JACK GLICKMAN—Creativity in the Arts

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

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[168]

9. Creativity in the Arts

JACK GLICKMAN
[orig. 1976]

I

What is it to be creative?

The answer usually given
is that there is a "creative process,"
and most writers on creativity have taken their task
to be a description of ... activity ...

... I will argue that that is the wrong way to go about characterizing creativity,
that one must attend to the artistic product rather than to the process.

Well . . . speaking again as a twice-over Music Major, immediately I see one obvious candidate explanation for why most writers on creativity would emphasize the process rather than the product: because they are teachers of prospective practitioners, not of prospective scholars; their prospective-practitioner students cannot learn the process directly from inspection of the product.

We may characterize concepts differently depending on the work we need them to do for us; thus, already one wonders: What sort of enterprise is this attention to products supposed to serve? Ostensibly, it serves the enterprise of characterizing creativity. So, as always, in brackets, we ask already at the outset: What are the really decisive, existentialliy pressing, morally urgent reasons why we need to be able to do this?

In Part II, I argue that their failure to properly distinguish creating from making has led some to suppose, erroneously, that some recent trends in art have celebrated the end of artistic creation.

Douglas Morgan, in reviewing a large number of writers on creativity, provides a convenient account of what I'll call the Creative-Process Theory.

He finds that

the "classic" theory of the creative process breaks it down into various stages. ... the various descriptions bear a revealing community, and I think we may take the "four-step" interpretation as reflecting the consensus:

1. A period of "preparation" during which the creator becomes aware of a problem or difficulty, goes through trial-and- error random movement in unsuccessful attempts to resolve a felt conflict . . .

2. A period of "incubation," renunciation, or recession, during which the difficulty drops out of consciousness. The attention is totally redirected . . .

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3. A period or event of "inspiration" or "insight". . . the "aha!" phenomenon, characterized by a flood of vivid imagery, an emotional release, a feeling of exultation, adequacy, finality . . .

4. A period of "elaboration" or "verification" during which the "idea" is worked out in detail, fully developed.

...

The theory has serious inadequacies. It excludes many instances of creative activity—improvizations in the performing arts, for example,

. . . or the improvizations themselves could represent step 4 only; stages 1-3 are part of the improv process, they just aren't observable in the observed moment of Sweaty Brow elaboration.

and other instances
in which the creating has taken place in a single unreflective
burst of energy, as when poets have had a poem come to them all at once.

Unless these poets were newborns,
this isn't actually a counterexample.

The most objectionable inadequacy of the Creative-Process theory, though, is that what it describes is not at all limited to creative activity.

The pattern described fits equally well many instances of genuine creativity and many instances of inept, bungling attempts at creativity.

Again, perhaps this construal is inadequate to the retrospective philosophical defining of terms; perhaps it does not comport with common usage; but for practitioners the realization that the process can miscarry is itself crucial. For practitioners, this construal of "creativity" is not over-general. As a good-humored and humorous contributor to an early internet discussion board once quipped about his own jazz sax playing: "People can tell it's me just by hearing one note, but in my case that's not necessarily a good thing."

It also fits activities
that are not even attempts at creativity: ...

Must one attempt "creativity"
in order to be "creative"?

Someone asks me, "Do you remember George Spelvin?" ... , mulling over the name
(step 1—aware of a problem).

I can't remember, so I put the problem aside, ...
(step 2—incubation).

After a while it suddenly comes to me, ...
(step 3—the "aha"! phenomenon).

Then I begin to remember more, ...
(step 4—filling in details).

Recalling who a person is, given his name, hardly seems an instance of creative activity;

yet it fits the description of the creative process.

... I might be accused of flogging a dead horse. Most psychologists seem to have abandoned this sort of account of creativity, ... Yet, as I will argue, in many subsequent accounts of creativity the same crucial error persists—the assumption that creativity consists in some distinctive pattern of thought and/or activity.

...

[Vincent] Tomas puts the problem this way:
when one asks what's meant in saying
that an artist is creative
or that something is a work of creative art,

"one is asking for a clarification or analysis of the concept of creativity as applied to art. One wants to know explicitly the nature of artistic creation—to be given a description of the conditions an activity must satisfy if it is to be an instance of artistic creation rather than of something else."

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This last sentence quoted makes it clear that he wants a set of conditions that are not only necessary but also sufficient ...

Tomas begins with the example
of a rifleman aiming and firing at a target:
the rifleman knows what he wants to do—
[and how to do it] ...

