Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)
[186]
10.
The Possibility of Art:
Remarks on a Proposal by Dickie
TED COHEN
[orig. 1973]
... Like much of Dickie's best work, this essay ["Defining Art"] is brief, direct, and convincing ... This time, however, I think he has tried to make things more simple and ingenuous than they can be.
The definition Dickie presents ...
A work of art in the descriptive sense is (1) an artifact (2) upon which some society or some sub-group of a society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation .
...
it may be helpful to note
three special features
of Dickie's thesis.
(1) The somewhat checkered history of attempts to define art is usually seen as a series of specifications of art-making properties.
These properties, though subtle and sometimes relational, have been understood to be properties the eye can descry. The definitions which require these properties of artworks are widely thought to have been discredited, if not by earlier examples, by the onslaught of problematic cases and counterexamples supplied by twentieth-century art.
The first question here for formulators of counterarguments: are these actually counterexamples? Or are they more problematic for certain observers and less so for others?
Each definition
(for example,
"Art is imitation,
or expression,
or significant form,
or symbolic feeling")
seems either to founder straightway,
since many obvious artworks do not display the allegedly necessary property,
or
to retreat into insignificance,
since the property it cites cannot be seen and is presumed to be
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present only because the objects are artworks.
Well . . . is the insignificance critique available against Danto and Dickie too?!
The suggestion that the old definitions (the "honorific" definitions, to use Weitz's term) also rest upon properties which cannot be seen suddenly strikes me as novel. Has Danto conveniently omitted this aspect of those theories in order to better distinguish his own from them? Or is Cohen's observation here simply hiding (from me) in plain sight in Danto's work?
"Imitation" clearly is not of this type: ostensibly it can be "seen." (Whether it is "noticed" may be another question.)
"Expression" ostensibly is a direct product of whatever is seen, though it itself cannot be.
Ditto "symbolic feeling," which I've never heard of before, at least not as a full-fledged definition.
"Significant form" may fail as a definition, but it seems daft to claim that it implicates something which "cannot be seen." It too is a second-order product of something seen; an artifact of see-ing which is not itself see-able.
Perhaps this is the clue to my perplexity at the above remark of Cohen's: what we see, in the sense referred to, is not what we experience (don't say "feel"). The "problematic" cases, then, are those where we don't experience "expression," or "significant form," or "symbolic feeling" because we don't "see" whatever first-order stimulus begets those second-order ascriptions: we don't see the "significant form" in a mass of jumbled wire or hear it in a free-jazz honkathon, although we do see the mass and hear the sound; and yet the work strikes us as, or just clearly is, an artwork, for reasons which . . . , well, just assume for now that we can find some freestanding reasons if we really need to.
And now, I think this points to the most glaring problem with Dantoism, and perhaps (if I understood it better) with Dickieism too: presumably something is seen rather than nothing. Or perhaps it is heard, or read, or yes, perhaps it is merely an "idea," communicated who-knows-how, but received as such and thereby experienced (we can only say) aesthetically as well as in whatever other [adverb]-ally manner. The Dantoist, by insisting even here that the art-conferring property has not actually been "seen," is then forced into arguing that a stimulus of the Duchampian type tout court does not entrain the receiver into even the first-order type of response, to say nothing of the second-order type; this despite the stimulus being presumed to be something and not to be nothing . . . and this argument cannot possibly be correct, not even in the case of explicit and literal language use. The literalness itself, like the vaunted Concept of the Conceptualist, can only be intended, and some problematic case of deviance or misprision can always be found for even the aridest stimuli; we can find it on the other side of the globe if we have to, but even that old saw forces a significant corollary to Dantoist theory, a corollary which begs all manner of important questions and leads thereby to conclusive objections.
Yep, I'm not above suggesting that (some) people who (like all of us, purportedly) do not "see" the art-conferring properties of Fountain nonetheless do see the "aesthetic" qualities of the urinal qua urinal. Of course this itself is no indictment of Dantoism: no instance of seeing-urinal where seeing-Fountain is intended can sink or exalt a Theory Of Art philosophically. What the example does, rather, is to point up more precisely what kind of social and moral action the making of a Fountain-work really is. It shows, precisely as the Dantoist/Dickieist says, that the conferral process and the seeing process have nothing necessarly to do with each other. What it does not show (what no Theory of Art can show) is that the actual, empirical divergence of the two processes is unproblematic, or even can be (ought to be) tolerated. This latter is nothing less than a moral question for anyone, artist or audience, seeking to live an "examined life." I'm continually surprised at how thoroughly so many theorists have "examined" Fountain without being willing to broach this side of the matter!
In short,
conferral is
top-down;
seeing is
bottom-up.
A broader faith in Bottom-Up as against Top-Down social action inspires the selfsame faith in seers and a corresponding lack of faith in conferrers.
Yep, the counterargument to the Institutional Theory of Art is . . . not much of a counterargument at all. Rather, it is a lack of faith institutions! How rude! And it is here that Danto's transhistorical bent has to be confronted, since he sees his Theory as accounting for something that has been going on for somewhat longer than the current crop of "institutions" has existed. And we have a journal paper somewhere in our files which purports to disabuse facile-minded pseuds of the notion that Danto's and Dickie's theories proceed at all along the same lines. And so we had better leave this thread alone for now and move along!
