In Art as Human Practice Georg Bertram has set himself the extraordinarily difficult task of explaining how art matters in human life. One might think there are two ways of doing this: One way is fundamentally formalist: we treat art as irreducible to other human practices on account of art’s distinctive values, processes of making, modes of apprehension, and institutions, and further claim that the activity as a whole embodies a set of values that are unavailable in other practices. So art might provide steady access to, say, some sort of transcendence, or ecstasy, or intensity, or satisfaction, that is unavailable or poorly accessible in other practices. An alternative way is fundamentally contextualist: we propose that art is just one practice among others, made up of and employing the same sorts of objects, materials, and sensibilities that one finds in other practices. Perhaps on this latter account the distinctiveness of art is carried by its vocation of critique, or affirmation, or self-expression, but these values are also available in other practices. The former way secures art’s distinctiveness, but at the cost of shearing from the rest of human life. The latter way insists on the close connection with the rest of human life, but lacks resources to explain why art isn’t at most the second-best way of engaging in some value; why, for example, would we need art as critique in a society with a moderately functional public sphere? Bertram offers a philosophical account that attempts to incorporate the virtues of both accounts, that is, that insists upon the distinctiveness of art and its irreducibility to other practices, but also that explicates how a work of art in every case can only arise amidst other human practices, and how an artwork gains its meaning and point through its relation to those other practices. How is this possible?
Here I can only sketch an outline of his position. He begins with the thought that, in order to avoid formalist autonomy and contextualist reductivisim, we must treat art from the start as (a) practical (p.53) and reflective (p.101), but also (b) that we grasp art as self-referential (p.120). The key claim is that it is only through (b), the self-referentiality of artworks, that (a), their practical reflectivity, is achieved. What is self-referentiality? Richard Wollheim once remarked to me that artworks have a way of teaching you what is important to understand them. Bertram means, I think, something quite similar: on his account artworks initiate for and through their recipients a dynamic wherein what is important to the artwork is clarified. But since the configuration of elements, none of which are unique to the practice of art, that emerges in the artistic dynamic does not simply replicate that of other non-artistic practices, the artwork represents both an instance of self-determination within its society and a challenge to its society. (Successful) artworks are necessarily provocations.
Has Bertram succeeded in squaring the circle? His account both insists upon the autonomy of artworks in that its distinctive kind of meaningful configuration of elements arises only within the practice of art, and also insists that art is necessarily practical in the very challenge it offers to other practices. In the next few days I’ll try to explore his account, first with a discussion of what he calls the ‘autonomy paradigm’ that philosophers have hitherto adopted with regard to art and which vitiates their accounts; then with a more detailed explication and critical account of Bertram’s own position. More soon.