If the rifleman fails, Tomas says,
he has not obeyed all the rules, ...

But ... Unlike the rifleman, "the creative artist does not initially know what his target is. . . .

Yet,
Tomas says,

the creative artist has a sense that his activity is directed—that it is heading somewhere. . . . Despite the fact that he cannot say precisely where he is going . . . he can say that certain directions are not right. ...

Creative activity in art, then, is activity subject to critical control by the artist, although not by virtue of the fact that he foresees the final result of the activity. ...

... we do not judge a painting, poem, or other work to be a work of creative art unless we believe it to be original. If it strikes us as being a repetition ... , to the degree that we apprehend it as such, to the same degree we deny that it is creative.

It is fairly clear, then,
how Tomas relates the following three questions:

(1) What characterizes an artist as a creative artist?

(2) What characterizes a poem, painting, or other work as a creative work of art?

(3) What characterizes an activity as artistic creation?

Tomas would
answer the first two of these questions in terms of his answer to the third:

...

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...

Tomas claims that although we judge a poem or painting to be a creative work on the basis of qualities of the work itself,   such a judgment is possible because the work reveals features of the activity that produced it.

So far, then, Tomas has set forth two conditions ... :
(1) the artist does not envisage the final result of his work,
but
(2) the artist exercises "critical control."

The first condition, I think, contains a conceptual truth—that if someone knows just what the product of his labors will be, then that product is, in a sense, already created. ... [but] this first condition does not distinguish the artist who is creative from the one who is not.

Tomas allows that a sculptor might know exactly what his sculpture will look like before he begins to work his material, ... in such a case the creative act is finished: it is the production of the idea, and all that remains is to "objectify the idea" in some material— ...

But
for any artist at work, either he does not envisage the result, ... , or else he does envisage the result, in which case he may be objectifying an idea that is the product of a creative act, ...

Tomas's second condition [that "the artist exercises 'critical control'"] raises difficulties, for artists at times produce a work in a single unreflective outpouring of energy. ...

... , even if all came out just right from the very first line, was there not a relatively cool hour when Nietzsche ... read what he had written and judged it to be an adequate expression of his thought? . . . If [so] ... , this is all that is needed to have made him create Zarathustra on the view of creation presented above.

... According to Tomas, had either Nietzsche or Coleridge not looked over his work after it was finished it would not be a creative work, but since he did look it over it is a creative work.

This is paradoxical: the work is the same in either case.

Fair enough. But again, just envision the college professor pulling his hair out over the self-absorbedness of his more "creative" students. That is where this seeming paradox finds its voice as a piece of bedrock practical wisdom. The difficulty is in impressing upon students that unreflective outpourings are bad without being able to deny outright that some good work was made this way. Perhaps that's the unspoken origin of this blind spot in the theory?

But sure, it is a blind spot.

...

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... if critical control can amount to no more than looking over the work, it is certainly an easy condition for any artist, creative or not, to fulfill, but it hardly seems necessary.

I haven't read any of the sources that are at issue here, and I probably will not read them . . . but, this seems like a deliberate misreading. We need only to mildly qualify the looking over corollary to say that this part of the process must be done sincerely.

Now, is this corollary strictly necessary to any airtight analytic concept of "creativity"? Is it a necessary ingredient in the achievement of "creativity" as a philosophically naive, "product"-oriented practitioner might define that term? Probably not, but I think the reason why it is not "necessary" probably has more to do with the elusiveness of positive verification in this area than it does with the not-so-elusive task of taxonomizing some fairly mundane conceptual and practical artifacts. The sincerity corollary is not "necessary" here only because we have necessar-ily learned to live without it; by which I mean: we have learned to live without positive verification of it.

All of that said, "sincere critical control" certainly is both an explicitly-held value and a pedagogical stipulation espoused by a wide swath of the practical art world. How could that be? Because as practitioners we may think we've achieved it, and when we explain it to someone else they may likewise think they understand exactly what we mean.

How can we be secure in thinking so if we have no explicit concept of "creativity" that holds up to the least analytical scrutiny? Because we have practice instead, and practice actually is epistemologically superior to analyticity. Putting a piece of cold metal to your face first thing in the morning doesn't feel good, but it is good, because a piece of cold metal can't come unclasped the way a chain of signifiers can.

