1
Defining Art
Chapter Outline
I. Fountain (1917)
III. Art as representation
IV. Art as form
VI. Art and aesthetic function
VII. On not defining art
VIII. Art and the artworld
I. Fountain (1917)
In 1917, the newly formed Society of Independent Artists held its first annual exhibition in New York City. Founded only the year before as an association for avant-garde artists, the Society opened its exhibition to any artist able to pay the six-dollar fee. Among the Societyâs founders and exhibitionâs directors was French artist, Marcel Duchamp, only recently arrived from Paris, and perhaps best known at the time for his controversial painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912).
With the exhibition only days away, Duchamp had yet to create a work for the show. But while at lunch with friends, he hit upon an idea. Travelling across town to J. L. Mott Iron Works (a specialist in plumbing fixtures), Duchamp purchased his urinal, and returned to his studio. Duchampâs first New York studio was a curious place: chessboards leaned against one wall; near another, a bicycle wheel had been secured upright to a wooden stool.
Overhead hung a snow shovel, and to the floor was nailed an ordinary coat rack. Duchampâs newest purchase was not out of place in the studio.
Duchamp turned the urinal on its back, painted âR. Mutt 1917â on its rim, and submitted it as âFountainâ to the exhibition under the name of Richard Mutt. The Societyâs board was at a loss. Was Fountain art? If so, was it indecent? Although the exhibition had been advertised as having no selection committee, effectively accepting any submission, they hadnât predicted Fountain. After some debate, the board narrowly voted to remove Fountain from view, either hiding it from view behind a screen, or physically removing it from the show (reports vary).
Duchamp resigned from the Society, and the next month released the second issue of his self-published magazine, The Blind Man, with several pages devoted to Fountain and âThe Richard Mutt Caseâ. Although not Duchampâs first âready-madeâ artworkâthe snow-shovel hanging from his studio ceiling was the first work he called a âready-madeââ Fountain is surely the best known, despite having been thrown out shortly after the exhibition (he has since made several reproductions). And although the piece could easily have been forgotten as something of a joke, thanks to the controversy surrounding the exhibition, Fountain would go on to become one of the best-known works of the twentieth century. Indeed, a 2004 survey of British art experts named it the most influential artwork in the history of modern art (Picassoâs first Cubist painting, Les Demoiselles dâAvignon (1907), took second place). But how could Fountain be art in the first place? Wasnât it just a menâs room appliance?
II. On definitions
The issue of defining art is central to the project of contemporary aesthetics. Whether or not Fountainâor anything elseâis art sounds like a simple question. After all, we know what art is, donât we?
Our contemporary concept of art is actually a rather modern notion. Although ancient Greece had no shortage of paintings, sculptures and great works of architecture, the Greeks did not have our concept of art. What they had was the term âtechnÄâ, meaning skilful production. And while this did apply to sculptors, painters and architects, it also applied to carpenters, weavers and all manner of craftsmen. The Greeks simply had no word that distinguished what we call âartâ from what we would call âcraftâ. Our word âpoetryâ comes from the Greek word âpoiesisâ, meaning any sort of production, and our word âmusicâ comes from the Greek âmousikeâ, meaning any activity associated with the Musesâthe mythical spirits of inspirationâand applied generally to anyone who was educated. The Latin, âarsâ, the direct source of our current âartâ, similarly referred to skill generally, and when the term âartistâ first came into use in the Middle Ages, it did not distinguish between skilled sculptors and skilled textile-makers. It was not until the eighteenth century that the concept of âfine artâ comes into play, collecting together the Arts with a capital âAâ and distinguishing them from other areas of skill.
Distinguishing the arts from other activities and products determines what it is we are looking to define, but it does not provide us with a definition. What is called a ârealâ definition is meant to serve as an analytic tool for classifying and organizing our world. Ideally, a definition tells us how we do apply our concepts, and how we should do so in any case in the future. Leonardo da Vinciâs Mona Lisa is an artwork, and Michelangeloâs David is an artwork. The Society of Independent Artists had no problem here, but when it came to classifying Fountain, they were at a loss. Duchampâs work challenged their notions of art, and so the problem fell to the philosophers. Ideally, a definition should supply a set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for classification. We might, for instance, define a âbachelorâ as an unmarried male of marriageable status. That a person is unmarried, that he is male and that he is of marriageable status are each necessary for his being a bachelor. Your sister might be unmarried and of marriageable status, but she is not a bachelor. Your 6-year-old nephew may be male and unmarried, but in our culture he is not of marriageable status, so he isnât a bachelor either. Unless all of our conditions are met, our contender does not qualify, and so they are each necessary. But as soon as all of our conditions are met, the contender does qualify, and so they are jointly sufficient. The first challenge for any definition is for our set of conditions to match how we already use the concept at handâhow we divide up our world. Developing definitions can involve some bullet-biting, but the bullets shouldnât be overly large. If our definition of âbachelorâ includes or excludes Catholic priests, we may have to slightly reconfigure how we conceptualize our world, but if it includes my married father, we will have a serious problem. Likewise, if our definition of âartâ includes all the products and activities of ordinary plumbers, or excludes the Mona Lisa, we will still have some work to do. Ideally, a definition of art should be such that it encompasses not only all of those things we call artâpainting, sculpture, literature, music, film, dance and so onâbut also any new forms of art that might develop in the future.
