Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)
[59]
2
Art and expression
Part I
Art as expression
The expression theory of art
For centuries, representation was taken to be the central, defining feature of art. ... broadly, the emphasis in imitation theories of art was on
the outward aspects of things—
the look
of objects and
the actions
of humans.
In a loose sense ... the objective features of the "external" world— ...
nature and observable behavior.
But, in the West, as
the eighteenth century
dissolved into
the nineteenth,
ambitious artists
... began
to turn inward;
... less preoccupied with ... appearance ... than with ... their own
subjective experiences.
... landscapes [e.g.] were charged with
a significance beyond their physical properties.
... artists ... attempted to
register their reactions
—the way they felt—
about the landscapes. ...
... Romanticism places premier value on
the self and its own individual experiences.
... some outward scene ... is not presented for its own sake, but as a stimulus for the poet to
examine his or her own emotional responses to it.
[60]
...
... We still live in the shadows of Romanticism. ... Many twentieth-century art movements ...
can be seen
as direct descendants of Romanticism.
Should
these
movements
be seen as
such?
Moreover, ... these developments ... employing distortion and abstraction for expressive purposes ... made ever more evident the inadequacies of imitation and representational theories of art.
. . . but presumably this didn't happen right away. I think Danto has a point there. The initial reaction, and the final reaction of many people until their final death-reaction, is simply to resist expansion of the "concept," as we might say in Anal. Phil. terms.
Danto can always be counted on to make many good points, but he usually manages to draw precisely the wrong conclusions from them. If "it was impossible to accept" Postimpressionism, at first, "as art unless inept art," then this does not at all suggest that "terrain is constituted artistic in virtue of artistic theories." What it suggests, in fact, is that theories and concepts are the last to adapt themselves to a new reality.
If so, then Our Man Here has an even bigger problem than Danto: What does this say about any "analysis" of "our" concepts and practices? Are we analyzing yesterday's newspaper hoping to find out what is happening today?
... these experiments ... also encouraged people to
take a second look at the historical record,
where interested parties saw that Romanticism and its vicissitudes were not something altogether new ...
" . . . now if only I could find EXACTLY what I'M looking for . . . "
Of course the second look at history also is an effort to register reactions, though it is almost never understood as such. Everyone's "reaction" to their own ideology is the same: "I cannot possibly be alone." (Ambiguity intended and hereby noted/emphasized.)
Were not Shakespeare's sonnets expressive?
You're supposed to tell us, dude.
Thus, art both new ... and old called for a new kind of comprehensive theory, ...
Representational theories of art treat the work of the artist as akin to that of the scientist. Both, so to speak, are involved in
describing the external world.
But by the nineteenth century, any comparison between the scientist and the artist was bound to make the artist look like a poor relation in terms of
making discoveries
about the world ...
Obvious but worthy point here. Who knows if it's true in this case. It is something that happens.
This seems to me a better example of nineteenth century baggage that we still carry with us, if we must insist on viewing things that way. Really though, it's a timeless human problem. Science envy is just a tiny token of the broader type: invidious comparison; presumably you never needed to be an artist specifically (or a Romantic) in order to feel it intensely. (See: Eric Hoffer on scribes.)
Obviously (I hope it is obvious to Our Man) you don't have to be an artist to practice in some domain which shares an axis of comparison with science. As Rank/Becker suggest, you just need to be trying "to earn a feeling of primary value." Everyone is trying to do that. Everyone has an "immortality project." Hence everyone has some vulnerability to comparison, and almost everyone has, yes, some natural enemies in the form of people whose "projects" seem to consist of countervailing, dissonant, or just empty objectives. We're all running the same race but riding in slightly different vehicles. Just as crucially, some of us "try" harder than others.
Rank of course understands artists to be trying unusually hard at a very peculiar project, yet they (I guess I have to say "we") are of very similar bearing to "popular leader[s]" and "founder[s] of a religion. In other words, our bearing (my term here, for lack of a better one) has almost everything in common with these others, although our "practices" per se seemingly have much less overlap. By then, already the reductionists are circling, the anti-reductionist holists are lurking behind them, and the speed-reading literalists have already lost interest, because it seems as if this remark paints the figure of the artist as merely a politician in disguise (and vice versa); but I think this is not Rank's point at all. In fact his point, I believe, is precisely to show just how thoroughgoing a psychological convergence can be without being predictive of the content of a person's eventual "project." Obviously this immediately calls the very enterprises of Artist Psychology and Sociology into question; it suggests that those enterprises are not looking at the right data for their purposes, perhaps because that data cannot be glimpsed at all, and/or perhaps because it just is not psychological or sociological in nature. So, you can see exactly why Rank has been almost completely ignored. Hopefully you also can see a bit deeper into the concept of invidious comparison, beyond all the presently popular meme-platitudes and therapeutic doublethink.
