Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)
[SK's vitriol]
[206]
5
Art, definition and identification
Part I
Against definition
Neo-Wittgensteinianism: art
as an open concept
... we have examined successive attempts to define art. ... each of them appears inadequate in turn. Undoubtedly, this has led some readers to suspect that maybe one cannot define art at all; ... Or, perhaps some of you thought this from the very beginning; ... you may feel reassured to learn that [this] is also a philosophical position, sometimes called Neo-Wittgensteinianism.
... Probably one reason that Western philosophers have been preoccupied with defining art for the last century or so is that it is during this period that we have found ourselves confronted with a dazzling array of different kinds of art ...
And, ... during the same period, Westerners grew more and more familiar with the art of other cultures, ...
[207]
... Whereas for centuries art developed slowly and smoothly ... , by the twentieth century matters were getting confusing. ...
It is at least plausible to suppose that if we had assembled a group of informed art lovers at some imaginary point around the middle of the eighteenth century and paraded a selection of objects before them ... they would have been able to agree, to a surprising extent, about which of the objects were art and which were not. ... They possessed a shared, though often unarticulated, understanding ...
Artists, too, shared in this common understanding, ...
...
Identifying art became a pressing issue;
Not really. I mean, those few who did care, cared intensely. That is one way to measure pressingness. But if we also find that many of these people had something more riding on this issue, so much more than the comfort of shared understanding or the general human hatred of confusion, then the "pressing" quality of their discourse on the matter is more plausibly explained by self-interest than by anything more cosmic. But, do expect the case for the cosmic importance of x to be made in a book devoted to x!
...
It is important ... —to be able to tell the art from the nonart—for many reasons.
Alright buddy, lay it on us!
Whether or not something is art might determine whether or not it is eligible for
an award
from a government arts agency
or
whether its sale or import
should be taxed.
🥱 🥱 🥱
...
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Of course, determining whether or not something is art is not merely important for the purpose of settling
practical and political questions
like these.
" . . . but of course, if a society elides its problems by reducing them to practical and political proxies whenever possible, then strictly formal questions such as definition will tend to acquire an outsized importance . . . "
Identifying whether something should be classified as art or not is
crucial to ascertaining
how we should respond
to it.
Well, if the old unarticulated common understanding has indeed dissipated, why should we think that it should (or even can) be replaced by some classificatory procedure hammered out Philosophically? How to "articulate" an "understanding" that was previously "unarticulated" without changing its content?
Perhaps we are intent upon recovering the old understanding because we like what it does for us. It is, however, very difficult for some of us to "like" the activities of classifying and ascertaining art as much as we like responding to it. That is already reason enough to question the necessity for (re)imposing a definition. Even art-agnostics have dirty words for people who get their thrills from taxonomizing rather than using or experiencing.
As always, we are missing (spectacularly in the case of this mere Introductory text) any Archimedean point from which to build out our notion of how we should respond. We need to find one quick if we are serious about declaring that artworks should and should not be "responded" to in whatever way. And if we cannot find one, then defining art does not actually have any use outside the practical and political. Rather, those just are its uses.
In what other domain(s), anywhere at all, is the task of definition not driven by precisely those uses?
...
For instance, suppose we come across, as we might at a garage sale, a stuffed angora goat wearing an automobile tire around its middle and standing on a canvas. Should we chalk it up as a random assemblage ... , or should we try to interpret it ... ? Of course, if we
identify it as an artwork
—as Robert Rauschenberg's combine Monogram to be precise— ...
we'll try to interpret it.
But otherwise it looks ... as unworthy of attention as any other old pile of junk.
Intentionalism does Our Man no favors this time. Are we to think that Rauschenberg did not in some sense intend this work to look . . . junky?
(Marvelously junky?)
Identifying something as art, then, is indispensable to our artistic practices.
Hmm. But we never got to hear to why identification is indispensible to aesthetic or design appreciation? Similarly, we have not said what grave misfortunes might befall the interpreter of nonartworks?