Going a step further: I think we may fairly question the very coherence of the concept of the unreflective outpouring. Probably there is plenty of reflection during the pouring-out, but this reflection is fleeting and/or subliminal and/or facile. In pop-cognitivist terms, it's done piecemeal by the Fast Brain, during "creation", rather than by the Slow Brain deliberately and after-the-fact. The prescription of a cool hour amounts to the equation of "reflection" with Slow Brain processes, and it denies the Fast Brain such honors; but Fast Brain decisions are shaped by experience and cultivation. Fast Brain decisions are "reflective" in the sense that matters here, even if they are (perhaps paradigmatically) not "reflective" in the colloquial sense. (Verification, again.) If someone were actually to proceed deliberately along the four-step process, it would, I think, be impossible to deny outright that step 3 involved any "reflection" or critical control whatsoever; and it would also be impossible to claim outright that this control had been exercised therein. From the outside, all we see is a burst. So, "critical control" inevitably becomes reified into A period of "elaboration", and by then it has been made discrete enough to be dismissed as hardly necessary. And by then we've jumped headlong over all questions of positive verification, which should have been where we started, and where we must remain unless and until those questions can be satisfactorily answered.

Already we can envision the same complication arising in the promised argument about "product" trumping "process." The first is simply far more amenable to observation than is the second: "process" implicates not only observable actions but unobservable ones too, i.e., things like thoughts, attitudes and emotions. It may be that process is amenable to definition, and perhaps that it is indeed the better way to define whatever it is we are trying to define here; but we simply cannot observe very much of what "process" entails, so we never get very far with it. We would need to be able to say that a reviser had taken some discrete and proactive cognitive measure even in cases where there is no material evidence for this. Perhaps we will never be able to do this; that does not mean that speaking of process here is incoherent. Rather, it means that "process" marks the limits of our analyticity. (But not the limits of practice!)

Tomas sees one other essential factor in artistic creation—inspiration.

... two moments may be distinguished, the moment of inspiration, when the new suggestion appears in consciousness, and the moment of development or elaboration. ...

... it becomes quite clear at this point that Tomas's theory is simply a more elaborate version of the Creative-Process theory.

Tomas introduces the notion of inspiration to explain the "critical control" in creative activity.

Whenever the artist goes wrong, he feels himself being kicked, and tries another way which, he surmises, trusts, or hopes, will not be followed by a kick. What is kicking him is "inspiration," which is already there. ...

... Ordinarily there is no distinction between a good inspiration and a poor one: ... if the idea is a poor one, it is not called an inspiration.

... surely there have been a lot of kickless goings wrong in the history of artistic activity. Each of two artists may work in the way Tomas describes, ... yet one artist may be creative and the other not be creative at all.

The three conditions of artistic creation that Tomas lays down—

not envisaging the result,
exercising critical control, and
undergoing feelings of inspiration

—do not help to distinguish the creative artist from the uncreative one. ...

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Tomas realizes that "in discourse about art, we use 'creative' in an honorific sense,
...

It is precisely because we do not call an activity creative unless its product is new and valuable, that no characterization of creating simply in terms of the artist's actions, thoughts, and feelings can be adequate, ...

Let's just be careful not to lose sight of the difference(s) between actions and the other two! "Actions" are almost as easy to observe as "products," whereas we may never really get at "thoughts" or "feelings" aside from reading them into more observable things like actions and products.

...

... we might say that someone was not only painting but also creating, ...
It is not that he is doing two things at the same time.

If we say that someone is ... riding a bicycle and viewing the countryside, ... we can imagine our subject doing one of these things without the other.

Creating, however, is not an isolable activity. The creator cannot be just creating; he has to be doing something we could describe as writing, painting, ...

One does not always create when one paints, writes, or composes; these are means by which one might create. ...

To know whether someone has created, we have to see (or be told about) the results of his work. And the creator himself knows he has created only by seeing what he has done.

It is unusual to say "I am creating";
"create" is seldom used in the continuous present tense. ...

Notice that it makes sense to ask "How do you know you're creating?"

whereas it would be silly to ask "How do you know you're painting?"

... We say an activity such as painting, writing, or composing is creating if it achieves new and valuable results; no specific isolable activity creating corresponds to the verb "create" as painting corresponds to the verb "paint."

These considerations suggest that "create" is one of that class of verbs Gilbert Ryle has labeled "achievement verbs." The verb "win," for example, signifies not an activity but an achievement. ...

