TIMOTHY BINKLEY—Contra Aesthetics

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

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Piece: Contra Aesthetics

TIMOTHY BINKLEY

[orig. 1977]

I. What Is This Piece?

1. The term "aesthetics" has a general meaning in which it refers to the philosophy of art. In this sense, any theoretical writing about art falls within the realm of aesthetics.

There is also a more specific and more important sense of the term in which it refers to a particular type of theoretical inquiry which emerged in the eighteenth century when the "Faculty of Taste" was invented. In this latter sense, "aesthetics" is the study of a specific human activity involving the perception of aesthetic qualities such as beauty, repose, expressiveness, unity, liveliness.

I think I prefer the first sense to the second, even though it often appears semantically imprecise or even outright deceptive.

Later in the Anthology we encounter some powerful arguments against conflating "aesthetics" with "philosophy of art"!

Although frequently purporting to be a (or even the) philosophy of art ,

aesthetics so understood is not exclusively about art :

This is exactly what I don't like about the second sense.

it investigates a type of human experience (aesthetic experience)

which is elicited by artworks,

but also by nature and by nonartistic artifacts.

Yep, this is the most important thing that both of these senses miss. When the silent uber-majority of intelligent non- philosophers refers to "aesthetics," usually they're referring neither to a "philosophy" nor to any merely "theoretical inquiry."

The really important (and frustrating) thing, however, is that even with intelligent people who are merely speaking of universal human experiences and feelings, even here we seem apt to build prisons of falsehood for ourselves and everyone around us without so much realizing that we have done so. Hence the extra-academic, sub-scholarly need for philosophy above and beyond the mere running of discursive water downhill.

Is this what is meant by Aesthetic Philosophy? By Philosophical Aesthetics? Or is that some eighteenth century bullpucky?

The discrepancy is generally thought to be unimportant and is brushed aside

with the assumption that if aesthetics is not exclusively about art, at least art is primarily about the aesthetic.

This assumption, however, also proves to be false, and it is the purpose of this piece to show why.

And it is the purpose of this annotation
(and of this whole blog)
to point up all of the trouble
us humanoids get ourselves into when
the aesthetic ceases to be primary
in our art practices.

...

2. Robert Rauschenberg erases a DeKooning drawing and exhibits it as his own work, "Erased DeKooning Drawing."

The aesthetic properties of the original work are wiped away, and the result is not a nonwork, but another work.

No important information about Rauschenberg's piece is presented in the way it looks, except perhaps this fact, that looking at it is artistically inconsequential.

It would be a mistake to search for aestheti-

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cally interesting smudges on the paper.

The object may be bought and sold like an aesthetically lush Rubens,

but unlike the Rubens it is only a souvenir or relic of its artistic meaning.

The owner of the Rauschenberg has no privileged access to its artistic content

in the way the owner of the Rubens does who hides the painting away in a private study.

Yet the Rauschenberg piece is a work of art.

Art in the twentieth century has emerged as a strongly self-critical discipline.

It has freed itself of aesthetic parameters and sometimes creates directly with ideas unmediated by aesthetic qualities.

An artwork is a piece: and a piece need not be an aesthetic object, or even an object at all.

The object may be bought and sold
like an aesthetically lush Rubens,
but unlike the Rubens
it is only a souvenir or relic of its artistic meaning.

So, why do people collect souvenirs ?

Perhaps more to the point:
why do some people sell "souvenirs" to other people who buy them?

Why is the destruction of mere relics potentially a Crime Against Humanity?

If any party to such transactions claims thereby to be engaged in an act of self-criticism, we are entitled to be dubious!

The neo-therapeutic platitude about choosing experiences over possessions is not too facile to be called into service here!

In this analogy-to-a-platitude,
the ineffable "experience"
of artistic meaning
is relatively more important;
and the concrete relic
of this experience
(strictly speaking,)
(the experience of possessing the relic of another experience)
(as opposed to simply . . . having this other experience)
is relatively more dispensible.

If on the other hand the maker of the souvenir-relic claimed thereby to be conducting self-criticism, then we as the anonymous liberal-democratic rabble haven't much else to do but to take this person at their (public) word. As friends and relations, of course, we are entitled to bust their balls a bit, "privately," just to keep them (as well as ourselves!) honest. And what if we are part of this person's audience? An audience is a peculiar thing, falling somewhere in the cracks between rando and relative. As the audience we consent (perhaps impliedly!) to make ourselves vulnerable to certain impositions by the artist. However, we need not cede an inch of previously-conquered ground to Intentionalism; for what ground has the Intentionalist gained here merely by ensuring that no important information about a drawing is presented in the way it looks , by creating directly with ideas unmediated by aesthetic qualities ? Ambiguity-of-intent may be reduced this way, certainly. Is it eliminated? Seems to me, above all, that ambiguity is merely channeled into the "ecosemiotic" arena, wherein the act of erasure of another artist's drawing, e.g., is confined to a far narrower field of Intentionalist parsing than are various "acts" of colorism, of harmony, of irony, etc. There remains some ambiguity here: erasure can be playful, freeing, earnest, violent . . . But this (re)channeling itself is far from an unambiguous social action. If anyone ought to be hip to that side of things, you'd think the Intentionalists would be!

---

What sort of ground are we treading upon here?

In social facilitation experiments with hyenas in captivity,
when one individual drinks,
the probability that an observing individual will drink
in the next few minutes is 70%.

(Preston and de Waal, "Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases")

the central concept of affordance ... introduced by Gibson ... who stated that animals perceive their environment in terms of what it affords to the consummation of their behaviour.


...


This ‘circularity’ of stimulus and reaction
is a central attribute of epistemic interactions with the world.
It means that
every stimulus presupposes a readiness to react,
and
that this readiness
‘selects’ as a stimulus
a phenomenon of the environment
which had been neutral up to that point.



...


The concept of circularity brings us to the pragmatic claims of Peirce who defined meaning in a rather retrospective way, from effect to causes.


...


[quoting Gibson]
"actually,
an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property: or it is both if you like.

An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither.

An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer."


...


a major claim of Gibson’s ecological psychology ... objects are experienced ultimately in terms of their functional significance for possible activities. ... it is not fruitful to study perception in itself. Perception ... must be treated as a phase of action in relation to the motor and intellectual activity of individuals.


...


the motor theory of perception ... motor ‘intention’ rather than manifest motor behaviour, is thought to be a largely endogenous phenomenon which is localised in the ‘central’ nervous system.

As such, it has been shown that there is a motor aspect in perception and that the same areas in the brain are activated during imagined and executed actions


(Mark Reybrouck, "Musical Sense-Making and the Concept of Affordance: An Ecosemiotic and Experiential Approach")

(The Sign of the Spectacle)

Detachment
refers to a situation in which
the context of action
outweighs in importance
the context of experience.
At an individual level,
it might involve
[e.g.]
the purchase of an ‘aesthetic object’
based on
some criterion external to it, ...
Detachment
can also occur even when a work is treated systemically.
Someone might experience sympathy
(as opposed to empathy)
for the circumstances of situated characters ... but
‘not want to get involved’, so to speak. ...

Communal detachment is a phenomenon of large-scale societies and can be attributed in part to the effects of mass media.
Television and the internet, while providing speedy and unparalleled access to information, also provide a large-scale frame around both good and bad events taking place in the world.
This creates a sense of detachment as one observes possible horrors at a safe and sometimes voyeuristic distance. ...
At the same time, one cannot put the blame on a medium in and of itself. As a complex system it functions simultaneously at many levels.

(Gerald C. Cupchik, "The Evolution of Psychical Distance as an Aesthetic Concept")

From infancy babies automatically represent artefacts partly in relation to how they might be manipulated,
apparently as a way to conceptualize their possible use or function.

Similarly, adults assess artefacts partly according to their function.

This springboard from manipulability to functional utility is absent from most works of art however,

as it is for printed text or signs. ...



A tool will be recognized as such if it carries out a specific function;
and if this tool carries out this function, we directly infer that its maker intended it to do so.

This tool, then, may be assessed without speculation regarding the maker’s intention;
recognizing its function is sufficient to categorize it and use it.

For a work of art, the contrary is true:
as it carries out no obvious precise function,
it cannot be assessed
without speculation about the artist’s intention.

In other words,
a work of art would be assumed to communicate something,
which would have to be inferred from the artist’s intention.


...


taking into account the intention of the artefact’s maker allows one to avoid some problems with classic approaches to artefact categorization. ... similarity of form and function are not sufficient for artefact categorization,
because
two objects may be dissimilar in form, but belong to the same kind,
and
two objects may be similar in potential function, but belong to different kinds.


...


Being human-made objects, works of art activate intuitive cognition for artefacts, but at the same time frustrate functional expectations associated with artefacts; the creator’s intended function for his or her creation cannot be simply “read off” of the work of art. ...


...


According to Relevance Theory,
to communicate is to make explicit an intention
(the intention to communicate, and the intention to communicate something in particular),
and
successful communication occurs when this intention is correctly inferred from the evidence,
that is,
from the utterance or behaviour in question.

However,
as most of the time a number of different inferences may be drawn from the evidence, communication is also constrained by the Principle of Relevance. According to [which]... communicating goes along with an expectation of relevance:
people pay attention only to information which may have an effect in a given context or, in cognitive terms, to information which is “worth processing”.