That something is art signals how and even whether we are to respond to it interpretively, aesthetically, and appreciatively.
Most certainly a true statement. But none of this hinges on the sharedness of our definition! Why do we need a shared definition in order to know how and even whether?
If we have no way of classifying art ... our artistic practices would cave-in.
Well . . . we don't seem to have one!! . . .
...
... As the question of identifying art became more and more perplexing, the solution to the problem seemed obvious: ... If the old
implicit
ways of identifying art no longer work, define the concept of art
explicitly
so that it can cover every case.
Well, well, well!
And then what?? . . .
The representational theory ... , neorepresentationalism, the expression theory, [etc.] ... They are all attempts to provide an explicit way of analysing the concept of an artwork ...
Is this really true of all of the attempts chronicled above? That is hard to believe. It seems more that this is the use Our Man himself would prefer a definition be put, should we be able to come up with one.
Is Brancusi's Bird in Flight an artwork? Is Rauchenberg's Monogram? Look to the correct definition of art to tell.
In which other domain(s) is anything like this use of definition given such pride of place?
By this time we do not seem to be looking first to our practices to reveal the relevant practical facts. Rather, we are looking to our definition to tell us which of several extant practices we are practicing in a given instance. But that's just not a practice anymore! A "practice" as Our Man uses the term ought to include identification as part of itself. If it does not include this crucial element, . . . ??
... by the 1950s, a significant group of philosophers grew suspicious of this approach. They
[209]
noted, as ... you may have, that every attempt to define art in the past has failed. ...
Similarly, these philosophers also were impressed by how many different, and amazingly diverse kinds of art there are in the world.
What does
an oratorio by Handel
have in common
with a readymade by Duchamp?
I assume this is a rhetorical question, but perhaps we should be asking it sincerely. If we find we're able to cherrypick pairs of works to which the answers is, "Nothing," without thinking too hard about it, that might go further towards settling the definition wars than would the standard practice of putting forth some jargon- and symbol-filled contrivance and seeing just what it takes for the other captial-Ps to shoot it down.
We have here also, I think, ground zero for the "convergence" identified by Janet Wolff: the convergence of the capital-Ps on "social theories of art" when all of the above-named -istic/isms have failed. If not in fact, then in theory nonetheless, once we try to answer Our Man's nonquestion above, exactly as it is given (i.e. using the given examples), it seems easier to name commonalities among consumers of these works than among either creators or practitioners. (I think there is a creation-side convergence, probably, but it is Rankian-Beckerian and is impossible to prove empirically. It is, so to speak, all the way to that side, whereas the consumption of the two works is only, say, halfway or so offset towards the reception side; there is much which lies beyond it in that direction, unlike the Rankian-Beckerian factors in their direction; they are "all the way" at the very root of creation. So to speak.)
THE THING IS . . . the convergence arises quite directly from the rage to define . . . which is itself specious . . . for reasons which are made crystal clear in these very pages . . . though Our Man seemingly intends to achieve the opposite effect! i.e. The "convergence" on a "social definition" and the "practical and political" uses of art create each other. i.e. What they "create" above all is a libel on art-and-artist, but it is not recognized as a libel so long as, first, it has a positive (or neutral) moral valence, and second, its so-called "practical and political" homeland doesn't actually abide by very many of the "practical and political" strictures that apply to capital-P Politics.
... they wondered whether any definition could cover every single artwork nonvacuously—that is, in a way that was informative and noncircular. ...
...
The philosophers who believed that art cannot be defined were often influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein's book Philosophical Investigations. ... They agreed that we need some way to identify art, but they thought the proper way to go about it is not to frame a definition of art and then to apply it to particular cases. ...
Many of the concepts that we employ in everyday life, like the concept of chair,
largely go undefined.
