A Cookie Sonnet

The cookie trays at holidays abound,

Yet so few morsels meet our sweet desires.

An ancient practice, baking will confound

All bakers creativity inspires.

 

Endeavor not to knead a novel dough;

Look to the past to cast your cookie spell. 

To wit, your baking wit you mustn’t show;

A grandma’s recipe will serve you well.  

 

A baker great this truth she understands—

The wisdom her foremothers handed down:

A simple cookie made by humble hands—

Joy will abound as these are handed ‘round.

    No personal touch add to your mixing bowl;

    A pleasing taste must be your only goal. 

A Readymade Sonnet

Are you a wizard? Practiced in black art?

For art, a thing sublime, you would create

With words, an utterance, your only part:

No palate, brush or paint to mediate.

An ordinary object you espy

And art declare it solemnly to be.

A clever trick to turn a low thing high

By means of nothing more than your decree.

Alas, no magic powers you possess;

So, miserably your incantations fail.

But self-deceived you boldly claim success

And offer the mundane for all to hail.

   

     Your ready-mades the critics may applaud;

     Art lovers call your hocus-pocus fraud.

Art As a Status Function

In the early twentieth century the art world began to prioritize the autonomy of the artist over aesthetic standards.  Artists were given carte blanche to create art or to declare something to be art, while aesthetic standards and traditional notions of beauty became increasingly irrelevant.  This change, and the art it produced, can be understood in terms of Status Functions and Status Function Declarations.  

According to Prof. John R. Searle of UC Berkeley (go Bears!), a Status Function is a function performed by an object or person (or entity) not in virtue of the object's or person's physical properties but in virtue of the object or person having a collectively recognized status.  President of the United States is a good example.  Harry Truman functioned as president not in virtue of his physical features but in virtue of the fact that Americans recognized him as having a certain status, namely, President of the United States.

Prof. John R. Searle

A Status Function Declaration (SF Declaration), according to Searle, assigns to an object or person a Status Function.**  On Searle's account all of social reality, all institutions and institutional facts, are created by SF Declarations.  Typically SF Declarations take the form of constitutive rules, which, spelled out logically, look like this: (X) counts as (Y) in context (C).  These rules act as "standing SF Declarations," and they make possible everything from the game of chess to a twenty dollar bill to President of the United States.

In 1917 the Society of Independent Artists put on an exhibition in New York.  Under the society's constitution, the show was open to any and all submissions from member artists.  The society's board of directors made clear it would not kowtow to preconceived notions of art or beauty.  There was no jury.  There were no prizes.  There were no aesthetic criteria.  In other words, anything a member artist submitted would be displayed.  Or, to put it as a constitutive rule:  Anything a member artist submits for display (X) counts as art (Y) in this exhibition (C).  

Marcel Duchamp, a 30-year-old French expat who had helped to found the society and was a member of its board of directors, put the rule to a test: under a pseudonym, "R. Mutt," he submitted Fountain, a urinal he had turned upside down and signed.  By a majority vote the society's board of directors refused to display Fountain—i.e., the board rejected the urinal's status as art (thereby breaking the constitutive rule and violating the society's constitution).  Duchamp resigned in protest.  But after the exhibition acceptance of the urinal qua art quickly spread, and eventually nearly everyone in the art world came to believe Fountain was art.  Duchamp had inaugurated a new kind of art—known as "readymade" or "found object"—and in doing so helped to change the nature of art.

Today "art" is whatever an artist declares to be art.  Since Fountain, artists have declared to be art everything from a bed to a boulder to a can of feces.  These declarations are SF Declarations.  Logically, they take the form "Object (X) counts as art (Y) in this exhibition, gallery, etc. (C)."  Practically, these declarations can look any number of ways.  Duchamp once commented on the importance of signing his readymades.  He didn't have Searle's vocabulary, but he knew intuitively that his signature was essential to changing the object's status—i.e., his signature was a SF Declaration, or at least an important part of one.  

