Stecker, Ch 5: What is Art?
- Goal: To find a set of criteria that distinguish art from non-art
- Perhaps by finding a set of necessary (required) and sufficient (guarantee)
conditions that make something an artwork
- Properties that all and only artworks have that make them artworks
- Why is it important to try to define art?
- Puzzling nature of avant-garde art (=AG art)
- Piles of dust and unmade beds exhibited in a gallery
- Puzzles and sometimes enrages critics and viewers
- Are these items art?
- Are they art merely because they are put forward by an artist and
placed in a setting like a gallery?
- Is this the institutional theory of art?
- Or is there something more substantial to being art?
- Could something be put forward in this way and not be art?
- AG art has progressively stripped away the traditional marks by
which we recognize something as art and expanded category of
objects that can get art status
- Artists themselves taken an interest in nature of art
- Much AG art seems explicitly aimed at trying to
undermine traditional definitions/conceptions of what
art is
- Examples
- Found art (unworked objects chosen by the artist that are often
ordinary artifacts, like bottle racks and bicycle wheels)
- E.g., Duchamp's ready mades
- Aleatoric art: where final product left to chance and artists
contribution is minimized
- Art w/o form: Lint strewn gallery floor
- Art that tries to eliminate aes properties
- Why are some things considered art and others, sometimes identical, not
- Some buildings are art, but not others
- Some paintings are art, but paintings on billboards are not
- Note: Wine, food, cigars and skillful entertainments typically not
considered art.
- We have several concepts of art
- Techne: any skilled activity and its products
- As when we call cooking and lots of other crafts art
- Art as referring only to visual arts ("art and music")
- Fine art: centrally includes five major arts of poetry, painting,
sculpture, music, and architecture
- 1800s notion
- Fine versus decorative art
- Fine versus popular or folk art
- Our concept of art today puts less weight on these distinctions
- Artist is not a genius set apart from normal humanity
- More democratic conception of art
- SUMMARY
- Functionalist classifications:
- Identify single valuable property or function of art that many artworks
share and claim this is the defining essence of art
- Functionalist accounts of art include
- Problem with functionalist accounts
- Rule out too many things as not art (too narrow)
- Hard time explaining bad art
- Trouble excluding many things that are not art (too broad)
- Usually lots of easy counterexamples to functionalist definitions
- Anti-essentialist (nondefinitional) classifications (no necessary and
sufficient conditions)
- Family resemblance (similarity to various paradigms, like similarities of family members)
- Cluster of properties (several groups of sufficient conditions)
- Prototypes: Rely on typical features of a kind determined by exemplars (examples pointed to in learning the concept) and a method of extending the concept to non-typical members
- Problems for anti-essentialist non-definitional views
- Don't say enough about the resemblance/similarities involved or explain atypical members
- Relational definitions (dominated last 30 years)
- Stecker on consensus in defining art
- Stecker's overall position
- Art is a vague concept (but so are many of our concepts)
- Def must capture this vagueness or be idealizations of actual concept
- Some fragmentation in our concept, but not serious fragmentation
- Art is not so uniform as to yield an essence and not so shot
through with inconsistency as to resist any attempt to make sense
of it.
END SUMMARY
- ART AS REPRESENTATION
- Plato and Aristotle thought that poetry like painting was a representation or
imitation of the world, including humans and their acts and had powerful
effect on emotions
- Representation looks outward and tries to "re-present" nature, society or the human form/action
- Example of representative art: Da Vinci's Last Supper
- Critique of art as representation in 19th century
- Romanticism, impressionism, and art for art's sake
- Challenge exclusive concern with representation
- Focus attention on expression of artist and experience of audience
- Photography challenged representative ideal in painting, if we understand it to
be getting an accurate life-like depiction of what one sees
- What else could be the goal of art as representation?
- Increasing prestige of purely instrumental music gives a clear
example of nonrepresentational art
- ART AS EXPRESSION
- If representation looks outward and tries to "re-present" nature, society or the
human form/action
- Expression looks inward to convey moods emotions or attitudes.
- Often when art forms lacks representation we find expressive art
- Instrumental music
- As visual arts move toward greater abstraction, they de-emphasize or
give up on representation for the sake of expression
- Expressivists argument: Can find art without representation but not without
expression and where both exist, the real business is expression
- Collingwood's proposal to define art as expression
- Art clarifies an emotion: identify the particular emotion one is feeling
as specifically as possible
- Job of the art medium is enable communication of emotion from artist to
audience who then have the same clarified emotion in their minds
(which is the work of art itself).
