What’s wrong with asking “what is art?”

(I will be making a pdf of this available shortly)

What’s Wrong With Asking “What Is Art?”

Wittgenstein and a Liberated Aesthetic Experience

Christian Giliberto

Much of philosophy can be characterized as falling within the context of a few great debates, such as “what is knowledge?” and “what sorts of entities exist?” Some would say, however, that many of these debates, at least as conventionally approached, arise from a problematic intuition of philosophers; to attempt to answer any question posed. A question such as “what is knowledge?” arises, philosophers divide into camps, marshal arguments to their side, and whichever camp has the most arguments at the end of the day wins. This “ethic of reasonability” has informed philosophy for most of its history, and while it certainly serves its purpose as a sort of rule for the adversarial game that is most philosophy, it isn’t particularly rational. Rarely, in the interest of accurately tracking truth, do we carefully examine whether the question is meaningful; whether we’ve approached the issue the right way. After all, the ethic of reasonability would tell us that declining a challenge, in the form of a question from another intellectual gentleman, would be uncouth. This misguided attitude is responsible for many of the “hard problems” of philosophy, especially when it comes to problems of definition and demarcation.

The question “what is art?” central to aesthetics is one such false problem. Since Plato’s time, philosophers have been puzzling over what exactly separates art from non-art. They are looking for a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that qualifies something for membership in the class “art.” Reality is distinctly divisible into art and non-art. Philosophers have created a dizzying number of different theories of art in response to this question. Representationalists maintain that art is characterized by the fact that it represents something. It must be an imitiation. Expressivists think that art is fundamentally an expression of emotion. Formalists believe that form is central to art; that art involves the direct appreciation of pure aesthetic concepts. And so on. The same camps continue to bolster themselves with more sophisticated versions of their arguments, each with a peculiar air of finality, all seeming to say “and that’s what art is!” But they have done little to resolve, or even clarify, the issues where disputes over the definition of art actually arise. Some philosophers have at least made efforts in the right direction, away from some grandiose, reified notion of art. George Dickie, for example, with his Insitutional theory of art, provided the following definition:

“a work of art is an artefact which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by the artworld.” (Dickie 1974)

This sort of answer avoids falling into the trap of treating art as an essential metaphysical class. While this may not be what Dickie originally intended, his Institutional theory actually points the way to what I argue is the correct response to the question “what is art?” He defines art in a sociological and/or anthropological context. When social scientists talk about the art of a culture, this is what they mean. They aren’t interested in whether that thing is essentially art, merely if it is art for the purposes of their models and theories. When we ask of something “is it art?” we are usually trying to use that thing’s membership in the class “art” to make some further inference about that thing. For example, in debates over the censorhip of pornography, we have people on both sides arguing about whether or not pornography is art, as we supposedly shouldn’t censor art. Pornography’s membership (or lack thereof) in the class “art” is serving as an inference rule for answering an implict query; “ought we censor this?”

The temptation of this Aristotelian thinking was noted and analyzed by Wittgenstein with his notion of “Familienähnlichkeit” or “family resemblance.” (Wittgenstein 2001, original 1953) Aristotelian logic tells us that things in a common class – in this case, are “art” – have at least one essential feature in common. Wittgenstein denied this. Instead, classes are helpful approximations of sets of commonly overlapping similarities, with no one feature in common between everything “tagged” with a class label. Defending the concept of family resemblance is not the purpose of this paper, and Wittgenstein himself does a perfectly fine job in this capacity (Wittgenstein 2001, original 1953). It is also worth noting, before we move on to the applicability of this notion to aesthetics that unlike the classical Aristotelian theory of concepts, the “family resemblance” model has extensive empirical support in fields such as cognitive science (Rosch 1973, see also Lakoff 1987) and research into neural networks for the purpose of artificial intelligence (Yudkowsky 2008). Indeed, it is essential to the success of many of the models in these fields.

Let us return to our example of the censorship of pornography, now armed with the idea of family resemblance. As we saw earlier, when we obsess over whether or not pornography is art or not, we are really asking if we ought to censor it. We have, possibly through historical contigency (Wittgenstein 2001, original 1953, see also Sluga 2006), developed this notion of art as a conceptual cluster of several more specific characteristics, and in our political thinking, we use this fuzzy category as an inference rule. Our thought process goes:

1. We ought not censor art

2. Pornography is art

3. Therefore, we ought not censor pornography

Or

1. We ought not censor art

2. Pornography is not art

3. Therfore, we can justifiably censor pornography

But all we really want to know is if we ought not censor pornography, so why not merely ask that question? Of course, there is the issue of defining pornography, but this may indeed be a case of the same family resemblance phenomenon as art. Regardless, the point remains that if we can notice when we are employing family resemblance, we can dissolve questions in the form “is this essentially a member of some class?” To see how this works more broadly, take the poster on my wall. Our conventional aesthetician might ask “is this poster art?” But absent any implicit query (such as “ought this be censored?”), what exactly would it mean for my poster to be art or not art? I expect no empirical difference between a world where the poster is art and where it isn’t. Whether or not the aethestician dubs it “art,” I still anticipate the same experience. I still expect to see the same image, to be the subject of the same aesthetic experience. One might argue that my enjoyment of my poster is affected by whether it was art or not, but this misses a subtle distinction, for taking pleasure in the fact that an aesthetician has declared it art is not the same as taking pleasure in the item being art. Indeed, any difference in anticipated experience from dubbing something art stems from facts about the agent involved (their reaction to the use of a certain label) and not facts about the thing itself. A world where my poster “is” art is, ceteris paribus, indistinguishable from one where it is not. The notion of whether something is really art is not connected to the real world, but is merely a scar left by an Aristotelian perspective.

Morris Weitz’s de-definition movement in aesthetics is probably the best historical example of the application of family resemblance to aesthetics (Weitz 1956), however, it does not go as far as I wish in its positive project. Weitz recommends, correctly I believe, that we investigate what sort of concept “art” is. This is rightfully the task of cognitive scientists, and that field has produced answers in the forms of prototype theory, cognitive semantics, neural network theory, and the like. (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, see also Lakoff 1987 and Rorsch 1973). But perhaps it is best that we do away with the notion of art altogether to instead focus more broadly on aesthetic experience. This does not mean that cultural artifacts traditionally conceived as works of art should stop being made, but rather change how we see them. When we rigidly divide the world into art and non-art, we do ourselves a disservice by compartmentalizing aesthetic experience in a set of very narrowly defined cultural items, rather than appreciating the aesthetic elements of our whole life experience. By discarding with the category “art,” we can bear witness to the ubiquity of aesthetic experience, from the designs of clothes, to the color of the sky, to the sound of birds. And when we create cultural artifacts, we should think of ourselves as bringing about a certain state of affairs in order to produce certain aesthetic experiences. The aesthetic should be a dimension of all of life, rather than confined to a set of things in the world.

References

• Dickie, G. 1974, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.

• Lakoff, G. 1987, Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind, London.

• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, Basic Books.

• Rosch, E. 1973: “Natural categories”, Cognitive Psychology 4, 328-350.

• Sluga, H. 2006: “Family Resemblance”, Grazer Philosophische Studien 71-14.

• Weitz, M. 1956: “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 15, 27–35.

• Wittgenstein, L. 1953/2001: Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell Publishing.

• Yudkowsky, E. 2008: Neural Categories, Less Wrong, http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/. (accessed December 2011)

Advertisement