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. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [email protected]
