The Awful Truth About What Art Is by Artlink

THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT WHAT ART IS DONALD BROOK

THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT

WHAT ART IS

Donald Brook

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from Artlink Australia. ISBN 978-0-646-49433-3 National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Brook, Donald, 1927 The awful truth about what art is. 1st edition Subjects: Art-Philosophy, Art criticism. Dewey number:701 Published by Artlink Australia 2008 Enquiries: info@artlink.com.au www.artlink.com.au Printed by Digital Print Australia, Adelaide. Design by Artlink

Artlink acknowledges the support of the Australia Council for the Arts and the Government of South Australia through Arts SA

Prefatory note

Questions about what art is have bothered me since my schooldays when an ambitious teacher first put to me the implausible opinion that the works of Pablo Picasso should be preferred to those of Dame Laura Knight. As an adult I have published a great deal of speculative writing on and around the topics of art, value and criticism. Some of this material has been more or less casual, appearing in newspapers and magazines often incidentally to my practice as an artist, and later as an art critic. Much of it has been more formally constructed for academic consideration in lectures, discussions, symposia and putatively learned journals. Most of the ideas animating the present essay have had a public airing somewhere alreadyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;occasionally in the very same wordsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but they have never previously been marshalled into a single coherent story. The suggestion that I should do this came from Stephanie Britton. As Editor of Artlink, she has many times over the years indulged my tendency to think aloud as if everyone within earshot already knew perfectly well what is and what is not transcultural and transhistorical, and what memes are. But this time (so she firmly insisted) it must be comprehensible.

Donald Brook, Adelaide 2008

Contents

1: Introduction

2: Memes

3. New memes and old ones; absolute and relative

4: Biological evolution, cultural evolution and history

5: Only kinds have histories

6: Beauty, revelation and memetic innovation

7: The category of art and the class of works of art

8: Art and the artworld

115

Introduction

In the course of awarding art prizes judges often muse aloud in a way that clearly shows their infirm grasp of what art is. They advertise their ethical position by explaining to people whose grasp (as they evidently suppose) is even less firm that, for example: ‘It is obvious that this portrait is an excellent likeness of the sitter, but that is not our concern. We are required to assess it as art’. Behind this otherwise admirable dedication to the duty of a much-maligned profession there looms a theory about what art is that will be rejected in this essay. It is widely supposed that things are all classifiable under some name or short description, according to their main characteristics. Correctly sorted, every object to which attention can be paid qualifies as a moral exhortation, a map of Tasmania, a custard pie, a pictorial evocation of the horrors of war or … something. There will always be—or at any rate there should always be—an appropriate label to stick on the drawer of the vast imaginary cabinet in which everything has a place. The art appreciator’s proper duty (so it is mistakenly thought) is to

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attend exclusively to those supposedly distinctive characteristics by virtue of which the object under scrutiny is classifiable under the label ‘art.’ There is a closely related misunderstanding. It is assumed that objects classified as art are, by virtue of possessing the qualifying characteristics, entitled to a distinctive sort of admiration and respect—or at least to a show of enthusiasm—to which things classified in other ways are not entitled. It is occasionally claimed that only unusually gifted individuals, or maybe people who have been favourably educated or specially trained, will be able to detect the arthood that is allegedly inherent in some but not all of the candidate objects presented for appraisal that are also classifiable in other ways: for example, as portrait paintings or funerary urns. It is believed by some of the more adventurous spirits in the artworld that passport photographs, remarkably configured deposits of elephant dung and floral bathroom curtains might all qualify as art. In this list, portrait paintings and funerary urns will often be judged to qualify as art sight unseen, just because portrait paintings and funerary urns are recognised art forms or genres. However, most art theorists seem to think that while such genre considerations are often a useful indication of arthood they are not quite sufficient. To qualify as art, so they suppose, some special, often elusive and more or less mystifying condition, must also be satisfied.

1: INTRODUCTION

Consistently with this picture of the situation, it is part of the conventional wisdom that qualified judges will be able to comment authoritatively not only on whether some candidate object is art but also on the amount of admiration that is due to it by virtue of its arthood, as contrasted with the amount of admiration that is due to it by virtue of its being a valid identifying document or a striking natural curiosity or an elegant specimen of domestic soft furnishing. I shall argue that the awful truth about what art is will expose all such speculation as futile, where it is not nonsensical. People would not think or speak in this way if they had not seriously mistaken both the meaning of the word ‘art’ and the meaning of the importantly different expression ‘work of art’. To say this is not to side with barbarians or philistines against any exercise of sensibility or fine discrimination. It is not to deny that the world presents to us things that exceed our verbal classifying power; nor is it to deny that there may be reasons for granting and for withholding admiration that stand on the far edge, or even beyond the reach, of immediate comprehension. My denial that ‘art’ is the name of a mysterious property or quality attributable to some things but not to other things is a plea for common sense only to the extent that the noun ‘sense’ takes precedence over the qualifier ‘common’. In relation to awful truths, it should be noticed that dictionaries equivocate over the meaning of the word ‘awful’.

