Frances to Derek and Boris and others... In regard to the eventual yet tentative determination of art, the overall term might better be "collective community of normal experts" although in some venues the agreed opinion of any relevant "learned group of normal experts" might be appropriate. The group may simply be the buddies of a sick person who is suffering a mental disturbance and afflicted with imaginary fantasies or deluded illusions that are real enough but that he wrongly considers as factual and actual and concrete. It then falls to his group of normal friends to correct him, by assuring him of his hallucinatory errors. This is why the individual person alone is unreliable to confer the status of art on an object or to determine the very being of art at all. Within the realm of art, its normal determining experts might include a group made up of artists, artisans, aesthetes, aestheticians, reviewers, historians, teachers, collectors, curators, restorers, archivists, authors, and so on. This process of communal determination furthermore seems to be prevalent in science, and it has therefore likely been originally prepared as such for science by art itself.
Derek partly wrote... Frances is not talking about artists. She is talking about some group of wise persons somewhere who decide what art is. She occasionally refers to these mysterious learned persons but will never say who they are. Not even what continent they live on.