The linchpin for moral philosophy here is "value." What do you value? Here is the most infamous axis of cultural divergence. Invidious comparison is just a fact of life; it's not going away any time soon. What is variable? Value systems and ideologies are always in flux.
e.g. To start to bring Our Man's example of Romantic "science"-envy up to date with current events: Science certainly had a moment in 2020-22. It has had a time. "Pro-science" and "anti-science" entered the lexicon of Red-Blue culture warring. We could shoehorn this into a retracing of "nineteenth century" origins, but I don't see the point in that. In its place: Becker's entire upshot is to admonish us to analyze our own "project," to become aware of what we are doing to earn our feelings of primary value, so that we might do less evil, if not more good. To that end, I say as nicely as I can that the "pro-science" contingent, however well-intentioned, has been completely bereft of Rankian-Beckerian understanding when it comes to their own missionary zeal. Added to this: because the "anti-science" stance marks an absence rather than a presence, it does not actually disclose its positive commitments quite as easily as it seems to. As Becker says, we need enemies so badly that we'll invent some if we can't find any; obviously there is some of that here, but nor is an enemy quite like a text to be read as the negative reflection of some positive commitment. So, if I dare say so, one side remains much more in the dark about its invented enemies than the other does about theirs; and not surprisingly, this is also the side which shares among themselves a self-created, self-exacerbated problem of invidious comparison, borne precisely of a temporary circumstance which coaxed out of them an unusually intense comparison-borne-of-identification. It's all enough to inspire a desire, but not quite an ability, to believe in the Christian God, for as Becker says, "the perfect God is abstract." That is the crucial point. If you come to identify with something godlike, if you identify with it intensely enough and are wide awake to its godliness, then probably you can accept that there is no comparison because you and it just are not comparable. Invidiousness is then warded off, but without simply taking all possibility of "earning primary value" with it, wherever it has been banished to. That really is a brilliant solution to the existential riddle. (And yes, it really is great marketing, truly the marketing GOAT.) Too bad the existence of an invisible, supernatural God is so thoroughly implausible! That really is a terrible kluge to introduce, in terms of the broader idea; and of course, this is how the idea was introduced, because it's the only way to market the idea to normies. To actually feel yourself in the presence of godliness while listening to Bach or Coltrane, to believe in what you're hearing as if it were the voice of the Christian god, but without believing in spiritualism or transcendence, and without doing evil to all the people who "believe" (sort of) in Schubert or David Bowie, requires . . . something peculiar. You have to be slightly gullible without being stupid. I suspect that if you are a hardheaded realist of average intelligence, you may enjoy the music as much as anyone but will have great trouble believing in it. (Yes bandmates, I'm looking at (some of) you.) But if you really do believe that something earthly and seemingly trivial, say art writ large, really is itself plenty expansive and profound enough so as to permit of no comparison at all between little old you and everything that has already happened before you arrived, if you really do feel that kind of reverence in your bones, then that is for all intents and purposes an eminently workable riddle-solution.
I understand why this sounds absurd on the surface, but I fail to see why it should not be the case. The only quality of the object that matters is its abstractness. The rest does not matter, not even its very reality. The reason is simple: it is the quality of commitment that is decisive. To recruit a platitude in service of this point: Commitment is a you question. If you are "gullible" enough to feel divine reverence for something concrete, if something concrete begins to look "abstract" to you, then perhaps you have discovered a commitment. I assume it is best not to shop around too casually or too interestedly. Probably we have to discover something that has always been there without being actualized: the "authentic self" or the "daimon" or whatever. And we have culture to give us at least few different options. Conventionally, we "choose" from among these, but I'm not convinced that this conventional usage is accurate. I tend to think, actually, that it is a gainful inversion.
People who declare this kind of "secular religion" to be inviable quite literally speak for themselves with this declaration. Of course it may be impossible for them, because they lack either or both of the value-system and the personality. That is really what they are saying. Or, perhaps the reality is that situations are determinative and cognitions fall into line, later; perhaps more people than we think are simply unlucky enough to avoid running headlong into a "religion" that suits them. Perhaps most people are just unlucky rather than insincere. In either case, I take it for granted that we have empirically confirmed-and-confirmable cases of extreme sincerity. We don't even need cognitivism to define or identify it, and it's probably better that way. Sincerity is real. It's a behavior as well as cognition. We all just have a hard time, no matter our gestalt, really believing that others' individual experiences and emotional responses could be so vastly different from ours . . . which is why we would do better (we would do devout-er) to ignore those things and confine ourselves instead to consideration of things like physical properties, observable behavior, the external world, etc., etc.
Know the observable. Worship the abstract.
