MARGOLIS—The Definition of Art

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

---

[137]

Part Two

The Definition of Art

...

The trouble with any effort to fix the basic category-term, "work of art," is that it will depend on what counts as an aesthetic point of view.

But
what counts as an aesthetic point of view cannot itself be decided by some simple inspection of actual usage.

Philosophers seem to decide,
more than to find,
what the boundaries of aesthetic interest are
...

Furthermore,...
the "aesthetic" tends to ignore the distinction of art as such—whatever we may choose to feature in speaking of art:

even its history as a specialized term has only an uncertain linkage,
systematically,
with the nature and appreciation of art.

To make the definition of "art" depend on how we specify the meaning of "aesthetic,"
then,
is inevitably to invite a measure of conceptual disorder.

So then let's define them independently of each other
??
:^/


Danto and friends insist that art no longer has anything necessarily to do with the "aesthetic," and perhaps never did
;

but
they cannot show that people do not proceed aesthetic-ally any-way
;

or,
they can show only that there are some people around who do not proceed this way,
while some others clearly do.


Taking Danto's bait (and inverting his peripeteia),
let's define as "aesthetic"
any view per which
Danto's indiscernibles
are
well and truly indiscernible.

Any such view is thereby stipulated to be "aesthetic,"
no matter its other corollaries.

One kind of "aesthete," then,
is simply a consequentialist
who prefers the consequences
of the aesthetic view
to those of the conceptual view.

The further this kind of aesthete is privileged
to observe the Consequences of Conceptualism,
the further their mere consequentialism hardens
into a bedrock morality.

And
it is surprisingly easy for them
to avoid
learning anything about Indiscernible Objects
that would crack the aesthetic edifice.

This aestheticism is not difficult.

What is difficult? Mastering the principles and codes of extra-aesthetic discernment.

(Pardon me for deciding. How much finding entitles a man to make his own decisions?)

[138]

... It has been argued, for instance, that works of art exhibit only "family resemblances" or "strands of similarities" but not essential and distinctive properties common to all admitted instances.

The question is a vexed one,
because it is not entirely clear
what sort of initial restrictions
may properly be placed
on the collection of things
for which this claim, or the counterclaim,
could be confirmed.

i.e.
If the whole problem
is that we lack
a Definition of Art
from the start,
then
we cannot exclude (or include) anything
from (in) the family;

and then,
ranging freely,
we will always be able to find
(we will eventually be found by)
some instance in the collection
which is totally "related"
but does not in the least
resemble.

Hence, if no restriction is allowed, it would seem trivially true that no definition of the required sort could be put forward,...

And
if an initial restriction is allowed,
will it be
a logical or an empirical matter
that a definition of the required sort cannot be found?

The question at stake is not, specifically,
the definition of art
but
the eligibility of the effort to define art.

...

Still, if "work of art" is a basic category-term, its importance probably is to be located elsewhere than in the presumed effort to discover its essential conditions (which may, nevertheless, remain legitimate). ...

Morris Weitz's Matchette Prize essay (1955) ... represents a turning point in aesthetic theory precisely by raising a "meta-aesthetic" question. But as with so many parallel efforts in other fields, it proves to be extremely difficult to separate sharply "object"-level questions and "meta"-level questions,...

... The nature of Weitz's demurrer is rather less obvious than may at first appear.

Weitz seems to press the point that

if it is to be provided,
a definition of art
should identify
what is
really essential to it,

what its necessary and sufficient conditions are.

Apparently, a definition can be provided "for a special purpose," but this, Weitz believes, is not the same thing.

Well, reading closely and shooting from the hip . . . Weitz's term "honorific definition" suggests quite specifically and un-demurly just what the "special purpose" of certain writers has been: to "honor" their own experience of art, not to define some collective experience. That is the really pernicious thing about the hunt for a definition: self-dealers can always find one! Self-dealing is a special purpose which readily reveals effective strategies for its own achievement. It is all but instinctual, or perhaps it is literally that.

Of course we probably should have some "purpose" in life; and, following the "instincts" again, maybe it is actually impossible not to have purpose, in some sense or other, even if this intensifies our existential dread rather than resolving it. By all means, discover your purpose, the one that (probably) you have had all along but had never stopped to consider and/or could not articulate explicitly. As Becker says, bringing tacit purposes to consciousness is both hazardous and necessary. Self-dealing will almost certainly turn up among them! But then you know! And then you can . . . revise your Aesthetic Theory accordingly.
; ^ )

[139]

... Are there any definitions
that do not serve a special purpose?

Good
question.

...is it the case that serviceable definitions must, and must be supposed to, capture the real essence of what they characterize?

I haven't the slightest clue what a real essence might be, but on the surface, yes, this does seem rather important!

It is in fact a feature of the more recent, changed reception of definitional requests (for instance, in the account provided by Hilary Putnam) that we may characterize the distinctive traits or conditions of art without pretending to fix its essence

I'm revisiting this interlude mostly in the interest of completeness; the above is really NOT what I want to be occupied with right now!

