“I opened my eyes and beheld reality, at which I began to laugh, and since then, I have not stopped laughing”
However I’m aware that I’m probably coming across as dreadfully facetious and annoying for which I’m sorry.
The serious point that I’ve been circling is that I think that this whole question comes from a Platonic belief that there we could identify a pure thing called ‘Art’ (or ‘Music’ or ‘Games’). However I believe in a much more Structuralist approach where the concept of Art evolves from what I/my community/my culture believes Art to be. It is defined by its relationship to our common framework of references.
Therefore I would argue that you and I could sit down and draw up a set of criteria for what is Art, or indeed what is not Art, and then go around comparing things to that list and labelling them as we go. However that would be our list we’re comparing things against and not the true and essential definition of Art. Indeed we could bump into two other guys with their own list that could be quite different from ours.
Further I think it’s a mistake to believe that a platonic ideal exists because that traps us in a world view where concepts can’t grow or change and that risks stagnation. We would become as those great Post-structural philosophers ‘The Eagles’ sang ‘all just prisoners here, of our own device’.
Finally thoughts:
I appreciate this (Socratic) discussion, it has made me go back and examine these concepts and although I’ve probably mangled them dreadfully, I’ve found this fun. Although I do find myself addicted to Sartre’s ‘absurdities of the world’, such what happens when you count in Base13 or that the Soviet Union tried to develope a Ternary computer because it’s provably more efficient than binary.
You shouldn’t depend on Logic to solve everything; Kurt Gödel put his boot through that one.
Derrida would be quite pleased that we had reached this state of confusion and disagreement, he would have taken it as a sign of the maturity of our thought.
Finally for an encore I shall now go off and prove that black is white and probably get myself killed on the next zebra crossing…
I’m not at all a Platonist; you can’t very well be both a Platonist and a Darwinian. What I’m doing is not looking for timeless essences; it’s looking at groups of things in the real, physical world that go together in some way, and trying to come up with a verbal formulation that draws a line around them, including them and excluding others. The formulation doesn’t necessarily create the category; often it simply makes explicit the nature of a category that already exists in established usage.
However, I also want to mention the ancient Greek story of the group of sophists in the marketplace of Athens who were debating the definition of “man.” One of them proposed “a featherless biped” (commemorated in the title of one of Woody Allen’s books). Another got up, walked over to a poulterer, bought a plucked bird, flung it at the first sophist’s feet, and said, “Here is your man!”
I am not rejecting it; I stand by it. But I don’t think this is an inconsistent (contradictory) position. Were the two men who made the emperor’s new clothes tailors?
If you sat down and came up with a definitive list of criteria something must or must not have to be considered art, and that list was used as the canonical definition by everyone, I would immediately lose interest in “art” because it no longer had a je ne sais quoi that separated it from everything else.
Also: as soon as you did, an artist somewhere (everywhere, actually) would look at that list, think to themselves and then throw all of their creative energy to prove the list was wrong – that, I feel, is the essence of creativity and, ultimately, the humanity that makes art “art”.
I had a similar though process when a thread came about on BGG amongst 18xx gamers where somebody was trying to “define” what 18xx meant – as soon as anybody could do that, if even possible, someone would find a way to make an 18xx game that violated those criteria but otherwise made a significant number of 18xx gamers say, “Yes, this feels like an 18xx game”.
The cynic in me, then, would say, “Art is whatever you cannot otherwise describe.”
4’33" has many of the functions of a musical performance. It manipulates sound. It incites a reaction in the listeners. It draws influences from previous works. It makes a statement.
If silence isn’t a part of music then a whole lot of musical devices cease to function.
You can decide for yourself whether it’s good or bad music. Whether it i’s a good or bad performance. Whether it accomplishes what it sets out to do.
Things acquire meaning by the context they’re put in. It’s music because it’s performed in a musical context.
I don’t think that’s a historically neutral definition. It seems to define “art” in terms of the practice of, roughly, the past hundred fifty years, when artists had schools and manifestos and competed to be the one who came up with an innovative approach. It’s like the change that took place in geometry at the same time, when the discovery that hyperbolic geometry was logically consistent shifted the focus from developing the implications of one set of postulates to exploring the effects of adopting different sets of postulates.
But for the great majority of history, artists were not striving to be innovators or revolutionaries. And a lot of the art of those eras still speaks to me, whereas conscious efforts to be experimental often don’t. So I think a definition that focuses on that sort of aspiration to revolutionize the art world is at best partial.
