Hamlet and Socrates, though in praise and deprecation respectively, spoke of art as a mirror held up to nature. As with many disagreements in attitude, this one has a factual basis. Socrates saw mirrors as but reflecting what we can already see; so art, insofar as mirrorlike, yields idle accurate duplications of the appearances of things, and is of no cognitive benefit whatever. Hamlet, more acutely, recognized a remarkable feature of reflecting surfaces, namely that they show us what we could not otherwise perceive â our own face and form â and so art, insofar as it is mirrorlike, reveals us to ourselves, and is, even by socratic criteria, of some cognitive utility after all. As a philosopher, however, I find Socratesâ discussion defective on other, perhaps less profound grounds than these. If a mirrorâimage of o is indeed an imitation of o, then, if art is imitation, mirrorâimages are art. But in fact mirroring objects no more is art than returning weapons to a madman is justice; and reference to mirrorings would be just the sly sort of counterinstance we would expect Socrates to bring forward in rebuttal of the theory he instead uses them to illustrate. If that theory requires us to class these as art, it thereby shows its inadequacy: âis an imitationâ will not do as a sufficient condition for âis art.â Yet, perhaps because artists were engaged in imitation, in Socratesâ time and after, the insufficiency of the theory was not noticed until the invention of photography. Once rejected as a sufficient condition, mimesis was quickly discarded as even a necessary one; and since the achievement of Kandinsky, mimetic features have been relegated to the periphery of critical concern, so much so that some works survive in spite of possessing those virtues, excellence in which was once celebrated as the essence of art, narrowly escaping demotion to mere illustrations.
It is, of course, indispensable in socratic discussion that all participants be masters of the concept up for analysis, since the aim is to match a real defining expression to a term in active use, and the test for adequacy presumably consists in showing that the former analyzes and applies to all and only those things of which the latter is true. The popular disclaimer notwithstanding, then, Socratesâ auditors purportedly knew what art was as well as what they liked; and a theory of art, regarded here as a real definition of âArtâ, is accordingly not to be of great use in helping men to recognize instances of its application. Their antecedent ability to do this is precisely what the adequacy of the theory is to be tested against, the problem being only to make explicit what they already know. It is our use of the term that the theory allegedly means to capture, but we are supposed able, in the words of a recent writer, âto separate those objects which are works of art from those which are not, because ⊠we know how correctly to use the word âartâ and to apply the phrase âwork of artâ.â Theories, on this account, are somewhat like mirrorâimages on Socratesâ account, showing forth what we already know, wordy reflections of the actual linguistic practice we are masters in.
But telling artworks from other things is not so simple a matter, even for native speakers, and these days one might not be aware he was on artistic terrain without an artistic theory to tell him so. And part of the reason for this lies in the fact that terrain is constituted artistic in virtue of artistic theories, so that one use of theories, in addition to helping us discriminate art from the rest, consists in making art possible. Glaucon and the others could hardly have known what was art and what not: otherwise they would never have been taken in by mirrorâimages.
I
Suppose one thinks of the discovery of a whole new class of artworks as something analogous to the discovery of a whole new class of facts anywhere, viz., as something for theoreticians to explain. In science, as elsewhere, we often accommodate new facts to old theories via auxiliary hypotheses, a pardonable enough conservatism when the theory in question is deemed too valuable to be jettisoned all at once. Now the Imitation Theory of Art (IT) is, if one but thinks it through, an exceedingly powerful theory, explaining a great many phenomena connected with the causation and evaluation of artworks, bringing a surprising unity into a complex domain. Moreover, it is a simple matter to shore it up against many purported counterinstances by such auxiliary hypotheses as that the artist who deviates from mimeticity is perverse, inept, or mad. Ineptitude, chicanery, or folly are, in fact, testable predications. Suppose, then, tests reveal that these hypotheses fail to hold, that the theory, now beyond repair, must be replaced. And a new theory is worked out, capturing what it can of the old theoryâs competence, together with the heretofore recalcitrant facts. One might, thinking along these lines, represent certain episodes in the history of art as not dissimilar to certain episodes in the history of science, where a conceptual revolution is being effected and where refusal to countenance certain facts, while in part due to prejudice, inertia, and selfâinterest, is due also to the fact that a wellâestablished, or at least widely credited theory is being threatened in such a way that all coherence goes.