- Tolstoy, not Collingwood?
- Work of art exists primarily in minds of artists and audience rather than in the usual artistic media.
- Fisher's account of Collingwood expression theory
- Problems for expression theory
- Rule out genuine cases of art when the art was not produced as a way
of clarifying an emotion:
- Shakespeare's plays not art because they were not produced as a way to express genuine feeling (instead they are
entertainment)
- Why assume emotion expressed in a work is the artist's?
- Why assume that the emotion a work expresses must be the one felt
by the artist when creating the work?
- Must a composer of sad music be sad when she creates it?
- Current proponents of expression theory say works are expressive
because they possess expressive properties (being sad, joyful, etc.)
- Can perceive these properties in the work and their presence
does not require any particular type of creation.
- So nature can have expressive properties in this sense, not just
art
- FORMALISM (ART AS FORM)
- Art is all about form, rather than (representational) content
- Form is the organization of the artwork
- Relation of parts/elements to each other to make valuable? beautiful? whole
- Harmonious proportions
- E.g., formal elements of a painting include colors, line, shapes, patterns
- Fashionable during the period of "high modernism" 1880-1960
- Works of painters a paradigm and Cezanne in particular for formalists
like Clive Bell (1914) and Roger Fry (1956)
- They focused on formal features in Cezanne
- Cezanne's interest in the three-dimensional geometry of his
subjects that gave them "solidity" not found in impressionist
predecessors while "flattening" the planes of the pictorial
surface"
- Cezanne painting
- Used focus on form to understand increasingly abstract works of 20th
century modernism
- Form defines art, is what is valuable in art, and is what one needs to
understand to appreciate art
- Bell: Art is what has significant form and this is a kind of form that
produces an "aesthetic emotion" in those who perceive it; producing this
emotion is what is valuable
- Problems
- Everything has form in some sense
- Rules out possibility of bad art, since significant form always to be highly
valued.
- Picks out one property in virtue of which we value art and ignores
others at the cost of excluding may great works of art
- If art is significant form, then artist like Brueghel--whose paintings teem with
vast numbers of tiny human figures giving a rich sense of many
aspects of human life but lack significant form--are not producing art (much less valuable art)
- Brueghel painting
- AESTHETIC DEFINITIONS (ART AIMED TO PRODUCE AES EXP)
- A def of aesthetic exp: Experience valued for own sake that results from close attention to the sensuous features of an object or to an imaginary work it projects
- Last qualification for literature
- Aesthetic def of art: Define art in terms of aesthetic experiences
- Artwork is produced with intention to satisfy aes interest, or will provide aes exp under standard conditions
- All and only artworks are produced with intention to satisfy aes interest
- An umbrella def that includes aes exp of form, representation and expression
- Seems far preferable to above three definitions, as it is inclusive of them all and thus avoids the counterexamples resulting when one tries try to define art as doing only one of these three things
- Can have aes exp of form, representation and expression
- Problems with aes def
- Objection one: Some art objects aren't intended to convey aes exp
- So intending to convey aes exp is not necessary to be art
- For example, Dadaism (e.g., Duchamp), conceptual art and performance art
- Try to convey ideas seemingly stripped of aes interest
- Or at least not concerned primarily to creating a rich aes exp
- Duchamp's ready-made "are aimed at questioning the necessary connection between art and the aesthetic by selecting objects with little or no aesthetic interests (urinals, show shovels)"
- Duchamp: "Fact ready-mades regarded with same reverence as objects of art probably means I have failed to solve problem of trying to do away with art entirely"
- Get rid of art in the sense of something aesthetically positive, produced by an artist, that is unique, etc.
- Some performance art is based on the premise political ideas can be more effectively conveyed w/o the veneer of aesthetic interest
- Some conceptual works seem to forgo or sideline sensory embodiment entirely
- Assumption that aesthetic stuff must be embodied in sensory medium?
- A joke not an an aesthetic object as not sensory?
- Stecker is employing his restrictive sense of aesthetic (as distinct from artistic)
- The above "avant-garde" works of art may have artistic value, but not aesthetic value
- Artistic value (includes cognitive, political, and moral considerations, in addition to asethetic ones) and aesthetic (excludes moral, political, and ?cognitive considerations)
- Duchamp's fountain is more like a lecture than an art exhibit? More about ideas stripped of perceptual content?