But we are able to
get along without
definitions. When we are confronted with a new kind of object for sitting purposes,
we decide
whether or not it is a chair
by comparing it
to already existing chairs.
Hmm. I think we decide only whether to sit in it; and I think that this is not nearly the same thing as deciding whether or not it is this or that.
... we ask whether it resembles what we antecedently believe to be chairs enough to be counted as one of their number.
It seems we would need a very good reason, borne of extenuating circumstances, in order to actually bring this example to fruition. Perhaps a "practical" or "political" reason/circumstance. The import tax example seems apt. The art example does not!
I recently viewed a dating app profile wherein the following question was offered for debate by the user: "Is a hot dog a sandwich?" This strain of irony, domain-dependent as it is, strikes me as actually paradigmatic; Our Man's chair hypothetical does not.
...
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...
The Neo-Wittgensteinians say ... We must have some other method: the method of family resemblances.
...
... Weitz seems to be saying ... that art ... is always, at least in principle, open to revolutionary change. ... Art is not required to be original in order to count as art. Nevertheless, ... our concept of the practice is such that it must accommodate the permanent possibility of change, expansion or novelty. ...
[211]
But if this is so, ... then the attempt to arrive at a definition of art in terms of necessary conditions that are conjointly sufficient for determining art status is incompatible with the conception of the practice of art ... since (Weitz appears to presume) conditions would place limits on the range of artistic innovation. ...
...
... it is important to notice that Weitz is not saying that ... any future attempt is, most likely, doomed. ... It is an argument that any attempt to define art must fail necessarily, as a point of logic.
...
Perhaps the history of twentieth-century art will illustrate the problem that Weitz has in mind. Philosophers
propound art theories
at a certain point in history ... But
once contemporary artists learn of the theory,
they make artworks that confound it,
as Duchamp did with Fountain.
i.e. A measure becomes a target. But where is the incentivization? There must be some; if not, then what basis have we for ascribing intentionality (as above) to the "targeting" of art-theoretical "confounds"?
... Art theories attempt to close the concept of art, but artists strive to exceed closure, and ultimately our concept of art is more sympathetic to the artists than to the art theorists.
One can only hope. But we do have to reckon with Danto's (trans)historicism here. The problem is, though I despise almost everything about Fountain, it does seem to have revealed something latent in the "concept" of art rather than forced an "expansion" of that concept. That is to say, for someone like me, something was 'revealed' this way which I'd be perfectly happy to return to a locked drawer; and that is because the work transparently just is "art," not because it presents as nonart masquerading.
...
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...
Weitz's open concept argument can be stated as a reductio ad absurdum of the view that art can be defined:
- Art can be expansive.
- Therefore, art must be open to the permanent possibility of radical change, expansion and novelty.
- If something is art, then it must be open to the permanent possibility of radical change, expansion and novelty.
- If something is open to the permanent possibility of radical change, expansion and novelty, then it cannot be defined.
- Suppose that art can be defined.
- Therefore, art is not open to the permanent possibility of radical change, expansion and novelty.
- Therefore, art is not art.
I really, really fail to see the wisdom in this form of presentation.
But this is an absurd conclusion. ... One of the premises must be false. ...
But if art cannot be defined, how do we go about identifying art? After all, we do do it.
We do?! Not quite like those ever-enviable mid-eighteenth century art-quietists did!
This calls for an explanation. The Neo-Wittgensteinian is not a skeptic about the possibility of
identifying art,
but only a skeptic about
the adequacy of definition
...
Is this to say that we're not always wrong when identifying, and that's okay qua mere "identification"? Whereas full-stop definition arrogates to perfection and therefore need fail only once (in a while) to be considered in-adequate? If so, then this seems not terribly important.
...
What is this family resemblance method? ... Wittgenstein pointed out that there are many different kinds of games. ... For any perceptible feature of some games that you can mention, there will be some other games that lack them. So there are no perceptible features of games that represent necessary conditions that all games must possess, nor is there some set of conditions that picks out all and only games. ...