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They situate very great in contrast with the options of extremely bad or unpleasant; ugly. They then suggest that to be awful is to inspire fear, to be dreadful or terrible, with the alternatives of inspiring reverential awe and being solemnly impressive. This essay comes down positively on the side of reverential awe, but until the argument is fully set out the adjective ‘awful’ in its title should have something for everyone. Many people manage their lives capably enough without ever taking the trouble to look up either ‘truth’ or ‘art’ in a dictionary. Both words slip so easily from the tongue that it seems only a tiresome pedant would do that. Most speakers are confident that other right-minded people should easily be persuadable that their own intuitive take on these words is broadly speaking correct. We recall Humpty Dumpty’s confident boast to Alice: ‘When I use a word it just means what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less’. Most people are fairly sure that they know what art is—and what truth is as well—despite their inability to make a lucid case when the challenge is presented. ‘Art’ in particular has accumulated several popular one-sentence definitions, and many people who are interested in paintings, music, poetry and the like have been encouraged to commit one of them to memory in case they should ever be called to account. Some of these slogans are weird or baffling or downright silly; and because they differ so much that they cannot all be right it

1: INTRODUCTION

follows that none of them has succeeded in putting the rest to flight. Forced by a gun-toting terrorist to choose I might find myself attracted by Joseph Conrad’s suggestion that art is an attempt to render the highest sort of justice to the visible universe. However this is a formula that sets more hares running than it traps, which may explain why it has not become a catch phrase. All the popular one-sentence stories about what art is have attracted the scorn of analytical philosophers and postmodernist theorists, who deride them as ‘essentialist’. The essentialist proprietors of these dogmas, so the enlightened allege, share a delusional conviction that it is possible to isolate a single condition that is satisfied by all of those things that qualify as art, and is satisfied only by those things that qualify as art. Hence—so the essentialists suppose—if something satisfies the essential condition, then there cannot be the slightest doubt that it is art. Some of the essentialist stories are as short as three or four words. For example, ‘art is beauty,’ ‘art is expression,’ ‘art is imitation’ and ‘art is emotional catharsis’. The robust exclusiveness of such formulae, mottos or incantations, is certainly troublesome because the truth of any one of them entails the falsehood of all the rest, despite the fact that some of them have at least a small degree of plausibility and all of them have at one time or another been vigorously promoted. Indeed,

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over the last two or three hundred years one might say that it became the standard opinion that art is identifiable with beauty; or—if not exactly with beauty—then with an elusive sort of beauty called ‘aesthetic value’. Combinations of the notional artistic essences, compressed into such slogans as ‘art is beautiful expressiveness’ or ‘art is cathartic imitation’ have never been acceptable. In the practice of perfume manufacture more than one essence may be allowed; not so in the logic of essentialist theories of art. There is another objection to essentialist claims. Beauty, expression, imitation, catharsis and the rest do not seem to be available to us only in the domain of art. We take many ‘natural’ objects—among which attractive plants and animals are obvious cases—to be beautiful. We take cries of pain to be emotionally expressive. We take electro-convulsive therapy (or anyhow some range of those shocks that can be administered to us either wilfully or accidentally) to be cathartic. It follows that if one of the promoted essences were to be favoured over the others as the key to art it would still not be sufficient when taken alone to distinguish art objects from other things that are also beautiful or expressive or cathartic. It is the essence of essentialism (if one may joke about such high theoretical solemnities) that the essential qualifying condition for art shall be both necessary and sufficient. All art must meet the condition, and only art will qualify.

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A suggestion has often been floated that one or other of the notional essences might be made viable by tightening up its specifications in a certain way. For example, it might be insisted that the essence of art is not simply beauty (or simply expression, or whatever); the essence of art is the distinctive sort of beauty (or expression, or whatever) that is peculiar to art. But

this

manoeuvre

must

fail

because

takes

uninformatively round in a circle. Precisely what sort of beauty can it be, that is peculiar to art? How could we ever learn to recognise this distinctive sort of beauty and to distinguish it from other sorts of beauty unless we were able to find out independently which are the indubitable works of art, so that the sort of beauty that is peculiar to them can be recognised when we stumble upon it in a new context? In spite of the poor credentials of the traditional contenders I shall put up a shortish sentence of my own that has an unfashionably essentialist look about it. It comes at first sight uncomfortably close to the ancient nostrum that art is revelation. In spite of this, I hope to show that there are ways of saving its hide from the lash of the analytical philosophers and the postmodernists. At least one of the more familiar objections to the claim I shall make must fail because, as will shortly emerge, I do not offer it as a way of distinguishing those things that are classifiable as art from those things that are not classifiable as art. Put simply, I shall argue that â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;artâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is not the