Now here comes
special feature
number
(1)
. . .
Dickie aims from the outset to specify a property which cannot be found merely by inspecting a putative artwork.
He says:
What the eye cannot descry is a complicated non-exhibited characteristic of the artifacts in question.
The idea is that the property required by the second condition of the definition is to be, as Dickie calls it, a social property, a non-exhibited status obtained within an institution.
This seems to isolate the issue well enough.
Is this What Art Is? Does this in fact define art?
It seems possible to point to works which have had no status conferred upon them whatsoever but which upon being put forward as candidates (for arthood, not for exaltation) would be all but impossible to deny.
This putting-forward is the conferral process, I assume the Dickieist argues. Merely by suggesting the hypothetical, I have transformed my counterexamples into exemplars. And so we are back to Danto's Time Machine and Wölfflin's Dictum. We can point to works, perhaps myriad works, which were never put forward but which, as soon as they are put forward, are impossible to deny. The theory, indeed, has by that time been revealed as (more properly) a Social Theory, in which connection "institutions" are merely one part and perhaps also "downstream" of the real action.
It should be possible to establish "institutions" where nothing is "put forward" or "appreciated" in quite this way. Those are transactional concepts at root. The ideal, rather, is some kind of fully voluntary coming-together, such that the validation-seeking artist and the sensation-seeking audience really accept each other, probably implicitly and temporarily, but authentically and without coercion. Typically, a skepticism of institutions either begins or ends in a skepticism about the possibility of precisely this kind of uncoerced intercourse; but really, only an "institution" of some kind or other can be the staging ground for this sort of thing. Communal ritual is not clearly better in this way, and it may well be much worse. Becker's account is apt as always: "social life is the saga of the working out of one's problems and ambitions on others." Institutions can facilitate some relatively frictionless working-out, but only along very narrow lines. It seems they are "purpose-built" and that corruption is essentially a process of creeping ulterior purposes (read: "problems and ambitions") coming eventually to dominate institutional structures which are ill-equipped to serve them. What we call "nepotism," e.g., is nefarious only in the context of an institution where such particularism and self-dealing is explictly against the rules; the "corruption" per se is in the duplicity and the tolerance of duplicity; it is not in the general notion of looking out for the best interests of one's kids and/or oneself. But these interests of kids-and-self, however legitimate, these are . . . well, these are "problems" to be "worked out", no? And if you determine to "work them out" on a youth baseball team or a music conservatory or a government office, then you have to some degree subverted the integrity of those institutions vis-a-vis their intrinsic structure and function. And that is corruption, whether or not it rises to any conventional legal standard per which that term could be invoked.
The basis for some degree of functional differentiation on all levels of society, from the institutional down to the individual, is in the necessity for purpose-built avenues of working out. I'm less concerned with the possibility that this is some kind of artifact of modern alienation, that it is a sign of something amiss. I'm more concerned with the evident fact that we don't seem very good at maintaining such purpose-built institutions, preferring instead to corrupt them at the first opportunity. If only they came with a user manual . . .
(2) Since the eighteenth century there have been a number of definitions of art in terms of something like appreciation.
Conceptions of appreciation have varied
and so has the strategy of the definition.
Usually some minimal requirement is given—for instance, that a thing be an artifact—and then it is held that appreciation of the thing is a necessary or sufficient condition of its being an artwork.
The principal refinements have consisted in making the condition more subtle—requiring that a thing be likely to be appreciated, or that it be intended to be appreciated, or that it should be appreciated.
And here comes
special feature
number
(2)
. . .
Dickie's second condition is subtle enough to transform the character of this kind of definition.
All questions of
actual appreciation
are
waived.
What is required is that a thing be a
candidate for appreciation,
and
actually being appreciated
is neither
necessary
nor
sufficient
for that.
(3) Dickie agrees with Morris Weitz in distinguishing two senses—or uses, as he sometimes says—of the term 'work of art,'
an evaluative sense
and
a descriptive sense.
Thus the initial qualification in the definition.
Dickie is interested in the expression 'work of art' only in its descriptive sense, and he has little to say about its evaluative sense.
He does invoke the evaluative sense as an explanation of the propriety of remarks like "This driftwood is a work of art" which precludes their being counterexamples to the requirement that works of art be artifacts.
Dickie
holds
that
the descriptive and evaluative senses are distinct at least to this extent,
that
both artifacts and nonartifacts can be works of art in the evaluative sense,
while
only artifacts can be works of art in the descriptive sense.
Furthermore,
works of art in the descriptive sense
need not be works of art in the evaluative sense.
So
special feature number (3) . . .
being a work of art in one sense is neither necessary nor sufficient for being so in the other sense.
The third feature of the definition is less novel than the others. I mention it because I will claim, toward the end of my criticism, that Dickie's determination to keep out of the definition everything he takes to be a matter of merit has left his conception of art too spare.
