I keep circling back to a question I can’t quite settle.
If you take something ordinary — an object, an image, even a sentence — and present it as art, what has actually changed?
The material hasn’t. But the way we engage with it clearly has. We stop using it, and start interpreting it.
So where does the “art” actually sit?
In the object itself?
In the context it’s placed in?
In the intention behind it?
Or in the viewer doing the work of interpretation?
I’ve been thinking about this partly through a small project I’ve been working on — a series of very minimal comic panels built around quotes from artists and thinkers. The panels themselves are deliberately plain, almost interchangeable, but people seem to read quite different things into them depending on the framing and the name attached.
That’s made me wonder whether the “art” is doing anything at all — or whether it’s just triggering a kind of interpretive mode in the viewer.
If that’s the case, is the artwork:
something that contains meaning,
or something that activates meaning?
Curious how others here would approach this — especially whether you think there’s a meaningful distinction between those two.
(If anyone’s interested in the project I mentioned, it’s here: https://www.instagram.com/whatisart.comic/ — but I’m more interested in the question itself than feedback on that.)
If you frame some x, give it some kind of context to live in then there’s that relationship between x and the frame that can induce a major transformation. For example, say x = jackal. Anthropomorphize it a little bit and imagine it’s ancient Egypt (this is the frame) and we have Anubis, the Egyptian god of mummification/cemeteries/afterlife
agreed - context framing creates meaning, but this is reliant on the knowledge of the observer. If you don’t know about ancient egypt, or it’s religous icons, then it’s still just a dog - albeit one that walks on two legs.
if it’s meaning/message that gives art it’s value, and that meaning is created by the framing, but the interpretation of that framing is dependant on the viewer, isn’t all art created in the mind of the viewer?
can a work be art without a viewer interpreting it? is the artist’s intent and framing enough?
In casual conversation, calling jackals part of the dog family is perfectly reasonable. In a zoology class distinguishing species, you’d be more precise - again, this is down to context and framing - ideas of ‘correct’ or ‘precise enough’ are dependant on the context
That’s a noble sentiment and my post about the jackal-god Anubis captures the spirit of your project. A lowly jackal being elevated to membership in the pantheon of one of the oldest civilizations on earth. How big a transformation does one want?
About jackals, like dogs/wolves they do get rabies.
yes, but only in the minds of those who recognise the language of the framing. to those who know - it’s a god. but they have to know, see and recognise. i think art relies on viewer’s understanding the context/framing in order to appreciate it as art - it’s elevated from a banana to a critique of capitalism, perceived value and the art market.
the more obscure and abstracted the framing, the more polarised the views are on the work - imo.
These are specifics concerning your view of art. I may have seen this approach elsewhere (there are multiple, active threads on art in the forum); it was interesting enough for me to engage with it.
Since it’s an actual, real project, it’d be nice for other folks to share their insights with you.
I have my own thing going on with art; a little project of my own.
Art is open territory; you’re not going to be penalized for claiming/developing a piece of it. This, though, is only a consensus-based idea about art. I believe art is definable.
Things within one and the same domain can have different modes of existing. What changes when one particular thing becomes a work of art might be entirely social, but for other works it might be changes in their materials or forms, or a change in the individual artist’s or observer’s epiphany.
I think that if you are invited to see something aesthetically, then it counts as art. The question of what makes art “good” is a separate issue, and it is often confused with the first quesion.
For me, chasing definitions is not always productive, because what counts as art is a conversation a culture has with itself, and it is constantly evolving. But it looks like many people want to see art in essentialist terms.
We’re at liberty to redefine objects. For example “I” is the pronoun for the self, but in electricity “I” = current. In this case we’ve replaced the original referent with a new one. We can also add a new referent e.g. in homo homini lupus, “lupus” continues to refer to wolves but now also to how mean humans can be to each other.
Nothing about the thing which is framed as “art” changes when it is framed compared to when it wasn’t. When you erect a toilet onto a display and declare it “art,” the toilet’s aesthetic value, or the intrinsic meaning which one could derive from viewing a toilet normally, doesn’t change. The only way that one could possibly declare for such a thing to be art is if one defines art in the terms of postmodern drivel, such as “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” or “Make your own truth,” both of which I reject for reason that, if anything could constitute art if you so desired for it to be, you could consider dildos to be art, or cement blocks to be art, or anything else that, if we so declared it to be, therefore is “art.”
So if I were to respond to your initial question as to what “art” is, it is intrinsic to the initial design of the piece of art as being art as such, not merely from how it is received and perceived by later users.
Whether “framing” x, like with (), to give us (x) brings about change is an open question. For some x and (x) are identical but to others they are not.
The idea of redefining things is as old as the hills. For example “bug” meant insect but now it also means a code error or malfunctioning transistor. This linguistic move is controversial for obvious reasons but is not without supporters. An artistic analog appears in Metamorphosis where the human protagonist is slowly transforming into a cockroach/some unspecified species of insect. The question of identity bubbles up, for attention. It becomes important here to ask, is this really meaningful or is it a ridiculous story? Do I really need a man, holding a veena/sitar in my display or should I just go with the sitar/veena?
This is more or less correct, it seems to me, and addresses the question of the OP. The interesting issues come up around who the “you” and “I” are, when we try to fill out this formula. Who is qualified to do the inviting, and to whom can the invitation be addressed? Theories about the “artworld” are designed to address this. I would say that there is no essential quality that a work of art must have in itself, including being a physical object. What makes X art is its role in a certain community context – a context that is not always clear, of course.
The second part of the quote above is also important, because it addresses the objections many people have to non-essentialism in art. Just because X is art, that doesn’t mean you have to consider it good art. So those who are outraged by Duchamp or Cage are free to make the case that that they’re bad art, art that should not be taken seriously.
It raises it up above the mundane and makes it into a kind of religious icon. For a population that has no religion, this is a weird experience. I think that’s what the Campbell’s Soup can prints were about to some extent. In the midst of a phase, I took the wrapper off a bottle of fish food and stuck it in the wall as a piece of art.
Maybe part of that is a cultural backdrop where everything is a commodity. Everything including people are currency in a machine.
Art creates its own world. It invites the viewer to enter the world. When you enter the world created by a piece of art, the meaning emanates from the connection between you and the art, without which the connection, meaning cannot emerge.