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name of a class of objects at all. It is—with elucidation to follow—the name of an abstract category. It would be intolerably teasing to withhold the awful truth until the last section of the essay, as if it had the form of a mystery thriller. I therefore post it here and now; together with a reassurance that I do not expect it to make sense until the arguments have been set out. We must work through the longer account of the awful truth about what art is before the short form is likely to appear not only comprehensible but perhaps even—as it should be—obvious. This is the short form. The word ‘art’ is the appropriate name for the transhistorical

and

transcultural

category

memetic

innovation. One of the inferences to be drawn from this is that the word ‘art’ is not an alternative short name for the class of works of art despite the fact that many people use it as if it were. I apologise for the high level of abstraction, as well as for the inclusion within this formula of a word that is not yet defined in all dictionaries; and also for the distasteful hint that what follows may turn out to be very technical and philosophical. A few technical expressions (such as ‘category,’ ‘class’ and— most importantly—‘kind’) will be carefully explained. They

1: INTRODUCTION

cannot be avoided if we are to ward off the confusions that flow from the ambiguities and unclarities of most ordinary-language conversations about art. To say that the word ‘art’ is the name of a category is to say that it is the name of an entity that does not change from time to time or from place to place. ‘Art’ is the name of something (whatever-it-is!) that was the same a thousand years ago as it is today. In contrast with timeless categories, kinds are changing entities. Moreover they are distinctive among the many different sorts of changing entities in that they change in an evolutionary way, as the mouse and the mulberry tree change. These are examples of biological kinds, and my account of what art is will turn importantly on the contention that biological kinds are not the only kinds that change in an evolutionary way. Cultural kinds such as the battleship and the baseball game are cultural kinds, and they also change in an evolutionary way. I suggest that art is today what it was a thousand years ago, just as invention and creativity are today what they always were. This is so notwithstanding the perpetual novelty of the items of various cultural kinds that are created and invented and from place to place and time to time. One might well have thought that everybody already knew this, but the evidence to the contrary is strong. Curiously, many people seem to be able simultaneously to maintain the contradictory convictions that

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‘art’ is the name of something that does not change and that ‘art’ is also the name of something with a history of quite radical changes; changes that so called ‘art historians’ delight in finding and reporting. This incoherence is part of a tangle of confusion that must be unpicked. Inconspicuously concealed within the short form of my story about art is the conviction—surely in this case widely shared—that art is associated somehow with creativity. It is unfortunate that creativity is one of the words that would have been dear to Humpty Dumpty. My purpose in snatching it away from him and putting its meaning up for public scrutiny should be helped by my substitution of a new and admittedly technical expression in its place. Memetic innovation is a phrase that I hope will be capable of demystifying creativity, without destroying it. More than a few sentences will be needed to throw light in these dark places. First we should notice that memetic is not a mis-spelling of the very different word mimetic. Mimetic is an adjective related to the noun mime, whereas memetic derives from the noun meme, that is something else. A mime is a performance offered in imitation of a performance that has already occurred; a performance that now serves the mimic as exemplary. A meme, on the other hand, is a performance that can certainly be imitated, but it does not necessarily go forward in mimicry of any previously available and exemplary performance. We can speak

1: INTRODUCTION

coherently of an absolutely new meme, as a performance (of a certain sort) occurring for the very first time; a performance without exemplar or precedent. The first employer of an absolutely new meme does not imitate an old meme in the way in which a mime or mimic follows a model. A capacity for mimicry—for performing actions that follow models—is characteristically, although not distinctively, human Successful mimicry is crucial for the participation of an individual in the social life of a community. A quite extraordinary ability to see what can be done, and to understand how and when to do it oneself by imitating what others have already done, distinguishes us from other animals. Cultural perpetuation depends upon this capacity, but cultural evolution also depends upon having a capacity to initiate new memes that, having been made available, can be imitated by others. I shall argue that the concept of art would be idle and would engage with nothing if we were unable both to acquire new memes by mimicry and to initiate new memes without having available to us examples that we can follow. Mimicry is a sustaining component of the engine of cultural evolution—a lubricant for the moving parts—but mimicry alone is insufficient. Without a capacity to innovate our cultural practices would do no more than turn on the spot. Cultural practice requires that there shall be numerous exemplary items of familiar cultural kinds available to us for

