Picasso wrote of African masks that they weren't art until they were taken to > Paris and shown there.
I wrote: "I continue to maintain it is a fundamental error, however romantic and self-aggrandizing for all of us, to maintain that "art" (artness, work of art) has a mind-independent ontic status." William wrote: "Picasso was right, of course. ...I think when a person declares such and such to be an artwork, they are claiming precisely what you say and are extending their subjectivity like a cloak to surround and cover something with that projected, pretended, imagined ontic status. And of course you can disagree all day long with Duchamp and Picasso but their words are beyond being parsed. You can't say, "Ah, Mr.Picasso and Mr. Duchamp, I think you are making a linguistic error about the ontic status of words". I wouldn't say that to Picasso because, although Picasso was undoubtedly also confused about the ontic status of so-called "words", my remark was challenging the ontic status of alleged works of art. Suppose Picasso seriously said, "My model Maria is a living saint, Duchamp's urinal is a miracle, Cheerskep's attitude is a sin, and his soul is in jeopardy." I myself would say that, though Picasso may harbor notions of "saintness", "miracles", "sins", and "souls", they are not -- to express it in "kitchen" terms -- "things that are real". I think he would he get the gist of my "message" if I added, "They are 'unreal' in the sense that unicorns, "about" which we can have lots of notions, are unreal." I myself don't feel for a minute that Picasso's "words are beyond being" challenged. Similarly, though Picasso might harbor a notion of "artness", and might po int at a painting and say, "That is a work of art!", the "artness" is no more real than "saintliness", "miracleness", or "sinness". To call it "art" or "a miracle!" is merely an honorific. (I ignore here the protests of those who would "define" a given work in terms of such things as the creator's intent. "I define as 'art' the work of any painter bent on creating work for the 'aesthetic contemplation' of others,"etc. Stipulative definitions like that are solely mental concoctions. All alleged qualities, categories, sets are mental figments, the mental product of a classifying mind. Even "the set of all tigers" is no more a mind-independent entity than is "the set of all unicorns".