One big difference between the logical force of a task verb and that of a corresponding achievement verb is that in applying an achieve-

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ment verb we are asserting that some state of affairs obtains over and above that which consists in the performance, if any, of the subservient task activity. ... for a doctor to effect a cure, his patient must both be treated and be well again. . . .
...

...

If creating were a specific process or activity we would expect that one could decide to create. But artists often try unsuccessfully to create. ...

If creating were a specific process or activity we would expect the possibility of error. It is easy to make something wrong. But one cannot create something wrong; either one creates or one does not. ...

To say that someone created x
is often to say that x was, upon being produced, absolutely new—i.e., new to everyone.

To say that someone has been creative, though, is to say that the product is new to the agent. ...

I do not think, though, that ordinary usage supports a hard and fast distinction ...

As Kennick points out, if a contemporary of Cézanne working in Siberia and wholly unacquainted with what was going on elsewhere in the art world, produced canvases just like the late canvases of Cézanne, we would have no reason not to describe his work as creative.

[175]

Judgments of creativity are implicitly comparative, like saying that a man is tall or short. But the comparison is not unrestricted. A work of art is creative only in comparison with works with which it is properly comparable, i.e., with what the artist might reasonably be expected to have been acquainted with.

Although whether we ascribe the verb "create" depends on the product, not on the activity that produced it, it does not follow that the praise conferred by "create" and "creative" applies only to the product;

but
in saying that the agent is creative,
one is praising him for what he has accomplished,
not for having gone through some special process in accomplishing it.
...

three questions:

(1) What characterizes an artist as creative?

(2) What characterizes a poem, painting or other work as a creative work?
and
(3) What characterizes an activity as artistic creation?

For Tomas, the third question is primary, and the first two are answered in terms of its answer.

On my view the answer to all three depends on the product; ...

... it is hardly surprising that it ["The Creative-Process Theory"] has been the dominant theory of artistic creation, since as such it is a variation on a main theme in the expression theory of art, ...

As the expression theory is usually formulated, good art, or "art proper," comes about only as the result of a certain sort of process—"artistic expression."

But as critics of the expression theory have emphasized, an examination of the process is irrelevant to an evaluation of the product.

And then, critics of this criticism really ought to co-emphasize that an evaluation of the product is a coherent concept only where all subjects party to the evaluation can reasonably be said to be attending to the same product.

We hold as well that criticism of "expression" specifically as a theory of art can quite well succeed in showing it inadequate as a "theory" without touching the question of just how all of the world's endemic, sub-theoretical "expression" is thought to work; the latter question being the one that actually matters.

...

Tomas argued that we judge a work of art to be creative on the basis of properties of the work itself, but only because we take those properties as evidence that the creator went through a certain sort of process.

I think Kennick is correct, though, in insisting that we do nothing of the kind. ...

we determine whether a work of art is creative by looking at the work and by comparing it with previously produced works of art in the same or in the nearest comparable medium or genre. . . .

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Anyone can tell at a glance whether two paintings or two poems are different, but not just anyone can tell at a glance which of two paintings or poems is the more creative. To tell this, one must be acquainted with properly comparable works of art and be able to appreciate the aesthetic significance of any artistic innovation, ...

It might be objected that Kennick's view, which I am endorsing, confuses evidence of creativity with what it means to say that someone is creative.

But ... "create" is an achievement verb and so applies only when something besides the performance of some action is the case. ...

I suppose that in some sense a valuably new artwork is "evidence" of creativity,
but more than that, we apply the verb "create" only when the results are new and valuable, since creating means producing what is valuably new.

Tomas considers the possibility that being creative is simply producing what is valuably new, but he dismisses that possibility with the following argument.

Do we want to mean by creation in art merely the production of a work that not only is different but is different in a valuable way? In that case, it would follow that a computer would be no less creative than Beethoven was, if it produced a symphony as original and as great ... So conceived, artistic creation is not necessarily an action, in the sense of this word that involves intention and critical control, and the traditional distinction between action and mere movement is obliterated.

... If machines can create artworks then it seems true that artistic creation is not necessarily an action,

but it does not follow that there is no distinction between action and mere movement.

But more to the point,
to say that someone is creative is to say that he is creative in some specific way. ...

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...

We might say of someone creative in a number of ways that he is a creative person, or creative in general, but we can in such instances enumerate the various ways in which he is creative.

Now
can a monkey be as creative as Picasso?

The proper reply is "As creative a what as Picasso?"

As creative an artist?
Only if it is allowed that a monkey can be an artist.