...


in our domain of interest, that would mean that works of art are expected to communicate something that is relevant ... Furthermore, ... successful communication occurs when the speaker’s intention is correctly inferred from the utterance. Understanding the artist’s intention would, thus, be a crucial factor in assessing the relevance of a work of art.


(Jean-Luc Jucker and Justin L. Barrett, "Cognitive Constraints on the Visual Arts: An Empirical Study of the Role of Perceived Intentions in Appreciation Judgements")

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I'm a rank amateur here, cherrypicking from among my own cherrypicking, but I must say, I am finding that the executors of the estates of Darwin, Peirce, and Gibson, whatever pomo adspeak they use to self-label their academic field, do ask findings such as these to do quite a lot of work; moreover, they ask that this work be done on behalf of social-actions-and-actors which are, let's say . . . not completely admirable as viewed from any number of hegemonic contemporary value systsmes.

These are scientists. They are telling the rest of us how it is. But let's always be sure to consult the "culminating science" of Philosophy, lest the hallowed circularity of stimulus and reaction metastasizes into an ugly spiral.

Dare I say, also, that a strongly self-critical discipline is very nearly a contradiction in terms. Axiomatically, the ultimate act of self-criticism would be to disband the discipline tout court. Any course of action short of folding the tents evinces some residual arrogation which remains off limits to criticism. Hence when we speak of the degree of "strength" of a "self-critical" impulse, it's not clear that anything terribly weighty is on the receiving end of these rhetorical blows. Even Duchamp seems a clear enough example of full-stop self-criticism in this art-epoch only until we put some real weight behind the punches, at which point the mere ascription of self-direction seems unwarranted and the other-direction seems the more obvious effect; as is the case with "critique" generally. (See: The Jorn quote I insert in almost every post here nowadays.) It seems, rather, that Duchampian metacriticism is a criticism which emanantes from outside rather than within a discipline. It bespeaks not loyal opposition but total alientation. That, anyway, is most of its appeal, no?

All to say: If we had to come up with a good definition of what Our Man here means by "self-critical," I'm not sure we could do it. The Fundamental Law of Hipsterism militates against it. If, on the other hand, what is meant is simply that artists themselves take over the role and function of the "critic," then this seems merely to confirm that the critic was never particularly necessary or even helpful, that (s)he actually was not harsh enough; we can then return to churning over all prior generations' unresolved questions about The Meaning of Life, and we can stop worrying at all about any parochial art-problems unless and until our own Daily Life is irrevocably implicated in them; which, yes, even for many Artists, is very rarely the case. (And that's okay!)

And Yet,
for all of this,
the Rauschenberg piece is a work of art.

Indeed. No doubt about it.

I am here to affirm this, not to deny it. I feel this quite intuitively to be true; and I have most often enjoyed my time actually spent interfacing with works of this kind.

Then I read Philosophers who are more-than-usually sympathetic to this kind of work and I can hardly agree with a word of it. Unfortunately.

3. This piece is occasioned by two works of art by Marcel Duchamp,

L.H.O.O.Q. and L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved. ...

If you deny that they are [works of art],

it is up to you to explain why the listings in a Renoir catalogue are artworks,

but the listings in a Duchamp catalogue are not. ...

Anyway, whether the Duchamp pieces are works of art is ultimately inconsequential, as we shall see.

This piece is also, shall we say, about the philosophical significance of Duchamp's art.

This piece is primarily about the concept "piece" in art;

and its purpose is to reformulate our understanding of what a "work of art" is.

II What Is L.H.O.O.Q.?

These are Duchamp's words:

This Mona Lisa with a moustache and a goatee is a combination readymade and iconoclastic Dadaism. The original, I mean the original readymade is a cheap chromo 8x5 on which I inscribed at the bottom four letters which pronounced like initials in French, made a very risqué joke on the Gioconda.

Imagine a similar description of the Mona Lisa itself. Leonardo took a canvas and some paint and put the paint on the canvas in such-and-such a way so that—presto—we have the renowned face and its environs.

There is a big difference

between this description

and Duchamp's description.

The difference is marked by the unspecified "such-and-such" left hanging in the description of Leonardo's painting.

I could, of course, go on indefinitely describing the look of the Mona Lisa,

and the fidelity with which your imagination reproduced this look would depend upon such things as

how good my description is, how good your imagination is,

and

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chance.

Yet
regardless of how precise and vivid my description is,
one thing it will never do is acquaint you with the painting.

You cannot claim to know that work of art on the basis of reading the most exquisite description of it ,

even though you may learn many interesting things about it .

The way you come to know the Mona Lisa is by looking at it ...

Now reconsider the description of Duchamp's piece: L.H.O.O.Q. is a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a moustache, goatee, and letters added. There is no amorphous "such-and-such" standing for the most important thing.

The description tells you what the work of art is;

you now know the piece without actually having seen it...

When you look at the artwork

you learn nothing of artistic consequence

which you don't already know from the description Duchamp gives,

and for this reason

it would be pointless to spend time attending to the piece

as a connoisseur would savor a Rembrandt.

And
I suppose
it would not be pointless
to talk about the Duchamp
the way it is pointless
to talk about the Mona Lisa?

The work may be known this way, yes.

What's the point in knowing?
:^/

...

This difference can be elucidated by contrasting ideas and appearances . Some art (a great deal of what is considered traditional art) creates primarily with appearances. To know the art is to know the look of it; and to know that is to experience the look, to perceive the appearance.

And to perceive is merely "a phase of action in relation to the motor and intellectual activity of individuals"!

At least, if the "individual" in question is some kind of Pragmatist, Ecologist, Psychologist, or Media-ologist, then this understanding of perception is in play. Perhaps it is in play roughly 70% of the time.

On the other hand, some art creates primarily with ideas.

To know the art is to know the idea;

and to know an idea is not necessarily to experience a particular sensation, or even to have some particular experience.

This is why you can know L.H.O.O.Q. either by looking at it or by having it described to you.

(In fact, the piece might be better or more easily known by description than by perception.)

But
what's the point in "knowing"?

The critical analysis of appearance,

which is so useful in helping you come to know the Mona Lisa,

bears little value in explaining L.H.O.O.Q.

Hmm.

The critical analysis of appearance is not the same thing as to experience the look .

Not even close!

Excursions into the beauty with which the moustache was drawn or the delicacy with which the goatee was made to fit the contours of the face are fatuous attempts

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to say something meaningful about the work of art.

Indeed. But it may be that such attempts to say something about traditional art are every bit as fatuous, only for different reasons. Those attempts are, again, not necessarily part of "experiencing" an aestheticist work.

The fact that aesthetic "experience" cannot be reduced to "description" is so much more than the mere foil for conceptualism into which it has been made here.

(As always, more ≠ better, but more is Different.)

If we do look at the piece, what is important to notice is

that there is a reproduction of the Mona Lisa,

that a moustache has been added,

etc.

It hardly matters exactly how this was done, how it looks.

One views the Mona Lisa to see what it looks like, but

one approaches Duchamp's piece to obtain information,

to gain access to the thought being expressed.

Great news, folks! No need whatsoever merely to "assume" this particular "work of art" to "communicate something." No need merely to "infer" the message from a prior inference about "the artist's intention"! Both of those inferences can easily be wrong! But it is not necessary to make them, nor to stake anything important on their being correct. This is not necessary in this case, at least, because you can obtain the desired information directly from the piece . . . and then we may all go to lunch!

III What is L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved?

Duchamp sent out invitations...
On the front...
he pasted a playing card which bears a reproduction of the Mona Lisa.

Below the card is inscribed. in French, "L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved."

This piece looks like the Mona Lisa and the Mona Lisa looks like it:

since one is a reproduction of the other, their aesthetic qualities are basically identical.

Differences in how they look have little, if any, artistic relevance.

We do not establish the identity of one by pointing out where it looks different from the other.

...its aesthetic properties are as much a part of L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved as a picture of a mathematician in an algebra book is part of the mathematics.

Appearances are insufficient for establishing the identity of a work of art if the point is not in the appearance.

Another large offshoot question: what is so important about establishing the identity of a work ?

Appearances seem quite sufficient, actually, for myriad other purposes; and those other purposes seem to be the only ones that matter for the aesthete.

Is the "identity" problem, then, a self-created burden of the Conceptualists themselves? Does it cease to arise anywhere works are perceptually distinguishable from each other?

Walton (previous paper) in fact argues that "(some) facts about the origins of works" are indeed "absolutely fundamental" to "aesthetic judgments," though such facts as these are not necessarily "discoverable simply by examining the works themselves." Hence, "the view that works of art should be judged simply by what can be perceived in them is seriously misleading," all the same for the aesthetes, and perhaps especially for them. (54-55)

"It is clear that ... resemblance and exact resemblance ... are not even cousins of the notion of perceptual indistinguishability. (62)

"The properties of a portrait which make it so different from ... a person ... are standard for us. Hence these properties just do not count with regard to what (or whom) it looks like. It is only the properties which are variable for us ... that make it look to us like what it does." (60)

But by this time we have already (tacitly?) placed the work in some "category," and we have done so based upon some "gestalt." (57-58)

Walton appeals to the dreaded T-word, "training," quite a bit in his Conclusion (76 and on), but he also says:
If training "is not generally necessary to undertake deliberately ... this is almost always ... only because we have been trained unwittingly."

