Frances to Michael... The consensus here suggests that a discovered or presented object given to sense must be first known as aesthetic and as artistic, so that the status of artwork and artifact is conferred upon or assigned to the object. This suggests that the status of art is arbitrarily invented and then deliberately imposed on any object that a person or group wishes. The typical class of art and its members thus becomes nothing more than a subjective social construct. This approach implies that humans have no inborn tendency to get and take objects as artworks. This conclusion is troublesome for me, because it may be wrong.
Let us take for example a simple object made as a simple drawing that is nonetheless aesthetic and artistic by our arbitrary standard above. Two main issues seem to surface here in this example if such a drawing is placed on display to view by persons not aware of our standard, which consequences may impact negatively on our standard. First, the viewer will see the object, but whether they see it as a drawing is the actual issue here; and if they do see the object as a drawing, will it be instantly by way of some instinct and intuition or by way of some prior sentience and experience. Second, the viewer will then see the drawing, but whether they see it as the carrier of an image, or of some other object and content or other subject and meaning, is the further issue here. If normal mature humans have an innate natural tendency towards receiving an object already posited for view as a drawing to indeed be a drawing, then no nurtured or learned knowledge would be required of them previously to get the fact. It would seem by some anthropic accounts that when primitive peoples are exposed to drawings for the first time that they have no problem identifying the objects as drawings and in turn to be drawings of some other referred object as its content. It is likely that the human brain is wired to handle signs like icons as drawings at will. It is likely that disposed instinct and inclined intuition are "given" factors here, with any naive person sensing the object as being in some way extraordinary and different from the ordinary objects found in nature, but it is also likely that some paradigm belief and collateral experience embedded in mind will also likely be required of that person for them to sense the object further as a drawing, and even more so to know that the drawing is a picture that depicts some other object. It may be that the embedded belief and experience may actually have as their mental source an engrained feeling for icons, perhaps like a mimetic gene in the brain. The sense of an object as a drawing and as a drawing of an object is clearly an act that only humans are capable of, and because they can do it instantly then it must be by ways other than rational knowledge. Michael partly wrote... Cheerskep claims that nothing meaningful inheres in the words or pictures, that meaning is entirely contributed by the mind. William says that the randomness of the quantum field (as in, everything) is given perceptual order by our mental processes. Bishop Berkley asks whether a falling tree makes a sound if no one is their to hear it? You assert that nature is also a "highly organized human created structure." And, of course, we don't know about Shrodinger's cat and we cannot specify both the location and speed of the subatomic particle, because our perception alters or determines things. Derain said that before the painting is a nude or a warhorse, it is a canvas covered with daubs of paint. It appears that paintings are quantum fields, or living-dead cats, or soundless fellings until someone looks at them. But more than that, they are paintings when **I** look at them, because I still cannot be sure about what happens when you look at them, either.