(No, value-systems per se are not formed rationally. Go full Nietzsche here. It's okay. Do it. This says nothing about what people need. It remains to be shown that human beings actually can both live well and live non-judgmentally. Can we live without values? Can we live without shared values? Perhaps only if we are Revolutionary Cognitivists who define values cognitively: stop thinking of value and value goes away. If we are behavior(al)ists with regard to values, then values can change but they cannot just go away. Cognition (our own, never others') enters as the tool we use to observe, to evaluate what we are observing, and to seek intersubjective verification. e.g. (Embellished but not made-up.) Imagine some employee, someone occupying an infinitesimal economic niche, who has landed their ostensible "dream job" but rarely shows up. They could reasonably be suspected of valuing the job less than whatever it is they are doing during these absences. We could arrogate to reason our way, by ostension, to the conclusion that this person needs the job more than most people need theirs, since even one other job coming open in their field would be something of a miracle. In reality, though, they are chronically absent. So, perhaps we just don't have access to the explanation, not ostensively at least. Perhaps if you just ask someone in this situation to tell you the reason for their actions, they will have an answer at the ready, and perhaps these words will turn out to be no answer at all. Perhaps, then, our initial observation just is all the answer there is. Period. Of course this is not what very many people mean by "value-system" . . . but the effort to say anything more specific necessarily involves epistemic kluges of the worst kind. Perhaps the employee is depressed or an alcoholic. Those are not values. Calling them values is monstrously uncivilized, no? This person needs help. But if they seem always to be in unusually good spirits and never once smell of alcohol, then these hypotheses are all but ruled out. Perhaps it's more difficult to diagnose depression than mere absenteeism, but both have behavioral symptoms. It's not that you can't see depression, although that is a popular belief; it's more that you don't recognize it. I wonder if this sort of diagnostic task has not advanced more precipitously on account of more precise measurement and more powerful perceptual aids than it ever has or could on account of the various efforts to coax patients into revealing the relevant cognitions? What say the cognitivists and the empaths to the advent of technology for diagnosing changes in health by changes in the sound of the voice? Given our purportedly miraculous powers of spectral discrimination and empathic insight, why haven't we been doing this the whole time using the naked ear? If Helmholtz could learn everything that he learned, in his time, with his instruments, why did it take so long for us to learn this? Perhaps we could learn to do it with the naked ear, if we allow the computer to train us. This, purportedly, has already happened in Chess, it has sort of happened in Scrabble too, and there is talk, as I write this, that it is happening in basketball and football. But if this is what we are doing, it seems we are not exactly learning to listen to our intuitive empathic responses; rather, we are learning a discrete material practice that can be investigated empirically so as to converge upon single solutions to single sub-problems. We're observing behavior, but with a cultivated eye and ear; and we had to invent a machine, a computer, to train us, because a human being who cannot even discover such things certainly cannot teach others to do them. We had to be told what to look for, simply because most of what we see is not that. Our social wiring is not just a lens, it is also a blindfold. But anyone who can see and most people who can hear will be able to say, with near-perfect accuracy, who came to work yesterday and who didn't. That is far short of establishing your employees' "value-systems" in the conventional sense, it is true. I am suggesting that the problem here is precisely with those conventions, not with the example.)
... social pressure for art to come up with some vocation that both distinguished itself from science and, at the same time, made art equal in stature ... The notion that art specialized in the expression of the emotions ...
rendered unto science its own
... while
saving something comparably important
for art to do to
—explore the inner world of feeling. ...
[61]
... From a purely intellectual point of view, representational theories of art were due to be retired; ... Moreover, in situating art in the same league as science, they made art seem prime for obsolescence. ...
... At root, all expression theories maintain that something is art only if it expresses emotions. "Expression" comes from a Latin word which means
"pressing outward"—
as one squeezes the juice out of a grape.
What expression theories claim is that art is essentially involved in bringing feelings to the surface,
bringing them outward where they can be perceived
...
... one kind of theory, popularized by Leo Tolstoy, thinks of expression as
a form of communication.
It's so
popular,
actually, that
it probably didn't need
Leo's
help.
... what marks art is that it is primarily concerned with the expression or the communication of emotion. ...
... Basic to the idea of a transmission is the concept of a transfer. ... An artist
looks at a landscape
and
feels gloomy.
Then she
draws the landscape
in such a way that
the viewer experiences the same sense
of gloominess. ...
...
[62]
In the film Amistad, Steven Spielberg expresses his outrage at the institution of slavery. That is, he makes something that enables the film audience to feel the same kind of outrage toward slavery that he feels.
This too would be great marketing if only value-systems were not so fickle. People love to feel the same kind of outrage as their heroes; Becker all but says that a hero just is someone who feels the same outrage about the same issues as you do. Unfortunately for all concerned, though, there turn out to be be many shades of emotion, and, more importantly, there turn out to be no heroes who can express very much of how they really feel and still remain heroes to all of their charges. So, if we want to have any heroes left at all, we need less "expression," not more.
Less said, the better.
More art, the better.
Ergo, . . .
...
Here, we have three necessary conditions for art—an artist, an audience and a shared feeling state. But clearly this is not enough ... Suppose I am very dejected; I've just lost my job. I am weeping, my shoulders are hunched ... You see me and ... catch some of my sadness. Suppose you start to think about losing your own job— ... I have not created an artwork, have I?
No, and at least one reason for saying this is that by weeping I don't
intend
to make an artwork, ... I don't care what you feel. ... [But] When an artist expresses her feelings, she does it intentionally. ... She wants to get her feelings out in the open where everyone, including herself, can contemplate them.
We've missed a golden opportunity here to deploy the masculine pronoun for reasons of political correctness.
: - [
...
But what of greetings cards? ... Such cards express emotions. But they are very generic emotions. ... we hesitate to call them works of art ... Why?
... The Romantics placed a high value on the articulation of
individual
experience. ... So let us add to our list of necessary conditions ... individualized emotion that the artist experienced.
This is still not yet an adequate definition ... Suppose that a painter receives an eviction notice ...
[63]
... He takes a can of red paint and splatters it on the wall, cursing profusely ... Imagine that we are infected with the painter's ire ...
... The expression theorist ... typically tries to explain ... that there is a distinction between the artistic expression of an emotion and the mere ventilation of an emotion. ...
An artist
examines
her emotions; it is not simply that she is
possessed by
them. ...
Typically, an artist begins a work ... with an insistent, but nevertheless vague feeling. ... She works on it, bringing it into clearer focus. ... externalizing it by experimenting ... with different ways of expressing it. "do they feel right?" or "do they get the emotion exactly right?" This process
clarifies the emotion for the artist
at the same time that the emotion
inspires and informs the artist's choices.
Okay. What about Galenson's "Young Geniuses," the ones who "find" rather than "seek?" What about the conceptualist process as against the experimentalist one? Is anything (can anything be) clarified that way?
... The artist is doing what we all do when we ask ourselves what we really feel about something.
