Lawrence Salander - Art as I See It

With thanks and respect for the great minds who for centuries have grappled with the subject of art in the effort to make sense of something that is, for me at least, as necessary for life as the food we eat, or the air we breathe.

But there has always been a very high, perhaps an impossibly high, hurdle to clear in order to talk or write about the subject of art with clarity. It is that difficulty which has made it impossible to get those who talk and think and write and make and love art to agree on the meanings of the words used to discuss it, for example the word art itself.

Some years ago, I had the chance to set up an experiment, which I believed would go a long way to proving the following hypothesis, to wit: there is no consensus of agreement as to the definition of the word art. On the evening the experiment was to take place, I had sponsored a panel discussion about some small technical issue in art that was intended for art specialists and professionals, including curators, conservators, and professional artists. In other words, for those who made their living in art in one capacity or another, and for whom, if only for that reason, art was of vital interest.

The panel that evening consisted of two men whom I greatly respect and who are now, as they were then, among the handful of great thinkers and writers on the subject of art alive: J.P. and L.W. I served as the moderator.

About an hour before the discussion was to begin, the three of us met to review what it was we were going to speak about, and the form in which the discussion would take place. I offered up the following:

Gentlemen, did it ever occur to you, who write so well on the subject, that there is but very little if any agreement about the meaning of the words we all use in the discussion of art?

As one they replied, Of course it has.

I continued, I propose that if I was to ask each of you to write down your definition of the word art, and if I did so myself, we would not define the word alike, certainly not exactly alike. But accepted definitions of words is the only way to ensure that there can be the least precision in the language we use to describe anything. Why, I wonder, have we allowed the discussion of art to be carried on in words that mean whatever the individual using them wants them to? And the same applies for those who hear or read the words.

So? J.P. replied.

Lets distribute pencil and paper to our guests tonight, all of whom are professionals in the world of art, and most highly educated in the subject. And then let us ask them to define the word art.

OK with me so far, L.W. said.

My guess that if all two hundred people we expert tonight were to try to define the word art, a word in which they are all so vitally interested, no two will be exactly the same. In fact, no two will be able to be construed to have the same meaning.

My guess is that at least fifty pairs of answers will be close enough to be called the same, J.P. said.

Twenty-five pairs, L.W. opined.

As amazing as it still seems these years later, and as distressing as it was to discover, no two answers could be construed to be close enough to be the same. There were, of course, certain words that came up more frequently than others in the two hundred answers; like some forms of the words create and express. However (and even) with all that no two definitions were the same.

So that in making the decision to write this book, which will be devoted, as my life has been, to the subject of art, I thought it was necessary for me to take a try at defining it; the word art I mean. Take it or leave it, improve on it if you can and will, but for this book to make sense in any respect we must start somewhere. I challenge some younger, more able person than I to write a dictionary of the words used around the subject of art. This would be a great contribution and necessary if we are to begin to find, excavate, and then separate the truth from the mountain of shit under which it has been for so long buried. Shit which when analysed will be shown to consist in great measure of words without meanings, undefined.

If the words used in the discussion of art are allowed to mean anything, then a logical conclusion to the resulting mish-mash of ideas will be that art can be anything too. And that may be fair enough as long as we are all clear, at least, as to what the word art means. It seems obvious to me that the low place at which we have arrived in the making and appreciation of art is the result of the fact that in discussing it using meaningless words, we have rendered the establishment of criteria impossible, and we have destroyed the criteria that may have once existed. We have made it possible for those who would to take advantage of this situation to the great detriment of art. People who will not stop until we define the words used to discuss art, to then use those words to set the criteria for it.