find anything to disagree with.

I briefly studied philosophy at university some years ago; aesthetics was my only real interest. One of my tutors once said, ‘Must we have a theory of art, and does it matter what people elevate or like?’ For me, the answer is no.

4

Thank you.

No doubt the Catechists will be along soon enough to set us right.

5

I was just now musing about the elephant in the room that quietly shuffles its feet at the back of any discussion about the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. This is the suspicion that it must be a discussion about theology, or a covert attempt to introduce religion or even :astonished_face: an attempt to convert.

Hence the reference.

As regard ‘theories of art’, I am bereft, although I did like Robert Hughes ‘The Shock of the New’ (which is no longer new.)

6

I thought I’d leave you all to it. Your return is the good work of St. Ignatius Loyola paying out its dividend.

Apparently Robert Hughes made headway outside of Dow Nunder and the Mother Land… pleasing; but is it the appeal of aristocratic tendencies? Definition always chases practice - the definition is for the critic, not for the artist. Attempts at definition fail because the practice is open-ended, with no necessary and sufficient conditions, no essence.

So if I am right, then we can’t be wrong simpliciter about what is or isn’t art. Even if it’s Thomas Kinkade.

There’s always more to say.

7

I’ve worked in the arts in various roles. There’s often an orthodoxy that seeks to set all values and rules. It doesn’t need to be religious to be a totalising autocracy. :winking_face_with_tongue:

8

Authority is an issue, but isn’t the only, or even the main, issue. Ellipsis is far more important, and how all this fits in with following a rule. Accepting some authority simplifies things, at the cost of choosing to abide by some rule. But this is to set the question aside, rather then to address it.

How will you carry on with “2,4,8,12…”? What you have already produced never tells you what comes next - will it be 16, or 14? Nothing so far determines the decision. The authority fills in the ellipsis retrospectively, then pretends that it will always be so. We need not be sceptical. It’s not that there is no answer, but that there are many. It’s not that anything will do, but that the tale grows in the telling - Tree and Leaf.

9

It was the dig about ‘the catechists’ I was referring to. They are ‘authorized volunteers, typically laypeople, who teach the Catholic faith to children in public schools’ - linked to my discussion of Aquinas.

10

Me, too. It’s aesthetics all the way down. It would be an error to think this thread was only about art.

There’a a way in which accepting this or that authority is a choice. If one finds an authority with which one is comfortable, things get easier.

11

I thought it was just a quip about those who enforce a particular view.

12

I’m afraid I have no idea what this is referring to.

13

Just more word games, Tom. To set up an essence is to set up a rule, but in the case of art it seems the rule can always be broken. A hand wave to Kripke and Wittgenstein and a nod to carrying the weight despite there not being a thread that runs through the whole rope.

1 Like
14

I understand the resistance to any “definition” of Art. I feel it myself. A definition narrows the scope of what encompasses, really, the entire human creative experience.

But - are we able to come up with a list of characteristics of what constitutes Art?

Most importantly, I think, it involves human creativity, generated by personal experience – and this creativity is not only an internal power, it is an impulse that seeks expression.

The jury is out as to what constitutes a “valid” expression of art. Is there a threshold of effort and skill required?

I am reminded of how John Lennon met Yoko Ono at her art show -

Here’s the story –

While there, Lennon, just 25 years old … saw the exorbitant price tags on the overly-simplistic, boringly inflammatory, or obfuscatingly conceptual art and mused to his companions “This is a con! What the hell is this?”

As he continued through the gallery, he came across a display set in darkness, on a raised white panel with a flood light set up to illuminate it. The display featured a standard-sized wooden ladder, with a magnifying glass hanging on a chain above it. On the ceiling was a piece of clear glass. Lennon climbed the ladder, grabbed the magnifier and moved it across the piece of clear glass until it found, in tiny letters handwritten in black ink, a single word: Yes.

Later, Lennon said that what he felt while looking at that tiny “Yes.” was relief. “It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say ‘no’ or ‘fuck you’ or something. It says ‘yes.’”

Did Lennon experience Art? He did have a reaction, but what would the skeptic say?

And while what Ono put together was clever, was it Art? Not all would say so.

I really don’t know.