Similarly, if we are to make any sense of the question "Is a monkey at a typewriter who produces a sonnet identical with one of Shakespeare's as creative as Shakespeare?" it must mean "Is the monkey as creative a poet as Shakespeare?" and the answer is clearly No unless it is allowed that a monkey can be a poet. ...

...

The monkey at a typewriter thing is a legitimate threat to Our Man's argument, as he can well see, since the canonical form of this trope is all about arriving at an identical "product" through an incommensurable "process." Hence examination of identical products must, one would think, land upon identical conclusions. Hence if Shakespeare is "creative," so must be the proverbial monkey.

The question of whether a monkey or a computer can be this or that feels like a non sequitur aimed at diverting the argument rather than facing up to it. For one thing, this seems to turn us back toward "process." How else to describe the difference between the poet and the nonpoet if there is no observable difference between their poem-like products?

But moreover, it also turns us toward the conceptual anarchy of social convention and the need to be able to say exactly what a poet is; to be able to say so apart from poems and poetry, apart from the "products" of this ostensible producer, the poet. This seems especially counterproductive. "Poet" too is likely to wash out as merely honorific rather than analytic; ditto for all of the specific ways someone might be said to be "creative." Instead we end up litigating those honorific concepts, attempting to give them an analytic grounding that most of them don't have. So while it may be true that prevailing usage of "creative" strongly implies that it must have a specific object rather than being applied generally, usage is usage; usage does not make processes or products, or poets or composers. There is the possibility of slippage here, and dare I say that if we've established anything here as of yet, slippage is it.

I think the problem that Tomas raises here is not so much a problem about creativity as about art —whether what is produced by monkey or machine can properly be called art.

... it doesn't follow that it would never make sense to say that a monkey was creative. After all, ascriptions of creativity implicitly compare what's been created to other things of similar kind and provenance. ...

... one might want to say that Bonzo is more creative than the other chimps ... to say this would be only to say that he is a more creative chimp; it is not to put him in a class with Picasso, ...

II

To construe creating,
as many have,
as a kind of making,
is to overlook crucial differences between the concepts making and creating.
...

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The chef made a new soup today.
The chef created a new soup today.

The seamstress made a new dress.
The fashion designer created a new dress.

Although the same noun occurs as direct object in both sentences of each pair,

with "make" the noun designates a particular thing,

but with "create" the noun is generic.

If the chef created a new soup,
he created a new kind of soup,
a new recipe;

he may not have made the soup.

But if we say
"He made a new soup today,"
"soup"
refers to some particular pot of soup he prepared. ...

Particulars are made, types created.

Suppose a potter makes a vase
and creates a new design on the surface. ...

... show the potter any of the [thousand] copies and ask,

"Did you create the design on this vase?"
The answer in all cases would be Yes.

The answer would be No if I asked,
"Did you make the design on this vase?"

With "make," "design" refers to an individual;
with "create," "design" refers to a type.
...

When we talk about what is created

we are not primarily concerned with some particular individual object and its fabrication,

rather we are concerned primarily with the idea, conception, or design that that individual object embodies.

...

... it might be objected
that the choice between "create" and "make"
does not always indicate a different sort of object: ...

One can create all sorts of things;
...
If someone creates a certain impression, it is no reason to call him creative;
...

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... But if a chef creates a new dish, a businessman creates a new way of merchandising, or a painter creates a work of art, these often are reasons ...

The object of "create" when the creating is noncreative is some specific state of affairs rather than some new conception.

...

An issue
that's been debated recently

Editorial Nb:

Corroboration
of the
's = has
!!

is whether natural objects,
such as pieces of driftwood,
can be works of art.

If they can, a curious question arises:
who is the creator of such artworks?

... is being an artifact a necessary condition of something's being a work of art?

But what really seems at issue ... is whether a work of art
must have been made by someone,
and that is another matter.

I will now argue that

although
(1) being an artifact is a necessary condition
of something's being a work of art,

(2) there is no conclusive reason to insist that a work of art must have been made by someone,

and so
(3) an artist may create a work of art that no one has made.

Most often the term "artifact"

. . . yep, usage of this term is the only really interesting matter in the above . . .

is used to refer to an object of archeological or historical interest, ...

But "artifact" is used also to refer to contemporary objects; ...

Practically any sort of alteration of the material environment might count as an artifact—a pile of rocks serving as a marker, for example, or a circle of trees planted to demarcate a certain area.