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imitation, but it requires as well a capacity sometimes to see for ourselves what can be made or done, and to see how to make it or how to do it, without relying upon any precedent. These introductory remarks are intended only to indicate the way forward. Until very recently the expression ‘memetic innovation’ had no currency at all. The word ‘meme’ on which the idea of memetic innovation relies has begun to appear in the dictionaries only in the last decade or so. We owe its success mainly to the biologist Richard Dawkins who has conducted an impressive campaign of popularisation that has provoked enthusiastic mimicry. My own story about what the meme is and about how it relates to mimicry differs in an important way from the account that Dawkins offers. In the next two sections I shall explain how and why there is a difference between what might be called the standard account (or ‘the Dawkins account’) of the meme, and my own account of it. After this, and with more obvious relevance to the question of what art is, I shall relate the difference between memetic innovation and familiar memetic practices to the old distinction between art and craft; a distinction that underlies much of the material of this essay. In Sections 4 and 5 a case will be made that the evolutionary principles already familiar in biology have a precise parallel in the domain of culture. I shall argue that we can understand the structured way in which cultural kinds

1: INTRODUCTION

change as we understand the structured way in which biological kinds (often called ‘species’) change, just because in both domains the pattern is the same. This pattern is evolutionary. The argument to this conclusion calls for a firm grip on the idea of the kind; and this in turn requires some understanding of how kinds (such as the biological mouse kind and the cultural wedding ceremony kind) differ from other sorts of things (such as heaps of rubbish and classes of wool and types of coins). These distinctions may be unfamiliar but they are not difficult to grasp, and without some clarification it would be fatally easy to lapse into the fog of confusion that characterises most popular conversations about art. I shall argue that ‘art’ is the name of a category, and because categories are unchanging—which is to say that they do not have histories—it follows that art does not have a history. Many people, including those caught in the bind of selfcontradiction, will find this claim so counter-intuitive (‘Just look at all those art history books!’) that a case must be made for a view of history on which it will seem less outrageous. I shall propose, and give reasons for proposing, a radical restriction of the range of stories that will qualify as history stories. Only evolutionary stories about the shaping of kinds are entitled to qualify as history stories. History stories are not merely true—or at least plausible—stories about what has happened. To count as history a story must have a powerfully

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explanatory form. Cultural History, understood to be an evolutionary study of the shaping of cultural kinds, will emerge as a viable discipline, while so called Art History must fail on the straightforward ground that ‘art’ is not the name of a cultural kind and is therefore not the name of an entity with a history. Of course art historians study cultural kinds with histories: Dutch seventeenth century still life painting and Benin bronzes, for example. Their mistake is to suppose that ‘art’ is the appropriate classifying name for these kinds, or that the kinds themselves are items of a more comprehensive kind for which ‘art’ is the appropriate classifying name. It seems likely that this misunderstanding arises in part because individual members of the class of works of art are frequently also items of one or more cultural kinds each of which does have a history. Membership of the class of works of art need not turn at all on the deep question about what art is, and the reasons why this is so will be directly addressed in Sections 7 and 8. It will be made clear that an object may be classified as a work of art beyond dispute, despite the fact that the institution responsible for classifying it in this way—‘the artworld’—has as a matter of fact either the wrong idea about what art is or no coherent idea at all. Many people will be reluctant to believe the awful truth until it suddenly comes to seem obvious, but the fact is

1: INTRODUCTION

that neither the word ‘art’ nor the classifying term ‘work of art’ is the name of a cultural kind with a history. ‘Art’ is the name of the category of memetic innovation and it is the unchanging propellant fuelling the engine of cultural evolution. ‘Work of art’ is the name of a class of objects most of which are incidentally members of one or more of innumerable cultural kinds, each of which has its own history. The classification of candidates for recognition as works of art is an unprincipled— or at best inconsistently principled—activity occurring within a major domain of entertainment called the artworld that—as we shall see—relates itself significantly to the category of art for an interesting reason. It encourages memetic innovation mainly because it provides opportunities for a productive mis-match between what its entertainers intend to make or do and what their audiences discover for themselves, independently of the entertainers’ intentions. But this is all some way ahead. First, we must become clear about what memes are.

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Memes

Summary Richard Dawkins is credited with a leading role in the popularisation of an approach to cultural evolution that draws heavily on the theory of biological evolution. It is a theory in which the meme plays a parallel role to the gene. I offer and defend a different account of the meme from that given by Dawkins. I distinguish between memes that are absolutely new and those that are only relatively so, and explore this distinction further in Section 3.

The word ‘meme’ was conscripted by Professor Richard Dawkins to bring evolutionary theory into the cultural domain in a way that is not merely metaphorical or suggestive but is capable of matching the theory of biological evolution in its explanatory power. Evolutionary theory, conveniently attributed to Charles Darwin, spectacularly underpins the best explanatory stories we can tell about how the kinds of living organisms that are usually referred to as ‘species’ emerged, how they were shaped over time, how they were occasionally transformed almost out of recognition and how they fell into extinction.