If only we all did this.
If only we could stop using art for this, so that we could go back to experiencing it.
The first few sentences that we utter may be vague ... But we keep revising them, striving to be more accurate ... What color is my emotion? Is it jagged or smooth?
Good one.
...
...
[64]
... if she has been successful, she will have
captured her feeling precisely
and enabled viewers, listeners, or readers
to do likewise.
...
...
Of course, ... each of us experiences our emotion where we live. Yet, what is shared is the same clarified emotion-type. ... art, on this view, ... affords the opportunity to experience, if not always new emotions, at least emotions more elaborated, articulate and precise than we ordinarily do. ...
to reflect upon emotional possibilities.
...
... it is at least conceivable that one could get clear on one's emotional state simply by thinking about it. ... clarified but not externalized. ... This would appear to violate our ordinary understanding of art which regards an artwork as
a public affair.
It would also seem inconsistent with
the notion of expression
...
the idea of
something "inside"
being
brought "outside."
...
...
[65]
...
...
the expression theorist does not say that
[all of this]
...
must proceed by means of music, literature, drama
...
because this
...
presupposes that we have a way of picking out
artforms
prior to defining the notion of
art.
...
...
...
We might call this version
[so far enumerated]
...
"the transmission theory"
because it requires
...
that the clarified emotion be communicated
...
Another version of the expression theory could be obtained by dropping this requirement,
...
call this
the "solo expression theory
of art,"
...
...
Romanticism called our attention to
...
the fact that an artwork embodies the artist's attitudes, feelings, emotions, and/or point of view toward his subject.
Hmm.
If I cut a lemon in half, does the halved lemon
embody
these things of mine,
these things that I
hold
toward
it?
You would indeed have to know my intentions in order to find any of this in either half of the lemon, for the diversity of commonly-given reasons for lemon-cutting is a wide enough diversity (perhaps just barely) so as to confound any attempt to "read" my intentions
(feelings, emotions, . . .)
off the surface of the lemon, as it were; all the same now that the surface area of the lemon has been sizably expanded.
But if you
do
know my intentions, and if you did
not
read them off the lemon halves, then at that point nothing need be embodied in some object in order to be
communicated;
rather, it seems
already
to have been communicated . . . somehow.
And if I then decide (realize?) that cutting the lemon has become unnecessary, since you and I are on the same page about my
point of view
towards it, etc., and if I indeed do not cut it, what are you then to think? That I failed to fulfil my intention? That I am indecisive? Angst-ridden? In most of the rest of life you would be far better served to presume that (1) my ostensible intention was in fact something less than that; and/or (2) that you were overconfident in your own knowledge claim vis-a-vis my intentions; and,
if
(2), then (3) there are numerous possible explanations for the manifest unreliability of the claim.
I make no assumption (not here, not yet) that for you to be "better served" is for you to be "in the right." I mean only exactly what I say.
(I just realized that there is not a full discussion, or much of a discussion at all, of intention(alism) in this book. Because there is no Intentionalist Theory of Art? That sucks! There sort of
is
such a theory, perhaps several versions of it. Surely it could have been worked in here? Or would it be too unpleasant for the present author to submit it to the analytic treatment?)
...
once Romanticism
[66]
called attention to
the subjective dimension of its own creations, people were
able to see past art as
possessing these features as well.
This is the best ambiguous statement I've read in quite a while! And there is another one here, coming much later, that is also pretty good.
...
after Romanticism, people could see retrospectively that
...
[art]works
came
inscribed with
points of view and
evinced
attitudes, feelings and emotions
toward
their subjects.
...
the expression theory
...
does as good, if not a better, job of tracking pre-Romantic art.
Its approach to music,
for example, seems nowise as strained as imitation and representational theories
...
Speaking of even pure orchestral music as expressive of feeling seems correct, whereas speaking of it generally in terms of representation appears almost silly.
Well . . . doesn't a
representation
also have to be
(ahem)
"pressed
outward"?
If
Why, if all that expression hinges on is intent, individuality, and pressing-out, cannot our representations too be served
fresh
squeezed?
Perhaps you can serve the grape juice to
people
but you cannot make them drink?
Perhaps the greatest
appreciators
of good grape juice are not (quite) speaking metaphorically when they refer to a subpar glass of it as
cough syrup?
Just in terms of comprehensiveness, expression theories are superior to rival[s]
...
But
...
[they]
also
suggest an important role
for art,
...
If science explores the outer world of nature and human behavior, art
...
explores the subjective world of feeling.
...
the expression theory of art not only explains what makes something art
...
it also explains
why art is important to us.
Cleary this is a synopsis of a particular theorist or group of theorists. I haven't dug into any of that yet. Whoever this "theory" belongs to, it's already quite clearly an unanalytic, incoherent, borderline dissociative theory. The latest equivocation is this thesis of
exploration.
The way that
science explores the outer world
is of course rather unique, so unique in fact that it struggles most of all precisely with
the subjective world of feeling.
Presumably, from my perspective, say, literally everyone else's "insides" are "outside" of me, and thus seemingly amenable to "scientific exploration;" but this turns out, for pragmatic reasons, to be all but impossible, and what little work
has
been pragmatically operationalizable does not have a good record of "scientific" productivity. So, if we are divvying up disciplinary turf, we have a bitter turf war from the very start, and somebody's Beckerian immortality project (and they themselves) will eventually have to pay the price. i.e. If the reason
why art is important to us
depends on defending art's "inside" turf against the encroachment of science, then our project is a false one, others will soon be onto this, and once they are, we are
"as good as dead."
