A Tools Definiton of Art

[packbat]

I don't think I'm cut out for being a professional philosopher - a lot of the job of such philosophers is to study, understand, and respond to popular positions held by other philosophers, however asinine or incoherent, and because "asinine" and "incoherent" are philosophical judgments, you can't make any agreed-upon list of works to exclude on that basis. I can deal with the stuff sometimes, but my tolerance for it is too limited to do the job in any kind of consistent way.

I do like philosophy, though, and philosophizing. And I've been thinking about how to define art lately - "art" as in the all-of-it thing, not specifically visual art - and that turned into the following.

Content warnings: homophobia, classism, sexism and racism mentions, hospital mention, and a brief rant about 1978 made-for-TV movie "Rescue from Gilligan's Island".

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At the end of his video "We don't play our instruments for 4 minutes and 33 seconds", music educator Adam Neely connects his commentary on John Cage's 4'33" to an excerpt he reads from an email sent by Charlie Banacos, a musician and music educator, to his students while he was in the hospital. In this email, Banacos describes how he identified the notes being sounded by the electronic equipment around him as pitches forming a B dominant 7 chord, and then, whenever he heard someone speak, he would identify the pitch or pitches of their speech as notes relative to that chord. Neely concludes: "So, Charlie isn't really listening to music; he's hearing the world as music. And for me, that is the lesson that I take from 4'33": music is a means of listening."

There are at least a couple ways that words are given specific meaning. In mundane matters, the usual method by which people learn what words mean is to observe them in use, much the same way that someone might learn what rolls of paper towels are by watching sheets torn off and used to dry hands or mop up spills or whatever else. We start with a world of prototypes and derive from those a wordless idea of what the word means. In technical matters, on the other hand, definitions are often created for specific purpose, like how a the sockets of socket wrenches match the outlines of common nuts and bolts. We start with some task that needs doing and create a definition to fit the task.

And then there's a third way, which is to take one's own ostensive, wordless understanding - or, in the case of dictionaries, one's best guess at what ostensive, wordless understandings are common - and aim to reverse-engineer it into a definition that can be written down without seeking to fit that definition into an explicit theory.

Frequently, this ends up instantiating in formal terms the biases of the cultures whose use of the word we are watching. As many have pointed out, the definition of the 🏳️‍🌈 community as "people attracted to their own gender" doesn't reflect the modern history of that community - either its origins with the Stonewall Riots, which were led by trans women of color, or the later exclusion of everyone from those trans women all the way back to cis lesbians to define "gay" as specifically "gay men". The "people attracted to their own gender" definition does no more than reflect the composition of present-day transphobic LGB communities, disguise the bigotry behind their exclusion of trans people, and distract from the ways they have common causes with those they attack.

This essay is about defining what 'art' is - that is to say, the umbrella under which painting, sculpture, poetry, storytelling, and music fall. It is also in part about defining these various forms of art. And it is an attempt to do so in a consciously functional imitation of that ostensive form of definition, but one that specifically and explicitly generalizes from the art any given person immediately recognize as art to other creative works they - we - might not have. Definitions of art frequently exclude tapestry, pottery, and similar practical items, and (not by coincidence) the creators who through racism or sexism or other bigotries are nudged towards working in those media and not the celebrated ones; I want to ground the controversial intuition that these practical creations are art as well.

Adam Neely proposed that "music is a means of listening". In the email from Banacos, he showed what that looks like: someone who is skilled at specific techniques listeners use to understand the music they are listening to, like the harmonic relationships between notes in this case, using some of those techniques on what they are experiencing. It is a doubly-indirect relationship between the examples and the definition - listeners to music grow accustomed to hearing notes in relation to each other and in relation to a context of a family of notes (for example, the tonic in a scale) because much of the music we begun with, our ostensive pool, uses these relations in its composition to create the effects it does ... and then takes one more step: from these tools to experiences people can understand with them. And thus the background sounds of a hospital or a supermarket or any number of places - or a single dyad (pair of notes) played and held for a long time, or a parody of how-it's-made videos involving a machine that creates regular sounds - can create a musical experience. The means of listening can reward.

That reward is where I base the function of my definition. Works like the Washington Metro rail map (originally created by renown graphic designer Lance Wyman and evolving over the forty-something years since) and Charles Minard's Flow Map of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign of 1812 reward those who view it with the skills of parsing abstract art (and also with the skills of parsing infographics and with the skills of parsing maps). Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, and Isaac Schankler's "Depression Quest" rewards those with the skills of parsing videogames (see the Folding Ideas commentary on its use of unavailable choices) and the skills of parsing narrative. Even bad art rewards - 1978 made-for-TV movie "Rescue from Gilligan's Island" rewards the viewer for understanding several languages of comedy, from physical to absurdist to witticism, and the societal changes over the fourteen years since the beginning of the TV series, but outside a theme of nostalgia for a past perceived as simpler, it rewards these skills with very little and with great incompetence, often extending gags to absurd lengths and repeating punchlines multiple times in what seems to be an attempt to stretch out a 25 minute episode's worth of material to fill the full 95 minute runtime. The skills that define art are the skills that are common across these and across the prototypical forms of art that created the definition: recognition of technical performance, recognition of associations between the work and its medium or between the work and the outside world, recognition of how the parts and the wholes create emotional reactions, recognition of how parts interact with each other to change their individual meaning and to create the meaning of the whole, and so on.

A typical objection to expansive definitions like mine is to point to objects whose non-artistic purpose are so emphasized as to make it ridiculous to claim them as art - catalogs of industral products, perhaps. The inclusion of such objects is fully intentional on my part. The traditional approach to such objects in esteemed artworlds is to ignore them until someone that world recognizes as an artist forces that world to confront them in a context of art, and then credit that person who selected it as the creator ... but this is an expression of classist snobbery. (This becomes even more obvious when the works being plagiarized are themselves works of visual art.) In the process of creating a catalog, the graphic designer considers the associations people form with typefaces, the clarity of images given the mode of production being used, and how these may be laid out on the page to preserve logical arrangement, communicate clearly which item corresponds to which description, and help the eye of those with specific desires to catch on items that might fulfill them. There are skills used to evaluate the impact of the creation - how the audience reacts to the object, in both emotive and communicative ways - and the skills through which people appreciate good graphic design in catalogs are recognizably connected to that body of skills that I have used to define art.

This definition of art is, admittedly, subjective. Some art relies so heavily on specific skills from the listener that listeners without those skills find them deeply unrewarding - the statement that a piece of music is "just noise" is an expression of a failure of an artistic creation to find skills in this specific member of its audience that said person can use to understand and be rewarded by the piece. As art curators, this suggests that part of the job is identifying communities with audience skills one does not share and either collaborating with their experts or learning from them. However, it is also one's duty as an art curator to recognize when one has chosen not to exercise these skills as an audience on some works and query that choice. Art is a human activity, so our definitions of it change how it is made - and to arbitrarily narrow that definition is to constrain that activity. Even without concerns of who gets praise and who does not, we deserve better than that.