If so, then . . . yeah, one would think!
The definition falls short, so to speak, both formally and materially, and it is the second condition which is defective. Despite the careful reference
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to candidacy for appreciation, and not to appreciation itself, we must be told something about appreciation—enough at least to give content to the notion of candidacy.
Materially,
what Dickie says about appreciation is too strong,
even though very general;
formally,
it lacks a dimension
without which it is not acute enough
to discriminate art from other things.
What Appreciation Is
Dickie first says:
The kind of appreciation I have in mind is simply the kind characteristic of our experiences of paintings, novels, and the like.
One may wonder whether there is such a kind of appreciation,
...
It seems to me it is already too much to suppose that there is a kind of appreciation characteristic of our experiences of, say, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Pollock, Olitski,
"and the like."
But
Dickie thinks this can be overcome.
Indeed,
if we mean by "appreciation" something like
"in experiencing the qualities of a thing one finds them worthy or valuable,"
then
there is no problem about the similarity of the various appreciations.
This suggestion fails to meet the one case Dickie speaks much about, that of Duchamp.
Dickie calls Duchamp's "Fountain" a work of art with no hesitation, and I think he believes it a substantial achievement of his definition that it easily accommodates things like the works of Dada. But does it?
I agree that whatever Dada's practitioners thought, their accomplishment was not simply the creation of Un-art. It was, however, the creation of something different. In understanding this I am inclined to follow Michael Fried, who has said this:
the situation has been complicated still further by the calling into question, first by Dada and within the past decade by Neo-Dada figures such as Cage, Johns and Rauschenberg, of the already somewhat dubious concept of a "work of art." . . . It would, however, be mistaken to think of Dada—the most precious of movements —as opposed to art. Rather, Dada stands opposed to the notion of value or quality in art, and in that sense represents a reaction against the unprecedented demands modernist painting makes of its practitioners. (It is, I think, significant that Duchamp was a failed modernist—more
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exactly, a failed Cubist—before he turned his hand to the amusing inventions by which he is best known.)
Now, now . . . let's keep our side of the street clean!
That said . . .
Of course my most anti-intellectual coworker did attend three colleges without graduating . . .
Of course it was recently revealed that my most anti-modern, anti-self-regarding, pro-self-loathing coworker did once apply for a NEA grant . . .
So . . . yeah, revisionist history is definitely a thing.
(Das es of my own intellectual and artistic adolescence is fairly well documented. You're already in the right place to find most of it, should you fancy a glimpse.)
[Fried, cont.]
But there is a superficial similarity between modernist painting and Dada in one important respect:
namely, that just as modernist painting has enabled one to see a blank canvas, a sequence of random spatters or a length of colored fabric as a picture,
Dada and Neo-Dada have equipped one to treat virtually any object as a work of art—though it is far from clear exactly what this means.
I suspect it actually is quite clear what this means to anyone who would/could write the above passage, but there is a reason why they do not want to share their opinion in this setting, fearing it is merely an "opinion."
Count me with Taleb: "opinions are the stuff of life." "Accept that being human involves some amount of epistemic arrogance in running your affairs." Academic discourse now is no one's "affair." It is rather a collective, social affair where "arrogance" is just Arrogance, not to be tolerated; and then, this is quite literally self-defeating.
But really, that's what the learning is for! It's not just for achieving scientific objectivity (though we could always use more of that than we have). It's also for forming what has been quite aptly called Learned Opinion; quite literally: opinions rather than facts, but formed learned-ly; fast-brain outputs that are, nonetheless, every bit as conditioned by learning and experience as are slow-brain outputs.
May we all have the experience of getting learn-ed.
Whether or not one agrees with Fried, it seems clear that the "appreciation" of Dada was and is novel. If Fried is right, then to speak of Dada in terms of experiencing qualities one finds worthy or valuable is exactly wrong.
It does seem wrong, but I think we get tied in knots once we move to Rank and Becker's "existential" level of analysis. (And we must do this eventually!)
Reading the Neo-Dadaists as opposed to the notion of value or quality may turn out to be exactly the same misreading as opposed to art. Just as making art does not quite smell like an anti-art stance, it also doesn't smell like a skepticism of value and quality. We should probably be more willing to heed surface content in the value case than in the broader question of art. But even this kind of art is made by someone. To my knowledge, the Neos namechecked above certainly were not shy about putting their names on their work. I'm not sure what evidence we have to really suggest that the Dadas' disvaluation of "art" was matched by a parallel disvaluation of that projection of personal value which Rank finds already at the earliest stirrings of the artistic impulse.
Even if Fried is wrong, surely the one obvious point about Dada is that it is not the occasion for appreciation of the "kind characteristic of our experiences of paintings, novels, and the like."
Of course Dickie is not referring to the same occasion as is Rank. But if he was we'd have a tougher time disputing his theory. When a work finds appreciators, so does its maker. Hence I fail to see the "renunciation" (Rank's term) in Dada. "Quality" is easier to renounce than is self-regard.
Of course
Dickie has not said that Dada
is, or is to be,
appreciated
in this way,
but that
it has acquired the status of being
a candidate
for such appreciation.