Something of the obverse problem arises looking in the other direction: The difficulty of doing good science
at all,
i.e. the sheer
delicacy
of empirical investigation, even with rocks, to say nothing of feelings, this delicacy is a robust characteristic of the discipline that is the gold standard for "exploration"
per se.
So, though science is not all of what matters in culture, though it need not be the model for everyone and everything, nonetheless it's unavoidable to think, once science
per se
does indeed exist, that constructing artifacts and displaying them prominently is a singularly
in-delicate
way of finding out anything about anyone or anything. If we have already decided to construct-and-display, then we have already decided against scientific "exploration." And/or, if we have already decided to "explore" the "subjective inside," come what will, we may perhaps recall the time before science, when, if this is what we really needed to know, then construction-and-display is mostly what we did; not in Romantic terms, certainly; but indeed I'm willing to assume, to an extent, that Our Man is correct to say that the present Expression Theory had and has some
retroactive
punch, at least in terms of what people
thought
they were doing and seeing.
(Because to some extent, this
just is
what human beings always
think
they are doing and seeing.)
So, the effort to ride science's coattails without going over to its side just isn't going to work. We cannot define our ambitions in
its
terms and expect that we can avoid any truck at all with its methods and paradigms. (This seems too obvious to need saying, in the present context at least, but perhaps it is worth saying it anyway, in generous consideration of all those human "contexts" wherein the same broad dynamic is willfully ignored. Far too often we
give someone our permission to make us feel inferior.
(Here
is a purported investigation of the famous quote, of what reliability I cannot say.))
Without making the mistake of thinking that Our Man believes this theory
himself
(clearly not), or that myriad exponents of
Romanticism
did
not
really believe it, it's fair to wonder nonetheless if the definition-driven approach is a workable way to structure an introductory text. I'm not sure what's tougher for the teacher to handle: A student who swallows every sentence whole, and is then flabbergasted at the eventual refutation? Or a student who can refute each theory, sentence-by-sentence, without thinking very hard? Those are hardly the only two possibilities, certainly, but I wonder if they are not the two most likely? (You get 1 of the second kind for every 9 of the first kind?) I wouldn't know. I do know that I'd be terrified to assign and teach from this text! Evidently I would enjoy writing papers on/against it, though, and perhaps that is everything that any teacher could wish for.
...
Objections to the expression theory of art
The expression theory of art has exerted a great influence.
...
When
...
an artist is said to lack a voice of his own, the odds are that the complaint can be traced back to an implicit assumption that the expression theory of art is correct.
...
Don't sell us Formalists short here.
Cannot the Formal too
lack a voice?
The transmission theory
...
something is an artwork only if it is an intended transmission
...
the solo expression theory, denies that instilling the
[67]
relevant emotion in audiences is required.
...
[So, is]
intending to make a work for an audience
...
a necessary condition for art status
[?]
...
Reputedly, Franz Kafka and Emily Dickinson did not want their work disseminated publicly.
Nota bene!
...
Doesn't it seem arbitrary to say that it is not an artwork just because I do not intend to exhibit it to anyone else?
...
the picture unexhibited is the same as the picture exhibited.
...
If I
showed it to others,
they would
say "that's art."
...
...
if
[a poet]
shreds
[a poem]
immediately, he certainly appears to intend that no one else shall see it—
...
But, appearances not withstanding, the poet's activity in writing the poem may still—at least in one sense—indicate an intention to communicate to others.
" . . . If a student submits a thesis advocating for the abolishment of universities, he certainly appears to intend that no one should go to college. But, appearances notwithstanding, the scholar's activity in submitting the thesis may still—in one sense at least—indicate an intention to earn a degree."
...
By adopting a publicly accessible medium, the poet shows an intention to communicate,
...
He has made something designed for an audience.
...
Both Kafka and Dickinson wrote works that audiences could have (and do) comprehend,
...
Here the poet's actions, so to say, speak louder than his words.
...
by employing a natural language he makes something designed for public consumption.
Perhaps this
argument from public accessibility
is not available against Absolute Musicians and Abstract Painters . . . although it is not needed there if the work is prominently exhibited rather than immediately destroyed.
The now-infamous Society for Private Musical Performances is, as always, a far more complex proposition than it has been given credit for, whatever it was or was not
intended
to achieve. What would it be to make art for
private
consumption,
so to speak? It's hard to say affirmatively everything that might go into this or come out of it, but perhaps we can say what it is not: it not (quite) a
transmission theory
and not (quite) a
solo expression theory;
and one reason it evinces neither one nor the other is that the variable "accessibility" of medium and materials has been neutered and an "institutional" procedure
(formal-ism now, not just form-ism)
instated in its place. Insofar as public-accessibility-of-medium might otherwise be thought, consequentialistically, as above, to determine the very intent, content, and meaning of the work, the Content Creators themselves, so to speak, can get out ahead of any (or at least some) potential confusion to that end. It's the reverse of a captive audience, the reverse of spewy "transmissions" fighting to be heard over all the others, and somehow also the reverse of shredding your poem as soon as it has been written.
Remind me again just why this is
not
in fact how we have decided to do things? (Or, whenever we
have
tried to do things this way, liberals and populists cry foul, though there are liberal and populist outcomes available here that, so far, haven't been achieved otherwise than by sheerest accident.
Why?)
...
[68]
...