15

Isn’t part of the issue that “‘art’ is said many ways,” analogously? For instance, saddle making and ship building were once considered paradigmatic arts, and still are in certain contexts. But we normally don’t say that our mechanic is doing “art” when they change our spark plugs. Hence, part of the vagueness seems to lie in equivocation.

Today, “art” variously refers to whatever is considered to be or presented as art by artists (those in a particular industry and cultural space, the “art world”), or more generally as a small subset of traditional arts (i.e., any skilled making or performing) whose value is primarily entertainment or decorative.

But some of the issues here only affect the narrower sense. Duchamp didn’t subvert the concept of skilled making, but rather the expectations of a particular cultural community with particular gatekeeping practices. That’s a much narrower and more historically contingent phenomenon.

For instance, one issue here is that the extreme mutability of “art” doesn’t seem to hold for all “arts,” taken in the broader sense, only for “art world.” What constitutes a good doctor of good mechanic is not vague or mutable in this way. And we might even say the same for a skilled painter.

The thing with the “art world” is that the art being practiced tends to be as much the skilled-making of meta-critique, stylized statements, etc. as the skilled-making of painting, sculpture, etc. In contemporary art museums, you will tend to see a mix of both sculpture that requires a great deal of technical proficiency and creativity, and pieces whose “art” consists almost entirely in contextual meta-commentary.

However, I’d argue that the meta-commentary and subversion is in a sense parasitic on the broader notion of art, because if art were wholly vague and had no end at all there would be nothing to subvert—no form to cannibalize to make the art into art.

To return to Duchamp: Duchamp’s gesture requires a stable target. The urinal only works as a provocation because there is already a relatively well-understood practice of making and displaying beautiful or meaningful objects against which it registers as a disruption. If “art” were entirely open and without criteria, the Fountain would be invisible; there would be no tension, joke, statement, etc. The subversion presupposes the thing being subverted.

Hence, I don’t think the subversive gesture is revealing art’s true nature as indefinable. In point of fact, the subversive gesture is only intelligible against a background of relatively stable criteria.

What is historically particular to the contemporary “art world” is that it has institutionalized meta-critique as a legitimate primary mode of praxis. That’s historically unusual. And in the long run, I think it might be exhausting. At a certain point, there is no form, no standards or intuitions, left to subvert. This is the problem of sheer potency being unable to actualize itself. It has to grasp on to any remaining form (which is maybe most obvious in shock value art).

But then there are multiple levels here. The skilled-making, the creation of the aesthetic/beautiful, and the institutional meta-commentary. The final level is posterior to the earlier ones, and depends upon them. Hence, I wouldn’t necessarily use it to define art per se, because it is the most derivative and historically contingent element of conceptions of art today. In a way, meta-commentary is more akin to comedy (which is of course an art), but comedy itself is highly dependent on prior factors. Some are more stable than others. Aristophanes is still funny millennia and cultures removed because there is long term stability, while other jokes are very niche or time-limited.

16

Good OP, and I largely agree. Have you read Arthur C. Danto? I have a few comments, relating back to Danto, but I won’t make them detailed if you’re already familiar with his (somewhat Hegelian) view of art, and how art must be understood as essentially non-physical.

17

Yes, he did do that, but I think there was an element of subversion as well. After all, the expectations you refer to were very much tied up with “skilled making” as a requirement for worthwhile art. Moreover, what gets made was supposed to be central too. Let’s not forget that the object Duchamp chose to aestheticize was not, say, a lovely spoon, but a urinal!

18

Of course, as noted in the last paragraph, the different levels are dependent on each other. But the higher level remains as the foil. For instance, I am not sure how the Fountain is supposed to subvert the idea that there can be good doctors versus quacks, or good mechanics versus ones who misdiagnose things, etc. It seems peculiar to the art world.

If the goal is beauty, surely there can be something beautiful about a subtle or illuminating criticism as well. There is a sort of skilled-making there as well.

19

What does one hope to achieve through an approach to aesthetics? What is the relationship between the approach and what is approached? Does the approach stand aside,beside, or between what is approached and those who approach?

20

Personally just to understand a little about how people have thought about it.

Seems to me this subject is primarily a case of establishing power over the discourse. Perhaps if you have control over the definition, you can control what counts as art and do what you want. This is why Hitler’s 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition remains a fascinating and salient lesson.