But
Dada in general, and certainly Duchamp's urinal, is virtually accompanied by an announcement that traditional appreciation (if there is such a thing) cannot occur.
This suggests two things:
(1) that being a candidate for appreciation in any but the emptiest sense of 'appreciation' (where it signifies any kind of apprehension appropriate to anything which is an artwork) is not part of what it is to be an artwork, at least not for some works,
and
(2) that possibilities concerning what
can
be appreciated have some bearing on what can be made a candidate for appreciation.
Sure. But if the art object is seen as a projection of the artist-as-person, then we confront the possibility that any such projection (any observable or ascribed action) is a candidate for "appreciation" as such. Artworks are a tiny sliver of a vast expanse called "action."
The second point is not considered by Dickie, and this is responsible for what I think of as a formal gap in his definition.
What Can Be a Work of Art
The second condition Dickie calls a "social property" of art. ...
|
There are two broad areas for questions about
how a thing acquires the social property which makes it art: |
in what circumstances and by whom can this property be bestowed, |
and
what qualifies a thing to receive this bestowal. |
...
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If part of what makes a thing a work of art issues from an "institution" or "social practice," then we need to be told something of the details of the institution.
There is merit enough in articulating the claim that art-ness is partly an institutional property—if that is true, ...
As he [Dickie] says,
lines of authority in the politico-legal world are by and large explicitly defined and incorporated into law, while lines of authority (or something like authority) in the artworld are nowhere codified. The artworld carries on its business at the level of customary practice.
... Dickie sees a difference between a plumbing equipment salesman displaying his wares and Duchamp exhibiting his urinal, ... :
The difference is analogous to the difference between my uttering "I declare this man to be a candidate for alderman" and the head of the election board uttering the same sentence while acting in his official capacity
But there is an ambiguity here:
whose enfranchisement are we concerned with,
some museum director's
or Duchamp's?
i.e.
That peculiar
enfranchisement
which is
bestowed
by the
museum director
is a decisive example of an
explicitly defined line of authority.
i.e.
Museum Directors are not shining examples of the informal
customary practice
which is said here to prevail in
the artworld.
Actually they are
counterexamples.
That Dickie means the former [the director], or at least that he does not mean Duchamp, is suggested by this—
The point is that Duchamp's act took place within a certain institutional setting and that makes all the difference. Our salesman of plumbing supplies could do what Duchamp did—
and by his remark concerning a different case,
"It all depends on the institutional setting."
If Dickie is read this way, then his analogy is strikingly inept, for it is precisely not the case that our Dickie could do what the head of the election board did (make someone an aldermanic candidate).
What the analogy suggests
is that
to make something art,
one first must be an artmaker.
I suspect that the analogy appeals to Dickie because it sets making-a-candidate-for-election beside making-a-candidate-for-appreciation.
But it is clear that one needs status to bestow status in the political case.
What about the case of art?
Yeah, what about it?!
... What if a urinal merchant or a junk
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collector had attempted to carry out Duchamp's act, say with the very object Duchamp used, and had been turned away by the organizers of the show? ...
the urinal did not become art
because
it did not receive the requisite social property,
...
;
and the only way in which Duchamp's being Duchamp figures is contingently (since the organizers knew him, they accepted his urinal)?
Well,
then what if Duchamp had been rejected as well?
A plausible counterfactual! And . . . a mere counterfactual, but one which stands up to empirical scrutiny: We don't have to look very hard to find examples of art-rejection by art-authority, which rejection does not, nonetheless, seem to bear the least upon the art-ontological status of the rejected works.
If he had then just sulked, that might be an end to it.
But what if he displayed the rejected urinal in his own flat, set it out on a roped-off rug in the living room? Does that turn the trick? Then could the merchant do the same?
Well, definitionally there are no Institutions Of One, but this too could easily be accommodated to the extent needed to reconcile it with the "institutional theory." All that would be required is the occasional visitor to the apartment.
Whom among us has not been that visitor several times over?
... Dickie notes that the ordinary salesman is presenting his wares for appreciation, but insists that he is not conferring on them the status of candidate for appreciation.
But he could be doing both things, couldn't he?
Couldn't Duchamp?
| ... since you may believe that Picasso's paintings were already art before he got to your house, suppose that he came and was commissioned by you to do a sketch directly on the wall in order to disguise some cracks in the plaster. | That would be art, wouldn't it? | And if it is when Picasso does it, why not when the neighborhood painter and plasterer do it? |
...
Before his discussion of Duchamp and the salesman, Dickie offers an adroit remark to help in accepting the notion of a "conferral of status" when it is clear that for much art this cannot be said to occur overtly (some artists never exhibit).
What I want to suggest is that, just as two persons can acquire the status of common-law marriage within a legal system, an artifact can acquire the status of a candidate for appreciation within the system which Danto has called "the artworld"
Then how is it
that
Picasso's merest scribble and,
perhaps,
Duchamp's urinal
have a status not possessed by just anyone's mere scribble or spare urinal?
Perhaps it is like this:
one of the ways the "artworld" breeds Art is by way of
enfranchising
Artmakers.