How does an object function as art?  According to Searle, function is always spelled out in terms of deontic powers:  "rights, duties, obligations, requirements, permissions, authorizations, entitlements, and so on."  When an artist declares an object to be art, our relationship to the object changes.  In my first post I told a story that illustrates well one aspect of this change:  Once during a visit to the modern wing of the L.A. County Museum of Art, I distractedly reached out and touched a switch plate on a wall.  A docent approached and admonished me not to touch the exhibits.  The "switch plate" was art.  Had I known, I would never have touched it.  After I was told, I felt I had done something wrong (albeit unwittingly).   

This anecdote also illustrates why traditional kinds of art such as representational painting and sculpture depend less on SF Declarations than does found object art.  First, because found object art typically has a function before it is declared to be art—a non-artistic function performed in virtue of its physical properties, not a collectively recognized status.  So unless the object in question is assigned a new function (i.e., unless it is declared to be art), it will simply continue to be what it was.  Paintings and sculptures, on the other hand, do not have an anterior function and thus do not require a SF Declaration to operate aesthetically or to be identified as art.  There is no chance we will confuse them with something else.  

A second reason traditional art depends less on SF Declarations is that it offers more aesthetically than found object art.  No one needs to be told that a representational painting—even a mediocre one—is worthy of special attention, ought not to be touched, etc.  We do need to be told that a switch plate is worthy of special attention and ought not to be touched.  And even after we're told, we might not believe it.  And if enough people don't believe it, then we don't have a piece of art.

This is the irony of the art world's divorce from aesthetic standards.  The goal was total artistic freedom.  The result was greater dependence than ever before on what other people think.  Before the twentieth century, art and artists were dependent on collective acceptance of aesthetic standards.  Now they are dependent on collective acceptance of SF Declarations.

**There are special cases that don't involve a preexisting object, person, or entity (X).  For more on Searle's theory, please see his book "Making the Social World."

Expressionism and Abstract Art

Inspired by the vibrant and not-necessarily-lifelike colors of Vincent van Gogh's paintings, Expressionists tended to exaggerate colors and lines for emotional effect.  Unlike Impressionists their goal was not to render subjects accurately but to express themselves emotively, and they used enhanced forms and intensified colors to do so.  They rejected the sanitized subject matter of much of classical and Impressionist art, depicting instead lifelike scenes of suffering, poverty, and angst.  In Germany, where, as E.H. Gombrich notes, the movement "found its most fertile soil," Expressionists tried to represent, among other things, the emotional and psychological effects of industrialization and urbanization.  

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Berlin, 1913

All well and good.  Until somebody took it too far.

Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian-born painter and theorist living in Germany at the turn of the century, thought he could express emotion with pure color—color abstracted from any recognizable form.  Gombrich states, "In his somewhat confused and passionate book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912) [Kandinsky] stressed the psychological effects of pure color, the way a bright red can affect us like the call of a trumpet."  Thus began abstract art.

Wassily Kandinsky, Cossacks, 1910

Here's what I think Kandinsky didn't understand:  While abstracted color can affect mood and please the eye, it cannot inspire the same depth of feeling as representational art because our associations with color per se are so varied and vague.  We've had countless encounters in our lives with red things—some good and some bad.  A painting must be more specific—i.e., it must be representational—to elicit a meaningful emotional response from the viewer.  Van Gogh's paintings convey so much emotion in part because they are paintings of things and people—a wheat field, a friend, a night sky, his mother, etc.  His use of vibrant color (among other things) helps us to experience his subjects the way he did, at least to some degree.  He could never have achieved the results he did if he had simply applied color—no matter how bright or rich—to the canvass with no recognizable forms.  

Regarding Kandinsky's early efforts at abstraction Gombrich writes, "One may doubt whether [his] first experiments at color music were a complete success . . . ."  One may indeed.  The shame of it is Kandinsky could really paint.  His early representational works are worth hanging.  Alas, he never (as far as I know) returned to representational painting.

The Sad State of Art Today

Last week The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting piece on the state of art today.  Here's the link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/remember-when-art-was-supposed-to-be-beautiful-1477090696

From Art to Non-Art in Three Easy Steps

Step 1 - Paul Cezanne

Cezanne wanted "to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums."  He often painted outdoors, and some of his works, especially from the 1870s, share the brilliant tones of Impressionist canvasses.  But as he matured artistically he wanted more than simply to record his observations of nature.  To his eye Impressionist works lacked something of the grandeur of seventeenth-century masterpieces (he particularly admired the art of Nicolas Poussin).  He wanted to reconcile the achievements of Impressionism with the beauty of classical masterworks—to unite the bright hues of Impressionist canvasses with the solid forms of traditional paintings, and to capture his experiences of nature without neglecting the harmony and depth of "the art in the museums."

Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen From Bellevue, c. 1885

He experimented fearlessly—with color, perspective, geometric shapes.  Often working in seclusion in the south of France, he ignored convention and invented new techniques to achieve desired effects.  And on various levels, according to art mavens, he succeeded.  Shortly after his death in 1906, a Paris salon put on a major retrospective of his work.  It changed art history.

Step 2 - Cubism

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque attended the Cezanne retrospective.  Cezanne's art—particularly his use of geometric shapes and distorted perspective—fired their imaginations.  Together they began developing a radically new style of art.  They jettisoned single-point perspective, deconstructed (or "analyzed") objects into parts, and represented those parts on the canvass from multiple viewpoints and in discrete planes.  The result was a fractured, geometric aesthetic and the birth of Cubism. 

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910

Other artists soon joined in the fun.  But unlike Picasso and Braque, who preferred making art to talking about it, many of the newcomers had a serious penchant for theory.  They were obsessed with grandiose ideas they couldn't understand, articulate, or relate to painting in any meaningful way (e.g., the so-called "fourth dimension").  But that didn't stop them from trying.  They held discussions, gave lectures, wrote papers, published books (1912's On Cubism was particularly influential).  And above all the theoretical white noise at least one idea, one claim, resonated:  in art ideas are more important than mere paint.  

Fifty years later this claim, this approach to art, would become a movement. 

Step 3 - Conceptual Art

According to The Tate, "conceptual art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. . . . Conceptual art can be—and look like—almost anything.  This is because, unlike a painter or sculptor who will think about how best they can express their idea using paint or sculptural materials and techniques, a conceptual artist uses whatever materials and whatever form is most appropriate to putting their idea across—this could be anything from a performance to a written description."  

Joseph Beuys, I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974
(Beuys wrapped himself in felt and spent three days in a room with a coyote to protest the Vietnam War.)

The differences between Cubism and conceptual art parallel the differences between art and non-art.  Cubism (at least initially) was about the artist's idea of an object.  Conceptual art is about the artist's idea of anything.  Cubists took a new approach to the age-old challenge of representing three-dimensional objects on a flat surface.  Conceptual artists have no interest in representing objects.  Cubists rejected the canvass as a window.  Conceptual artists reject the canvass altogether.

If we accept conceptual art as real art—that is, if art can take any physical form (or no physical form) and can be about any conceivable idea—then we empty the terms "art" and "artist" of all meaning.  And if we do that, then to talk about art is to talk nonsense.

The World As We See It

A lot of artistic isms sprouted in the early twentieth century—Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Primitivism, Fauvism, to name a few.  They varied aesthetically and theoretically, but they had one thing in common: their adherents were no longer interested in representing the world as we see it.  Indeed many believed the very notion of representing the world "as we see it" was confused or illegitimate.  This was an abrupt about-face from Impressionism, which had revolutionized the art world just 30 years prior.

Edouard Manet, Boating, 1874

Disillusioned with the stale and limiting (as they saw them) conventions of the art academies, Impressionists had moved their canvasses outdoors to paint objects as they appeared in nature.  Manet and his clan were particularly interested in the effects of light and air on the visual experience, and they developed new techniques to capture these effects with greater immediacy and accuracy than ever before.  Representing the world "as we see it" was the goal, and some of these revolutionaries eventually claimed they could paint the visual experience with "scientific accuracy."

Vincent van Gogh, Fishing Boats on the Beach, 1888

But Cezanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin wanted more from their canvasses than Impressionist ideals and techniques could yield.  And there was no going back to the art of the academies.  Each began painting something other than what he saw, sacrificing a measure of lifelikeness to greater artistic ends (and in the case of van Gogh, with gorgeous results).  Each inspired future artists to do likewise.  And each posthumously inspired one of the isms mentioned above (stay tuned for more on that).  This was the beginning of Modern art.