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The domain of culture is usually contrasted rather than compared with the domain of nature. Many people readily accept the idea that the natural development of plants and animals follows a pattern that is largely determined by causal factors, with the reservation that the social and cultural development of humans is characterised by irregularities, by the promptings of free will and ambition, by moral precepts and political expediency. Many of those who do not doubt that the evolution of animals and plants can be systematically explained by genetic variation and environmental adaptation are hostile to the suggestion that the term â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;evolutionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; has more than a loose or metaphorical application to the unsystematic changes that are observable in the context of human cultures. Most would probably concur with the suggestion that to speak of democracy as an evolving form of government is to speak metaphorically about it, whereas those biologists who explain to us that the bird is an evolved form of the dinosaur (whether they are right or wrong) are speaking literally. The idea that a cultural kind such as democratic government has evolved in a systematic, orderly and fully explicable way, closely parallel to the way in which a biological species such as the echidna has evolved, is quite new. Approaching the question as a biologist with cultural interests, Richard Dawkins conceived of memes as the fundamental units of cultural evolution, in parallel with the already well-established

2: MEMES

idea of the gene as the fundamental unit of biological evolution. He was incidentally attracted by the rhyme between ‘meme’ and ‘gene’. There are obvious respects in which Dawkins’s memes, conceived as agents with a regular pattern of influence on the course of cultural history, differ from genes conceived as comparably influential entities in the biological domain. Items of cultural kinds, such as the romantic landscape painting or the domestic refrigerator, seem on the face of it quite unlike items of biological kinds such as the fruit fly or the mango, not least in the differences between the ways in which items of these different kinds are generated. The sexual mode of reproduction, normal among most plants and animals, plays only an occasional and quite incidental role in the generation of an oil painting of a stag at bay or of a grandfather clock. To the extent that an item of a cultural kind can be said to have parents at all they must be conceived as metaphorically progenitive. The likeness of cultural offspring to their cultural forebears is attributable to voluntary imitation, not to autonomous self-replication. Although oil paintings can be replicated they do not replicate themselves. Their descendants are more or less freely imitated or pastiched or parodied by those observers who find them seductive. Nevertheless, despite their differences, the biological and the cultural domains can be reconciled. Although its details must differ, an explanatory theory of the way cultural kinds are shaped

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can be constructed in such a way that it precisely matches the structure of the theory that is so persuasively explanatory in the biological domain. Before pressing this claim, however, I must draw attention to the way in which my own account of the meme considered as a functional analogue of the gene differs from accounts of the meme that are typically given by Richard Dawkins and other prominent theorists. I suggest that my account is not only more coherent than the more familiar accounts; it has the advantage that it offers a key to answering the old and seemingly intractable question about what art is. Theorists differ in the stories they tell about the meme, but they share a motive for telling them. All of them intend to construct an evolutionary account of cultural change in which the meme parallels the gene as the fundamental unit of transmission. My own account of the meme is motivated in the same way. The challenge is to explain why and how cultural kinds such as the television set, the daily newspaper and the birthday party, persist over time and also how and why these kinds change in ways that are, in retrospect, fully explicable. A satisfactory explanation of the persistence of cultural kinds and also of their mutability, must rely on at least one factor or concept that is foundational, just as it is with biological kinds. The deep question is this: can the pattern of persistence and change that we actually observe in the cultural domain be conceived as evolutionary in the same sense窶馬ot in some

2: MEMES

metaphorical or suggestively parallel sense—as the sense in which the pattern of persistence and change in the biological domain is conceived as evolutionary? I take the Darwinian account of persistence and change as it is observed in all of the biological kinds to be nowadays the conventional wisdom. It cannot, of course, be claimed as the universal wisdom, but it would exceed the scope of this essay to engage with those determined anti-evolutionists who seek to account in some other way for such plain facts as the ability of the head louse to adapt itself to survival in the face of successive onslaughts of medication. A sustained rebuttal of explanatory principles such as divine benevolence or intelligent design would intolerably postpone the development of an evolutionary story about the place of art in cultural evolution. The moderately faithful replication of similar items of a given kind, ensuring that this kind persists, is attributed in basic evolutionary theory to self-replicating genes. The mutability of a biological kind is attributed partly to genetic variations—that is to say, to the slightly imperfect replication of the genes—and partly to a survival factor or ‘adaptation’ determined by the unpredictable variability of those environmental contexts into which successive and more or less different items of a kind find themselves projected. Hostile environments reduce the frequency and success with which some individuals are able to reproduce themselves, while variant individuals fare better. The perpetuation