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We [identify a 'game'] by taking note of whether or not it resembles in significant respects some things that we already regard as paradigmatic games. ... There was no fixed number of similarities required to obtain between these new candidates and our paradigmatic examples. Rather, when the similarities mounted, the weight of reflection upon the correspondences gradually led us to decide in favor of the game status ...
... if it were true that we had such a definition at our disposal, even if only implicitly, then why would it be that no one seems able to articulate it? If ordinary folk can identify art on a daily basis by means of a definition, why can't philosophical specialists, ... ? ...
The Neo-Wittgensteinian says that that is because we do not possess a definition of art, even implicitly. Instead we identify artworks in terms of their resemblances to paradigmatic artworks. We start with some things that everyone agrees are artworks ... Then, when inspecting a new candidate for art status and arguing on its behalf, we note similarities between it and various features of our paradigms.
... Just as a family member's appearance may recall his mother's coloring and his grandfather's nose, so a candidate artwork may correlate with some of the expressive properties of The Scream and with the structural complexity of The Goldberg Variations. ...
...
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... her red hair is like her father's; her powerful legs are like her mother's; her taciturn temper is like her uncle's.
... there is not one dimension of resemblance that is the one and only family resemblance, like the Hapsburg jaw. ...
The family resemblance account seems to accord better than the definitional approach with how we actually go about defending a claim that such and such a work is art. ... arguments ... about the status of a candidate for arthood rarely proceed definitionally; instead they usually proceed by trading examples and reflecting upon them. Thus, the family resemblance method accords nicely with actual practice, ...
... [generally] we do not simply compare the new work to one of our paradigms. ... We look for many different strands of similarity across various dimensions between the new works and often more than one of our paradigms. ... as the number of connections swells, the classification of the new work becomes irresistible.
The family resemblance approach does two inter-related things for the Neo-Wittgensteinian. On the one hand, it offers an account of how we succeed in identifying art. ...
[215]
... This is something that we do do. Philosophy should explain it. ...
But the family resemblance account also adds another argument ... the definitional approach and the family resemblance method can be seen as competing explanations for the same phenomena—our successful identification and classification of certain objects as artworks. ... which explanation is superior [?]
The Neo-Wittgensteinian argues that hers is.
👸 👸 👸
... she can point out that it is astonishing to say that we identify art by means of an implicit definition if no one, after centuries, can say what it is. On the positive side, she can point out that reflecting on resemblances between paradigms and their recognized descendants, on the one hand, and new cases, on the other, fits more accurately with what we actually do ...
The Neo-Wittgensteinian points out that many of our concepts are not governed by definitions replete with necessary and sufficient conditions. The concepts of game and chair reputedly are not.
[earlier]
Importantly for the example above,
soliloquy,
narrative,
and
a certain kind of dream logic
also are not. We seem apt to be caught here in a spiral of clusters.
[now]
Evidently I have excised the example. Thank me later. I assume what I was getting at is that the constituent parts of a "cluster concept" also are "concepts" comprised of mere "clusters," which suggests a sort of degradation of fidelity the further down the chain one investigates. If you are suspicious of the conceit that "our practices" are rational enough so as to be amenable to "analysis," then this comes as absolutely no surprise.
Indeed, there are very few concepts—save formal definitions, such as those in geometry—to which the definitional model appears applicable. ... [we have] solid grounds for suspecting that the concept of art is more like the concept of a game than it is like the concept of an equilateral triangle.
...
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...
The family resemblance method also fits like a glove with the open concept argument. If art, as a matter of the logic of the concept, must be in principle so unpredictable that no set of conditions can ever be laid down, but, at the same time, it is also the case that we can continue to classify works as art, then what resources enable us to do this? ...
Neo-Wittgensteinianism is a philosophy of art. ... It is not a theory of art where the term "theory of art" means "an essential definition" ...
