What is Art?

University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education, Undergraduate Philosophy Certificate, Assignment 11

Peter B. Lloyd

The definition is inexact: consider, for instance, how one differentiates art from decoration. The latter is intended to be in the background, and not seen for its own sake. You hang a painting on a wall that is covered by wallpaper: the painting is art, the wallpaper is decoration. What if the wall is covered with a mural? There is a continuum of murals, from unambiguously decorative abstracts to great works of art that happen to have been painted on a wall. Likewise, a 'craftsman' performs a highly skilled job in making functional or decorative things but does not create art.

'Artefacts' may have received vanishingly little human intervention: an artist may put a piece of driftwood on a pedestal and label it "Untitled, 1996". No artefact is completely created by the artist: when a sculptor creates her sculpture, she works with already existing material. Every artefact consists of pre-existing matter plus the effects of manipulation. Placing a piece of a driftwood on a stand in a gallery and labelling it counts, from a philosophical point of view, as sufficient manipulation. This definition excludes objects still in their natural environment. Placing the label "Untitled, 1996" by the same piece of driftwood on the beach would not create a work of art. Again, there is a grey area where it is undefined whether an intervention is enough to create an artefact.

Artefacts that are works of art may also be useful. Religious art in the middle ages conveyed doctrinal messages; and advertising art conveys commercial messages. If an object is created partly for its own qualities and partly for some other purpose, we still say it is art whilst taking cognisance of its being useful.

The word "art" formerly had a narrower usage. Art used always to involve manual dexterity, a careful eye for building the work up from its components, and often involved trying to communicate emotions or numinous notions through the work of art. Its usage has mutated since then. Partly this was because of the move from feudalism to an industrial free market. Artists could no longer rely on church and aristocratic patronage, and would not pander to the unreflective tastes of common folk, so they retreated into 'art for art's sake'. Creating works intended only for others within the art world, artists were free to stretch the definition of what counted as art. Duchamp's infamous urinal was a move in that direction. Dadaism, advertised as 'anti-art', in fact extended "art" to cover all artefacts created to be attended to in their own right - bringing the de facto definition of the term to the one given above.

The logic of this definition was always latent in the usage of the term. In the ancient Greek concept of 'techne' or excellence, we find the germ of the modern idea of art for art's sake. If a javelin thrower wanted to excel, he would attend carefully to the act of throwing, both training himself and improving the javelin's design. His mental focus would be on the act itself rather than on the aim of the act, which might have been to kill Spartans. In the past century of art history, this concentrated reflection on artistic acts has been taken to its limit and artists have become self-conscious about it.

1.2 What has beauty got to do with it?

2.1 Art as a language

Could one posit an unconscious language? - that the artist, when she is painting, unconsciously complies with a linguistic syntax? This cannot be true either. For, artists are often clear that they are deliberately building up their works to achieve some result, such as Constable's reminding us of what it's like to be in the countryside. It would be absurd to suppose that whenever an artist puts marks on the paper, following her own conscious plan, she happens also to follow an unconscious language.

2.2 Art as expression

2.3 Kant's concept of aesthetic sense

The possibility of such knowledge is easily disproved, following David Hume's argument, which Kant knew of. Suppose you had a belief, and you were considering whether it was synthetic a priori knowledge. To establish that it was knowledge, you would have to justify it. You could not prove it analytically, as it is synthetic; nor could you justify it from your observations of the world, as it is a priori. Nor could you justify it from any propositions that had been derived from analytic or empirical knowledge. What else is there? Only, perhaps, other synthetic a priori assertions. Well, if there are any other assertions that you take to be synthetic a priori knowledge, then trace them back to their antecedent premises. Those premises cannot be analytic (because they are synthetic), nor can they be empirical (because they are a priori), nor can they be derived from other synthetic a priori knowledge (because, by hypothesis, they are the basic premises). We have therefore exhausted all the possible sources of justification.

This argument obviates further consideration of Kant. For corroboration, however, note that what Kant claimed as synthetic a priori knowledge in physics has been found fallacious by scientific research. He said we knew a priori that space is Euclidean, but we now know it is not; and that all events must be caused, but we now know that some quantum mechanical events are not. Furthermore, his claim of objective moral values knowable a priori is demolished by the elementary consideration that any set of categorical imperatives begs the question of why we should accept the principle of obeying that set of categorical imperatives. Aesthetics may be another game, but Kant's track record does not inspire confidence.

Finally, in what Kant says about aesthetic judgements, he simply assumes - without any supporting argument - that aesthetic judgements are universal. Yet it is an everyday fact that aesthetic judgements are not universal. Highly erudite art critics differ radically in assessing works. Kant could claim that this is because large swathes of the art-critical community have defective aesthetic faculties, and cannot see artistic value when they see it. That can be dismissed on Popperian grounds of non-falsifiability: if there is no robust means of telling which works possess aesthetic value, then "aesthetic value" refers to nothing over and above whether a work is "agreeable".

Consider also Kant's basic argument for synthetic a priori knowledge. He says we possess some concepts (such as causation and aesthetic value) that cannot have been abstracted from our observations of the world, and they must therefore be 'synthetic and a priori'. This is untrue, and suggests that Kant used too limited a notion of what counts as abstraction. For example: the natural numbers 1,2,3,... can indisputably be abstracted from observations, but Kant would balk at saying the imaginary square root of 1 can too. Abstracting is, however, only a further step in the same process. Likewise, causation is a higher-order abstraction from the observed world. We need posit no mysterious faculty of transcendental cognition to account for our having the concept. And, likewise again, the concept of aesthetic value is an abstraction from agreeableness.

