Michelle Marder Kamhi - Who Says Thats Art?: A Commonsense View of the Visual Arts

Notes

N. B. Most of the articles cited in the notes are available online. If an article can be readily found by a simple title search, the URL has been omitted, to avoid cluttering the notes. The entire contents of Aristosthe online review of the arts that I co-edit at www.aristos.orgare archived there. Many articles from the earlier print edition of Aristos are also available (in PDF) on the website, and can be located by a title or keyword search.

Introduction - If Art Can Be Anything, Then It Is Nothing

Carol Vogel, "On the Use of Buildings for Decorative Effect," New York Times, April 28, 1998.

Kelly's work is dubbed "Minimalist" by those in the know, as if that stylistic designation were sufficient to justify it.

Regarding the Met's rooftop exhibitions, see the following items in online Notes & Comments in Aristos: "Who Cares about Caro?" (on Anthony Caro on the Roof), October 2011; "Roxy on the Roof" (on Roxy Paine on the Roof: Maelstrom, December 2009; "Andy Goldsworthy, 'Sculptor'So They Say" (on Andy Goldsworthy on the Roof), November 2004. A telling example of what passes for contemporary art abroad is Marilyn, by Joana Vasconcelos (b. 1971)a giant shoe "sculpture" made of stainless steel pots and pot lids, exhibited in the famed Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in 2012.

Cynthia Freeland, But Is It Art?:An Introduction to Art Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), xvii. Art historian and critic Suzi Gablik's Has Modernism Failed? (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1984, 2004) even more explicitly aims "to bridge the gap in understanding... between people outside the artworld and those within it" (p. 26).

A more recent example of a book by a philosophy professor who accepts virtually anything as art is Art, Self and Knowledge by Keith Lehrer (Oxford University Press, 2011). Gablik, too, accepts much of the "art" and many of the artworld premises that I challenge here.

Though generally attributed to Warhol, that provocative statement actually originated in a slightly different form with the influential media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who declared "Art is anything you can get away with" in his book The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam, 1967), 13236.

As suggested by Michael Gross, the author of Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum (New York: Broadway, 2009), such pressures may have been what prompted de Montebello to step down after a historic tenure as director.

George Dickie, "The New Institutional Theory of Art," reprinted from Proceedings of the 8th Wittgenstein Symposium, 10 (1983), 5764, in Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of ArtThe Analytic Tradition: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 51.

Arthur Danto, "The Artworld," reprinted from Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 61 (1964), 57184, in Lamarque & Olsen, 3233 (emphasis mine).

The quote is from Danto's reply to essays in Danto and His Critics, ed. by Mark Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993), 198.

Arthur Danto, What Art Is (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 149.

Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi, What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand (Chicago: Open Court, 2000).

A quite remarkable confirmation of my point has recently come from an acquaintance who told me of the distress experienced by her eleven-year-old son during a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. On viewing a strange video exhibited there of a man jumping up and down on a trampoline, he burst into tears and wailed in protest: "Mom, that's not art! They shouldn't say that's art!"

Peter Schjeldahl, "Gated," The New Yorker, February 28, 2005.

Ken Johnson, "Is Sculpture Too Free for Its Own Good?" New York Times, May 7, 2004.

See, for example, Amei Wallach, "Is It Art? Is It Good? And Who Says So?," New York Times, October 12, 1997.

For a brief exploration of this point, see "Kandinsky and His Progeny," Aristos, May 1995.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835), Ch. 1, "Philosophical Method of the Americans."

. An international art movement founded in 1999, Stuckism boldly advocates "contemporary figurative painting with ideas," as well as (if less prominently) sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, and does not hesitate to say what art isn't.

Chapter 1 - What Exactly Are We Talking About?

The World Book Dictionary, ed. by Clarence Lewis Barnhart (World Book - Childcraft International, 1981).

In the words of one philosophy professor, "Art as we have generally understood it [in the sense of "fine art"] is a European invention barely two hundred years old." Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 3.

The Latin term for "art" in general was ars (plural artes). The corresponding Greek term was techne, from which the English term "technique" derives.

Aristotle's view of art's psychological function is examined in depth by the classical scholar Stephen Halliwell in a comprehensive and illuminating study entitled The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), esp. 202206. As his subtitle indicates, the subject is highly relevant today.

On the two categories of art, see W. Tatarkiewicz, "Classification of Arts in Antiquity," Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1963), 232; and Aristotle, Metaphysics, 981b. On the purported "Uselessness of Art," see the article by Peter Lamarque in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Summer 2010, 205214.

The treatise in which Baumgarten introduced his ideas on aestheticsoriginally published in Latin in 1735has been translated as Reflections on Poetry by Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954).

Baumgarten pursued these ideas in a later work, entitled Aesthetica, but never completed it. Regrettably, his insightful work had relatively little influence. Subsequent eighteenth-century thought on aesthetics largely ignored the fruitful directions he had explored and instead focused on such tangential questions as the nature of beauty and the role of taste. The long-prevailing but mistaken assumption that fine art is primarily "concerned with beauty" can be found even in the work of the eminent historian Paul Johnson. See his Art: A New History (New York, HarperCollins, 2003), 7.

Abb Charles Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts rduits un mme principe (1746), ed. by Jean Rmy Mantion (Paris: Aux Amateurs de livres, 1989), 82.

Batteux, 83. By "imitation," Batteux did not mean slavish copying but, rather, the imaginatively selective representation of nature's most beautiful elements. Equally important, when he refers to particular works of art, he seems to leave room for the representation of aspects of reality that are not beautiful. For example, in explaining imaginative imitation, he notes that the fictional character of Harpagon (the protagonist of Molire's comedy The Miser) borrows the "characteristics of actual avarice" (87). Surely Batteux did not consider avarice "beautiful."

Gordon Graham, Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 1997), 131.

See Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, tr. by Richard N. Schwab (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963).

Similarly, the main entry on "Arts" for the Encyclopedia properwritten by Diderot himselfdid not even mention the fine arts. It dealt instead with the "liberal arts" and even more fully with the "mechanical arts."