...
perhaps this may be enough to save the audience condition of the transmission theory
...
Furthermore, this seems to be an eminently sound addition to the theory anyway, since artists usually make works
only intended
in principle
for audiences,
without necessarily
having any
particular
existing audiences in mind.
Would we include
Mass Artists
in this most-group, Professor?
Opening the Pandora's Box of
intent
here creates more immediate difficulties than it resolves. I think the "intents" of the arch modernist and the arch populist may in fact be same; or at least what might be called the
uber-intent
is the same:
as many people as possible should experience (consume) the work.
Perhaps that part actually is
(usually)
the same.
How could
that
be? What
is different?
(Something must be.)
It is this: The two
claim to know
different things about their work and their audience, and they form divergent
expectations
(inferences, predictions)
based on this. i.e. Perhaps the modernist, if he has two feet on the ground and half a brain, does not
expect
his work to gain a mass hearing, but to say he does not
intend
this is not quite right either.
If so, then we cannot really say that the modernist and populist
intents
are different, at least not in the sense under consideration above, and not if
actions
indeed
speak louder than words.
...
you may object, what if the poet, in order to thwart even the possibility of an audience, writes in a way that is completely inaccessible publicly—in an idiolect
...
utterly of his own invention
...
?
Might that be an artwork, one that shows that the audience condition is not universal?
Here we are again, neck-deep in calculated didacticism . . . and here I am, taking the bait, again.
Obviously there is an equivocation here between two senses of "accessible," and it is made possible by the choice of example (poetry). The suggestion above is that an
idiolect
is not "publicly accessible" in the way that a locally-prevailing
natural language
is. But in this latest suggestion, also, the
immediate shredding
counterfactual seems to have been abandoned; the poem has been allowed to live, and, ostensibly, to
have a life.
But that
just is
"public accessibility," no? If you are an Absolute Musician or an Abstract Painter, and if you are not a poet (this time you cannot
also
be a poet, for it would compromise the aforementioned values),
then this
is the form of accessibility that matters; perhaps it is the
only
kind that exists; and even if not, it is precisely the kind of accessibility that the shredding counterfactual implicates. The accessibility of language is something else entirely. That's the equivocation; a merely calculated and didactic one, we can only hope; and if so, then we have already caught a wave and can retire to the cantina anytime.
Most artworks and artists are neither Absolute nor Abstract, but those who are are closer to the
existential
truth of artistic creation, the truth that Rank sought to reveal and Becker to elaborate. Here on earth, at least, abstraction
per se
makes for a small reduction in exploitable ambiguity. It is a
very
small delta, yes, but it is
nonnegligible,
and in this domain,
every little bit counts.
What is this purported "existential truth" of which I dare to speak so confidently? It is something like the old adage, already encountered above, that "actions speak louder than words."
What do I mean by this? Surely I mean something much more specific than the saying conventionally denotes.
Try this: If the very water of ostensive norms that one swims in is such that artworks
per se
are made and consumed for all of the reasons Rank thinks they are, then to write a nonsense poem is, in this regard, no different than to write a prose poem in the locally-accessible natural language. In that case, it
is
hard to believe that the "immediate shredding" of a poem betokens "solo expression." This is imaginable, at least, but it is far more
plausible
that it is, just as it appears to be, a
peripeteia;
perhaps a temporary bout of heart-less (mindless) rage; perhaps a peculiarly urgent and acute-onset material incentive, of some sort, which has yet to be considered here; anyway, some such peripatetic thing. In other words, some earlier intent has been followed and superseded by a later, contrary intent. If so, then that earlier intent is, for present purposes, I am saying, the
über-intent of Rankian
"creation;"
nothing more nor less nor other than that.
And now, "intent" here has once again outlived its usefulness and begun to mislead (very badly, in fact) as to what I mean to say. Intent is at most half of the whole Rankian answer to such Ptolemaic questions as Our Man poses here to his unsuspecting proteges. Rank's theory bends toward a certain determinism which is very difficult for self-regarding human beings to accept. Here I would say, again, and now in an optimistic tone befitting the object of the critique, that this determinism,
this too
is only half the answer, the
other half
as it were. But don't expect any such Light Reading as above to visit the
dark side,
let alone to make even a dim synthesis. That task seems to have been exiled to some other Continent, where the Existentialism Upon which Psychoanalysis Closes cannot do otherwise than to take it up.
Two things
...
First, if
someone makes something
that is
truly incomprehensible
to everyone else, it is extremely unlikely that we would
regard it as an artwork.
Art does seem to require some, if only minimal, quotient of
public accessibility.
So, to
regard
a work is
not
to
access
it.
As always, my heart bleeds here for
everyone else.
...
Second, if the poem were written in a completely private language, one wonders whether it would be accessible even to the poet.
Well, can the poet "regard" his own poem?
Does the natural-language poet (or the tonal musician) really
comprehend
their creation in its entirety? That seems like another
Romantic
myth that organically recurs even where it does not
descend
from the Romantic Century. Everyone's view of creation is necessarily partial. Perhaps the creator's view can be even partial-er than the audience's. (I think it often is.)
...
is his composition really even a poem?
Maybe it's a poem but not an artwork?
...
[69]
...
...
it might still be argued that
[the poem]
was not only in principle intended for a potential audience, but that it also had an actual audience, namely the artist himself.
...
...
to be self-critical, the artist needs to take up the position of a spectator.
...
[hence]
we must grant that the artwork is something intended for an audience.
Not quite Rankian, but it'll do!