Some such episode transpired with the advent of postâimpressionist paintings. In terms of the prevailing artistic theory (IT), it was impossible to accept these as art unless inept art: otherwise they could be discounted as hoaxes, selfâadvertisements, or the visual counterparts of madmenâs ravings. So to get them accepted as art, on a footing with the Transfiguration (not to speak of a Landseer stag), required not so much a revolution in taste as a theoretical revision of rather considerable proportions, involving not only the artistic enfranchisement of these objects, but an emphasis upon newly significant features of accepted artworks, so that quite different accounts of their status as artworks would now have to be given. As a result of the new theoryâs acceptance, not only were postâimpressionist paintings taken up as art, but numbers of objects (masks, weapons, etc.) were transferred from anthropological museums (and heterogeneous other places) to musĂ©es des beaux arts, though, as we would expect from the fact that a criterion for the acceptance of a new theory is that it account for whatever the older one did, nothing had to be transferred out of the musĂ©es des beaux arts â even if there were internal rearrangements as between storage rooms and exhibition space. Countless native speakers hung upon suburban mantelpieces innumerable replicas of paradigm cases for teaching the expression âwork of artâ that would have sent their Edwardian forebears into linguistic apoplexy.
To be sure, I distort by speaking of a theory: historically, there were several, all, interestingly enough, more or less defined in terms of the IT. Artâhistorical complexities must yield before the exigencies of logical exposition, and I shall speak as though there were one replacing theory, partially compensating for historical falsity by choosing one which was actually enunciated. According to it, the artists in question were to be understood not as unsuccessfully imitating real forms but as successfully creating new ones, quite as real as the forms which the older art had been thought, in its best examples, to be creditably imitating. Art, after all, had long since been thought of as creative (Vasari says that God was the first artist), and the postâimpressionists were to be explained as genuinely creative, aiming, in Roger Fryâs words, ânot at illusion but reality.â This theory (RT) furnished a whole new mode of looking at painting, old and new. Indeed, one might almost interpret the crude drawing in Van Gogh and CĂ©zanne, the dislocation of form from contour in Rouault and Dufy, the arbitrary use of color planes in Gauguin and the Fauves, as so many ways of drawing attention to the fact that these were nonâimitations, specifically intended not to deceive. Logically, this would be roughly like printing âNot Legal Tenderâ across a brilliantly counterfeited dollar bill, the resulting object (counterfeit cum inscription) rendered incapable of deceiving anyone. It is not an illusory dollar bill, but then, just because it is nonâillusory it does not automatically become a real dollar bill either. It rather occupies a freshly opened area between real objects and real facsimiles of real objects: it is a nonâfacsimile, if one requires a word, and a new contribution to the world. Thus, Van Goghâs Potato Eaters, as a consequence of certain unmistakable distortions, turns out to be a nonâfacsimile of realâlife potato eaters; and inasmuch as these are not facsimiles of potato eaters, Van Goghâs picture, as a nonâimitation, had as much right to be called a real object as did its putative subjects. By means of this theory (RT), artworks reâentered the thick of things from which socratic theory (IT) had sought to evict them: if no more real than what carpenters wrought, they were at least no less real. The PostâImpressionist won a victory in ontology.
It is in terms of RT that we must understand the artworks around us today. Thus Roy Lichtenstein paints comicâstrip panels, though ten or twelve feet high. These are reasonably faithful projections onto a gigantesque scale of the homely frames from the daily tabloid, but it is precisely the scale that counts. A skilled engraver might incise The Virgin and the Chancellor Rollin on a pinhead, and it would be recognizable as such to the keen of sight, but an engraving of a Barnett Newman on a similar scale would be a blob, disappearing in the reduction. A photograph of a Lichtenstein is indiscernible from a photograph of a counterpart panel from Steve Canyon; but the photograph fails to capture the scale, and hence is as inaccurate a reproduction as a blackâandâwhite engraving of Botticelli, scale being essential here as color there. Lichtensteins, then, are not imitations but new entities, as giant whelks would be. Jasper Johns, by contrast, paints objects with respect to which questions of scale are irrelevant. Yet his objects cannot be imitations, for they have the remarkable property that any intended copy of a member of this class of objects is automatically a member of the class itself, so that these objects are logically inimitable. Thus, a copy of a numeral just is that numeral: a painting of 3 is a 3 made of paint. Johns, in addition, paints targets, flags, and maps. Finally, in what I hope are not unwitting footnotes to Plato, two of our pioneers â Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg â have made genuine beds.
Rauschenbergâs bed hangs on a wall, and is streaked with some desultory housepaint. Oldenburgâs bed is a rhomboid, narrower at one end than the other, with what one might speak of as a builtâin perspective: ideal for small bedrooms. As beds, these sell at singularly inflated prices, but one could sleep in either of them: Rauschenberg has expressed the fear that someone might just climb into his bed and fall asleep. Imagine, now, a certain Testadura â a plain speaker and noted philistine â who is not aware that these are art, and who takes them to be reality simple and pure. He attributes the paintstreaks on Rauschenbergâs bed to the slovenliness of the owner, and...