I don’t think that’s valid. It’s like saying that a bottle of kerosene is wine if it has a vintner’s label on it.
There are things that belong to categories. And there are social processes that certify those things as belonging to those categories. But those social processes can also be captured and perverted, so that they accept things that don’t fit or reject things that do. In fact, as soon as certification acquires any prestige, it creates an incentive to do so. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a parable about exactly that process.
Context is more than just the label that has been stuck on the bottle. It’s the history of how the liquid is treated. It’s the reaction a human body has when trying to drink it.
It’s possible for contexts to change how a thing is defined and how it is valued. Differing contexts can even make something contradict itself on what it is. Strawberries are berries. Strawberries aren’t berries. Both of these are true for different contexts.
And what you accept or deny personally about those contexts doesn’t deny wider or differing cultural contexts. The western 12 tone system doesn’t make other systems “wrong” in the same way that the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet doesn’t make other aphabets not “the alphabet” in different contexts.
Why should art be defined in a specific manner? Why does it require definition? Why are we obsessed with labelling something as nebulous as art?
A screwed up piece of paper dropped on the floor by accident isn’t art. A screwed up piece of paper placed on the floor purposefully is. Why? I don’t know.
Sometimes, for some definitions of Art, I simply don’t care whether an object meets them or not.
Some of the things that I have decorating my walls were not made by artists or were not made with the intention of creating an aesthetic impression. I don’t care.
“Art” as a physical object; something you like the look out sounds of, or find interesting to look at our listen to.
“Art” as a concept; something that is designed to convey a message, or which somebody finds a message or meaning in.
Both of these are valid, and anything can fall into either of them.
I think the label exists already. It’s the word ‘art’. What doesn’t exist is a shared understanding of what we mean by it.
What is intriguing (to me) is that we can all use lots of words while not agreeing what their meaning is… and still understand one another, more or less, most of the time. This is a weird feature of normal language. It doesn’t apply to specific domains like maths, where a failure to agree on a meaning would be a breakdown of communication.
I think the reason we’re obsessed with trying to define the word (if we are - and this thread maybe answers that in the affirmative) is that if we genuinely accept that it has no definition at all then it really is meaningless… and we instinctively feel that the words we use have meaning. Look at it this way: if you learnt a new language, you’d want to know what word in that language can be used to carry the meaning of ‘art’ in English. If you don’t know what ‘art’ means yourself, you can’t do that. [Of course, all translations are mistranslations etc etc]
A fair bit of art appreciation is following the herd; Damien Hirst was generally regarded as a bit of a joke until Charles Saatchi spent a lot of money on making him a Name (and, obviously, made that money back and rather more by selling the art he’d bought when it was cheap). Was a piece of his art better in any way when it was suddenly worth more money? People certainly talked about it as though it were.
When I lived in Riverside, I liked to listen to the songs of mockingbirds. But I didn’t consider them art.
We have a shelf with natural objects, including the skull of our first cat, and I like to look at them, but I don’t consider them art.
I find Maxwell’s equations for the electromagnetic field meaningful, and indeed I think they are stunningly beautiful. But I don’t consider them art either.
I think your statements are far too general to fit my concept of art. And I don’t believe that an ordinary native English speaker, asked about any of them, would call it “art” either; I don’t think that’s how the word is used in English.
I’m tempted to say, “If you got to ask, you ain’t never gonna know.”
But I care about the definition of art, among other reasons, because I consider some of what I do—running role-playing games—to be a form of art; and I want to learn how to do it better; and I want to be able to think about it; and I want to consider aspects of other arts and see if they suggest anything to me. So I want to have a clear idea of where to look.
For example, there is a concept in literary theory of “theme” (originally, in Greek, dianoia). And for a long time I found it really elusive and hard to grasp. But then I started thinking about how the word is used in arts other than literature: in music, for the melodic subject of a musical composition; in visual arts, for the thing that is shown by a painting or sculpture or other work as a whole, that everything in it contributes to. And it came to me that what a theme was was a principle of selection, one that made it possible to determine what belonged in a work and what didn’t; and that I had mostly been following a principle of selection in running my campaigns, including encounters and situations of a sort appropriate to each other and to the campaign premise. And that let me think more consciously about how to run campaigns, and be more selective about what I did in them.
It’s not whether it matches mine. It’s whether it accurately represents the use of the word in a given language. I’m simply using my sense of what art is as a sample of what “art” means to a native English speaker; I’m not attempting to devise some new concept of art.