Objection two: Some things intended to convey aes pleasing experiences are not art works
- Pervasiveness of aes outside art
- Non-art artifacts with some aesthetic interest
- Donut boxes, ceiling fans and toasters (even when not put forward as ready-mades)
- Reply to Stecker: artworks have significant aes interest distinct from mere aes interest of other artifacts
- Stecker reply: But this has trouble with above ready-mades as they don't provide significant aes interest
ANTI-ESSENTIALISM
- Rejects simple functionalisms, that is, any view that claims art can be defined in terms of a single function
- New artworks supply a constant source of counterexamples to simple functionalist definitions
- Family resemblance view of art
- Necessary and sufficient conditions for art don't exist
- Concepts are open textured, and art is such a concept
- Concepts like art involve a network of crisscrossing similarities based on multiple paradigms
- Like resembling features in a family, there is no one feature they all share in common
- One work is art as it has one set of similarities to other works and another is a work of art due to a different set of similarities
- Art is a cluster concept
- Several dif sets of properties and possession of any makes one art, but none are necessary
- Stecker criticism:
- Anit-essentialist views don't say enough about the resemblance/similarities involved or explain atypical members
- Thinks anti-essentialist classifications end up providing definitions when they are fully specified
DANTO AND DICKIE (Art defined in terms of "artworld")
- Both specify art in terms of a non-exhibited, relational property perhaps involving intention, use or origin
- Both rely in different ways on the "artworld" as what specifies art
- Danto: historical and functional (i.e., expressive?)
- Dickie: afunctional and institutional
- Arthur Danto
- Rick Lewis on Danto: "Danto has argued that what all works of art have in common is that they all relate in some way to an `artworld', to an accepted artistic theory, or to the history of art as a whole. So if someone puts a toilet in the middle of an art gallery and calls it art, then it is art if (and only if) it makes sense in the history of the development of art over the centuries."
- Note: On this account, the same item might be art at one point in history and not another
- E.g., a urinal might not have been art if been placed in a gallery and intended as art in 1850.
- Three features of Danto's account:
- One: Art and non-art can be perceptually indistinguishable and so can't differ due to "exhibited properties."
- Two: Artwork always exists in an art-historical context
- This relates a given piece of art to the history of art
- Provides art with "an atmosphere of artistic theory" on which the artwork depends for existence
- How would this view handle "first art"?
- Three: Nothing is an artwork w/o an interpretation that constitutes it as such
- All artworks are about something and express artist's attitude about that thing
- Interpretation tell us about these things
- Noel Carroll's interpretation of Danto: X is art if and only if:
- Has a subject
- Stecker criticizes Danto on this point: says music and architecture and some abstract painting are not about anything
- About which X projects an attitude or point of view
- Requires audience participation to fill in what is missing (i.e.., interpretation)
- Required audience response
- Something is not an artwork if never been an audience for it?
- Where both work and interpretation require an art historical context.
- Danto's artworld consists in historically related works, styles and theories
- Stecker says it's the last condition--that the work and interpretation stand in historical relation to other artworks--that is different here (otherwise its basically an expression theory)
George Dickie
- Dickie's artworld is an institution
- An institution that exists to confer an official status on an object as art, even if done via informal procedures
- An institution that is geared to production of a class of artifacts and to their presentation to a public
- Two defs of art:
- One: An artwork is an artifact (some of whose aspects) that has had conferred on it (them) the status of candidate for appreciation by someone acting on behalf of the artworld
- Note status conferred is not status of being art
- Dickie seems to imply that artists alone confer this status (but it might be more plausible to think that museum directors, critics, gallery owners do this as well)
- Being an artwork consists in having a status conferred on it by someone with the authority to do this
- Dickie rejects this definition later
- Two: Work of art is artifact created to be presented to the artworld public, a public prepared to understand the object (to some degree)
- So status of being art is not conferred by some agent's authority, but comes from a work being related in the right way to the artworld (artist and art world public)
- So if the public can't at all understand a creation of an artist, it is not an art object?
- Stecker's problems with Dickie's definitions:
- 1st def: Conferral of status of candidate for appreciation occurs outside the artworld (official tourist brochure for a place or advertising)
- 2nd def: Artifact production and presentation systems outside the artworld (any time a product is produced for consumers)
- Only way Dickie has of distinguishing these from the same thing with art is to say this happens in context of artworld, but this is circular.