...
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...
[Perhaps] It is because he did "Nude" that Duchamp is an artist;
it is because he is Duchamp that "Fountain" is not just a misplaced urinal.
This idea suggests that art and its institutions are inbred and self-justifying in ways that are hard to untangle,
and I think that is plausible though I will not argue for it.
This does seem to be the case, and it does seem advisable not to argue the point to lustily. That is because we can find the same irrational basis lying at the root of most any human endeavor, institutional and otherwise.
In other words, calling some human endeavor "self-justifying" is not much of an accusation coming from some other (irrational) human, who in fact justifies theyself with precisely this act of critique. The occasion for legitimate criticism of instititions, rather, is when they have claimed a rational basis for their own own stucture and function, but this rational basis does not, in fact, exist. And even there, that may be the entire scope for valid criticism: simple hypocrisy, or simple failure to hold up one end of some bargain. But by the time we've drilled down to the existential level of critique, we're courting pot-and-kettle territory.
I hesitate to declare that there are no rational institutions at all, but it does seem (to me) safe to assume that our institutional ambitions have badly outpaced our really available means. To achieve rational institutions, we need to severely confine their roles and limit their size and scope. We can claim only those bases and roles for our institutions which institutions writ large actually are able to toss off. Government is of course the celebrated example, at least in the U.S., and that is the lens through which this general question has been endlessly relitigated. I hesitate, again, to draw too close an analogy, but I do think that we get the government and the art (institutions) that we deserve. Build better citizens and the scope widens for institutional mandates as reflections of what those citizens are capable of; but don't hold your breath for the first part.
It seems clear [however!] that Dickie does not agree with this.
He says, after all, that the salesman could do what Duchamp did, and there is no suggestion that to do this the salesman must first acquire a power Duchamp already has.
...The creation of a political candidate ... seems an apt analogue of artmaking only so long as only one aspect is considered.
In both artmaking and candidate-making there exist constraints in terms of the objects.
The head of the election board cannot make
just anyone
a candidate.
...
Perhaps Dickie supposes his account of artmaking supplies an analogue for all this in the first condition, that the object be an artifact.
But something is missing.
There is nothing to match the connection between the qualifications imposed on a would-be alderman and the point in making someone a candidate for alderman.
The qualifications
...
derive from considerations of what aldermen
do
or are
supposed to do.
...
What connection of any kind is there between being an artifact and being appreciated?
Why is it that only artifacts can be made candidates for appreciation,
and, more important,
why suppose that every artifact can be made such a candidate?
...
If we are to get to the subtleties implicit in Dickie's suggestion,
we need a different analogue for the act of making something art,
one in which a distinction appears,
not
between
having a power
and
not having it
(as the head of the election board has a power not possessed by others),
but
between
exercising a power we all have
and
not exercising it
(like Duchamp's act which Dickie thinks anyone could have carried out).
I believe that Dickie thinks we are
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all, or nearly all, in the artworld and that in the artworld everyone is empowered to make art.
A suitable analogue may illuminate what limits the exercise of this power.
I take the act of conferring the status of candidate for appreciation to be (or to be like) what Austin called an illocution ...
The analogue chosen by Dickie,
declaring someone a candidate in the uttering of certain words,
is an illocution.
To improve on it, we need a different illocution.
I will use
the act of promising,
though it too is an imprecise analogue in some respects.
There are a number of obscurities in our understanding of the mechanics of promising,
but that is a help here,
for it exposes the complexities that arise when we move from formalized rituals and ceremonial acts like christening and political licensing to less canonical ones like promising and, as Dickie thinks, making things art.
...
The act of promising accomplished in the saying of "I promise . . . " in appropriate circumstances is an illocution.
Characteristically, this illocution precipitates various effects and consequences Austin calls perlocutions.
Among possible perlocutions are,
for instance,
the recipient's feeling gratified in some way,
his attributing to the speaker an intention to do what is promised,
...
... I ask you to think of all these consequences or effects as one perlocution, ... "accepting" a promise.
Promising is an illocution;
having a promise accepted is a perlocution.
In the case of promising and securing acceptance,
the illocution and the perlocution are associated,
I think,
on two levels:
as a relation between promising and acceptance in general,
and
as a constraint on promising in particular instances.
In general, the perlocution is something like the rationale, or part of the rationale, for the illocution. ... —it gives the act a point.
...
if there is no acceptance of promises,
then the act of promising becomes not merely a vain effort,
but it ceases to be that kind of act—
...
In any particular case it must be possible, or at least appear to those concerned to be possible, that the perlocution transpire. ...
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... I cannot promise you something we both know, and know one another knows that I cannot deliver. ... 6
Note 6, in part:
"I leave some principal questions concerning the relations between illocutions and perlocutions untreated here, ... These questions— ... —are taken up in my "Illocutions and Perlocutions," forthcoming in Foundations of Language."
The paper is on JSTOR but is paywalled.
Sometimes I cannot do an illocution because the illocutionary act is not open to do.
...
I cannot argue the point with you if you are already persuaded, or warn you of a danger to which you are already alerted, or point out something you already see.