Does this mean that the history of art theory is completely worthless? [For] the Neo-Wittgensteinian ... Art theorists in the past ... were mistaken in believing that they could provide an essential definition of art. ... But, without knowing it, they were also doing something else, and that "something else" is valuable. What was it?
Art criticism.
Clive Bell thought that his theory of significant form disclosed the eternal nature of art. ... Though limited as a theorist of art, Bell was a very good critic: he
told people
what to look for
and what to value
in newly emerging art movements.
...
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...
Similar recuperative readings, the Neo-Wittgensteinian suggests, can be offered of many other past theories of art. The expression theory of art, for example, can be reconceived as offering critical insight into the art of the Romantic period as well as certain modernist tendencies that flowed from it.
Hmm. Is this to say that the jar theory is actually, materially, verifiably true of Romantic period art? Or, it was true, if only during that "period"?
These grand theories don't all bite the dust in exactly the same way. In the above parable, Formalism was too narrow to succeed as "an essential definition." The problem with the expression theories is something else entirely: their basic claims are often outlandish or even demonstrably false. This would seem to preempt any recuperative readings. (Evidently some would say that the concept of "significant form" is similarly incoherent, and hence Bell's Formalism doesn't even get to enjoy its too-narrow-ness, because it also is just gobbledygook.)
...
...
Neo-Wittgensteinianism ... is not simply a skeptical position, ... It is also a coherent, comprehensive philosophical view that includes a positive account of the concept of art, ... [it] is able to weave its "no to definitions" into an ostensibly informative philosophy ...
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Objections to Neo-Wittgensteinianism
The open concept argument and the family resemblance method work very effectively together. ... The first says that art cannot be defined; the second says "But not to worry," since we can get along nicely without definitions ...
The open concept argument, so to speak, clears the ground for the family resemblance method, ...
...
... but it trades on a very dubious ambiguity. When the Neo-Wittgensteinian maintains that art cannot be defined, he is talking about the attempt to craft necessary and sufficient conditions for what counts as
an artwork;
but to show that this is impossible, he then adverts to
the practice of art,
the very concept of which he maintains must be open to the permanent possibility of expansion. Thus, in effect, the Neo-Wittgensteinian is arguing that a closed concept of artwork is incompatible with an open concept of the practice of art. But here the levels of generality between the two concepts of art ("art" as artwork; "art" as practice), though related, are hardly the same.
Is this to say that we cannot (or ought not?) define product by process? We cannot define an artifact by how it was made? Wouldn't it be nice if we'd been clued in to that detail from the start of the book rather than slipping it in here toward the end?
Qua levels of generality, there is certainly a fatal equivocation looming. At the same time, can't we locate at least a few weighty examples of precisely this tendency in practice to indeed "close" the "concept" of "artwork" along lines dictated by the process of making/creating said works? Is this tendency not precisely the object of Beardsley's crusade against 'intentionalism'? And of course he crusaded against it, but that is to say that he thought he detected it just about everywhere. The critics he singles out were perhaps more apt to disagree that this is indeed what they had done; as opposed to maintaining that the equivocation itself is unproblematic. Why should it be problematic? Perhaps there is a strictly logical or "analytic" reason, but my gut tells me the real reason for fastening onto this issue is that our answer is both reflection and cause of some bigger-picture questions about what kind of society (better, community) we want to live in. To wit, channeling Ted Cohen, if art must always be a 'possibility' rather than the mere output of a recipe followed to the letter, then there must be more to arthood than just the creation side. Whether this is true or even possible is less important than simply reflecting on the consequences: If so, or if not, . . . then what??
...
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...
... In premise #3 [excised above], when we say that something is art only if it is open to the permanent possibility of radical change, expansion and novelty, we are talking about the practice of art. Clearly it makes no sense to say of an individual artwork that it is open to the permanent possibility of radical change ...
But in premise #5, when we suppose that art can be defined, we are talking about artworks; after all, the debate is about whether the concept work of art can be essentially defined—that's what the Neo-Wittgensteinian accuses his predecessors of doing.