What is distinctive? This seems like every bit the vexed   question as any other posed here, because here too there is a certain absoluteness about the request. To hold otherwise, again, after one set of absolute criteria (necessary and sufficient) has already been abandoned by the side of the road would seem to really beg the question. (And, it's clear that much of the bitterest disputation in Aesthetics follows from precisely this inability to agree upon the "distinctiveness" of various aspects of art from various aspects of literally everything else in life and experience.)

To settle on a definition without fixing the essence seems merely to pass the buck. What am I missing here? Technical usage? Intraprofessional subtext?

[without pretending to fix its essence] or without insisting that empirical definitions be addressed to real essences.

I don't know what empirical definitions are. Definitions arrived at via direct experience? More likely he means: arrived at via "empirical inquiry" or "empirical investigation," which is (to this layperson) a deceptive euphemism and seems really to refer to the pooling of "experience" at scale, among myriad specialist investigators, in order to check their work. I call it a "deceptive euphemism," then, because these "empirical definitions" are not actually available "empirically" to laypersons, nor even (perhaps excepting some very basic physical science) to individual researchers; the nonspecialists of the world just have to learn that if some pool of "empirical" authority dictates to us, e.g., that in the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white, then we should (must) believe exactly what they say. I suppose this is how we end up with the fruit/fruit salad joke about tomatoes? The "empirical" work of plant scientists and that of chefs lands on different "definitions." This is frustrating, yes; but I have to admit, I'm not sure what "essence" a tomato could have apart from named and discrete human endeavors; and since the tomato is implicated (more or less happily!) in several such endeavors, then even in that sense it still has no single essence. This breaches (finally) the limits of my Antihumanism! And of my Eliminativism! It aligns me with Danto on certain issues. But now, leave this blog immediately and navigate to any boutique grocery or garden site: learn there for yourself that "tomato" does, also, seem to be very much the "open concept"! So, in the end, Weitz's demurrer does appear to me rather more obvious than it does to Our Man here. Given our respective credentials this seems like bad news for me. But that's the point of the exercise.

...Arthur Danto's paper "The Artworld" (1964).

...Danto does not disqualify definitions but rather shows why it is that ... the inventive possibilities oblige us to keep adjusting...

He hints at a difference
between
physical nature and human culture
and
he introduces,
without development,
what he calls the "'is' of artistic identification."

...we may suggest, here, ... that definitions may serve only to fix ... the normal or central instances.

...definitions fix only the nominal, not the real, essences of things;...

It is entirely possible, therefore, that works of art that are somewhat deviant relative to the standard cases can be admitted as works of art
and
can be admitted to have properties quite different from those focused by our definition, without contradiction at all.

Well sure, if that's how we choose to define definition.

But what use could mere nominations such as these possibly have if we already know (purportedly) what is normal?

It is only when such discrepancies begin to take on a systematic importance that earlier serviceable definitions will have to give way:

Right . . . because mere normative thinking cannot be of use systematically.

Dare I say: art is not systematic, but analytic philosophy is! (Or it is supposed to be.)

... This explains in a sense the tolerance that is possible in speaking of driftwood, readymades, l'art trouvé,...

Not at all! There's not actually very much tolerance of Duchampianism in this world. Duchampianism is not merely somewhat deviant from Aestheticism, it's full-stop anathema. Something else is going on here. Something else is going on with us, the subjects, if not also (actually) with the objects. I think Danto is going to win that part of the argument. I'm more interested in unpacking my own gut feeling that this Duchampish behavior . . . shouldn't be tolerated! (Well okay, it should be tolerated under the rubric of "free expression," but only in the sense that we tolerate someone throwing his ice cream cone against the wall if he is a toddler but not if he is an adult; and further, just as "No one considers a plane crash as 'anecdotal'" (Taleb), an adult who throws his ice cream even one single time, even in an obviously anomolous turn of events, this adult's peers shouldn't ignore or forget what happened, and they won't in any case.)

... The definitions of empirical terms in the sciences are intended to facilitate discourse that is primarily explanatory (in the causal sense) and predictive.

I need to better understand exactly what these two terms mean in the sciences! It seems that in common parlance an "explanation" is merely a half-narrowed-down "prediction": the less is known at the outset, the greater number of candidate "explanations" may be spun (and only later falsified). A "prediction" also can be just a blind stab; it can rank far below a bonafide "explanation"; but the idea here, "in the sciences," seems to be that a "definition" forms only after the empirical work has settled on a bankable "prediction." The resulting definition is then characterized as a predict-ive one only after the so-called "prediction" is no longer really a prediction at all: we begin to be able to "predict" things when we have seen them unfold exactly the same way, over and over, in a sufficiently well-controlled setting. (N.B. No "social" or "cultural" setting is anywhere near this well-controlled! N.N.B.B. Any "large-sample theory" is a theory which can only apply to . . . large samples!)