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of a species that remains recognisably distinct depends upon the extent to which those successively generated items of this kind that are still significantly similar to their parents are able to survive adversities of context, and continue breeding. Mutability depends upon the extent to which successive items of a kind differ from their parents and these differences turn out to have a crucial effect on their individual survival and to be genetically transmissible. The persistence and the mutability of biological kinds are fully comprehended within the theory of biological evolution. We seek to account, in a way that is not merely suggestively similar but is identical in structure, for the persistence and for the mutability of cultural kinds. If we are to offer such an account our first step must be to assign a name to the entity that is to play the same role in a theory of cultural evolution as the notional ‘gene’ plays in biological theory. The name ‘meme’—or indeed any name at all—can be arbitrarily assigned to this entity, but naming it does not give it substance or credibility. The meme must be more than a merely fanciful entity if we are to develop a theory in which memetic reproduction plays the same role in cultural evolution as genetic replication plays in the evolution of species. The rhyme between ‘meme’ and ‘gene’ is felicitous but it does nothing to support the case that memes are real. It does little to suggest any of the characteristics that might help us to recognise a meme, should we stumble upon one. Clearly, the word ‘meme’

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etymologically associates the entity it prospectively names with memory. It also suggests some association with those mimetic performances by virtue of which we are able to generate items of cultural kinds resembling items that have already been generated by other people. We watch somebody cook an unfamiliar dish, or use an unfamiliar word, and find that we can then do the same ourselves with similar results. It is a barely contestable fact that we acquire most of our social and cultural skills by imitation, and that we are able to remember the skills that we have acquired so that we are able in the appropriate contexts to generate recognisable items of any of the cultural kinds that fall within our repertoire. We may have long forgotten their sources, but it will nevertheless always be true that we imitate observed performances from the past whenever we apply for a passport or send a birthday greeting or make a poached egg on toast. Lecturers on memetics often carry their audiences with them to this point without winning unqualified consent to the strong thesis that poached eggs are memetically generated in a significantly parallel way to that in which chickens are genetically generated. Scepticism is rife. ‘That’s all very well,’ the doubters cry, ‘but show us a meme!’ It would be taken as culpably evasive to point out to them that they accept the theory of biological evolution readily enough without ever having been shown a gene. My objection to the accounts of the meme that are ritually offered by Dawkins and others emerges precisely at the point where

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listeners demand examples. It is not that the popular meme-theorists are unwilling to respond to requests for a concrete illustration. On the contrary, they are ready and eager with examples; but unfortunately those that are routinely offered share a typical disqualifying flaw. Doubters are invited to contemplate such supposedly exemplary memes as the popular song, the catch phrase or the traffic signal. We are assured that these things are the cultural entities that are most often and easily imitated, replicated or duplicated. This—so the theorists tell us—explains why they should be regarded as the fundamental units of cultural transmission. But to speak in this way about memes is not just to speak carelessly. A fundamental mistake is made, conflating the items of a kind with the kind itself. Items of a kind—for example a particular popular song or a particular catchphrase—are certainly copied or reproduced by imitators, but the kind itself is not copied or reproduced or imitated. The kind is an abstract entity that changes in an evolutionary way, while the items of a kind that are copied or imitated are most certainly not things that change in an evolutionary way. The items of a kind may well endure vicissitudes of various sorts, but these vicissitudes do not impose an evolutionary pattern on the way an item changes over time. A kind—contrasted in the strongest possible way with its own items—is shaped in an evolutionary way in part because its items are copied, reproduced or imitated. The fact that the memetic imitation of an item of a certain kind is not always exact

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reinforces the analogy with the replication of genes, which also do not replicate perfectly. It does not cross the minds of biologists to explain the theory of biological evolution to doubters by offering a biological kind such as the elephant as an exemplary gene by virtue of which (according to their theory) the elephant kind is perpetuated. Nor would they ever suggest that an item of the elephant kind—a particular elephant—is the fundamental unit of elephant evolution. The fundamental unit of biological transmission for the elephant is the elephant genome or, in the handy simplification of ordinary language, ‘the elephant gene’. The fundamental unit of biological transmission for this species is neither an elephant nor is it the elephant. The participants in a culture are recognised as such primarily by virtue of the fact that they find themselves attracted by, and have an ability to imitate, the concrete instances of particular tunes and phrases and practical devices that they find attractive. It is also true—indeed it is a tautology—that the most popular songs and catch-phrases and signalling devices are those that turn out to be most attractive to the largest audience of imitators. The imitative reproduction of popular items of cultural kinds has an important social function. It contributes to the bonding of communities, to the consolidation of forms and modes of communication and to the establishment and maintenance of all manner of personal and public relationships and practices.