2.4 Virtual works of art

Unfortunately, I cannot believe it, for two reasons. First, and fundamentally, this is simply not how the phrase "work of art" is used in the English language. A work of art is something that actually exists. One could augment the language by adding a further meaning, and marking it (e.g. in capital initials) to signal that one is using the phrase peculiarly. It would be a mistake, though, to confuse that idiosyncratic usage with the normal one. In the word's normal meaning, art that has been thought up, but not yet made, simply does not exist. This is reflected in the law. If you commission a portrait, and the artist invoices you for £500 whilst saying she has only imagined the portrait in her head, you would have no obligation to pay.

John Hospers wrote that works of art were "commonly supposed" to be artefacts and not ideas in artists' minds. This is not the point, because the issue is not a matter of fact but of semantics: not what people suppose works of art to be, but what they use the phrase "work of art" to mean.

2.5 Art as a skill

2.6 Intuition and art

Let us leave aside the question of at what stage the 'work of art' attains expression. Does art have essentially to do with intuition? If 'intuition' is taken in the normal sense, then this claim is trivially true. An intuition is an unjustified conviction. (This is roughly what Ken Brownsey said in the class, and nobody put up any serious arguments against it.) As art is not rule-governed (unlike painting by numbers), an artist will not know precisely what do at each stage. She will not, for instance, know where to put the next pencil mark. Therefore, creating the work must be driven by intuition - that is, conviction without justification - rather than knowledge. Thus the Croce-Collingwood theory is right, but says little.

Of course, this is not what Croce and Collingwood thought they were saying. They thought an artist's intuitions were revelations of something universal- a "cosmic totality" as Croce enigmatically put it. This suffers the same fate as all claims of universally valid mystical experience: the content of the intuition is supposed to be inarticulable (for otherwise you could just write it down instead of needing to create a work of art about it), but therefore you cannot compare your own mystical experience with others'. The only robust view to take, therefore, is that an artist's intuitions reflect her own personal preferences.

Some people say they experience the artist's original intuition when they attend to a work of art. Marianne, for instance, says she feels what Edvard Munch felt when he painted The Scream. It is, however, impossible to tell whether one's feelings match the artist's, as the artist's experiences are private to her own mind. At best, you can get a rough hint of a match: if you feel joy when you see a painting, and you read that the artist was joyous when she painted it, then that is only a hint: you cannot thereby make a precise comparison. Furthermore, are the elements of the painting that generate a feeling in you those that the artist put down when she was having her intuition? Suppose, for example, that Munch had an intuition of terror when he painted the sky in The Scream, but was happy when he painted the screaming figure; and suppose that you find the screaming figure fills you with terror, but the sky is calming. This brings us back to the argument against regarding art as expression. Even if the artist were driven by a mystical intuition, she could not express it in a painting.

Whatever the ontological status of the intuition - whether it is a universal vision or a personal idea - Croce and Collingwood imply that expressing it is one-directional. They admit that an artist may get an intuition during the act of externalising, but they see the intuition as always coming from within the artist, and ultimately from the 'cosmic' source. In fact, when an artist is creating a work of art, she usually engages in trial and error: she puts down some marks on the paper (or whatever her medium is), then makes a judgement about them, and scrubs them out or keeps them and continues with the process. The artist's intuitions are largely triggered by the work in progress. This is a fact of artistic life that Croce and Collingwood ignore and which, once admitted, undermines their theory: for then works of art must be seen as an inextricable mixture of ideas that the artist brought to the process and ideas that were given to the artist as the work unfolded. In fact, the latter may be random, which was deliberately used by artists such as Max Ernst and William S. Burroughs.

Another strand in the Croce-Collingwood distinction of art from, say, craftsmanship, is the claim that artistic intuition cannot be taught, whereas the techniques for externalisation can. This is not true. Courses are commercially available that teach artistic intuition. They involve exercises to open up the irrational, unconscious part of the mind and allow its ideas to be manifest in artistic media. One example is called drawing on the left side of the brain. Another is Burroughs' cut-up method. And Salvador Dali's paranoiac-critical method is a general description of intermeshing intuition and technique in art.

2.7 Why bother with art?

One category of art does invite philosophical attention. Works for which religious experiences are claimed seem to point toward an ontologically different realm. I include not only works that are associated with religious movements - such as the churches admired by John Betjeman - but also secular works such as Mark Rothko's paintings. They seem to lead us toward an awareness of the numinous that can necessarily not be articulated or explicated theoretically. As Francis Bacon said, "If you could express the meaning of a painting in words, then there would be no point in painting it". Theorists, from Plato to Collingwood, have registered the spiritual value of some kinds of art, but have mistakenly thought it could be accounted for in a theory, and then concocted unworkable theories.

On the other hand, the ineffability of the numinous does not entail that, as Wittgenstein said, "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent". For it is possible to deal with it indirectly, namely using art itself: the proper response to art is not theorise about it but to respond to it with works of art that engage with and develop the intuitions found in it. The response need not be in the same medium: one could, for instance, write effusively and lyrically about a painting - as art critics do in the press. There is an analogy here with religion, where parables and metaphors lead people to apprehend the spiritual. One cannot use art to state things about art, but one can use it to show things about art.

Numinous experience, be it in art or religion, is not a special species of experience. Rather, it is with us always but we usually pass over it in everyday life. The point of religious art is that it helps us to focus on the ever-present numinous quality of life. This does not entail that anything is expressed or communicated from the artist's mind to your mind. It is just that minds are so similarly constructed that the same thing induce this awareness in different people. Moreover, this potency is not peculiar to art: anything from walking in the countryside to watching news footage of war can induce spiritual or numinal awareness. Nevertheless, some art is especially good at doing it.

© Peter B. Lloyd, 1996. File last modified 10th June 1999 (tutor's comment added).

Assignment mark: 70%

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