Frances to Chris and Boris and Michael and others... The issue of why it may be important to differentiate art from nonart is seemingly a worthy one to address, because ordinary objects given or driven or taken as works of art clearly do something that works of nonart fail to do or do as well. That class of objects or works called nonart might at least include art that is not lofty fine art like unart or antiart or applied art, but it would certainly include tech and science that is not art or at least not yet art. My tentative approach to addressing this issue of course would be philosophic and then realist and then pragmatist.
For a normal mature human to find or hold or deem or call an object an artwork as a member of that class known as art is to merely recognize a familiar quality, which may be similar at least to say a mere quality of feeling, that is embodied or embedded within the form of that object, and to merely be evoked by the "power" that this form has to reflect values and to evoke responses of an aesthetic kind. For any object to be art therefore entails the presence to sense of some information the artwork bears or yields as a sign, such as enforced formal qualities in forms with powers, as well as reflected referential values, and evoked instrumental effects. In other words, the syntactic form must have the force and power to result in semantic content and pragmatic effect to some degree. The human however must be normal and mature, because it is likely that some "neural paradigm" and "contextual relation" and "collateral experience" and on their part is perhaps required for this kind of signed situational event to occur. This simply admits that the signer is brought mainly into a relation with the "object" of sense, rather than mainly with the "sense" of the object, because it is after all the object as say art or nonart that is sensed. The object and the human are both necessary in a situation, otherwise without the human or any life the object cannot be felt or sensed or known. For this pragmatist theory to be validated, the basic key here is perhaps to accept the seeming qualities of art as the impetus, which qualia would be found as objective phenomenal constructs in much the same way that the legia or laws of science are found also to be such. The qualities of art therefore continue ideally to exist prior to art and aside from sense. The normal human brain is perhaps hardwired with neural genes to instinctively or intuitively deal with this kind of ideal qualitative phenomena. Phenomenal qualia and legia would be "ideal" to the extent that they are infinite perpetual continua, and they would be "real" to the extent that the objective property of continuity is given uncontrolled to sense as a fact of existence. If the stuff can be sensed, then it is a fact and is real. Only the psychical sciences through empirical research in due course will be able to confirm any of this theorizing about art. (Some further specific comments by me in my reply as "FK" are interleaved below.) Chris wrote... Outside the special world of contemporary art, the only instance where the "art/not art" distinction is important is when "art" means nothing more than "made by humans". ------ (FK: An object or work of art can surely be found or made in nature and its culture by normal humans, but not only made in culture. The wider term under which art would then fall is as a qualitative "aesthetic object" of nature or its culture.) ------ I remember when I first saw some "scholar's rocks" in a museum exhibition, and was puzzled that such a style of sculpture was practiced in historic China. But after reading the labels, I learned that they were natural objects, not sculpture. But otherwise, the distinction is irrelevant- especially in an era when art can be anything. Are art museums now beginning to present Norman Rockwell paintings as art instead of mere commercial illustration? Even as artifacts to be studied by future cultural historians, the information that can be taken from a Rockwell painting is unchanged, whether it ever appeared in an art museum or not. ------ (FK: Many objects of technical design like the useful crafts of applied or "commercial" art and many obscure documents or theories of ancient religions and obsolete science can attain the status of art or even fine art.) ------ As Boris put it, "When we hear melody or noise we don't need any idea to approach them the way they deserve" (regardless of the fame of John Cage's "4 minutes, 33 seconds") And it is only "unable wannabes and idiots- collectors advised by crooks" for whom "art does not exist until approached with the idea that this is art " ------ (FK: The status of art need not be known to preexist nor even preexist the sensing of an object as an artwork, as the fact of intelligent primitive peoples can well attest.) ------ Or school boys -- i.e. young people who quite properly defer to the judgment of their teachers regarding the value of things. Or participants in that lucrative social practice of advanced capitalism called the Contemporary Art World, where social and intellectual status is bought and sold in a cultural Ponzi scheme. ------ (FK: Even girls and women can be lawfully exchanged as a commodity for profit in many societies to this day, but that acceptance does not make the act good or right or just as one of marriage or humanness and humanity.) ------ >To "call something art" is to say that it is proper to make certain statements about the thing. Among them may --may-- be statements about some symbolic quality, or about higher or more noble sentiments. But those statements *derive* from the initial judgment that an object qualifies to be called art and thus qualifies to be described in certain ways. >I say that you cannot begin to describe something as "art" or to say things about it as "art" until you first determine whether it qualifies as "art"--even if just for the time being. And I am also saying that if you determine that it is more important to judge the denotational (epistemic) truth of the representation, then you are not viewing it as art but as something else; and conversely, if you determine it's more important to judge the work as a free creation, then you are viewing it as art. (Michael Brady) ------ (FK: The main obstacle in these kinds of discussions is the rift in supportive philosophic stands, especially that which continues between realism and antirealism. As long as rigid mental subjectivism, in say the form of psychologism or mysticism or notionalism or nominalism or rationalism, is adhered to by itself alone then little substantive progress can be made.) ------