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To say this is not at all to say that the popular song—or even a particular popular song such as Lili Marlene—is an exemplary meme. It is the imitatively acquired ability to generate, on demand, an item of this kind that is an exemplary meme. More strictly speaking, such abilities normally require not just the exercise of one meme but a complex orchestration of a great many contributory memes. Those theorists of cultural evolution who confuse themselves and others over the fundamental differences between a meme, an item of a cultural kind and the cultural kind that is constituted of similar items will be unable to develop a consistent and lucid parallel between the theoretical role of the meme and that of the gene. Such confusion should not be generously overlooked, as if it were only a muddled way of articulating the parallel truisms that elephants beget elephants just as television soapies beget repeats and plagiarists. It should on the contrary be clearly exposed, and ridiculed as nonsense. Whatever a gene may be we shall certainly find that it is neither a biological species nor is it a particular animal or vegetable. In fact, biological kinds—species and their varieties—are countable among what philosophers call nonparticulars, thus contrasting them explicitly with the particular items of which they are constituted. Biological kinds are said to evolve just because certain genes or orchestrated combinations of genes, appropriately characterised as the fundamental units of biological transmission, provide the

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processing and bodybuilding information by virtue of which items of distinct biological kinds are generated. Biological kinds have histories that are in principle discoverable; no matter how difficult the task may be in practice nor how vehemently historical accounts may be contested. The history of a biological kind is a comprehensive account of how, when, where and why the interplay between the process of bodybuilding initiated by the genes, abetted by often unpredictable processes of environmental adaptation, shapes this kind from its emergence to its extinction. In search of theoretical parity in the cultural domain we must find a strictly comparable way of elucidating memes as the fundamentally generative source of items of distinctive cultural kinds. It must be obvious that no single gene can be held responsible for the generation of an entire item of a biological kind, such as an elephant, and it has already been remarked that a characterisation of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the geneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; as the fundamental unit of biological transmission simplifies and compresses a great deal of intricate thought. It is a simplification about which those biologists who work at the frontiers of genetic engineering are often critical despite the fact that they continue to find it useful in a heuristic way. Genes in considerable numbers determine actual biological outcomes in an extremely complex dance, and their influence is powerfully orchestrated in ways that are by no means fully understood. It is therefore reasonable to expect that in the

THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT WHAT ART IS

cultural domain there will be a comparably elliptical sense in which the generative power of memes must rely on their coordination with many others in the generation of items of complex cultural kinds. Just as no single gene can be held responsible for an elephant, no single meme can be held responsible for a gothic cathedral or an Elizabethan five-act play. Some of these embedded complexities may only be interesting at the microscopic level of theoretical scrutiny. At the macroscopic level of ordinary conversation it will be simpler, and not greatly misleading, to discuss an extremely primitive cultural kind; a kind so simple that we might almost attribute the generation of its characteristic items to the exercise of a single meme. I offer the cultural kind that we call the greeting by handraising. However, before developing this example in detail it may be appropriate to propose a very general account of the meme; in part to summarise what has already been said and in part to indicate the direction in which the argument will move. A definition of the term â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;memeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; might go like this. A meme is a purposeful action undertaken in a recognised cultural context. It is an action or an orchestrated combination of actions such that under the circumstances in which it is performed it can reasonably be expected by the performer (as well as by other cultural participants) to generate an item of a cultural kind that is anticipated by the meme-user.

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That is to say, the action goes forward in a context of regularities that are sufficiently well understood for the consequences to be regular, and broadly predictable. This formula does not have the rigidity of a law of physics. Not all of the relevant universal regularities—not even all of those local regularities with some bearing on success of memetic performances—will be known to memeusers. Disappointments and failures of many kinds are to be expected, and they will be attributable to many causes. Nevertheless, if it were not that memes are very often successfully deployed there would be, and indeed there could be, no significant cultural life. It is important to stress that memes are to be conceived in concrete terms as real existents. They are identifiably distinct actions, undertaken in definite contexts by cultural participants. They are not to be confused with mere behaviours, in the narrow sense of the word ‘behaviour’ that is occasionally invoked by psychologists. Behaviours in the narrow sense are activities that supposedly respond to causes in a mechanical way, and they are in principle if not in practice as predictable as clockwork. They are theorised as responses to stimuli, which is to say, as responses to ambient forces and circumstance in a manner akin to the way in which impelled billiard balls are reflected from cushions. Contrastingly, we take actions to be shaped by goals that are envisaged by performers in advance of realisation and

