17 hrs ago·edited 17 hrs agoLiked by Silas Abrahamsen
I personally take this perhaps naive view: art is communication through aesthetics (or beauty, if you want). If an object is used for this purpose, then it is being used for art. So it is art. Do you see any obvious problems with it? Of course, that leaves some objects of beauty as not classified as art, which is perfectly fine with me. Beauty is what I seek in the end.
That is an interesting suggestion, and I think it is actually in many ways close to the definition I propose, in that it emphasizes art as a relation between the artist and the observer, only mediated through the aesthetic object, but not depending on any specific features of the object, if you will. I guess my biggest sort of qualm with this kind of view is that it maybe demands too much of the intentions of the artist. For example I tend to think that artworks do not have to have been intentionally created by the artist as artworks (as I also mention in the post). I also think this makes it hard to make sense of features of artworks that are not intentionally included by the artist (like my example with a painting on a piece of cardboard)--if the artist put no significance in the painting being on a piece of cardboard, or didn't intend some specific feature of the painting, it wouldn't seem to be part of the artwork proper on your definition. But it seems intuitively to me that we should include those sorts of unintentional features.
I was about to raise literally the exact same counterexample you considered: the intuition that the Mona Lisa remains art when the Louvre is closed (funny how that happens sometimes).
I much prefer your observer-neutral formulation. If you’re worried about the soda-can case, we might say that upon being breadcrumb-framed, the can itself isn’t art, but the artwork is the can within a particular context. When the can is removed for that context, that particular artwork ceases to exist, even if the existence of the can continues.
I am certainly not completely opposed to taking an agent-neutral formulation, and I think the move you make with the soda can example is interesting. I guess it just seems to me that I can also make an artwork out of the soda can simpliciter, excluding its context, and it's just a choice on my part. So it still seems like I can drastically overpopulate the world with artworks by going around and focusing on objects in themselves in the right sort of way.
But again I think the choice really just comes down to whether you are more worried about making sure that something stays an artwork even when no one is thinking about it, or more worried about not making random objects permanently art. The amount of substantial disagreement here seems pretty minor--about as substantial as the disagreement over favorite flavors of ice cream.
Perhaps a useful metric would involve how the person partitions focus on the object O itself vs the agency A involved in producing the object. For example, if V is the "artistic value" a person ascribes to an artwork, where V = Op + Aq, then we might say that high V with a high q/p ratio means the artwork is "swanky ass high art", and low V with a low q/p ratio means the artwork is "cheap ass pop art". Also, A need not be "intelligent" agency. An atheist could rightfully consider a tree to be quality art if he thinks it is very beautiful while being particularly awestruck by the natural processes that produced it
I personally take this perhaps naive view: art is communication through aesthetics (or beauty, if you want). If an object is used for this purpose, then it is being used for art. So it is art. Do you see any obvious problems with it? Of course, that leaves some objects of beauty as not classified as art, which is perfectly fine with me. Beauty is what I seek in the end.
That is an interesting suggestion, and I think it is actually in many ways close to the definition I propose, in that it emphasizes art as a relation between the artist and the observer, only mediated through the aesthetic object, but not depending on any specific features of the object, if you will. I guess my biggest sort of qualm with this kind of view is that it maybe demands too much of the intentions of the artist. For example I tend to think that artworks do not have to have been intentionally created by the artist as artworks (as I also mention in the post). I also think this makes it hard to make sense of features of artworks that are not intentionally included by the artist (like my example with a painting on a piece of cardboard)--if the artist put no significance in the painting being on a piece of cardboard, or didn't intend some specific feature of the painting, it wouldn't seem to be part of the artwork proper on your definition. But it seems intuitively to me that we should include those sorts of unintentional features.
I was about to raise literally the exact same counterexample you considered: the intuition that the Mona Lisa remains art when the Louvre is closed (funny how that happens sometimes).
I much prefer your observer-neutral formulation. If you’re worried about the soda-can case, we might say that upon being breadcrumb-framed, the can itself isn’t art, but the artwork is the can within a particular context. When the can is removed for that context, that particular artwork ceases to exist, even if the existence of the can continues.
Haha, great minds think alike (or so I've heard).
I am certainly not completely opposed to taking an agent-neutral formulation, and I think the move you make with the soda can example is interesting. I guess it just seems to me that I can also make an artwork out of the soda can simpliciter, excluding its context, and it's just a choice on my part. So it still seems like I can drastically overpopulate the world with artworks by going around and focusing on objects in themselves in the right sort of way.
But again I think the choice really just comes down to whether you are more worried about making sure that something stays an artwork even when no one is thinking about it, or more worried about not making random objects permanently art. The amount of substantial disagreement here seems pretty minor--about as substantial as the disagreement over favorite flavors of ice cream.
Perhaps a useful metric would involve how the person partitions focus on the object O itself vs the agency A involved in producing the object. For example, if V is the "artistic value" a person ascribes to an artwork, where V = Op + Aq, then we might say that high V with a high q/p ratio means the artwork is "swanky ass high art", and low V with a low q/p ratio means the artwork is "cheap ass pop art". Also, A need not be "intelligent" agency. An atheist could rightfully consider a tree to be quality art if he thinks it is very beautiful while being particularly awestruck by the natural processes that produced it