In my present ignorance I've no choice but to provisionally accept this characterization, but I don't quite believe it as it is literally worded here.
But if we apply these clarifications ... , then it is obvious that there is no real formal contradiction ... For there is no inconsistency in saying that an artwork is not the practice of art— ... Moreover, there is no reason to suppose that the concept of a practice may be open, while the concept of the objects of said practice (in this case artworks) is closed.
There also is no reason . . . not to suppose this. Right? Does he mean, again, that "there is no contradiction" rather than "there is no reason to suppose"??
Why does the Neo-Wittgensteinian imagine that there is any real, logical tension here? ... Talk of the permanent possibility of expansion only makes sense with reference to the practice of art; it sounds virtually nonsensical to say of completed artworks that they need to be literally open to the permanent possibility of change and innovation;
Well, who is equivocating now?
few artworks would ever be completed, if that were the case.
Of course. But if the definers have in mind completed artworks, they have them in mind as a class, not as individual works. The individual completed works need not change at all in order for the class to expand its range with the addition of each newly "completed work."
...
This refutation may leave some unconvinced. They may be haunted by the residual suspicion that somehow if we
"lay down"
necessary and sufficient conditions
for artworks, we may be
really
stipulating limitations
on the kinds of things that artists can do ...
I suppose this is a worry I would have had roughly between ages 15 and 25. Nowadays I'm not as worried about the specter of "our practices" actually falling into lock step with someone's stipulated limitations.
...
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...
But there is no reason in principle to suppose this. That artworks might possess defining characteristics does not logically preclude the invention of new works that instantiate the relevant conditions in innovative, unexpected, and unforeseeable ways.
It seems more a question of who is and is not able to foresee what, and of what practical political power they hold over who-and-what. If someone insists that a condition has not been met, there is only so much that can be done to convince them otherwise. But let's save all of that kind of thing for another occasion.
...
... There is no reason to imagine that, in principle, defining art is necessarily a barrier to artistic innovation.
Is that because the causes of so-called artistic innovation are oblique to (not to mention in advance of) any act of defining?
One reason for believing that this is so is that many existing definitions of art propose no conceptual barriers to artistic experiment.
Many, but not all? That is little comfort in and of itself.
For example, in the next section, we will study the Institutional Theory of Art ... clearly any theory that countenances readymades as art is compatible with artists presenting
any kind of thing
as an artwork,
since
any kind of thing
can be
turned into a readymade.
No thanks, I prefer making nonart and knowing that this is what I have done; as opposed to dearly grasping after arthood only to be mock-consoled with the stipulation that any failures which arise can and will be turned into a readymade.
Readymades, like Duchamp's Fountain and the "found sounds" of Cage's 4' 33? ... If a definition of art can be framed to accommodate such indiscernibilia, then clearly it will permit anything to be transformed into an artwork in
the proper circumstances
and for
the right reasons.
This is actually a very illuminating line of argument. I suppose we can be thankful that someone sufficiently credentialed to attract our attention also turns out to be dunderheaded enough to actually follow it out.
It is no accomplishment at all that a definition can be framed to accommodate these works, or any other particular class of works or individual works, not unless we have already decided, before the fact, that this or that work simply must be "accommodated." Surely even more could be "accommodated," up to and including the entire universe, given a "framing" that is up to that task; but again, this is no accomplishment at all. There seems to be no way to get the ball rolling at all, actually, other than to concede a tripartite division of the object-world into (a) artworks (the so-called 'paradigm cases'), (b) nonartworks, and (c) borderline cases. Without any paradigm case(s) at all, there is no basis to include or exclude anything; there are no proper circumstances or right reasons. There are not even tenuous, easily disprovable attempts at saying what is "proper" and "right," because there are no criteria of evaluation. So, there is a chicken and egg problem from the start . . . and of course it remains possible even so that some adept inductor could make a veritable leap, nonlinearly so to speak, toward simply blurting out a 'real definition' that later (much later) turns out to be analytically perfect. The human mind has made far stranger and more improbable leaps than that. But otherwise we are going to need at least a few givens to work with.