And earlier, "One cannot merely decide to respond appropriately to a work ... But an effort of will may facilitate the training ... "

All of this suggests that he very much appreciates what I would call the "tacit" quality of gestalt formation. Meanwhile, he seems not to appreciate at all the possibility (for me it is a near-certainty) that all "training" worthy of the name is willful, but that not all gestalts are formed willfully; nor that there is a profound (for me it is absolutely incommensurate) difference between these two phenomena; hence the "witting" and "unwitting" adept are absolutely incommensurate art-subjects; and so, if an art-object indeed is discovered on Mars, then we are all of the "witting" type in that case and there is nothing anyone can do about it; whereas if we are fortunate to be born and to live somewhere where the critics and the interpreters have not quite "wittingly" destroyed what "tacit" understandings still prevail locally, then in that setting (and likely only there) we can still enjoy consensual acts of unprotected music.

It seems obvious to me, also, that if witting-ness is your game, then "perceptual indistiguishability" is as good or better than an origin on Mars.

If so, then the perceptual indistiguishability of the Mona Lisa and L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved undermines not only certain contrivances of the aesthete and the connoisseur but also the very Ecology of Images out-in-the-world; this tout court. And that is not very nice.

To deploy "perceptual indistiguishability" certainly is to render moot all matters of mere "resemblance," however the latter is taken to work. But this deployment cannot render moot the Ecological function of "perception" as one "phase" in a whole chain of "actions"; in the chain of life itself, actually. This is no way to live.

Now, the nice thing about being an art-life Dualist is that you don't have to live this way, not even if this is (for whatever inscrutable reason) your kind of art. But then we find the arch Conceptualists espousing art-life Monism quite explicitly. Hence even the Dadaist and Experimental tendencies really are deathly serious, just as Rank and Becker would notice immediately, precisely because and not in spite of the fact that the game this kind of artist is (thinks they are) playing is the Monist game. This art is at work on life, not merely in it. Therefore, around here we DO, yes, parse Conceptualist manifestos as properly Political documents! Not as utterances or expressions or theories. As documents. And we do so not in spite of our own art-politics Dualism but because of it.

Are not Walton's "standard," "variable" and "contra-standard" features entirely artifacts of perception? Is there any coherent sense in which we may speak of them as artifacts of nonperceptual knowledge or information?

It's the contra-standards that are most interesting here.

e.g.,
"The monochromatic paintings of Yves Klein are disturbing to us (at least at first),"
for according to Walton,
"we see them as paintings, though they contain the feature contra-standard for paintings of being one solid color."

Yet,
"we find other similarly monochromatic surfaces ... not in the least disturbing." (66)

"It must be emphasized," Walton says, "that to be contra-standard relative to a certain category is not merely to be rare or unique among things of that category," for "being rare in a category is not the same thing as being a misfit in it." (67)

All of this being purportedly as it is, the contra-standard-ness of one-solid-color-ism does not seem to be a piece of "knowledge" in any conventional sense. It seems least of all to be communicable qua "knowledge"; that is, if I may subvert Binkley's arch locution: determinations of standardness are makeable but not obtainable; or, in Picasso's brand of archness: such determinations cannot be found merely by seeking for them. Gestalt does seem like an apt term here. But all that kind of thing goes out the window right along with "distinguishability."

Conceptualists typically claim to have done away only with perceptual distinguishability, but make no mistake: their works are absolutely, archly distinguished-and-distinguishable. They're out there doin' the Full Danto. It is possible to accept every word of Danto's account of Conceptualism, e.g., as it is possible to accept every word of Marx's analysis of capitalism, and to land on quite contrary recommendations for future courses of action. After all, "Marx was right about capitalism but wrong about communism."

In the end Walton lands in a peculiar spot: "If we are confronted by a work about whose origins we know absolutely nothing ... we would simply not be in a position to judge it aesthetically." (74) Why? If I am understanding him correctly, it is because "origins" may establish "category," and there are cases where this is the only way to do so. "Aesthetic features" are category-relative: Picasso's Guernica is a chaotic painting but a serene guernica; hence, to "correctly" ascribe or adduce aesthetic features, a category gestalt must previously have been ascertained.

"If a work's aesthetic properties are those that are to be found in it when it is perceived correctly, and the correct way to perceive it is determined partly by historical facts about the artist's intention and/or his society, no examination of the work itself, however thorough, will by itself reveal those properties."

"If the origin of a work which is coherent and serene had been different in crucial respects, the work would not have had these qualities; we would not merely have lacked a means for discovering them. And of two works which differ only in respect of their origins—that is, which are perceptually indistinguishable—one might be coherent or serene, and the other not."
(74)

What really jumps off the pages here is that Walton has impressively anticipated much of the Ecological bent of later (and harder) scientists. But this telescoping of "correct"-ness strikes me as quite transparently wrong; Philosophically wrong. Or if I simply must be more polite about it: this determination of correctness depends upon some very peculiar background assumptions which are easy to discredit empirically and consequentialistically, though plenty of people (and even some Philosophers) will no doubt continue to cling to them and to defend them rationalistically, in which arena they can indeed (fbfw) be defended just well enough to enjoy continued safe passage.

Briefly:
Paying this exobitant tribute to "historical facts"
out of the meager accounts of present realities
is not very prudent in the long run!
And in the present it is even worse!

The irony-of-ironies here, in the "present," is that art is an arena where Liberals now, conventionally, are the ones paying tribute to "origins," while the Conservative reverence for "historical facts" seems never to have been lower; meanwhile, one can safely expect an EXACT INVERSION of principle regarding, say, immigration or the economy. Bit of a tell, eh?

Finally, from deep in the endnotes:

"To say that it is incorrect (in my sense) to perceive a work in certain categories is not necessarily to claim that one ought not to perceive it that way. I heartily recommend perceiving mediocre works in categories that make perceiving them worthwhile whenever possible. The point is that one is not likely to judge the work correctly when he perceives it incorrectly."
(79)

I don't know how else to parse this but to enlist the assistance of my older married co-workers, commenting on their marriages and their wives: "You can either be right or you can be happy." That seems to be the choice this parting shot of Walton's leaves us with. How unfortunate! I'm not even married!

...

IV What Is Aesthetics?

1. The Word. ...Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten... contrasted things perceived (aesthetic entities) with things known (noetic entities),...

Baumgarten then gathered the study of the arts under the aegis of aesthetics.

The two were quickly identified

and "aesthetics"

became "the philosophy of art"

in much the way

"ethics" is the philosophy of morality.

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2. Aesthetics and Perception. From the outset aesthetics has been devoted to the study of "things perceived,"

whether reasoning from the "aesthetic attitude" which defines a unique way of perceiving,

or from the "aesthetic object" of perception.

Once things perceived have been well and truly reasoned from,
something quite un-aesthetic has gone down, no?

The commitment to perceptual experience was deepened with the invention of the Faculty of Taste,...

The Faculty of Taste exercises powers of discrimination in aesthetic experiences.

A refined person

with highly developed taste

is enabled to perceive and recognize

sophisticated and subtle artistic expressions

which are closed to the uncultured person with poorly developed taste.

Smash the elites!! I'm here to pile on, not to disperse the melee.

Here's the problem: When one human being is exposed to some stimulus over and over again, while another is deprived of it completely, the first human being does develop, is enabled, in ways which the second is/does not.

By now there's no sense in disputing the value-ladenness of such terms as "refined," "subtle," "closed," or "uncultured." Everyone seems to agree about the intent(s) behind them, and we've mostly agreed (tacitly or noisily) to abandon them. But what to say, then, about the strictly value-neutral facts of change which attach to incommensurate prior experiences among individuals?

The quickest, easiest answer is: Most of what was said on this front under the old rubric of Taste did not really need to be said at all. This cuts the problem down to size, but there remains the odd anomalous case where something indeed simply must be said (or worse, done).

It seems to me that the tight circumscription of Value talk (or the outright taboo on it) was never a viable way for human beings to live. Instead, we need places to go and people to see where at least some minimum of values-and-valuation is shared collectively; hence wherein we can again speak freely of "highly developed" and "poorly developed" practitioners who tacitly accept the validity of those assessments simply by being (continuing to be) a part of the group.

The universalist, capital-L Liberal intervention ought to be to give people more group options, and to allow them to leave groups which don't work for them and to join those which work better. The C-for-Conservative part is twofold: (1) groups must enjoy maximum autonomy and sovereignty; and (2) everyone is entitled to be highly suspicious, together, of serial leavers-and-joiners.

... The development of the concept of disinterestedness reinforced the perceptual focus of aesthetics,

since removing "interest" from experience divests it of utility and invests its value in immediate awareness.

An aesthetic experience is something pursued "for its own sake."

Just terrible!! Who could tolerate such a thing?!
;^/

Eventually aesthetics came to treat the object of aesthetic perception as a kind of illusion

since its "reality"—i.e., the reality of disinterested perception—stands disconnected from the reality of practical interest.

The two realities are incommensurable: The cows in Turner's paintings can be seen, but not milked or heard.

... Aesthetics has continued the tradition of investigating a type of experience which can be had in the presence of both natural and created objects.

...aesthetics has never been strictly a study of artistic phenomena.

...aesthetic experience is not an experience unique to art.

This fact has not always been sufficiently emphasized,

and as a result aesthetics frequently appears in the guise of philosophy-of-art-in-general.

Indeed.

This incompleteness of aesthetics vis-a-vis art-in-general is not merely inconvenient but in fact dictates that we turn contra the whole shebang?

In order for that against-ness to make any sense, we have to believe, to start, that there is anything important in the extra-aesthetic part-of-art; probably we need also to believe that its neglect is not merely one choice of focus among many, all of which have their blind spots, but rather that this particular kind of blindness is somehow untenable in terms broader and (for lack of any other way of putting it) actually serious enough to ramify beyond even this now-complete conception of "art."