Also a single natural object can be an artifact if it has been invested with some important function.

...

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...

Now let's take a hypothetical case. Suppose an artist exhibits pieces of driftwood; perhaps the gallery announces a new conception, Beach Art. The pieces of driftwood are materially unaltered— ...

Suppose further that this exhibit is warmly accepted by the artworld, ... The very fact that the pieces of driftwood would have acquired the status of artworks in our culture would qualify them as artifacts of our culture; ...

Maybe this just shows what a porous concept culture is?

Porous ontologically as well as materially?

And since being a work of art of a culture is a sufficient condition of something's being an artifact of that culture, it follows that being an artifact is a necessary condition of something's being a work of art, ...

As was mentioned earlier, an artist need not make the work of art he creates. ... What is central to the notion of creating something is the new design, idea, or conception, not fabrication; ...

But the artist need not even design the art object.
Duchamp displayed as art a urinal and entitled it Fountain: ...

So in many cases the creator of a work of art has not fabricated the art object, and in other cases the artist has not only not made the art object, he has not designed it either.

And if the artist need not have made and need not even have designed the art object, then I see no conclusive conceptual block to allowing that the artwork be a natural object.

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... there is no conceptual absurdity
in the idea of a work of art
created by someone
but made by no one.

There are not sufficient grounds for ruling a priori that pieces of driftwood or other natural objects cannot be works of art, and if they are accepted as such, they would not be that much different from objects already widely accepted as artworks.

Already we have artworks that were neither made nor designed by the artist who created them.

The direction of the present argument has been influenced by
Arthur Danto's paper
"The Artworld."

UGH

Also influenced
by Danto's argument that "to see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry— ... George Dickie has argued that art's institutional setting makes possible a definition of art in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

Again with the typo!

Dickie argues that a work of art can be defined as

"1) an artifact

2) upon which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation."

... I'll briefly register some doubts ...

First,
for the reasons given above,
the condition of artifactuality seems to me superfluous.

Also, ... Consider the ... functional objects in the Museum of Modern Art's Design Collection. ...

"an object is chosen for its quality because it is thought to achieve, or to have originated, those formal ideals of beauty which have become the major stylistic concepts of our time. . . . It applies to objects not necessarily works of art but which, nevertheless, have contributed importantly to the development of design."

Here we have objects
—not necessarily works of art—
upon which someone
acting in behalf of the artworld
has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.

And ... it doesn't follow,
given such an atmosphere [i.e., of "artistic theory"], that
even in the artworld everyone
will see it as art.

This remark is mundane on the surface, but really it is preganant with all kind of Formalist, Materialist, and Empiricist offspring.

The artworld is not monolithic.

Nor is any human association!
FBFW!

Some painters and sculptors
still balk
at calling pieces of driftwood works of
art.

Their hesitation to call such objects works of art does not stem from a reluctance to value such objects:

no matter how exquisite such objects may be,
they would say,
they are no more works of art than is a

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magnificent sunset.

I for one
would not be surprised
to find
these same painters and sculptors
observing the letter
rather than the spirit
of the law
ELSEWHERE in their own lives!

Hopefully none are Sunday painters and Monday cops!

They know, moreover, the intent ... , they understand fully the theory of objets trouvés;

their reluctance to call such objects works of art is their reluctance to accept that theory. ...

I do not wish to discuss the question how widely accepted as art an object must be before it can be said unequivocally to be art.

I am not even sure that that is the right question to raise.

I want only to register a doubt about Dickie's claim that anything proffered as art is to be classified unequivocally as art no matter the extent of its acceptance. ...

In any case,
the driftwood dispute is illuminating
because
it shows that

although on Danto's view anything might become a work of art,
that doesn't mean anything goes:

rational argument has a place
in formulating and assessing the theory
that would extend the concept of art to some new kind of object.

... It might be objected that if an art museum director decides to put on display a collection of, say, bottles, or doorknobs or shipping bags, ... and they come to be generally considered artworks, it is not the museum director who is credited as the artist who created them, rather it is the person who designed the objects.

And if, in general, the person responsible for bringing about acceptance of x as an artwork is not considered the artist who created x, why should we say it is Duchamp, and not the person who designed the bottlerack, who created Bottlerack ?

But there is a difference ...

Presumably when the museum director decides to put on display doorknobs, shopping bags, or whatever, his gesture is one of calling attention to objects he considers to be already works of art, but ones that have gone unrecognized.