III. Art as representation
As the ancient Greeks did not have our concept of âartâ, and as their way of organizing their activities and products diverged so much from ours, they certainly had no definition of art. However, as they studied what we would call the arts, they observed that many of them seemed essentially imitative: the painter imitated nature, the sculptor imitated the human form and the poet imitated manâs speech and actions. Plato condemned the arts for their imitation, and Aristotle praised them for the same, but lacking a general concept of art, neither set out imitation as a defining principle. It was not until the notion of âfine artâ developed in the eighteenth century that philosophers attempted to describe imitation or representation as an essential or necessary feature of art, and made the first moves towards a definition.
Although Immanuel Kant spends very little time on the notion of art, he makes perhaps the first attempt at defining it.1 Unlike natural objects, Kant notes, works of art are artefactsâproducts of human intention and creation. And unlike scientific ones, artistic activities do not simply depend upon learned knowledge. As such, Kant distinguishes between art and technology. Kant puts fine art along with what he calls âagreeable artâ into the category of âaesthetic artââ representational art designed towards evoking a feeling of pleasure. Where agreeable art gives rise only to immediate pleasure, the pleasure of fine art comes from the âreflective power of judgementâ. Today, we might make this sort of distinction between fine art and merely entertaining art. In the end, for Kant, fine art âis a way of presenting that is purposive on its own and that furthers [. . .] the culture of our mental powers to [facilitate] social communicationâ.2 As such, while Kant does not formulate an explicit set of necessary and sufficient conditions, his view of art is that it is essentially representational, and that it has no function except to bring about reflective pleasure and to advance communication. So described, art is set apart from nature and from all manner of other human products and activities.
The view of art as essentially imitative or representational is perhaps not surprising given that up to the eighteenth century, with the possible exception of instrumental music, most art was centrally representational in nature (and arguments have been made that instrumental music imitates the form of the human voice, emotion or movement). However, as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, a new technology would have an enormous effect on the arts. In the 1820s and â30s, a number of inventors worked to develop camera photography, in particular Louis Daguerre, creator of the daguerreotype photographic process. Where a painted portrait would take days, weeks or months to complete, an early daguerreotype could be completed in minutes. Advances in technology quickly reduced this time to seconds. Painting was also prohibitively expensive compared with photography, which could be afforded by the working class. With the swift advances in technology, its sweeping popularization and its ability to perfectly capture minute details, photographyâs effect on the business of portrait painting was immediate. Landscape painting felt similar pressures. As a result, painters began to explore the other possibilities of their art.3
Where artâs representational elements once largely served to distinguish it from other human activities and products, the popularization of photography inspired artists to pursue new directions. French painter Claude Monet turned the tables on photography by insisting that a painting is, after all, ultimately a canvas covered in pigments, and that we should not be trying to look through it, but at it.4 Monet helped to found Impressionism, a painting style characterized by its visible brush strokes, its emphasis on light and its attempts to portray movement. Following the Impressionists in the late nineteenth century were the Post-Impressionists, a loose collection of painters variously inspired by the Impressionists.5 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec alternatively produced textured paintings and lithograph posters consisting of outlined, flatly coloured figures. Georges Seurat introduced the technique of Pointillism, replacing brushstrokes with countless dots of colour. And perhaps the most celebrated of the Post-Impressionists, Paul CĂ©zanne, worked (as one art historian has put it) to transform paint into âa visible structureâ.6 In an effort both to capture the new directions in art as a result of photography, and in part to keep photography itselfâseen largely as a technological and not artistic endeavourâfrom falling into the category of fine art, philosophers began to pursue the project of defining art with new vigour.7
IV. Art as form
Although it is perhaps difficult to imagine today, the work of the Post-Impressionists brought about a split among critics as well as the public at large. While one side praised the innovation of the new movements in art, the other flatly refused to recognize what they saw as art. Particularly enamoured of CĂ©zanne and the Post-Impressionists was Clive Bell, who produced the most well-known formalist theory of art.8 Bell argues in his 1913 book, simply titled Art, that CĂ©zanne and the Post-Impressionists represented a return to the âfirst-principlesâ of art. Although, like most of the painters that had come before them, the Post-Impressionists produced portraits, landscapes and still-life paintings, what set them apart was a focus on the painting as an image, rather than as a representation per se. As a result, Bell says, CĂ©zanne and his contemporaries were able to create works that gave rise to a certain peculiar feeling in their viewers. Bell called this feeling the âaesthetic emotionâ. It is not the artwork-as-representation that provokes the aesthetic emotion, Bell argues, but rather the lines and colours that make up the artwork itself. Essentially, Bell contends, art is a matter of form, not of content. However, simply stipulating that art is form would not do as a definition. First, every visible thing has form: a blender has form, a goldfish has form, your hand has form. These are not art. Second, not every form gives rise to that peculiar feeling that Bell calls aesthetic emotion. Rather, Bell contends, what gives rise to the aesthetic emotionâand what sets art apart from other thingsâis âsignificant formâ. So art is something with significant form, and significant form is that which brings about the aesthetic emotion.
Bell is clear that he is only discussing painting, the art form with which he is most familiar. It is not that he thinks there is nothing analogous to significant form, say, in musicâit is just that he is not particularly sensitive to musicâs forms. We might further look to extend Bellâs theory to something like significant form in dance, literature and other art forms. That a work has significant form is no guarantee, Bell says, that you will be sensitive to it, and if you are not sufficiently sensitive, it will not provoke in you the aesthetic emotion. However, a good critic might be able to guide you to seeing significant form you had previously overlooked. When you are made aware of the significant form, says Bell, you will receive the aesthetic emotion, and so recognize it as a work of art. It is the artistâs job to combine forms so that they will move us, and insofar as he succeeds, he has made art. Representation, Bell suggests, is at ...