I don’t remember when I first heard the sentence “Anything can be a work of art.” It must have been over thirty-five years ago, when I was first developing an open curiosity about contemporary art, particularly in its then-newly emergent genres of performance, video, and installation. One of the works that I saw repeatedly around 1980 at the Berkeley Art Museum was Robert Smithson’s ‘Mirror Displacements’, the exhibition of which I recall consisted of several distinct piles of sand or dirt, each supporting a small, rectangular, vertical mirror. Something of its supporting pile was reflected in each mirror. What does this work mean? At that time I knew nothing of Smithson’s thought, in particular his conception of a work of art as a ‘dialectic of site and non-site’, a conception that the work was meant to embody. But attaching the thought that anything can be a work of art to ‘Mirror Displacements’ seemed to begin the process of reflective understanding: well, if anything can be a work of art, then mirrors stuck in piles of dirt can be one. But since not all piles of dirt with mirrors are works of art, what further is required for this use of these materials to result in an artwork? How does one pass from ‘can’ to ‘is’?
There is I think a standard answer to this question, and one given in the second great axiom of contemporary art: “Something is a work of art if someone says it is a work of art.” In its most common iteration, the ‘someone’ is specified narrowly as an ‘artist’, or sometimes more broadly as a member of something called ‘the artworld’, which includes at least the studios, galleries, museums, and art history departments of the world. A moment’s reflection suggests that the first sentence expresses an implication of the axiomatic second sentence, since the range of things that someone can declare to be a work of art is unrestricted. The standard exempla of the second sentence are the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, or perhaps the work of Robert Rauschenberg declaring “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so,” although the Rauschenberg piece at least does not declare itself to be a work of art.
A striking feature of this cluster of intuitions, perceptions, and thoughts is that it centers on the question of status of individual artifacts. If there is any urgency motivating this cluster, it seems to be generated by anxiety about classification: one is confronted by some non-standard instance of a putative work of art, and one wants to know whether it really is an artwork. Why should that matter? Well, presumably because an artifact’s being (judged) a work of art is way of singling it out for special attention, and so inclusion within special places that foster attention to particular artifacts, which with regard to the visual arts in modern life means inclusion and exhibition in galleries and museums. A second striking feature of this cluster is that axioms within it are silent about what sort of special attention artworks merit, and what it means for such attention to be rewarded. As a start one might say very roughly that what rewards such attention is something like ‘artistic meaning’. If so, then the coarse structure of a theory of art would consist of two unconnected parts: a theory of art-status oriented towards answering the question ‘What makes an artifact a work of art?’; and a theory of artistic meaning oriented towards answering questions like “What sort of meanings are distinctive of artworks?” and “How do artworks acquire distinctively artistic kinds of meaning?” It’s not obvious how on this picture one could begin to develop a theory of artistic meaning; the conceptually prior theory of art-status offers no guidance.
What alternative might there be to a two-part account? Perhaps the beginning of wisdom in these matters is to begin with the second part, and treat art status as simply a vaguely defined point on spectrum of artistic meaning. I’ll try to explicate this obscure thought in future posts, but consider now the account of artistic meaningfulness offered art theorist Gottfried Semper back in the middle of the 19th century. Semper started from the question of how materials take on meaning in the process of creating artworks. First, they take on meaning because they are so to speak elaborated artifacts. The particular kind of elaboration that is most distinctive of works of art comes from the way in which artifacts become richly self-informative about how they are made. So, for a extremely simple example, motifs are might be added to a pot made on a wheel that evoke the process of spinning, as in the sense of torsion in Minoan pottery.
Or something of the sense of seriality, of repeated elements emerging into view and submerging from view, might show up in decoration, as in the stupefying textiles of the Andean civilization of the Paracas.
The second major way in Semper’s account in which materials gain meaning in their artistic uses is through metaphor. Again, some extremely simple, and also extremely common, ways in which this takes place in the visual arts globally is through the metaphorical treatment of a pot as a woman’s body, as again in a very early Minoan pot depicting a goddess.
On this line of investigation, one begins with immersion in some of the world’s artistic traditions, and comes to recognize instances of artistic meaning ‘at full stretch’, that is, where artworks attain a high-degree of meaningfulness. These works are in turn treated as exemplary instances of art. This solves the problem of determining art’s extension, one of the problems that plagues the standard two-part approach—non-exemplary artworks have the status of works of art as a matter of the degree to which they share the kinds of artistic meaningfulness seen in the exemplary works--, and treats art-status as determined by and derivative of artistic meaningfulness.
In the next blog post I’ll consider the insoluble problems in one of the most influential accounts of art of the past half-century, the philosophical account of art proposed by Arthur Danto.