...
I take it as a kind of rule of thumb that the availability of at least some illocutions requires the openness of their associated perlocutions.
...
Let me import these points about perlocutions
into Dickie's definition.
I construe the act of
conferring the status of a candidate for appreciation
to be
like an illocution,
and I take
the actual appreciation
of a thing with this status
to be
like an associated perlocution.
Being appreciated is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for something's being a candidate for appreciation,
just as having what I say (about what I will do) accepted is neither necessary nor sufficient for its being a promise.
But
if
what I say
is
a promise,
then
it must
seem possible
that it
be accepted.
And
(supposing Dickie's definition correct),
if I am to succeed in conferring the status of art
on an object,
it must seem possible that it be appreciated.
My utterance is not a promise
just because I say so,
...
(I cannot promise that I was on time yesterday, or that it will rain tomorrow.)
And neither, I think,
is
x
a work of art
just because I say so.
There are substantive constraints on what I can promise
...
and there must be constraints on what I can make art.
But what are they?
Dickie names one—x must be an artifact.
But this is not enough.
What of an artifact
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which clearly cannot be appreciated
(in Dickie's sense)
?
I say that there are such things ... and that if Dickie's definition were correct then these things could not be artworks because they could not receive the requisite status.
Duchamp's urinal is like that.
Things like that cannot acquire the status required by Dickie's second condition because it would be pointless or bizarre to give it to them.
An exceptionally fruitful discussion here, but it runs aground on the sulk that some things clearly cannot (while, presumably, others clearly can) be appreciated.
What is Dickie's sense of "appreciation?"
"in experiencing the qualities of a thing one finds them worthy or valuable,"
(p. 188, subheading:
"What Appreciation Is")
And what are Cohen's examples of things which fail even this minimal test?
ordinary thumbtacks, cheap white envelopes, the plastic forks given at some drive-in restaurants
(p. 195, excised above)
Now, is it pointless or bizarre to find the "qualities" of a "plastic fork" to be "worthy or valuable"? Not at all. Perhaps it is bizarre to find those qualities of equal value to, say, a one-hundred dollar bill, or to a Beethoven symphony; that is, this is highly unexpected in normal run of things; but perhaps we require only a sufficiently "bizarre" set of circumstances to validate what otherwise seems like a purely abstract and unpragmatic counterargument. (In elementary school we several times watched a movie based on the book Hatchet where the main character uses a twenty dollar bill to start a fire; the point seems to be: he realizes in the moment that a fire is worth more than the bill in his "bizarre" situation.) Or, perhaps it is indeed notably unpragmatic to hold out for circumstances so bizarre that the closest-at-hand example is a fictional movie; perhaps, then, Our Man's case here ought simply be accepted as is.
However, we also have heard nothing (here, at least) about which "qualities" may serve as bases for "appreciation"; this leaves unsettled all cases of purely functional qualities, which are, generally, precisely the salient qualities of the thumbtacks, envelopes and forks of the world, in all contexts other than that of art appreciation.
All of this aside (and it is already too much to push aside), the really difficult question is: Do we REALLY neglect entirely to "appreciate" the art-qualities of "ordinary" functional objects? Certainly we do not confer art-qualities upon the vast majority of them, and we would not do so even if we did better understand everything that is at issue in the above passage. The sticking point is that there is at least one whole family of qualities (aesthetic qualities) which may indeed manifest without being "conferred": the aesthetic qualities of a plastic fork may "force themselves" on us; or, I may be "susceptible" to seeing form and ignoring function, whereas Bob or Steve or Susie tend to fixate on function and not to notice form in all but extreme or outlier cases of forcing-upon. Seemingly there may be both circumstantial and so-called individual factors at play in such matters, and this is the basis for my own pet sulk: I'm far more prepared to opine on what should and shouldn't be appreciated than to arrogate to say what clearly can and cannot be . . . and that is not even philosophy, but it takes a sizable helping of philosophy to arrive there securely.
So, while Our Man at times seems admirably skeptical of the larger Duchampian project, he actually plays right into the Duchampians' hands with this insistence that thumbtacks simply cannot be appreciated; for, as his own exposition well demonstrates, it was precisely this boundary of "quality" which was ripe for subversion and exploitation; it was precisely this boundary which enabled the charlatans to insist that a found object could be exhibited without being in any danger whatsoever of evincing "quality," or beauty, or provenance, or any such art-value as might be ascribed to it by way of the then-traditional "critical canons." This is why Duchamp could be so arrogantly confident that his Bizarre Promise could only be accepted, i.e. that Fountain has no aesthetic qualities. But even the urinals on the walls of fully operational restrooms have aesthetic qualities . . . , at least, for certain people, in certain situations, sometimes. If you are not one of those people, I acknowledge that you do exist, and I much prefer not to live under the same community or government umbrellas as you.
Dickie's concrete mistake has been to suppose that Duchamp's "Fountain" has anything whatever to do with what Dickie calls appreciation.
If such eccentric works are art, then if that requires that they have something in common with traditional art, it is not a candidacy for what they were designed to forestall and disdain.