Where art is concerned, no such constraints obtain,

[***collective gasp***]

though there is a clear sense in which definitions must be brought into fair agreement with the

[140]

general sorts of theories and activities that characterize our aesthetic concern with the arts themselves.

One could only hope! Care to say exactly what all of those might be?
:^/

I myself am burdened with myriad concerns, a dozen or so pet theories, and a small handful of chronic actvities, most of them centered on some form of art, and the rest living in the "open concept" borderlands, which we can safely include here without contradiction at all. I've never quite felt the need, just to get through the day, to posit a definition which agrees with any of them. Maybe I need to think more about that? I had already decided I was fortunate not to feel the need!

The lack of definition, even of coherent usage, I feel more acutely regarding such terms as, say, to "understand a piece of music," on which point Dad himself once told me, the first time I pressed the matter, that there is in fact no agreement. On the other hand, I think we can all agree that this non-concept has in fact taken on a systematic importance among precisely this cohort of aesthetic concerners.

The concession,
it may be admitted,
points as well to the possible vacuity of definitional disputes.

Or the likely vacuity!

(No, my Theory of Likely Vacuity is not based on a "large sample," not quite; but let's just say that recent expanded sampling efforts have thus far turned up only confirmation.)

But,
more important,
it signifies a refinement
in the theory of definition
and
a sense of
the function and validity
of particular definitions of art.

i.e.
They are
functional and valid
only
normatively
and
nominally?

...

...Danto, in ... "The End of Art" (1984), has usefully collected the historically unfolding record of the art tradition in a way that confirms the conceptual puzzle of what we take ourselves to be doing in defining art—...

Still,
what we should understand by the definitional question
remains for others to examine
(for instance, Robert Matthews, 1979),

particularly if
there is no final or essential theoretical discovery
about the nature of art
(see for instance Francis Sparshott, 1982).

Matthews, "Traditional Aesthetics Defended," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XXXVIII

I can't find Sparshott in the bibliography to Part 2. His The Theory of the Arts was purportedly published in 1982.

Nelson Goodman (1977) has, for reasons rather different from Danto's, eschewed the definition of art.

In speaking of the "symptoms" of art as opposed to its "defining properties," however, he does actually consider a set of disjunctively necessary and conjunctively sufficient conditions that tempt us—against his demurrer—to view his thesis as definitional.

These are linked
to
symbolic functioning;
to
features of symbols,
to
features symbolized,
and to
functioning at least by way of exemplification.

One may perhaps say that, effectively, Goodman favors a functional essentialism with regard to art rather than a substantive essentialism—...

...if he were to concede that much, artworks might be shown not to exhibit the salient

[141]

symbolic functions he favors and yet remain significant artworks for all that, Goodman might well be obliged to curb considerably his semiotic orientation, both in general and in detail.

There is a typo or run-on somewhere in here, with or without my excisions.

The theory that works of art are symbols or symbolic forms is perennially of interest, of course.

Goodman introduces a particularly subtle version of it,... But in doing so, he obliges us to consider once again how minimal the basis may be on which to construe an object as functioning symbolically ...

The key to Goodman's entire theory of art rests with the concept of exemplification.

Granted that
to exemplify is to symbolize;

the question remains
whether
in possessing whatever properties it does possess
(non-symbolic properties),
a work of art
must be said
to refer to or symbolize
any or all such properties.

Goodman's account, therefore, suggests a possible asymmetry between validating and invalidating definitions of art
or,

more informally,
characterizations of what serves as strong (or even decisive) evidence of the presence of art. ...

... Instead of challenging what is normally thought to be a defining property of art, namely, being an artifact, [Jack] Glickman [(1976)] attempts to show that being an artifact does not entail having been made by anyone. ...

...his claim that "particulars are made, types created" draws us on to the profound ontological problem of how a work of art can be a particular and combine concrete and abstract properties...

...the so-called "institutional" theory of art advanced by George Dickie (1969)...

There is no question that some sense of the institutional or societal complexities of art is essential to our theorizing.

But Dickie's thesis has puzzled his readers primarily because,

as [Ted] Cohen [1973] very clearly shows,

we cannot sort out satisfactorily
whether
the prior achievements
of some putative artwork

are marked as such
by a knowledgeable clientele

or
whether some (somehow) authorized public body
fixes the pertinent properties
of a would-be artwork
by
selecting some artifact for artwork

[142]

status.

...

Cohen's own emphasis rests chiefly with
the performative feature of Dickie's defining conditions:

both
with respect to "conferring"
(in Dickie's account)
a status
that must already obtain
before
the would-be enabling act itself

and
with respect to the difficulty of supposing
that relevant conferring moves
need be (or can be)
directly linked
with what Dickie has in mind
in speaking of appreciation. ...