The works which have so far appeared as examples above won't support this conceit very strongly, since a calculated unseriousness seems to lie at the heart of their intents and contents alike. The ideas with which these artists have created directly here don't seem able to bear this kind of weight. If someone neglects to consider them, then this person "misses the point" of the work(s) in some meaningful sense, it is true. But what am I missing here?

(What if ideas are also ultimately of an aesthetic nature?)

As aesthetics and the philosophy of art have become more closely identified, a much more serious confusion has arisen.

The work of art has come to be construed as an aesthetic object, an object of perception.

Hence the meaning and essence of all art is thought to inhere in appearances,...

Hmm. There is confusion in this account of confusion.

It is one thing to grant that the meaning and essence of at least some art does not in fact inhere in appearances ; it is another thing entirely to expect that human beings could be capable, even theoretically, of receiving whatever may appear in front of them in any other way but based on its appearance. Meaning and essence may not "inhere" in appearance, but they are mediated by appearance, at least anytime there is an appearance.

Seems to me that the appearance is bound to be "received" first, and everything else later. Experience and conditioning enter into both the snap judgment and the protracted, contemplative judgment; but the cognitive processes of System 1 and System 2 have different ways of working on their materials (so we are told).

Binkley begins by verbally describing L.H.O.O.Q. and then describing why a mere verbal description is adequate and an appearance superfluous in the case of this work. But it strains credulity to think that these means could ever be truly interchangeable. Cognitive Science could furnish one avenue for skepticism of that claim. Failing that there is consequentialism: I for one just don't want to live in a world where second-hand description is (on whatever grounds) adequate and first-hand "experience" is optional; and, conjuring Lasch, I am indeed prepared to "recommend to everybody" this imperative based on my own assessment of . . . the consequences!

(Of course, as long as artists in this métier do display their work, promote their shows, and post about everything on social media, rather than simply describing it verbally, they can expect plenty of due and undue suspicion to come flying at them from most every other societal direction. The canonical conceptualists and experimentalists didn't have Instagram, but almost all of them are open to this same suspicion. And they continue to find contemporary apologists to play along, as even Danto does, e.g., in claiming that the intent of Mike Bidlo's copies of Warhol's Brillo Boxes was something like why jazz musicians transcribe solos. If so, the box copies need never have been promoted, exhibited or sold; Danto need never have known of their existence, nor of even the intent to make them! A few music students nowadays do play "transcription concerts," but it is equally doubtful that this simply must be done publicly in order to reap the peculiar rewards that this process can yield.)

The first principle of philosophy of art has become:

all art possesses aesthetic qualities, and

the core of a work is its nest of aesthetic qualities.

Hmm. You certainly wouldn't know this from reading only this far in the Anthology. All of that must be contained in some earlier Anthology.

It seems that aesthetics are being tarred here with that infamous eighteenth century brush. The question is: can anything be well and truly devoid of aesthetic qualities ? It can be devoid of the eighteeth century notion of Beauty, certainly, and ditto any number of historical "aesthetic" notions; it can be devoid of evident human intention, of the wroughtness for which Jucker and Barrett make out artworks to be "acts of non-verbal symbolic communication," and which for them make artworks "relevant" stimuli among all the other competing stimuli of life. The more specialized a definition of "aesthetic" we are working with, the more art will fall outside its boundaries. This makes it an appealing rhetorical strategy, I must imagine, for writers such as Binkley here to establish the continued importance of the narrower definitions if only so that the obvious shortcomings of these definitions can be the beachhead for ongoing dissention. I've never been a fan of the eighteenth century thing either. To be honest, I struggle even to understand it literally. So, in my own head I work with the broader, colloquial sense of "aesthetics," and nor am I anything resembling a disinterested student of such matters. For better or worse, then, I do end up as some species of relativist when it comes to the core of a work . Your standpoint will determine most of how you construe this "core." But it will not determine whether or not you are an aesthetic creature. That much has already been determined!

This is why "aesthetics" has become just another name for the philosophy of art.

Although it is sometimes recognized that aesthetics is not identical to the philosophy of art, but rather a complementary study,

it is still

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commonly assumed that all art is aesthetic

in the sense that falling within the subject matter of aesthetics is at least a necessary (if not a sufficient) condition for being art.

Yet as we shall see, being aesthetic is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being art.

The question is: Is there anything which is not aesthetic?

Do there exist any human beings who, as subjects, are sufficiently un-aesthetic for the phenomenon of the non-aesthetic object to be, in their case(s) if not all others, a valid, rational, philosophically transactable concept?

One conspicuous candidate for such an inherently non-aesthetic object would be: the artist's intention; on which point the entire discourse surrounding intentional-ism would bear. So far Binkley doesn't seem too interested in treading that path, and this is undoubtedly all the better for him and his argument. Implicitly, though, the whole conceit to "[create] directly with ideas unmediated by aesthetic qualities" does point in this direction; this is a direction taken by much Philosophy of Art, and calling this direction Aesthetics indeed doesn't seem quite right.

(And, uh . . . there would seem to be some nineteenth-century "idealism" in this twentieth-century conceit, no?)

Devotees of modern aesthetics may believe that Baumgarten's "science of perception" is a moribund enterprise befitting only pre-Modern aesthetics rapt in pursuit of ideal Beauty. Yet a survey of contemporary aesthetic theory will prove that this part of philosophy still accepts its raison d'être to be a perceptual entity—an appearance—and fails to recognize sufficiently the distinction between "aesthetics" in the narrow sense and the philosophy of art. In his essay "Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic," Frank Sibley has articulated this commitment to perception:

It is of importance to note first that, broadly speaking, aesthetics deals with a kind of perception. People have to see the grace of unity of a work, hear the plaintiveness or frenzy in a music, notice the gaudiness of a color scheme, feel the power of a novel, its mood, or its uncertainty of tone. . . . The crucial thing is to see, hear, or feel. To suppose indeed that one can make aesthetic judgments without aesthetic perception. . . is to misunderstand aesthetic judgement.

Despite the many new directions taken by the philosophy of art in the twentieth century, it is still practised under the guidance of aesthetic inquiry, which assumes that the work of art is a thing perceived.

Hmm. This isn't so simple as a distinction between "perception" and "senses?" Does "perceive" apply only to the "sensory?" Are they being used interchangeably here? "Ideas," then, would be "communicated," "understood," "grasped," etc.?

Put another way: is the notion of a "beautiful idea" a literal or metaphorical notion? If ideas can be beautiful (or ugly, or gaudy, or delicate), then "aesthetic beauty" is always already wider than mere "sense perception."

On the other hand, if "aesthetic" is definitionally just another word for "sensory," then we should use "sensory" in its place; but that seems like a conceptual regression. At the risk of getting too far out over my skis, I really do think there's something to the System 1, "fast brain" theory; there's something to the notion that some judgments are effectively automatic but that they are still, nevertheless, every bit the products of conditioning that slower, conscious, intellectual judgments are. That seems to me like a big puzzle piece that the old, stilted "aesthetic" theorists didn't have, yet it fits better into their puzzle than into the Contraesthetics of the later twentieth century. The old mistake, then, is not the emphasis on some nebulous thing called Aesthetics; rather, it was to mischaracterize (but not as wildly as it first seems!) the "reasoned"-ness of "judgment" which attaches to properly "aesthetic" experience. There is "reason" at play here, certainly; but it is FAST reason, "preconceptual" judgment, and yes, dare I say, it is un-intellectual or perhaps even Contraintellectual in a consequentialistic sense. And so oddly enough it is the ostensibly anti-intellectual conceptualists who really are the ones pulling us towards Ideas and therefore towards Intellect; towards being able to "know" an artwork by verbal description and not (necessarily) being able to know it by firsthand experience; towards the Slow Brain and away from the Fast Brain.

The reason aesthetic qualities
must be perceived in order to be judged
is that

they inhere in what Monroe Beardsley has called the "perceptual object":

"A perceptual object is an object some of whose qualities, at least, are open to direct sensory awareness."

This he contrasts with the "physical basis" of aesthetic qualities,

which "consists of things and events describable in the vocabulary of physics."

Hence
the work of art turns out to be
an entity possessed of
two radically different aspects,
one aesthetic and the other physical:

When a critic . . . says that Titian's later paintings have a strong atmospheric quality and vividness of color,

Does ANYONE ELSE EVER say such things?

he is talking about aesthetic objects. But when he says that Titian used a dark reddish underpainting over the whole canvas, and added transparent glazes to the painting after he laid down the pigment, he is talking about physical objects.

Hmm . . . Dualism, of a sort!

This "aesthetic object" is taken by the philosophy of art to be its subject of study.

Appearances are paramount, from expressionist theories which

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construe the artwork as an "imaginary object"
through which the artist has articulated his or her "intuition,"
to formalist theories which venerate perceptual form.

Given only the present excursus, it is not at all clear that appearances are paramount in the Beardsleyan-Sibleyan account; rather, it is aesthetic qualities which carry the day, and by now it's hard to take seriously the conceit that these qualities indeed follow necessarily either from perceptual or from physical   base s.

Clive Bell's "significant form" is clearly a perceptual form...

Susanne Langer has christened aesthetic appearances "semblances,"...

Aesthetics perceives all the arts to be engaged in

the creation of some kind of semblance or artistic "illusion"

which presents itself to us for the sake of its appearance.