...
Since there is no kind of thing that something like the Institutional Theory of Art, an essential definition of art, forfends, it is a counterexample to the Neo-Wittgensteinian allegation (premise #4) that definitions of art are in principle incompatible with the reputed openness of the practice of art to radical change, innovation and novelty.
i.e. Someone actually came up with a "definition" of "kinds of things" which actually posits no kind of thing at all for them to be. But that seems contradictory on its face, as it must be if this alleged "definiton" excludes anything at all rather than simply including everything.
This is not to say that the Institutional Theory of Art is true, but only that it illustrates the logical point that an essential definition of what it is to be an artwork can be framed in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions without constraining the range of artistic creativity and innovation, and without legislating what kinds of things artists may and may not produce.
Wonderful. But if it really does not stipulate those things, then that is to say that those things are not in the least implicated by its conditions, by its essentiality. i.e. If the definition is somehow true, then creativity and object-type are literally in-"essential."
By this time, either the phrase "kinds of things" needs to be retired, or we need it to be explained why (and that) both a "kind" and a "thing" per se need not be purely physical concepts. Otherwise we are, yes, equivocating once again by insisting that a given definition does not actually legislate vis-a-vis kinds of things, whereas in another sense that is precisely the point of attempting a definition in the first place. i.e. The Institutional Theory really is just as rigid here as is any other candidate "definition," whether or not it is (quantitatively?) more inclusive. We can locate problematic works, i.e. 'borderline cases,' and it's not safe to assume (as Our Man does anyway) that Institutionalist circumstances and reasons will be consistently in evidence throughout, say, the Romantic period.
Still, it might be argued in response that necessary and sufficient conditions must place some limits on what can be an artwork, even if no limits are placed on the kind of thing that can be an artwork.
One would think!
Otherwise,
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they wouldn't be necessary and sufficient conditions. Several points need to be made here. First, necessary and sufficient conditions are not incompatible with an immense latitude for expansion and innovation—as much, as we shall see shortly, as anyone should want.
Try this for "necessary and sufficient":
I suspect that something has gone horribly wrong with any Analytic Philosophy in which the phrase
as much...as anyone could want
appears in connection with a crucial Analytic detail.
Second, though the concept of art (in the practice sense) may be open, it is not wide open—
not anything can be
art
at any time
for just any reason.
After all, even if we agree that the practice of art is open to change and expansion, the relevant changes and expansions must be related to what precedes them, lest they would not be changes and expansions of the practice. That is, the changes, expansions, and innovations we have in mind cannot be utter non sequiturs.
Well . . . if some event really does occur, then it is not an out-of-nowhere event. This will continue to be true for as long as time moves only in one direction.
Much of the disputation here ends up being disputation over whether or not some event really has happened. Perhaps that's because such classes of "events" as critics and academics tend to concern themselves with have been overlarded with invisible, ephemeral things; e.g.:
an artist intended i;
some "culturally emergent property", p, has emerged from some culture, c;
some meaning, m, has been "embodied in" some artwork, w; some artist, a, has done this;
etc., etc.
The difficulty of verifying these events empirically does not mean that they can, if they are real, have come out of nowhere. The difficulty of coherently distinguishing true proximate causes from Butterfly Effects also does not mean this. What all of this means, rather, is that we often are left high and dry when it comes time to say with any certainty or rigor whether or not such things actually have happened. But an event doesn't come from out of no-where just because we don't know-where it came from. That is pretty idiotic.
Thus, we can argue that the only expansions to the practice of art that an essential definition, like the Institutional Theory and comparable theories, block are supposed "innovations" of the utter non sequitur variety. But this is not a problem, since the commitment of such theories to the proposition that any kind of thing can be art for the right reason is just as liberal and open as anyone should want.