- Dickie seems unable to explain what makes something part of artworld
HISTORICAL APPROACHES
- We can define the artwork historically:
- E.g., something is art if it is related in the right way to historical paradigms of art, say, the fine arts of the 18th century
- Problem: Excludes non-western art?
- Something is a work of art because of relations it has to earlier artworks
- And the earliest artworks (first art) must be specified in a different way (perhaps functionally--e.g., expressing, representing, presented for aesthetic interest)
- Stephen Davies: Something is art it it is related to the earliest artworks ("first art") in the right way and these earliest instances of art are defined functionally (as having the aim of aesthetic interest)
- Now that there are art institutions to confer art status, these aesthetic aims are no longer necessary
- Levinson's "intentional historical" def: "Artwork is a thing seriously intended to be regarded as a work of art (meaning in the way previous artworks were correctly regarded)"
- How does one get change in art?
- Stecker's counterexamples:
- Duchamp tried to transform a Woolworth Building into a ready-made, but failed though he "seriously intended it to be regarded as a work of art"
- A forger of a Rembrandt self-portrait may seriously intend his work to be regarded as an artwork, but that doesn't mean he is creating another one
- **Vessel created only for holding water and unintentionally became a remarkably beautiful pot (has many aesthetic qualities)
HISTORICAL FUNCTIONALISM (Stecker's view)
- Stecker: Art is defined in terms of historically evolving functions
- Though still referring to artistic intentions (How?)
- Does not define art of one time in terms of a relation to art of earlier time
- Artforms and functions evolve over time
- But at any given time, art has a set of functions, to be identified by the central artforms at that time
- Objects that don't belong to central artforms, can be art, if meet a higher standard
- Says almost anything can be art
- Def: Item is art (at a given time)
- if it is in one of central artforms at that time (and intentionally made to fulfil a function of art at that time)
- Central artforms are ones treated in certain ways by artworld
- or if it achieves excellence in fulfilling a function of art at that time
- Problem: A pill that makes you have a great aes exp is not art, but fulfills a central function of art in our time
- Stecker replies, not an aes exp unless comes from attention to an actual aes object
- ***Some genuine functions of art Stecker mentions (in addition to rep, express, and form)
- Provide aes exp
- To move an audience
- To enlighten an audience
- To powerfully question the nature of art
- Note: I believe Stecker would say the last two are not "aesthetic" but "artistic" functions/values of art
STECKER ON CONSENSUS ON DEFINING ART
- Institution, intention, functional accounts are in some ways very similar
- All agree that
- Art must be defined historically
- Definition involves a number of different sufficient conditions (This would make you art or this other thing would make you art)
- But not necessary conditions that together are sufficient (you must be this way and this way and this way to be art and only if you are each are you art)
- Separate an understanding of what art is from question of why it is valuable
- Some functional accounts (Bell's formalism and Collingwood's expressionism) show why art is valuable at the same time explaining what it is
- No one value or function essential to art; no essence to art (anti-essentialism)
- Stecker rejects the skeptics
- They think art can't be defined and one is wasting one's time trying to
- Perhaps because the concept of art is so fragmented there is no one thing to define anymore (the no single concept view)
- Artworld is so fragmented no common conception about what is art
- What is art will be relative to different artworlds
- Stecker rejects this relativism, claiming that all adequate conceptions/definitions of art will be "roughly in the same ballpark"
- Stecker thinks (105) there are criteria that a good conception (account) of art must satisfy
- Stecker's overall position
- Art is a vague concept (but so are many of our concepts)
- Def must capture this vagueness or be idealizations of actual concept
- Some fragmentation in our concept, but not serious fragmentation
- Art is not so uniform as to yield an essence and not so shot through with inconsistency as to resist any attempt to make sense of it.
- Miscellaneous (ignore)
- Kant's two aesthetic arts
- Aesthetic arts are arts of representation where the feeling of pleasure is what is immediately in view
- Two aesthetic arts
- Agreeable art (entertainment): end is pleasurable sensation
- Fine art:
- In contrast to pleasure in agreeable art, pleasure afforded by representation in fine art is one of reflection (arises from exercise of imaginative and cognitive powers)
- It makes more demand on the intellect and offers deeper satisfactions
- Mode of representation that is intrinsically final (appreciated for own sake) and advances a the culture of mental powers in the interest of social communication (essential connection with communication)