This material error is a symptom of a more formal, conceptual gap—namely, supposing that making something a candidate for appreciation can be altogether unilateral, ...
Again: Good point, but let's always keep in mind that crashing a party is a peculiar way of disdaining it. What is disdained this way, first and foremost, is the fact that you weren't invited.
In fact,
the untoward consequence of Dickie's suggestion
is that
it will rule out the very items Dickie is eager to accommodate.
I have managed to miss any whiff of this eagerness in the summation of Dickie given here so far.
But then what about "Fountain"? ...
I am not clear about whether "Fountain" is a work of art, ...
If Fried is right, in the aftermath of Dada we are able to count nearly anything a work of art—but, he says, this leaves unclear what it means to count something as a work of art.
What is wrong with Dickie's definition, I think, is that as Dickie takes it, it is clear and it clearly applies to "Fountain."
No definition should fit "Fountain" so comfortably.
Why not takes some explaining.
To say that an illocution must be "pointless" if its associated perlocution is not open is not quite right.
There can be a
point
in saying
"I promise to love you forever"
or
"I promise never to feel anger again."
Indeed, saying these things can be splendid ways, perhaps the only ways, of saying and doing some things. But that does not make these sayings promises (I think they cannot be promises because these things cannot be promised).
Similarly, there can be a point, I suppose, in invoking a formula for bestowing the status of candidate for appreciation on a thing which cannot be an object of appreciation.
But that will not give these things that status.
In both kinds of cases, as with "pointless" illocutions in general, the effect is to draw attention from the thing said (or the putative object of appreciation) to the act of saying it (or the act of exhibiting it).
Nota bene!
If Austin is right, we cannot entirely separate the saying and the said without distortion, but we can identify, so to speak, the locus of significance and import:
if the situation is normal and altogether unproblematic, the thing
[196]
uttered
(or the object of appreciation)
engages us;
if the situation is in certain ways remarkable,
then however canonical
the thing uttered
seems,
we will pass behind it to its genesis.
What significance we can find in "Fountain" we find not in
the urinal
but in
Duchamp's gesture.
It is not that "Fountain" is simply
(nor is "I promise to love you forever"
its transparent resistance to appreciation
is the sign that
it is not
simply a candidate for appreciation
(as the fact
It is not only the questionable conception of appreciation which undermines Dickie's definition. Let us ignore that for a while. At the end of his essay Dickie says:
Now what I have been saying may sound like saying, "a work of art is an object of which someone has said, 'I christen this object a work of art.'" And I think it is rather like that. So one
can
make a work of art out of a sow's ear, but of course that does not mean that it is a silk purse [p. 256b].
What I have been arguing is that it cannot be this simple:
There are bound to be
conditions to be met
both by
the namer
and
the thing to be named,
...
Austin's characteristic way of describing a kind of act or thing was to catalogue the dimensions in which it can be irregular.
Thus
As we move through various departures from the
normal, pedestrian
cases, passing through all the
gross irregularities
Austin called
"infelicities,"
we come eventually to cases which
are no longer promises.
The boundary between
non-promises
and more or less
failed promises
is hard to locate,
but
If artmaking is like an illocution, then a similar catalogue is in order, an account of the ways in which artmaking can be irregular.
I do not blame Dickie for not yet supplying such a catalogue. I do complain that he has not noted the importance of such a catalogue,
for if artmaking is simply a matter of informal illocutions, then the catalogue may be the only substantial definition we can get or need.
There must be a boundary,
After passing through all the familiar avant-garde battlecries, on one hand, and all the familiar Philosophical wrangling, on the other, do we not end up concluding that the avant-garde's actions speak lounder than their words here, and therefore that the avant-garde in fact only
confirms
(and ever re-confirms) the above stipulation rather than refuting it?
. . .
and
. . .
that there's nothing wrong with the fact, but everything wrong with insisting it is not a fact?
As before, re: "institutions" generally: Leave the artworks alone; critiquing the hypocrisy is adequate to all possible purposes!
...
[197]
...
Duchamp's "Fountain" is a difficult case.
One
The other
Perhaps the most helpful part of Dickie's view is the implicit suggestion of
a way to avoid this choice.
Instead of either of these responses,
I think we must
give up the compulsion to
decide
about "Fountain,"
to rule it in or out;
and I think we can do this by taking seriously the suggestion that whether "Fountain" is art depends upon whether and how
a certain kind of act
was performed.
Succeeding in getting "Fountain" under, or out from under, the term "art" is a delusive achievement:
for the sake of a kind of
ontological tidiness,
most of what is
interesting and instructive
about "Fountain" is ignored.
What we need to discuss are
the ways in which "Fountain" is very much like normal art
and
the ways in which it is altogether unlike normal art,
and then how this bears on the character of Duchamp's
act of putting it forward
and having it called art.
When that discussion is done,
So it is with promising.
The unclear cases illuminate the clear ones as they bring out parts of the conception according to which the clear cases are clear.
"I promise to wring your neck."
Not a promise:
"I promise to keep all cigarettes out of your reach."
This is not clear.