I wouldn't ever put it that way. I think the illusions are projected upon all the arts and then transacted as knowledge. That is what most of these early theorists of "aesthetics" seem to have done, but that is not really Aesthetics!

It has been difficult , however, to maintain a strictly perceptual interpretation of the aesthetic "appearance."

Literature is the one major art form which does not easily accommodate the perceptual model of arthood.

Cool. I say let them have the arthood and we'll go off and be Decorators.

Although we perceive the printed words in a book,

we do not actually perceive the literary work

which is composed with intangible linguistic elements.

Yet as Sibley points out,

the reader will "feel the power of a novel,

its mood, or its uncertainty of tone,"

so that its aesthetic qualities are at least experienced through reading

if not actually perceived by one of the senses.

There are various things we experience without perceiving them.

Like an emotion, the power of a novel is "felt" without its being touched or heard or seen.

Thus,

although it will not be quite correct to say that one cannot know the aesthetic qualities of a novel without "direct perceptual access,"

it is true that one cannot know them without directly experiencing the novel by reading it.

This rules out the possibility of coming to know a literary work by having it described to you...

Hence,

although perception is the paradigm of aesthetic experience ,

an accurate aesthetic theory will locate aesthetic qualities more generally in a particular type of experience (aesthetic experience)

so that literature can be included.

What this suggests more than anything, I would argue, is that once again Rank's mere preliminary is actually much more than a preliminary: from the start we have tacitly defined even aesthetics somewhat too much from the standpoint of creation; too much, that is, for the resulting notion of aesthetic experience to make very much sense as a study of reception, which is what it purports to be.

This is why the case of literature is more fraught even than the above suggests; for in Rank's account literature does indeed come from the same place as does a more obviously "perceptual" art like music; but these two arts do not go to the same destination! This is such a simple notion, and there is, as far as I can tell, hardly any real disagreement about it. And yet . . . !!

3. The Theory of Media. What does it mean to have the requisite "direct experience" of an aesthetic object? ...

Here we encounter a problem.

Aesthetic qualities cannot be communicated except through direct experience of them.

So there is no way of saying just what the aesthetic qualities of a work are independently of experiencing them.

...there are no intersubjective criteria for testing the presence of aesthetic qualities. ...

It is impossible to establish criteria for identifying artworks which are based on their aesthetic qualities.

And this is the point where aesthetics needs the concept of a

[87]

medium. ...

...the problem of the relationship between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic properties of an object has been much discussed.

...it is generally conceded that aesthetic qualities depend in some way upon nonaesthetic qualities. ...

Changing what Beardsley calls the "physical" properties, however slightly can alter those features of a work of art which are experienced in the "aesthetic experience" of the object.

Aesthetic objects are vulnerable and fragile, and this is another reason why it is important to have identity criteria for them.

Well, it seems possible to argue that this vulnerable and fragile aspect is more theoretical than real. Perhaps that's where we're headed here?

It's easy enough to imagine alterations that would in fact obliterate the identity of any aesthetic work, but it's not so easy to argue that this is a constant danger in the normal run of things. It's the aesthetic qualities which are fragile; the very identity of works seems far more robust.

At least pragmatically, there can be (and very often are) "versions" of works, whose construal as distinct works on their own would frequently be at odds with any number of artworld norms, and occasionally also with common sense.

Since aesthetic qualities depend on nonaesthetic qualities, the identity of an aesthetic artwork can be located through conventions governing its nonaesthetic qualities.

These conventions determine the nonaesthetic parameters which must remain invariant in identifying particular works.

A medium is not simply a physical material, but rather a network of such conventions which delimits a realm over which physical materials and aesthetic qualities are mediated.

For example, in the medium of painting there is a convention which says that the paint, but not the canvas, stretcher, or frame, must remain invariant in order to preserve the identity of the artwork.

On the other hand, paint is not a conventional invariant in the art of architecture but is applied to buildings (at least on the inside) according to another art, interior decorating. ...

In its network of conventions, each artistic medium establishes a non-aesthetic criteria for identifying works of art. ...

As we watch a dance, we heed how the dancers move their bodies.

As we watch a play on the same stage, we concentrate instead on what is being acted out.

Treating a piece of writing as a poem will make us focus on

different nonaesthetic features

than if we approach it as a short story: ...

Thus Susanne Langer's

[88]

characterization of media in terms of the particular type of semblance they create is pointed in the wrong direction.

She holds that painting creates the illusion of space, music the illusion of the passage of time, etc.

Yet it is not the "content" of an aesthetic illusion which determines the medium.

Before we can tell whether something presents a semblance of space,

we have to know where to look for the semblance;

and this we know by understanding the conventions, ...

Anything that can be seen can be seen aesthetically,

YIPPEE!
 

i.e.,
it can be viewed for the sake of discerning its aesthetic qualities.

...but this part sounds much less exciting! Especially if we remain mired in disagreement about these qualities even in spite of much discussion.

The reason we know to look at the aesthetic qualities on the front of a painting is not because the back lacks aesthetic qualities, but rather because the conventions of painting tell us to look there.

Even if the back of a painting
looks more interesting than the front,
the museum director
is nevertheless required
to hang the painting
in the conventional way ...

My note says:
Fire the
"museum director."

In the twentieth century we have witnessed a proliferation of new media.

By this definition? I'm not so sure.

What has proliferated is media in the material, subconventional sense of avenues of delivery. The preceding paragraph, on the other hand, constructs "media" more or less as Walton's "categories of art." What are the really new categories whose conventions tell us to look somewhere or somehow other than we did previously? Is that what iPhones are doing? Or are they merely delivering shorter, underproduced, crowdsourced TV shows? Instragram seems clearly enough a different medium from TV; but to argue that we look at it differently, to argue that it tells us to look at it in this or that different way from any and all other screengrab media, think about the kind of argument this would have to be and the undue assumptions it would have to make.

In the case of Conceptual Art, it seems we are being told, by the present author and document, precisely where to (and where not) to look! But if you have to be told . . .

A medium seems to emerge when new conventions are instituted for isolating aesthetic qualities differently on the basis of new materials or machines.

Yep, lots of new machines came around during the twentieth century. But is this an accurate description of what they have done? I suspect that aesthetic revolutions of this sort have been less frequent than the Early Adopters tend to think.

(Reprise: Barry Schrader breaks the bad news (this news) to the BFA1s.)

...

The aesthetic theory of media has given rise to an analogy which seems to be gaining acceptance: a work of art is like a person.

The dependence of aesthetic qualities

on nonaesthetic ones is similar to

the dependence of character traits

on the bodily dispositions of persons.

As Joseph Margolis has put it, works of art are embodied in a physical object (or physical event) in much the way a person is embodied in a human body:

To say that a work of art is embodied in a physical object is to say that its identity is necessarily linked to the identity of the physical

[89]

object in which it is embodied, though to identify the one is not to identify the other;

it is also to say that, qua embodied, a work of art must possess properties other than those ascribed to the physical object in which it is embodied, though it may be said to possess (where relevant) the properties of that physical object as well.

Also, if in being embodied, works of art are, specifically, emergent entities, then the properties that a work of art possesses will include properties of a kind that cannot appropriately be ascribed to the object in which it is embodied.

This seems to give the perfect recipe for something different to emerge to/at each and every different audience member!

But . . . where tf in the above is there any suggestion at all that a work of art is like a person?

The "emergent" entities of aesthetic art are aesthetic qualities which are accessible only through direct experience.

The aesthetic and physical properties of the artwork
fuse
into a person-like whole,
the former constituting the "mind,"
the latter the "body"
of the work.

But I'm not actually seeing those Dreaded Dualogs in the quoted passage!

Seems like the Beardsleyan dualism of page 85 was, transparently, a dualism of verbal ascriptions, not a dualism of soul and flesh . . . but now we have conferred souls upon the mere flesh of artworks?

...

Although not universally accepted,
this person analogy
appears frequently in aesthetic theory
because
it provides a suitable model
for understanding the artwork
as a single entity appealing to
two markedly different types of interest.

It explains, for example, the basis of the connection between Beauty and Money.

I missed it!!
 

The analogy has recently been carried to the extent of claiming that works of art, like persons, have rights.

To deface a canvas by Picasso or a sculpture by Michelangelo is not only to violate the rights of its owner, but also to violate certain rights of the work itself. ...

I'm playing a lot of Devil's Advocate here, but this part does seem tendentious.

It's true that you violate people's rights in defacing artworks, but these people thus wronged are actual people: they are the people, living and unborn, who may yet have the privilege of experiencing a work which lots of other people, previously (and not free of myriad vicissitudes, it is true), have deemed to be just this significant.

4. Art and Works. Aesthetics has used the conventions of media to classify and identify artworks,

but its vision of the nature of art does not adequately recognize the thoroughly conventional structure within which artworks appear.

This is because
aesthetics
tends to view a medium as a kind of substance (paint, wood, stone, sound, etc.) instead of as a network of conventions.

The possibilities for networks of conventions are significantly determined by kinds of substance , no?
 

Its preoccupation with perceptual entities leads aesthetics to extol and examine the "work of art," while averting its attention almost entirely from the myriad other aspects of that complex cultural activity we call "art." ...

[90]

...we frequently find aesthetic discussions of the question "What is art?" immediately turning to the question "What is a work of art?" as though the two questions are unquestionably identical. Yet they are not the same.

