What do we want from a theory of art? Perhaps the most common imperative embodied in theories of art has been for some criterion or set of criteria for distinguishing works of art from both natural objects and also human artifacts and performances. Neither hunks of marble nor plates nor pronouncements of marriage are artworks; what distinguishes them Michelangelo’s Pietá or a Picasso ceramic or a performance of the Oresteia? Or are those invidious examples, or the wrong questions to ask, and if so why? A second concern typically addressed in theories of art is question of what function or functions are fulfills in human life. Is there some single aim across the arts, such as human self-exploration in and through a sensuous medium? Or are there several, typically overlapping aims? And can appeal to considerations of human evolution guide inquiry into these? A third, much less commonly addressed concern might be to explicate what if any distinctive kinds of meaningfulness—kinds of rhetoric, style, metaphor, symbolism, etc.—arise in the arts. Is artistic meaning something sui generis, or is it a kind of intensification or elaboration of the sorts of meaningfulness possessed by everyday artifacts? Or is there no distinction between meaning in art and in everyday life?
General theories of art have been unfashionable in Anglo-American philosophy for over a half of a century. One wave of rejections that began cresting around 1960 centered on the Wittgenstein-inspired thought that art, like games, did not admit of a definition: there were no set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something being a work of art; rather there were at most resemblances among various undisputed instances of art, and so the task of mapping these resemblances (and non-resemblances) replaced the definitional task. Another wave of rejections turned on the formerly fashionable idea that there were no interesting human universals, including of course art, a wave that crashed on, among other things, Donald E. Brown’s demonstration in 1991 of dozens of such universals. Most recently has been the wave of exhaustion, signaled by Peter Kivy in the late 1990’s, where philosophers have simply turned away from the definitional project in favor of investigations into particular art forms or kinds, such as painting or opera or movies. An outstanding and philosophically rigorous instance of this has recently come from Dominic Lopes, who has argued that making and appreciating a work of art gain nothing through appeal to the work’s status as art per se, but rather these activities and their artifactual and/or performative products occur and are guided by the role they play in practices of particular art kinds.
Standing against these three great Anglo-American waves of rejection have been a small number of philosophers. The most prominent of these was Arthur Danto, who in 1981 proposed that art works are distinguished from natural objects and non-artistic artifacts in that (a) they have meanings (and so are different from natural objects); and (b) they embody their meanings (and so are different from other artifacts. Danto never quite gives the explicit account of what it means to embody a meaning, as opposed merely having a meaning, but his main line of thought seems to be that works of art possess distinctive kinds of expression, style, rhetorical appeal, and metaphoricity uncharacteristic of most artifacts. Starting a few years later, Danto went on to write a very large body of art criticism that bears an uncertain relation to this general theory. Some of the same examples are used in both bodies of work, such as Roy Lichtenstein’s painting of a brush stroke and, to the point of obsession, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. Much of Danto’s criticism consisted of free-wheeling philosophical speculation and recovery and analysis of the particular artist’s vision, her manner of seeing and interpreting the world, which was Danto’s core characterization of style. So while his art criticism is plausibly seen as roughly consistent with his theory of art, the criticism could have been just as well written by someone who lacked any theory of art, but was interested in issues of style in contemporary art. But if a theory of art offers no guidance in understanding, appreciating, and criticizing works of art, is this not grist for Lopes’s mill?
Among the very few general theories of art published this century, Alva Noë’s account in 2015 in his book Strange Tools stands out for its novelty and revelatory qualities. And the recent publication his book Learning to Look, which includes many short pieces of criticism that he wrote during and after his work on Strange Tools, offers the richest recent attempt to apply a theory of art to the criticism of actual works. Does it work?
Noë’s fascinating account is easy enough to state, but not perhaps easy to understand. I’ll try to capture its distinctive features in a few propositions: 1. Human behavior, including above all actions, habits, and practices, is best characterized as ways of bringing and maintaining order and organization. Examples of such behavior include breast-feeding, conversation, playing baseball, and dancing. 2. There is a separate and much smaller class of human activities rightly called ‘art’. Art is a second-order activity, in that it always involves the re-organization of prior (first-order) behaviors (as identified in proposition #1). The most basic feature of art as a second-order activity is that it shows or displays a first-order activity. Further, in showing or displaying the conceptually prior activity art proposes new perspectives upon and poses questions about that activity, and thereby opens up routes of investigation and contemplation of that activity. Art shares these features with philosophy. 3. Human tools are made for and are used within human activities. A hammer, for example, is made to drive a nail, and this basic activity is embedded within a larger activity, such as being a house. Tools accordingly have functions, and these functions are themselves intelligible in virtue of the roles they play in teleological-ordered practices, institutions, and social spheres. But art is tool-like without being a tool, in that it lacks a (first-order) function. Art is accordingly a ‘strange tool’.
Noë’s book attracted mixed reviews in both academic journals and mainstream venues. For example, the philosopher Mohan Matthen, much of whose recent work explores evolutionary accounts of aesthetics and art, dismissed outright Noë’s claim about the identical function of art and philosophy while affirming the basic thought that art always involves the re-organization of prior organized activities. The distinguished philosopher of art Nöel Carroll, whose wide-ranging work of several decades includes detailed consideration of experimental arts, particularly dance, argued that Noë’s analysis of art as a strange tool was valid at most for avant-garde arts. Might then Noë’s new collection offer in particular some illumination on the application of theories of art to the markedly non-traditional works of Contemporary art?