The hard thing to do is
to
we know what art and promises are
while
refusing to suppose
can decide
We
hardly ever truly
need to!
That is by far the most frustrating part of reading all of this Philosophy.
I would propose to label the
need-to-know
aspect of philosophical issues as the "pragmatic" aspect, but I gather that label is already spoken for . . .
Dickie and others have criticized earlier theories for having lost the good art/bad art distinction, often, as with Collingwood, willfully absorbing it into the very distinction between art and non-art.
Ironically, Dickie has effectively reversed this:
he has provided for room on the bad art side of the good art/bad art distinction for much of what is normally taken to be non-art.
...
Please remember that when I say "Fountain" is a work of art, I am not saying it is a good one. And in making this last remark I am not insinuating that it is a bad one either
[p. 255b].
[198]
This is the view Dickie proposes to take of any object whatever.
From this view
the real difficulty,
and that question is never more than a nominal problem encountered occasionally because "lines of authority (or something like authority) in the artworld are nowhere codified"
and so it may be hard to discover whether the thing has been christened.
This view obscures too much.
The works of the painters Fried discusses (Stella, Noland, Olitski) are clearly works of art, and the
serious questions
about them concern
what kinds of paintings they are,
and
whether and why they are good.
But
there are very few such questions
about "Fountain," most Dada works, and many contemporary works.
The questions about them concern exactly
whether and why
they are art, and
how they become
anything like art,
To make these questions easy is both to mistake the nature of these objects and to refuse to take seriously the question of the possibility of the creation of art.
...
[199]
...
8.
In Danto's "The Artworld"
(op. cit.)
I find a suggestion of a way to treat artmaking as an extraordinary illocution, one whose constraints are always emendable.
In the last section of the essay, Danto ventures some remarks which, in rough summary, are to this effect:
there is a set of pairs of artwork-relevant predicates.
Each pair consists of two "opposite" predicates
Opposites,
but
(It is not true that anything is either representational or nonrepresentational;
A necessary condition for an object to be an artwork is that at least one pair of artwork-relevant predicates be sensibly applicable to it.
Danto remarks that an artistic breakthrough may consist in adding a pair of artwork-relevant predicates.
Then we might try to think of artmaking in this way: the constraints on what can be christened art are given by the condition that some artwork-relevant predicate pair be sensibly applicable to the object.
But
it is possible to make art of an unqualified object
not by
altering the object
but by
adding to the set of predicate pairs
a pair already sensibly applicable to the object.
a candidate for appreciation which cannot be appreciated
simply a promise which cannot be accepted);
that love cannot be promised
is the sign that this utterance is not simply a promise).
even if
in the end
it is
successful christening which makes an object art,
not every effort at christening is successful.
a promise might be untoward, gauche, imprudent, impractical, ineffective, or unaccepted.
(1) it exists,
and
(2) it is not identical with the boundary between utterances of the form "I promise . . . " and those without it,
for this form is neither necessary nor sufficient.
however hard to chart,
between making art,
and trying but failing to make art.
It is difficult in the adjustment it demands of us, but neither of the two adjustments likely to be suggested is in order.
is to give up defining art,
pointing to "Fountain" as an illustration of the inevitable failure of any definition.
is to formulate a definition
which covers "Fountain" as neatly as "Nude."
nothing may be left to do.
Some cases are clearly promises,
some clearly are not.
Some are unclear.
I cannot promise what you do not want,
knowing you do not want it.
Can I promise you something we agree you need
even if we both know you do not want it?
hold onto
the conviction
that
that we always
or
need to decide
.
the philosophical anguish,
will arise after the question of art has been settled,
(e.g., "representational"/"nonrepresentational," "expressionist"/"nonexpressionist").
unlike contradictories as usually construed,
do not sensibly apply to all objects;
with regard to any artwork
they behave as contradictories.
it is true that any artwork is either representational or nonrepresentational.)
In order to work out the details of this suggestion,
one will have to say something about
how a predicate pair can be made a member of the set.
The project is complicated by Danto's ingenious observation that once an object is an artwork all artwork-relevant predicate pairs apply.
This means that after the fact, the new pair will be as definitive as the older ones of earlier artworks, and the older pairs will sensibly apply to the new work.
Indeed, just how can a freshly-minted predicate pair get itself invited to the Art Party?
If everyone is invited, it won't be much of a party.
i.e.
If we can force acceptance of our work as art simply by describing it
sensibly,
then perhaps the party is indeed over.
I should make clear that Danto's remarks are made in an altogether different context, and their adaptability to a discussion of the illocutionary act of making art is my own tentative suggestion.
In any case, the suggestion is of no use to Dickie, who seems to conceive the act as an ordinary illocution.
Indeed,
whereas Danto's idea
might at last give content
to Morris Weitz's somewhat dogmatic claim
that the conditions for a thing to be art are indefinitely corrigible
...
,
Dickie's essay is offered as an explicit refutation of Weitz.
This indefinite corrigibility itself is a hint that (1) we don't often truly "need" to have recourse to it, and (2) we ought to avoid having such recourse whenever possible.