Sure. So is there anything about these myriad other aspects that drives people to make this separation?

For myself, I can say exactly what it is, and it has never been a mystery to me why (or that) I happen to feel this way: the "other aspects" suggested here are the most general sorts of human vicissitudes. They are the respects in which "art" is like everything else; whereas the question "What is a work of art?" is asking, at least in part, "What distinguishes or separates a work of art from any old object or idea?"

The only interesting thing about that question is that we still have a lot of trouble answering it. For that reason alone it is a worthy preoccupation, to some degree. But for me personally it has never been very urgent. Other questions which I find more important do not hinge upon the answer. Mostly these other questions have to do with how to keep the above-named vicissitudes from sinking the entire enterprise and perhaps the entire planet too.

What counts as a work of art must be discovered by examining the practice of art.

Art, like philosophy, is a cultural phenomenon, and any particular work of art must rely heavily upon its artistic and cultural context in communicating its meaning.

Hmm. Suddenly he knows the answer to his own question: Art is a complex cultural activity wherein meaning is comminicated.

Count me out!!

L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved
looks as much like the Mona Lisa as any reproduction of it does,
but
their artistic meanings could hardly be more different.

Well okay, but at that point a meaning must be imposed, because the more this new work looks as much like the Mona Lisa as any reproduction , the less is any other "meaning" than this likely to be found in it. All of this, per the conventional structure into which this work was released.

We can always fall back on intent . The intent could hardly be more different, no? We probably shouldn't say this, however, and Our Man here does not say it.

Just as I cannot tell you what the word "rot" means unless you say whether it is English or German, I cannot explain the meaning of a painting without viewing it immersed in an artistic milieu.

Indeed. And that's why the milieu theory of art, as it appears in a globalized context without community boundaries or meaningful sovereignty, is an Elitist rather than a Populist ideology. Transaction in meanings excludes all to whom those meanings are not available. True immersion in any old "milieu" one might please to join, in the sense indicated above, probably isn't even possible, not without full acculturation, be that on the scale of nations or cliques. These "meanings" live where they live. That's why transacting in them so easily becomes a kind of priestcraft.

The analogy to language serves adequately enough as rhetoric, but the difference is that it would be absurd for "critics" and "curators" and "professors" of language to carry on about the meaning of "rot" in the manner that their counterparts have approached the meaning of paintings or symphonies. If "rot" is truly an "arbitrary sign," then there's no moral or transactional obstacle to deploying it differently in different languages. It pains us, meanwhile, to be confronted with the "arbitrary" aspects of an artwork. Most artworks are nowhere near as arbitrary as any given three-letter word, but nor is the meaning of an artwork ever entirely fixed. That's the really funny thing about plurality of meaning in art: it shows another way, besides the "aesthetic" way, in which an artwork can "transcend" its milieu-of-origin. And yet the effort to apprehend the work's "meaning" in its context-of-origin easily becomes the effort to (re-)impose that initial meaning upon it for all times-and-places. But really, to say that a work's meaning depends upon its milieu is to say that this meaning is as bound to change as are society and culture, broadly construed, bound to change.

The shock value of Manet's Olympia, for example, is largely lost on modern audiences, although it can be recovered by studying the society in which the painting emerged.

That is a pretty low bar of recovery. More likely a lost  value can merely be "appreciated" this way.

Let's think all the way through this rhetorical use of "recovery" in the context of the broader account of what is and is not "aesthetic" in art. As with other such rhetoric here, if "recovery" somehow were to cease to be desired or valued, we would have to reformulate such passages as the above, but we would not lose any ammunition. What if artworks were to be received according to the (our) context-of-the-moment rather than according to the (their) context-of-creation? Art would still have a properly extra-aesthetic aspect, but it would now be a different aspect. What we would shed this way is the arrogance to think that we ever could truly "recover" anything of the sort vis-a-vis some society in which neither we ourselves nor anyone we'll ever meet could actually have lived in. That sounds pretty nice, actually!

Even so simple a question as what a painting represents cannot be answered without some reference to the conventions of depiction which have been adopted.

Whether a smaller patch of paint on the canvas is a smaller person or a person farther away—or something else—is determined by conventions of representation.

The moribund prejudice against much of the "unrealistic" art of the past comes from misjudging it according to standards which are part of the alien culture of the present.

Hmm. Dare I say it seems rather (also) a broad prejudice against "unrealistic" art generally, regardless of standards. Showing someone a selection of "unrealistic" art from across recorded history is a pretty good Shit Test! (♪ ♪ ♪ Shit for Brains ♪ ♪ ♪)

Certainly we can fail to grasp what a painting represents if it doesn't look like anything to us. But now we really are neck-deep in Intentionalism whether or not any I-words actually appear in this text. We cannot argue that the artist had no intention represent anything in particular merely because we cannot detect any such representational content. In other words, to observe any given conventions of representation is de facto to have an "intention." But this de facto kind of intention is, in fact, precisely the rhetorical extreme which undermines the simplest accounts of intentional-ism: it seems that these sorts of conventions only ever change, and eventually this change leaves the original intent high and dry. This raises the question of whether there can be any futureproof intent. (I would prefer to leave that to the capital-P Philosophers and to ask instead: need there be? Or, better: Need there not be?)

The focus always seems to be on what is lost when intention is not considered, but really there's lots (I would say more) to gain by not considering it. There is little "recovery" and much self-flagellation in today's Cultural Intentionalism.

There is no misjudging according to one's own standards . That is a misnomer. There is only the mis-conduct of transacting this judgment on some basis which ought to require that it be more than merely a judgment.

Thus trying to define "art" by defining "work of art" is a bit like trying to define philosophy by saying what constitutes a philosophy book.

A work of art cannot stand alone as a member of a set.

Set membership is not the structure of that human activity called art.

To suppose we can examine the problem of defining art by trying to explain membership in a class of entities is simply a prejudice of aesthetics, which underplays the cultural structure of art for the sake of pursuing perceptual objects.

Yet even as paradigmatic an aesthetic work as the Mona Lisa is a thoroughly cultural entity

whose artistic and aesthetic meanings adhere to the painting by cultural forces,

not by the chemical forces which keep the paint intact for a period of time.

Yup!

But
the structure is not entirely cultural!

That is every bit the prejudice!

Chemical forces, like friction and inharmonicity, can never be reduced to zero simply to facilitate a clean calculation!

As media proliferated, the aesthetic imperatives implied in their conventions weakened. Art has become increasingly nonaesthetic in the twentieth century, straining the conventions of media to the point where lines between them blur.

i.e.
The road
to re-differentiation
of media
and of forms
is
the aesthetic road.

... The concept of a medium was invented by aesthetics in order to explain the identity of artworks which articulate with aesthetic qualities.

As art questions the dictates of aesthetics,
it abandons the conventions of media. ...

Along with those purported mere conventions, it abandons as well all vectors of aesthetic differentiation which are direct consequences of materials. I mean physical materials, NOT poietic materials!

Certainly there are other vectors of differentiation out there to be found. We are currently learning just what desperate sorts of workarounds human beings will resort to when deprived of the poietic Free Square of brute material concerns. For once, I'm not sure we can say in this case that nothing worth doing is easy. The easiest thing in the world is to differentiate your symphony from a novel or a building by writing a symphony. A One-Note-Symphony is every bit as adequately differentiated from any kind of novel or building as is a Work of Many Notes. Whether any pressing need is met this way, whether the resulting work is "good" or "bad," those sorts of questions do hang in the air, and they may need to be addressed, eventually. The point is: conventions of media self-evidently do meet a need! Namely: the need for differentiation of forms.

Now, if that particular "need" is in fact a contingent rather than an essential one, I would like to know how and why we find some authors pronouncing the abandonment of the conventions of media while other authors pronounce the hardening of these same conventions; I would like to know how and why both kinds of author think they find their supporting evidence in the same macrohistorical and macrocultural churns.

It seems more likely that
we create what we need
but that
we do not all need the same things.

[91]

V Art Outside Aesthetics

... L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved makes the point graphic by duplicating the appearance of the Mona Lisa while depriving it of its aesthetic import. ... As the risqué joke is compounded by L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved, the Mona Lisa is humiliated.

A certain cohort of stuffed-shirt critics will parse this as a humiliation, certainly. But the work, if we can indeed speak of it almost as if it were a person, is not quite humiliated here. Rather, the Mona Lisa is, to borrow a contemporary coinage, living rent-free in Duchamp's head, and in Binkley's head too, it seems. Channeling Eleanor: They have given Her their consent to make them feel inferior. And then, channeling Freud, . . .

Though restored to its original appearance, it is not restored to its original state.

Duchamp added only the moustache and goatee, but when he removed them the sacred aura of aesthetic qualities vanished as well—...

The original image is intact but literalized; its function in Duchamp's piece is just to denote the Mona Lisa.

L.H.O.O.Q. looked naughty, graffiti on a masterpiece. It relies upon our seeing both the aesthetic aura and its impudent violation.

But as its successor reinstates the appearance, the masterpiece is ironically ridiculed a second time with the disappearance of the dignity which made L.H.O.O.Q. a transgression.

Are we merely sinking deeper into Intentionalism by now? Or is there something to this? A two-phase desecration is needed to thoroughly repress the living-rent-free critique!

...

It has already been pointed out
that one can know the work L.H.O.O.Q. without having any direct experience of it,...

What you need to see, to experience, in order to know this art is subject to intersubjective tests—unlike aesthetic art—and this is why description will sometimes be adequate in communicating the artwork.