If these arguments are correct, then the transmission theory should be preferred
...
However, it is not evident that
[its]
other conditions
...
can be defended as successfully.
...
[e.g., that]
the artist must have experienced a certain emotion, and, then, she must transmit just that emotion to audiences.
...
the "experience condition" and the "identity condition,"
...
...
Surely artworks can arouse emotions in audiences which their creators do not feel.
...
Similarly, art in many genres relies upon certain formal strategies in order to move audiences
...
[70]
...
the author
...
need not feel suspense as he rachets up the audience's apprehensiveness.
Indeed, he might feel amusement as he tightens the screw—
...
Indeed, it is said of Beethoven that he would make audiences weep over his improvisations, only to laugh at their folly and his own power.
...
Sometime in late adolescence, probably in 2001 or 2002, I was at a show at the old Dakota where a jazz saxophonist, in the moment, became aware of
their folly and his own power,
and proceeded, not literally to
laugh at
his audience, but, you might say, metaphorically and phenomenally to "laugh at" them, by repeating a bluesy gesture a few too many times after it first elicited a chorus of "Woos" and "Yeahs." It was sadistic but masterful. I will never forget it. And yes, it imparted the above point to me, well beyond a reasonable doubt, from that age on.
(Daniel Cords, if you're out there, please stand up and claim your due credit for this "work of art!")
Much art is commissioned.
...
artists were often hired to celebrate all sorts of things,
...
some advertisements may be art, though the people who compose them need not have the same enthusiasm for Alka-Seltzer or Burger King that they mean to provoke
...
One might say that such people are not really artists,
...
Yet that is merely a bit of name-calling and not an argument.
Surely a cynic can make a moving artwork.
...
...
in addition, it may not be the case that the artist has any feelings at all when creating the artwork.
...
...
it might be objected that, even if in order to inspire pity, the artist need not experience it while composing her artwork, it must be the case that at some time or other the artist must have experienced the relevant sort of pity.
...
...
[But]
Imagine a horror writer.
Perhaps
she has never been frightened
by a horror story in her life, but
she knows how to scare other people.
Well . . . then yes, she must have "learned" this other than by experiencing it herself. It cannot be an Infinite Monkey situation; she has had
some
informative
experience
and has explicitly cultivated the skill; but the experience she has had is not the experience her readers have. She
could
be like
Sibley's
idiot-savant, who
"ha[s] no more reason to choose tasteful objects ... than a deaf man would to avoid noisy places,"
and yet has learned how to
"say the right things"
solely by way of
"inductive procedures and intelligent guessing."
My unsupported-and-unsupportable conjecture on this is: I
do
think I see this, all the time, among artists-for-hire, but it's not because they have never had the experiences that their work aims to afford; it's because they
used to
have those experiences, but now they're dead inside.
...
[71]
...
To her,
it's just a job
of work.
She may
think that it is peculiar
that
other people are frightened
by her stories.
But
she does it anyway.
She has to
pay the rent;
she has to
feed the family.
Likewise, why suppose that
psychopaths
can't be
effective actors;
they are often reputed to be
able to move people,
but purportedly they
feel nothing.
🧐
...
the proponent of the transmission argument may respond
...
, it is impossible that an artwork be made without feeling, since humans are always in some emotional state or other;
...
But this is problematic
...
even if it were the case
...
, it would not help the transmission theorist much, since he claims not only that the artist must be in some emotional state, but that she be involved in clarifying that state.
...
...
the clarity condition
...
does not seem to be the aim of all art.
...
Beat poetry and Punk Art,
[e.g.]
appears to covet pure, unrevised emotion—
...
Revision might even sometimes be thought of as a disqualifying betrayal—a matter of selling out—in such art.
There is something to this! Hear me out!
Sure, we may
sell out
to some
psychopathic
commercial enterprise. That, however, is not the only kind of "enterprise" which cannot safely digest our
unrevised emotion,
and it is never the first enterprise to face that problem.
We ourselves
are the first. If we can't digest, we have to revise. We
sell ourselves short
this way; or perhaps this is how the Jungian Daimon "sells out" to the Freudian Ego. In any case, it's not crazy to posit a
betrayal
here, once we admit that this may well be a
self-betrayal. AND, for once, it's not crazy, I guess, to think that the "emotion" really is "expressed" and "transmitted" with high fidelity, from us in one moment to ourselves in another (though Our Man has enabled himself to question even that possibility by appealing to literary artworks and ignoring abstract/decorative ones).
I think this might really be the contour of the problem. If it is ultimately a nonproblem, that would be because what I have called "fidelity" to any given moment of experience is not a value at all; it's not really worth anything, not worth preserving, for there really is nothing gained that way, not for the artist and not for the audience either. Perhaps it's actually
better
that the creation-of-a-moment be released as freely as possible into the flux, free to become whatever it actually is, not what we think it is in that moment; and perhaps the death-grip of willful self-styling is no less evident in the militant resistance to "revision" than in the militant burnishing of just-so stories. So, ultimately I'm agnostic on "revision" . . . IF you'll allow me to strongly disbelieve Intentionalism and Contextualism.
"Information wants to be free,"
and so too do artworks. Easy to see why, tougher to say/write it!
...
...
[72]
...
...
Some art is designed to project vague emotions.
Symbolist Art of the late nineteenth century is of this sort.
...
It is meant to suggest emotional states, rather than to clarify them.
...
...
the "Exquisite Corpse."
...
procedure can generate poems of any length.