😭 😭 😭
This in no way compromises the legitimate creativity of artists, since it allows that artists can present any kind of thing as art, ... Who would want to count as an artwork just anything for the wrong reason?
Certainly not me. And so it may be that a symphonist should want his symphony not to count as a readymade but rather as . . . a symphony. We probably shouldn't worry about what people want . . . but if we are going to consider it . . .
...
...
According to the family resemblance approach, the way in which we go about identifying artworks ... is by looking for similarities between works already regarded to be artworks and new candidates. Ideally, the process begins by establishing a flexible set of paradigmatic artworks ...
[222]
... If in the present moment, we are perplexed about the status of a new work, we are instructed to look at the body of works already adjudged to be artworks and to see whether the new work in question bears appreciable similarities ...
Perhaps the new work is similar to Tristam Shandy in its possession of an elliptical narrative structure, like Oedipus Rex in its capacity to raise pity and fear, and it resembles Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in its sublimity.
I think that these are, even in ideally clearcut cases, terribly misleading examples of the derivation of appreciable similarities.
As these correspondences accumulate, we decide to classify the new work as an artwork, though no established numerical criterion determines how many correspondences are required here. Rather, we reflect on the resemblances and make an all-things-considered-judgment.
If there is no numerical criterion, then maybe there is no accumulation either? Maybe this kind of judgment would better be called 'no-things-considered'??
But there is a really big problem with this story. It is that the concept of similarity upon which the family resemblance method relies is too slack. For, it is a truism of logic that
everything resembles everything else
in some respect.
This is definitely something that some writers on Aesthetics seem to forget. But it's mostly a problem with critics and criticism.
I would venture that the Fast Brain is actually better at this than the Slow Brain. A misleading aspect of the above truism stated so baldly is that just because "resemblances" exist doesn't mean they'll be obvious. i.e. Is there a parallel truism that says: 'Some resemblance can always be found'? The resemblance exists, but it cannot always be found; and here a reliance on Fast thinking has an advantage nested in its only-apparent disadvantage: the Fast brain will only be able to notice certain resemblances. We could get totally derailed arguing out the criteria for 'significant' or 'meaningful' resemblances; or we could refer that question to old Picasso's seeking-finding distinction, now properly psychologized for the critics and other blowhards.
...
... applying the family resemblance method today, we will be able to declare that each and every thing is art by tomorrow, if not sooner. ...
... that seems way too inclusive for any classificatory procedure.
[223]
But, ... maybe it is not really problematic for a classificatory procedure to arrive at the conclusion that everything can be art. Isn't that a just consequence of taking readymades and found objects seriously?
Not really. To agree that readymades can be art accepts the principle that any kind of thing
could be
an artwork, but not that everything
is
an artwork. ...
...
... you might think that there is a clear-cut way to repair the family resemblance method: simply require that the similarities between candidates and the paradigms (and recognized descendants thereof) be of a certain sort. ... But ... The reintroduction of talk of necessary conditions is inconsistent with the point of the family resemblance approach.
But perhaps there is another way ... Instead ... , let us draw up a long list of the properties of our paradigms and their recognized descendants that we think are art-relevant; and then let us propose that if a candidate resembles already existing art in some of these respects, then it will be art. ... This gets around the problem of necessary conditions, since neither a nor b nor c nor d are necessary conditions of all art.
[224]
But this strategy will not save the family resemblance method either, ... the proponent of the family resemblance account is as opposed to the notion of sufficient conditions as he is to the notion of necessary conditions. ...
The family resemblance model, then, is caught on the horns of a dilemma: either it employs the concept of resemblance without qualification, which results in the conclusion that everything is art; or, to avert that conclusion, it qualifies what kind of resemblances are relevant for art status, thereby reintroducing either necessary or sufficient conditions or both, ...
...
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