Comparing Apples to Lightbulbs

This post is about categorisation errors, and about how confusing such fallacies are when applied without thought. Let’s start with a simplified example.

mathematician: Understand Math?
Other guy: Absolutely!
mathematician: What’s 2 x 2
Other guy: 6
mathematician: Um, isn’t that 4?
Other guy: Well, my belief system is different…

The mathematician is obviously refering to simple arithmetic. The other guy however is somewhere else. Not only did he get the sum wrong, he’s gone ahead and botched up the category itself. It’s like comparing apples to lightbulbs. Confounding and frustrating. What does one do when someone’s personal ‘take’ is the rejoinder to simple documented fact?

You probably recognise encounters like this in everyday life. What’s particularly frustrating about such discussions is that inarticulate and ambigious feelings are presented in the face of logic or fact. The evolutionist VS Intelligent design debates are similar as well, and anyone who’s watched the Dawkins VS Lennox session knows how frustrating categorisation errors are.

Art and Illustration

This post is about an anecdote that I heard from an artist friend. The artist recently organised an exhibition of her work and visited a well known art curator for feedback. The curator apparently told her that she should quit ART and take up Illustration.

Spotted the categorisation error yet? No?

Art relates to a specific artefact, one that goes beyond the regular confines of it’s utility and is defined by meaning instead. It is inseperable from the artist and often acts as a surrogate or a totem of it’s creator. One cannot choose to create ART because the artist can never claim that it is so. Theodor Adorno puts it nicely when he says “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident.”

While classificatory disputes on art are as old as the history of art itself, what the curator is surreptitiously referring to is George Dickie’s Institutional theory of art. Dickie defines it as that “which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting in behalf of a certain social institution” in this case, the so called art-world.

The art-world is a sort of group of insiders comprising of people such as critics, art historians, curators, institutions, collectors and art investors. According to Dickie, this alone actually confers the status of Art to an artefact.

While Dickie may have contributed his definition in an effort to bell the cat, he himself got his cue from Arthur Danto who was more straightforward and more importantly, honest! “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.”

The curator is implying two different things here…
1. That he belongs to the artworld, and as such posseses Danto’s something that the eye cannot descry.
2. That paintings may contain a universal – an art’ness if you will. Something that makes an artefact art by it’s very existence.

The Art’ness in Art

It is almost as if the curator is using Platonic forms to suggest the non-artness of the work. In Pluto’s words, “We must then possess knowledge of the Equal before that time when we first saw the equal objects and realized that all these objects strive to be like the Equal but are deficient in this.”  As though there were an ‘art’ness to art, and that some work possessed that ‘art’ness, while others didn’t. It is note worthy that his own role though in art-stamping is brandished but never itself posited as the reason behind a work not being up to some lofty standard of art. Rather, the curator implies that the work does not carry a pre-determined art’ness to it.

Quite surprisingly this view is widely held and never questioned, as though it were an answer in itself. Statements like, “But, is it art?”, “Does it have it?” reflect the sense that some gifted individuals do posses this mysterious ability to sniff out the inherent art’ness in a painting. If it ‘has it’, that is. This confusion is apparent within the artworld as artists attempt gimmicks, lofty and profound monikers, witticisms and other idiocy, trying to isolate this mysterious quality (art’ness) that will transform their work to art.

We also run into the intention problem here. The classic other minds problem. The curator has no way of peeking into the artist’s mind to see the process that resulted in the work of art, and ergo assumes that it is literally what it depicts, or worse anchors the work within his own framework.

So, is it art then?

So, art (unfortunately) is mysterious accordance by the art-world while illustration is an activity that results in made to order work. The exhibition itself is clearly a sign that the work displayed is not illustration. (This is denoted by the context, remember, not by the work itself.) The other clue to why this is not illustration is the fact that the artist herself belongs to Danto’s artworld by virtue of her chosen role,her intention. – Fine Art.

Confusing an artist with an illustrator (some illustrators are artists, but artists are not illustrators) is hardly becoming of an insider such as the curator and his comment is made worse by the implication that my artist friend is an outsider. (to the artworld!) I’m happy if this was merely an error, because knowledge can always be augmented. On the other hand, if this was simply an attempt at condescension, then I recommend  what Manet told Cezzane he did to a wag – a saber through the shoulder.

Popularity: 32% [?]