But Duchamp and subsequent artists who have transformed mere objects into artworks by signing their names to them have not supposed that there were all these objects, already artworks, lying around unnoticed; ...

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The Duchamp case I think supports Danto's contention that "it is the role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible."

It is not the case, as I take Dickie to be saying, that it is simply the right institutional setting that confers the status "work of art," ...

... I would think, it is because of the specific theory in the context of which Duchamp's ready-mades appeared that they are artworks.

As of yet we've heard remarkably little from either Danto himself or from Our Man here about what exactly an artistic theory is or about how it all works.

Danto's opening hypothetical actually is something quite different from the above. Rather, a paradigm-bending work appears in the context of a specific theory which denies it arthood; theory must then be somehow accommodated to (newly arising) practice if it is not to be abandoned altogether.

Finally, if all we're interested in is to be able to say that they are artworks or that they are not, then I suppose there's no reason or basis to dispute the characterization of this process as profoundly theorybound, since by then we are already "theorizing" in at least the basic sense. But we're not obligated theorize in this way. Not only that, Danto's opener, once again, seems not actually to proceed quite this way; rather, the "but it's not art" critique is hardly a critique at all, much less an artifact of "theory." He could have said it is an artifact of "norms" or "hegemonic cultural practices" instead of "theory," and maybe then all of this would make (somewhat) more sense; but he doesn't say any such things, he does say "theory," and this seems quite intentionally specific.

For now, all I mean to get at is: I had no idea that Duchamp's ready-mades did in fact appear at a time-and-place wherein the prevailing "theory" did in fact confer arthood upon them. That doesn't seem accurate. But by the time the present paper was being written theory had caught up, sort of.

... "since their first public appearance, [Duchamp's] creations have possessed an inherent capacity to stir up conflict. Sixty years ago, he entered the art world by splitting it, and he still stands in the cleft."

"[H]e remains the primary target to those critics and artists whose interest lies in restoring art to a 'normal' continuity with the masterpieces of the past. "

To reiterate a prior thought . . . I'm perfectly happy and able to embrace Duchamp, the artist. It's Danto, the theorist and his Theor-ism, about whom I have grave reservations.

And yes, even I can see that there is only ever continuity. This much as a material reality. The positing of dis-continuity with the past is the most transparent kind of ideological distortion. Ditto the self-appointed Clean Break. One of the appealing things about Danto's oeuvre is that he coherently parses out the continuity and the change; he has an internally coherent art-historical theory which accounts for both and for their relationship. It's just that his "essentialism" gets the better of him.

[Harold] Rosenberg then sketches the case against Duchamp, one argument of which is the following.

In adopting the ready-made, Duchamp has introduced the deadly rival of artistic creation—an object fabricated by machine and available everywhere, an object chosen, as he put it, on the basis of pure "visual indifference," in order to "reduce the idea of aesthetic consideration to the choice of the mind, not the ability of cleverness of the hand."

And yet . . .

Methinks a good ol' dialectical fissure lurks behind this indifference!

The hand who made the urinal was in fact cleverer than most . . .

. . . and it shows!

In the world of the ready-made, anything can become a work of art through being signed by an artist. . . . The title "artist," no longer conferred in recognition of skill in conception and execution, is achieved by means of publicity.

What sense is there in denying the publicity angle?

Perhaps this old saw is also a novel angle in on the Intentionalism discourse. Perhaps it hardly matters whether Duchamp's own actions were cause or effect. Perhaps the dethroning of skill was his avowed intent whereas the role of publicity was one additional effect but not necessarily intended or premeditated? Perhaps this has been, actually, an "unintended consequence" more so than an intended one? I wouldn't know, because I haven't dug into Duchamp's own words and actions. The point in any case is: The Publicity paradigm is not less pernicious than the Skill paradigm; in fact there is very good reason to prefer the latter, imperfect as it is.

To repeat a point I've already belabored, skill in execution cannot be considered necessary for artistic creation since works of art are so often not executed by their creators.

To exclude readymades on that account would entail excluding too much else.

And ingenuity, wit, and insight of conception are not necessarily excluded either.

Just as some artworks of great technical skill embody the most banal conceptions and others, brilliant conceptions, is there not a range of conceptual skill exhibited in ready-mades, objets trovés, and works of conceptual art?

Such art does exclude "ability or cleverness of the hand," but it does not on that account preclude artistic creation.

Notes

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