But the process cannot be called one of clarification,
...
Yet, this procedure has generated artworks.
...
...
The Exquisite Corpse is an example of aleatoric art—
...
Merce Cunningham and John Cage
...
their aim was to short-circuit their own subjective processes of decision-making and replace them with a thoroughly random, objective procedure.
...
...
[73]
...
...
Undoubtedly, there are some works of art that explore uncommon, highly individualized emotional states.
However, it overstates the case to presume that all art is like this.
...
...
...
The transmission theorist mistakes a good-making feature of some artforms
...
as necessary conditions of all art.
...
[74]
...
...
not only are there alternative, nonconverging canons of excellence for different artforms,
but some works that are undeniably art are bad,
...
But bad art is still art;
...
Another problem
...
the very idea of an individualized emotion is very slippery and may even be incoherent.
Most emotional states have something generic about them.
Kivy can help us out with this. TBC.
...
...
a defender of expression theories of art might say that all of our criticisms so far have really only been of details
...
the bottom line
...
is that something is art only if it expresses emotion
...
But
[this]
is not plausible
...
[as]
a necessary condition of art.
...
Some art is about communicating and/or exploring ideas.
Or perhaps it
is about
. . .
expressing
ideas?
...
...
[75]
...
M.C. Escher
...
you could say that his work is about pictorial representation.
But it is not about emotions.
It is cognitive, not emotive.
" . . .
You may feel tears, or pure rage, welling up at such 'cognitions' as occur to you, but that is not what
his work is about
. . . "
...
postmodern choreographers in the 1960s,
...
wanted to make the audience think, not feel.
...
to contemplate the question of what counts as a dance and why.
...
...
the friend of the expression theory may resist this conclusion
...
either by denying that the preceding examples are art,
or
by arguing that
...
the work in question
[actually]
is concerned with the expression of emotion.
...
[but]
if the expression theorist invokes her theory to support her conclusion
...
, then she has merely assumed what she is supposed to prove.
Alternatively, the expression theorist might argue
...
Humans bring their emotions to everything they do, and they cannot help leaving traces of themselves behind.
...
two claims here:
...
that we approach everything we do
...
in some mood, with certain feelings,
...
and
we cannot avoid depositing the imprint of these states on whatever we create.
...
But both
...
presuppositions
...
seem false.
...
[76]
...
if I can approach a column of
[numerical]
figures without emotion, why suppose that it is impossible for me to calculate the disposition of architectual columns dispassionately?
Good one.
...
even if it is the case
...
that every human breath is accompanied by some emotional state,
...
there is still no reason to believe that it will insinuate its way into the products of our endeavors.
...
...
Scientists attempt to remove their emotions, feelings, moods and so on from the outcomes of their research,
...
they have special procedures and techniques that enable them to do so.
...
But
...
Artists, too, have techniques for bracketing their emotions.
...
Nor does the case against the
[theory]
...
rest exclusively with
...
avant-garde "idea" art.
Much traditional art does not express emotions.
Much of it is designed merely to provoke pleasure in viewers or listeners.
Call this the art of the beautiful,
...
...
Pleasure is not an emotion, though it may accompany some
[77]
emotions, and, in any case, these works do not
express
pleasure; they stimulate it.
Hmm. Are we sure that purportedly
emotion-laden
works really are in the business of
expressing
and not of
stimulating?
...
The last necessary condition
...
says, in effect, that artworks must be in a physical medium.
You mean it does not
say
anything about
being
in a
natural language?
This
...
seems to be a promising requirement, at least in spirit,
...
it is connected to the very plausible requirement that artworks be publicly accessible,
...
However, there are at least two potential problems
...
...
a kind of contemporary art, called Conceptual Art,
...
important for its ideas.
...
[and]
generally opposed to
...
the commodification of art.
...
...
an artist might declare that her artwork was comprised of all the ideas that she had about art before breakfast.
...
One reason to suspect that
[this]
is not
[art]
is that it is not publicly accessible.
But it may be.
...
Perhaps the artist
...
exhibits
...
a neatly typed out list
...
[maybe]
it is not a counterexample, since the list is in words.
But the list is not the artwork—the thoughts were.
...
...
another problem with the
[physical medium]
condition.
...
the list
[of mediums]
—lines, colors, shapes,
...
must be incomplete.
[78]
...
there is no way ahead of time to enumerate all the possible media that artists might employ.
...
Moreover, there may be ways of transmitting
...
[the]
emotion
...
that we would not regard as constituting artworks.
...
pills
...
telepathy.
I doubt that we would count these methods as artistic.
But how will we justify excluding
[them]
...
?
...
...
We have not asked whether
...
all the conditions
...
are conjointly sufficient.
...
Imagine that you have just broken up with your lover.
...
You sit down and write a letter
...
written in publicly accessible language, and you
...
clarify your emotions
...
It's individualized
...
very effective
...
You make your lover loathe himself/herself in the same way that you loathe him or her.
And that's what you intended.
But I doubt we would regard most such letters as art;
...
...
All sorts of everyday behaviors can be cited
...
in accordance with
expression theories, but
[they]
are not art.
...
...
only the requirement that artworks be intended for audiences looks like it has a fighting chance to succeed as a necessary condition
...
[79]
...
it really does
seem correct
to find
expression even
in
pure orchestral music,
then
can it possibly be correct
to deny that
intentional
acts of "representation"
more than
evince
(in fact express)
their
conceptual content?
🧐 🧐 🧐
🧐
🧐
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