So,
what are the consequences
(as many of them as we can reasonably anticipate!)
of knowledge of a work
being subject to intersubjective tests?

It seems we are
merely being told,
again (!!),
how to know this art;
told something different, certainly,
but being told nonetheless.

Also again (!!),
we are being told of an intention,
which is a tacit acknowledgment by the intender
that
they know that we know
that
the intent is not certain to be grasped
without simply telling us what it is!

If you have to explain the joke, it wasn't funny!

If you explain the joke, you prevent the non-getter from getting it later; you thereby deprive them (ungenerously) of precisely what you once offered so generously!

Intersubjective verificationism is a joyless existence for Artists and Audiences! Even as it is salvation for Scientists and Technicians!

When Duchamp wrote "L.H.O.O.Q." beneath the image of the Mona Lisa,
he was not demonstrating his penmanship.

The beauty of a script depends upon aesthetic properties of its line.

The meaning of a sentence written in the script, however, is a function of how the lines fit into the structure of an alphabet.

Aesthetics
assumes that
artistic meaning must be construed
according to
the first type of relation
between meaning and line,

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but not the second.

It mistakes the experience of aesthetic qualities for the substance of art. ...

The flaw in aesthetics is this: how something looks is partly a function of what we bring to it,

WOWSER! The big reveal!!

And somehow this is not true of ideas ?! We do not bring stuff with us there as well?

and art is too culturally dependent to survive in the mere look of things.

Of course it all depends on what counts as survival, and it depends on whether such purported "survival" is in fact necessary or even good. The sort of survival being hinted at here seems pretty clearly (to me at least) to be neither necessary nor even good. The reality of the situation seems (to me) to be precisely the opposite of that presented here: really, for meaning to survive is to disenfranchise future generations of the substance of art by railroading them into "seeking" for someone else's meaning rather than simply "finding" their own.

The importance of Duchamp's titles is that they call attention to the cultural environment which can either sustain or suffocate the aesthetic demeanor of an object.

Duchamp's titles do not name objects; they put handles on things.

They call attention to the artistic framework within which works of art are indexed by their titles and by other means. The culture infects the work.

A great deal of art
has chosen to articulate in the medium of an aesthetic space,
but there is no a priori reason
why art must confine itself to the creation of aesthetic objects.

Well of course there are no such reasons. The only candidates we could possibly offer would be consequentialist and speculative.

I just keep getting stuck on the (admittedly simple-minded) argument that any and every object worthy of the name is always-already an aesthetic object, because some "aesthetic judgment" per se is endemic and involuntary. Only once "aesthetic judgment" is telescoped or pigeonholed into a culivated, specialized skill can I caucus with the Conceptualists against the Professorate and the Commentariat; but a world with only those two caucuses is truly a world that has lost its mind and sold its soul.

It might opt for articulation in a semantic space instead of an aesthetic one so that artistic meaning is not embodied in a physical object or event according to the conventions of a medium.

Can anything which has been said here Contra Aesthetics also be said against semantics? All of it, I would think!

Duchamp has proven this by creating nonaesthetic art, i.e., art whose meaning is not borne by the appearance of an object.

What is meant here, I assume, is to reiterate the previously-reiterated point that "experiencing" the appearance is not necessary to "know" the work.

If what is meant, on the other hand, is literally that the meaning is not borne by the appearance, then this is clearly wrong. Someone could reasonably intuit the meanings here ascribed to the Duchamp and Rauschenberg works simply from looking at them. This assumption is quite explicitly at the core of the entire theory laid out here. The issue is not whether this is possible but whether it is assured. Seeing that it is never assured in aesthetic space, Our Man here exalts the alternative of semantic space and its greater surety of meaning. This is the real reason for the move towards "creating directly with ideas." And indeed there is no a priori reason to forbid this; there are only consequentialist reasons; there is only Ethan's how-did-that-work-out-ism. And that is never a terribly satisfying or actionable place to land.

My own consequentialist theory about this is: Meanings always change; there is no point in trying to fix meanings, but there is a "point" to abstaining from the effort to do so, since that kind of effort is a canonical example of Becker's "natural and inevitable urge to . . . achieve a heroic self-image," complete with the "inevitable" consequences he ascribed to it.

In particular, the role of line in L.H.O.O.Q. is more like its role in a sentence than in a drawing or painting. ...

The first version of L.H.O.O.Q. was executed not by Duchamp, but by Picabia on Duchamp's instructions, ...

The aesthetic qualities of L.H.O.O.Q., like the aesthetic qualities of Rauschenberg's erased DeKooning, are not offered up by the artist for aesthetic delectation, but rather are incidental features of the work, ...

Line is perceived in Duchamp's piece just as it is in a sentence in a book, and in both cases we can descry the presence of aesthetic qualities. But the point of neither can be read off its physiognomy.

The point? Or the intended point?

He does seem to be saying here that appearances in this case must fail, tout court, to convey "the point." I'll have to think about that some more. It seems nonsensical.

(Of course it is at least imaginable that such a work could be made.)

...

If an artwork is a person,
Duchamp has stripped her bare
of aesthetic aura.

L.H.O.O.Q. treats a person as an object by means of the joke produced by reading the letters in French.

It also treats an artwork as a "mere thing."

The presence of the moustache violates the Mona Lisa's

[93]

aesthetic rights and hence violates the artwork "person."

In making fun of these persons, Duchamp's piece denies its own personhood.

...

VI What Is an Artwork?

An artwork is a piece.

The concept "work of art" does not isolate a class of peculiar aesthetic personages.

The concept marks an indexical function in the artworld.

To be a piece of art, an item need only be indexed as an artwork by an artist.

Simply recategorizing an unsuspecting entity will suffice.

Thus "Is it art?" is a question of little interest.

The question is "So what if it is?"

Art is an epiphenomenon over the class of its works.

This all seems perfectly agreeable to the aesthete in me!

The conventions of titling works of art and publishing catalogues facilitate the practice of indexing art.

However, it is important to distinguish between the artist's act of indexing by creating and the curator's act of indexing by publishing the catalogue.

It is the former act which makes art;

the latter act usually indexes what is already art under more specific headings, ...

To make art is, basically, to isolate something ...

This may seem to devolve responsibility for arthood upon the official creators of art called artists,

and the question of determining arthood turns into a question of determining who the artists are.

But this wrongly places emphasis upon entities again, overshadowing the practice of art.

Anyone can be an artist.

To be an artist is to utilize (or perhaps invent) artistic conventions to index a piece.

These might be the conventions of a medium which provide for the indexing of an aesthetic piece by means of nonaesthetic materials.

But even the aesthetic artist has to stand back from the painting or play at a certain point and say "That's it. It's done."

This is the point where the artist relies upon the basic indexing conventions of art.

...
A work of art is not necessarily something worked on;
it is basically something conceived.

To be an artist is not always to make something,
but rather
to engage in a cultural enterprise in which artistic pieces are proffered for consideration.

Robert Barry once had an exhibition in which nothing was exhibited:

[94]

My exhibition at the Art & Project Gallery in Amsterdam in December, '69, will last two weeks. I asked them to lock the door and nail my announcement to it, reading: "For the exhibition the gallery will be closed."

The fact that someone could be an artist by just christening his or her radio or anxiety to be an artwork may seem preposterous.

Not anymore! It's totally accepted and blasé, and believe it or not after all I've written above, I actually think that's really shitty! It would be great for this to be new and exciting again. Life would be richer for it. In a way I envy people for whom all of this does remain preposterous. They may have a richer life than I do, though they encounter only a few pieces each year while I encounter dozens or hundreds.

At a certain point there's no way around the fact that a few people today still do find conceptual art to be exciting, and I am not one of them. I still find aesthetic art exciting, and there are only a few such people around, among whom we cannot count the conceptualists. The problem is less that we might feel differently and more that we have no protection from each other.

Beyond that, there is the sheer entertainment value of "philosophy," there is the difficulty of writing any philosophy at all without lying, and there is the ease of spotting others' lies as against the difficulty of ferreting out our own. If I can't have the art I want, I can at least settle for this!

...
The amateur indexer may index trivially, and the effortlessness of the task will only seem to compound the artistic inconsequence.

But things are not so different when the Sunday Painter produces a few terrible watercolors which are artistically uninteresting.

Despite their artistic failures,

both the casual indexer and the casual painter are still artists,

and the pieces they produce are works of art, just as the economics student's term paper is a piece of economics,

however naive or poorly done.

...there are senses of "artist" and "economist"
which refer to people
who pursue their disciplines
with special dedication.

But what these "professionals" do is no different from what the amateurs do;

it is just a difference in whether the activity is selected as a vocation.

...

A useful analogy is suggested.

Art is a practised discipline of thought and action,
like mathematics, economics, philosophy, or history.

The major difference between art and the others is that doing art is simply employing indexing conventions defined by the practice.

The reason for this is that the general focus of art is creation and conception for the sake of creation and conception, and consequently the discipline of art has devised a piece-making convention which places no limits on the content of what is created.

In other words, art, unlike economics, has no general subject matter.

The artworld develops and evolves through a complex network of interrelated interests, so it does have the general structure of "discipline."

But part of the recent history of art includes the loosening of conventions on what can be art until they are purely "formal."

The wider use of the term "piece" instead of "work" reflects this liberalization,
as does the decreasing importance of media.

"Work of art" suggests an object .

"Piece" suggests an item indexed within a practice.