The subtitle of Learning to Look is Dispatches from the Art World. Noë refers to “the art world and its glamorous enticements” (17), and so seems to use the term ‘art world’ in the informal sense referring to anything associated with the social 31the people associated those worlds, including artists, critics, gallerists, curators, collectors, and celebrity scene-makers. The subtitle is a bit misleading, in that a number of pieces including have little or nothing to do with the art world, such as a reviews of books on physics and linguistic variation. Another difficulty in evaluating Noë’s claims stems from the format of short columns addressed to a non-specialist audience. This rhetorical situation seems to intensify Noë’s penchant, lamented by Matthen (and myself), in Strange Tools for framing coy conundrums and tone-deaf aphorisms; the following description of the Hollywood pot-boiler Top Gun nearly induced an episode of book-throwing in this reviewer: “George Balanchine has nothing on [director] Tony Scott’s exhibition of counterpoint and organization as men and fighter planes maneuver on the deck of an aircraft carrier, eventually upswelling into a gravity-defying, soaring supersonic pas de deux of jets in flight, all to the thrilling pulse of Kenny Loggins’ soundtrack-defining song “Danger Zone.”” (31) Balanchine reformed an art form, ballet, into something that could be a vehicle of great artistic aspiration in the twentieth-century; worked with Stravinsky to produce among the greatest dance works of the twentieth-century (Apollo, Four Temperaments, Agon, etc.); introduced and developed in choreography a distinctive conception of dance as visualized music; extended inherited ballet technique in the service of a novel kind of abstracted corporeal expressiveness; etc.). There is no serious comparison in aspiration and achievement between Balanchine and Scott. It’s not only snobbishness that requires one to pass by many of Noë’s remarks.
Nonetheless, there are, I think, two areas in which Noë’s accounts merit attention and reflection: the conception of artistic meaningfulness that arises from his application of his theory of art; and his conception of historicity within Contemporary art. On the first point, his fullest account comes in a review of the Albanian artist Anri Sala’s 2-room video installation Ravel Ravel Unravel (13-15). In one room a monitor shows two different pianists’ left hands in near-synchronized performances of Ravel’s concerto for the left hand. The other room shows the French DJ Chloé at a deck manipulating the LPs of the two performances, “scratching, pushing, stopping, accelerating, and decelerating the records.” (15) Noë makes four interpretive points: 1. There’s a kind of excitement present in the work’s presentation of a “techno-perceptual puzzle” (14). 2. The work presents different kinds and aspects of agency and ways in which these are altered through technology. 3. The hands are parts of male bodies, whereas the female DJ is presented double-handed and intact. And 4: “like all art everywhere, the raw materials out of which she [Chloé] makes her art is the making activity of other people.” (15) These points individually and collectively surely illuminate the work and support Noë’s perhaps disappointingly anodyne conclusion that “Anri Sala’s strange and beautiful performance illuminates art and technology and their place in our active lives.” The fourth point is self-admittedly a truism, though one at the core of Noë’s theory of art. The first point too shares in the general theory’s insistence that works of art as second-order tools are inherently ‘strange’, i.e. puzzling and disturbing and seemingly non-functional. Points 2 and 3 do not evidently derive from the general theory, with the second point being a bit of introductory throat-clearing, and the third a penetrating observation of the sort one hopes for in reading art criticism. Perhaps it’s something of this mixture of truism, theory-guided observation, and independent critical insight that one can hope when a philosopher of art turns their attention to art criticism.
The second point, Noë’s conception of historicity, or at least the historical dimension of recent art, leads deeper into problematic aspects of both Noë’s project and of the art he discusses. This concern is closest to the surface in his review of the an exhibition of works by Henri Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2017 (38-40). As Noë notes, Diebenkorn’s encounters (especially in the 1940s and 1950s) with various works by Matisse provided key models upon which Diebenkorn formed his distinctive conception of ambitious Modern art, and stimulated Diebenkorn in major shifts in his own painting style and subjects. Yet Noë goes on to note: “there’s something arbitrary and gimmicky about the pairing. The story of Matisse’s influence on Diebenkorn is never more than a good story, a hook to keep a viewing public interested until they can find a way to actually notice or be gripped by the work itself.” (40) Perhaps part of the target of Noë’s criticism here is that attitude that only finds artistic interest in what leads up to a work and/or what developments a work induces. I’ve often heard in response to a critical remark about some artist that “well, of course they influenced a lot of people.” Then part of Noë’s claim is that in artistic response there must be after all some part of the response that finds interest and value in the work itself, not only in its ancestry or descendants. Still, it’s startling that Noë judges the work itself, the content or subject or artistic focus of this or that painting by Diebenkorn, to be available outside of any historical conditions. It seems to me this contravenes the very point that Noë initially affirms, that Diebenkorn’s relation to the model of Matisse is partially constitutive of who he was as an artist, and this historical dimension enters into the content of Diebenkorn’s work. If so, Noë’s judgment mutilates Diebenkorn’s art in stripping it of its historical dimension, thereby denying the seriousness of Diebenkorn’s historical thinking not just in his life, but in his art. Perhaps in this peculiar criticism Noë’s criticism pays the price of his not having a theory of art that fully incorporates the thought that all art is an historical phenomenon. And perhaps further the lack of this dimension is not some individual failing of Noë’s, but rather corresponds to the peculiar nature of Contemporary art, an art that builds its traditions out of determinedly anti-traditional attitudes.
References:
Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (1991)
Noël Carroll, ‘Comments on Alva Noë’s Strange Tools’ in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, January 2017
Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)
-----After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (1995)
Peter Kivy, Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences (1997)
Dominic McIver Lopes, After Art (2014)
Mohan Matthen, review of Strange Tools, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, February 15, 2016
Alva Noë, Strange Tools (2015)
-----Learning to Look (2021)