If uniqueness always attracts, does that make it an automatic work
of art?
mando
On Apr 27, 2009, at 10:34 PM, William Conger wrote:
I can't agree with Michael. His argument asserts that whatever an
artist consciously makes as art is art (without qualitative
ranking). That reduces art to intention in the sense that if the
artist intends to make art, the result of intention is art even if
it can't be ranked qualitatively until some consensus occurs or
recurs.
I think Michael's argument is wrong on at least two counts.
First, intentionality is not validated by its result anymore than
the means are justified by their ends. The artist's intention is
not sufficient to create art. Perhaps we could replace the word
intention with the word propose and say that the artist proposes
something as art. But this begs the issue too because whether or
not a proposal is made, or whether or not an intention is declared,
the result remains undefined. No one can make a work of art on
demand, even to oneself.
Second, by splitting the art work into two halves, as it were,
where one half is the art work made by the artist but unverified,
and the other half is not made by the audience but is verified,
the definition of art is merely shuttled back and forth leaving no
one responsible for the whole work of art since it seems logical to
require the whole work, not one half or the other half, to be
either verified or not verified. But if an artist declares the
intention to not make an artwork but goes ahead anyway, is the
result still a candidate for being validated as art by the audience
alone? I say yes because the presence or absence of intentionality
is irrelevant to art. I can also say no because the audience
cannot assume responsibility for the whole work of art without
claiming the role of artist. If that is the case, then similarly,
but in reverse, nothing precludes the artist from claiming the
role of audience.
The argument that because Michelangelo or Shakespeare fell out of
favor at one time or another (by whom?) does not mean that a work
by either artist was art, and then not art, and then art again for
the simple reason that the objects remained unchanged. At best it
means that the audience verification changed. But since the
artworks themselves did not change, one half of the art validity,
that which results from the artist's activity, as argued above, did
not change.
The only resolution to this paradox is to conflate artist and
audience so that the artist is both artist and audience and so too
is the audience both artist and audience. Both agents of
validation are necessary but it matters not at all whether the
artist in the studio claims both roles or the perceiver strolling
by claims both roles. And, of course, the artist and audience may
share the validating task fifty-fifty or in any ratio.
Because no settled way -- no precise division of responsibility, no
claim to responsibility -- exists to validate a an artwork as art
-- except to say that artist and audience are one and the same,
somehow, we are left with the happy problem to continually examine
the mystery of art and to hope that our keen attention to that
mystery will at least suffice to alert us to the experience of
authentic art as a continuing potential of a life worth living.
It's a Heidegger sort of thing.
WC
________________________________
From: Michael Brady <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2009 9:07:13 PM
Subject: Re: Heidegger and Singularity-string
On Apr 27, 2009, at 9:40 PM, Saul Ostrow wrote:
sometimes they come up with hash other times something that may be
called art
Isn't everything an artist comes up with--i.e., makes--art? Maybe
bad art, poorly made art, ill-fitted art, unmoving art, dull art,
but art nonetheless? (And to be clear, I'm not talking about making
a dessert or a dress or a shopping list. I'm talking about whatever
an artist consciously makes in the studio, or wherever he or she
makes those things that can or may be called "art.")
Often different writers on this list assert that "art" is a
qualitative achievement, that if a made thing is of sufficient
quality (defined somehow) then it can be called "art." And the
implication is that some things made in the same fashion as a 'work
of art' may lack attributes of quality in such degree that they
cannot or should not be called "art." Then they're hash or some
other species of made thing.
I think this is an error, a wrong way of looking at these made
things. It shifts the burden of proof, as the lawyers would say, to
the judge, not to the piece and the maker. Is it good enough?
Often, the unspoken criterion in this question is: for me? Not for
the artist, who, we assume, believes it is. But for the viewer who
projects his or her own scale of evaluation on it, with the result
that we get an on-going dispute, not only over whose work exceeds
others, and whose lasts the test of time, and whose old paintings
are deficient and piecemeal, but over whether a work "can be called
'art'" because fashion has abandoned it. (Remember, Shakespeare and
Michelangelo fell out of favor for long periods of time.)
I return to my basic thesis about art: it is made in a way that is
entirely independent of contingent requirements. It doesn't have to
appear a certain way, to construct its correspondences to life or
the stuff "out there" in any way that can be assayed and proven by
epistemic truth tests. Some of these things succeed admirably well,
most are middling, and a good proportion of them are mediocre or
worse. But they are all art, from the clumsy seascapes in the
shopping mall displays to an apse mosaic in St. Apollinaire in
Classe, from a woman with a green nose to a Kiefer.
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