There are many

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kinds of "pieces,"
differing according to the practices they are indexed within.

A "piece" could be a piece of mathematics or economics or art;
and some pieces may be addressed to several disciplines.

An artwork is just a piece (of art), an entity specified by conventions of the practice of art.

This view of art
has one very important point of difference with aesthetics.

Media are set up
to identify works
extensionally.

Joseph Margolis relies on this idea when he argues that the identity of an artwork depends upon the identity of the physical object in which it is embodied:

So works of art are said to be the particular objects they are, in intensional contexts, although they may be identified, by the linkage of embodiment, through the identity of what may be identified in extensional contexts. That is, works of art are identified extensionally, in the sense that their identity (whatever they are) is controlled by the identity of what they are embodied in.

Some difficulties for this view are already suggested by Duchamp's "double painting," ...

The decisive cases, however,
are found among artworks which are produced merely by indexing,
such as Duchamp's readymades.

Indexes index their items intensionally:

from the fact that "the morning star" occurs in an index,

one cannot infer that "the evening star" occurs there also,

even though the two expressions denote the same object.

L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved could, for the sake of argument, be construed as residing in the same physical object as the Mona Lisa itself.

Then

there is one extensionally specified object,

but

two intensionally specified artworks.

So how much of indexing is mere "intention?"

The above, once again, veritably reeks of "idealism," now a twentieth-century pastiche of the eighteenth-century classic.

But the upshot, again and again here, is that suddenly we are more than halfway to a fully pluralistic theory of reception. We just needed to wait our turn for more socially palatable demonstrations of the point to be developed. i.e. We had to wait for (1) the flux of time-and-place to be minted and christened as "cultural contingency" by which mechanism art is too culturally dependent to survive in the mere look of things ; and (2) the acknowledgment of artists' (i.e. anyone's) ability to intensionally specify infinite artworks from fixed materials without anyone outside of their own heads needing to be told of it, and indeed having no other way of finding out that it had been done at all but simply to be told so by some act of indexing.

All of this being so, mere absolutism of interpretation, of intentionalism, of critical edict, these absolutisms then need never have had any legs. The more remarkable thing is that they ever did. Suddenly the point requiring explanation is the lack of plurarity, not the abundance of it. Here is the opportunity for an explanatory inversion. Our Man's view on things here is quite useful for that purpose, whatever other unsightly baggage it might come with.

What's more, we have here also a good enscapsulation of just what Becker's infamous "dualism" of the bodily and the symbolic consists of. It is underwhelming, certainly, and that is the whole point: we are gods who shit. Dare I venture that the circle could be completed and Binkley's riff here could be applied back to anthropology, where Becker gets his start: as we see so often, one person's spouse is another person's sibling and yet other people's parent; there is but one extensionally specified human object, but two or more intensionally specified kinship relations; and in a certain kind of "dysfunctional family," the friction of vicissitudes arising from this plurality can be highly destructive. For the family to come back together, each person must become aware of both their own demands and the demands of others; these demands must be brought out of the shadows; it is precisely the opacity of everyone's needs and motivations which is crippling. But when all demands are openly articulated, both to self and to others, everyone can see immediately what is untenable about the situation and begin to come to terms with a more equitable and sustainable way forward.

The family is elemental whereas art is elective, and in that respect there would seem to be no reason why a mere object of art could not serve anyone, anyhow. However, what we see in practice, I think, is that this is possible only ideally and privately, and that it really ought to stay private but rarely does. If desiring subjects have nothing else at all in common, we all seem to share the compulsion to socially transact our ideal "intensionally specified" versions of artworks as well as of people, of religions, of just about anything. The various large and small points of distinction among all of these human institutions are dwarfed by the sameness of our transactional dealings in them. And of course what Becker did was arrogate to say precisely what drives this broader impulse: "social life is the saga of the working out of one's problems and ambitions on others" (Escape From Evil, p. 49).

The failure of the Duchampian moment, then, is the same failure as most every "social" practice humans have yet devised. Success in "escaping" the priestly and transactional functions of contemporary art requires a kind of determination, detachment and wherewithal that is all but superhuman. Escaping aesthetics, tradition, critical absolutism, disciplinary boundaries, and extensional specification has not been enough, because even then there remains plenty in which to transact, and it doesn't take much of this kind of temptation for human beings to succumb, instantly and totally, to the "saga" of "social life"; and it takes even less for Philosophers (worse yet, Theorists) of Art to get busy rationalizing the task of examining the practice of art exactly as it is, as opposed to asking whether that practice as-it-is actually is working very well for any of its own stated purposed or conceits.

Rauschenberg has suggested this possibility since the only things of substance he changed by erasing the DeKooning drawing were aesthetic qualities.

To complete the cycle in the way Duchamp did, Rauschenberg should buy a DeKooning painting and exhibit it in his next show: "Unerased DeKooning."

...

That an artwork is a piece and not a person was established by the Readymade. ...

[96]

... The Readymade
demonstrates the indexical nature of the concept "work of art" by showing that whether something is an artwork is not determined by its appearance but by how it is regarded
in the artworld. ...

Even an old work of art can be converted into a new one without changing the appearance of the old work, but only "creating a new idea for it," as Duchamp has said of the urinal readymade called Fountain.

The significance of the title of this piece has not been fully appreciated.

A urinal is a fountain;

that is, it is an object designed for discharging a stream of water.

The reason most urinals are not fountains, despite their designs, is that their locations and use differ from similar devices we do consider fountains.

The objects are structurally similar, but their cultural roles are very different.

Putting a urinal in a gallery makes it visible as a "fountain" and as a work of art because the context has been changed.

Cultural contexts endow objects with special meanings; and they determine arthood.

I for one find it plausible that the significance of the title has in fact been sufficiently appreciated. Calling the fountain and the Fountain structurally similar seems more than a little bit disingenuous. It's true that there is a structural similarity, but something more needs to be established about the nature of this similarity before it can do the heavy lifting Our Man demands of it here. A social ecologist or eco-semiotist certainly would not accept this passage as written.

Regardless, it is inarguable that cultural contexts do endow objects with special meanings . One merely wishes for a better illustrative example than this. What makes for a "better" example? The very "best" would involve the selfsame object in both contexts-of-comparison. There are fewer of these examples available, because . . . well, everybody knows why! Except for conceptual artists and their theorist-apologists!

It has been pointed out that Fountain was accepted as a work of art only because Duchamp had already established his status as an artist by producing works in traditional forms.

This is probably true: not just anyone could have carried it off.

You cannot revolutionize the accepted conventions for indexing unless you have some recognition in the artworld already.

However, this does not mean that Duchamp's piece is only marginal art and that anyone desiring to follow his act of indexing has to become a painter first.

Certainly not. But if not, then the moment has well and truly passed.

You should become whatever you want. But if you do not become something else first then you are not following in the path of Duchamp (or whoever else) and hence you don't get to claim that you are. You're also not following your own path (at least not in this respect) if teeming hordes of your peers have gone about things exactly as you have. That is all.

When Duchamp made his first nonaesthetic work,
the conventions for indexing artworks were more or less the media of aesthetics:
to make an artwork was to articulate in a medium.

Duchamp did not simply make an exception to these conventions,
he instituted a new convention,
the indexing convention which countenances nonaesthetic art,

though perhaps it should be said rather

that Duchamp uncovered the convention,

since it lies behind even the use of media,

which are specialized ways of indexing aesthetic qualities.

In any event, once the new convention is instituted anyone can follow it as easily as he or she can follow the indexing conventions of aesthetics.

The Sunday Indexer can have just as good a time as the Sunday Painter.

. . . and the same audience . . .

VI Duchamp's Legacy

...

[97]

... With the art of Duchamp,
art emerged openly as a practice.

His Large Glass,
whose meaning is inaccessible to anyone who merely examines the physical object,
stands as the first monument to an art of the mind.

Idealism, anyone?

Have we merely uncovered idealism from beneath the six feet of earth heaped upon it by the Logical Positivists?

It certainly seems that MacDonald, e.g., was already considering some such art of the mind as bequeathed to her cohort by their intensely idealist-ic forebears. Surely all of that needs to be reckoned with before such a pronouncement as the above can be taken (or made) seriously.

This kind of art developed historically; it is not an anomaly.

Probably it originates in what Clement Greenberg calls " Modernism,"
whose characteristic feature is self-criticism.

Like philosophy,
art developed to the point
where
a critical act about the discipline
(or part of it)
could be part of the discipline itself.

Once embarked on self-scrutiny, art came to realize that its scope could include much more than making aesthetic objects. ...

An artwork is a piece indexed within conventions of this practice,

and its being an artwork is determined not by its properties,

but by its location in the artworld.

Its properties are used to say what the particular work is.

If art must be aesthetic, the tools of the art indexer must be media, whether mixed or pure.

To make a work of art is to use a medium to join together literal physical qualities and created aesthetic qualities.

An aesthetic person is born in the intercourse.

Aesthetics treats aesthetic experience,
not art. Anything, from music to mathematics,
can be seen aesthetically.

Even ideas?

This is the basis for the traditional preoccupation of aesthetics with Beauty, a quality found in both art and nature.

Aesthetics deals with art and other things under the heading of aesthetic experience.

Conversely, not all art is aesthetic.

Seeing its marriage to aesthetics as a forced union,

art reaches out to find meaning beyond skin-deep looks.

The indexers create with ideas.

The tools of indexing are the languages of ideas,

even when the ideas are aesthetic.

Notes

...