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continuously modified in the course of performance. Goaldriven actions can be said to be foolish or misconceived or unsuccessful in ways in which causally propelled behaviours do not attract any of these epithets. Participants in a culture are able to identify a vast range of the physical and social situations in which they move, such as the context in which they recognise that if they raise a hand in the air, right now, a vote will be generated. To spell out the point: an exerciser of the ‘voting-by-handraising meme’ has a reasonable expectation that a publicly recognisable item of the vote kind will be generated by raising a hand. In a different context a superficially similar raising of a hand may generate an item not of the vote kind but of the hail kind to which a taxi driver will respond, or perhaps an item of a greeting kind that friends will recognise. It is possible, when raising a hand, to intend to generate a greeting that a friend who has been seen across the road will acknowledge. It is possible to fail to generate a greeting because the subject was not looking, but nevertheless apparently to succeed in generating a hail to which a passing taxi responds. The criterion of outcome—the way an item of a cultural kind is identified by onlookers independently of what was intended by the meme-user— may be persuasive. It is nevertheless not decisive in settling a dispute about which meme was actually exercised by a performer. A dispute over whether a taxi has been hailed by a meme-user who

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failed to generate a greeting with a friend may be hard to resolve in the course of a street altercation, but the question of which meme was exercised is determined by the user’s intention. It has already been pointed out that memes are not identical with the items of cultural kinds that they are instrumental in generating, just as genes are not identical with the items of biological kinds that they are instrumental in generating. As prolific meme-using cultural participants we are all wonderfully adept at putting a restricted range of movements, shaped as they are by what is physically and anatomically possible and convenient, to a range of different purposes. If the cultural lives of fish include the deployment of acquired greeting memes—which is unlikely but no doubt possible—the meme of greeting-by-handraising will certainly not be one of them. Moreover, the superficially observable bodily movements that contribute to the success or failure of memetically driven performances are only part of the action. If bystanders were able to monitor the internal bodily and mental processes that go forward when a meme is exercised, including the performers’ ongoing perceptual feedback as the action unfolds, then different memes with similar visible aspects would be more easily differentiated. In practice we are not able to observe significant parts of what goes on internally when a meme is exercised, and this can easily lead to misunderstanding and disagreement. Nevertheless,

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exercises of different memes are in principle distinguishable in objective ways. The temptation to theorise that the voting-byhandraising meme differs from the greeting by hand-raising meme only in some elusively non-physical way must be resisted. It is occasionally suggested that the generation of items of different cultural kinds with a superficially similar appearance, such as a vote and a greeting, should be explained in terms of the same action being performed in both cases, although â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;under a different concept,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; as if the ongoing bodily processes were identical. This is seriously wrong. Neither the action of generating a vote-by-handraising nor the action of generating a greeting-byhandraising is merely a matter of raising a hand. To exercise the one meme or the other is not to do the same thing in both cases but to do it somehow in one or other of a pair of parallel, nonphysical, mental or conceptual worlds. It is to do either one thing or to do the other thing, in one and the same material and social world. So, to summarise the story about memes to this point: they are purposefully directed actions with broadly predictable outcomes, intentionally undertaken in recognised cultural contexts. Every exercise of a meme is an action purposefully directed toward the generation of an item of a cultural kind that can reasonably be expected to win public recognition. The expectation of meme-users that their actions will generate items of reasonably predictable kinds is based on their familiarity with

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precedents. Inevitably, inductive inferences to the future are fallible, and memetic actions are vulnerable in a great many ways. The context of the action may have been misjudged by the performer; the items that are generated may be unexpectedly interpreted by their audience. The possibility of some intervening contingency or accident may be overlooked, or it may have lurked outside the range of reasonable expectation. A polite greeting of the kind that is commonly generated by lifting oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hat may be ruined or turned into comedy by a gust of wind, no matter how accomplished the performer. Not all action is memetic, or related in any way to the generation of items of cultural kinds despite the fact that they are imitatively acquired. Many young animals, including humans, learn from their parents how to do things that are without cultural relevance, such as how to fly or to fight or hunt, or what to eat. Innumerable actions can be purposefully performed, although not with the intention of generating an item of a cultural kind. They serve only an individual interest or advantage, and while they may have considerable biological significance they have no cultural role. For present purposes it should not be necessary to spell out all of the sorts of difference between the situations of an animal that is taught what to eat by its parents and a child who is taught how to boil an egg, and how to use a knife and fork. The inappropriateness of treating all purposeful and imitatively acquired actions as memetic mirrors our reluctance to

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conceive of life in general and of human life in particular as an essentially cultural enterprise. Bridging the conceptual gap between ‘instinctive’ or genetically inherited activities and the cultural domain we make use of the intermediate concept of the social animal. This manoeuvre places the radically solitary organism at one end of a broad spectrum of cases, progressing unevenly through such social organisations as those of the ants and bees toward the indubitable cultures of the higher apes, cetaceans, and finally our human selves. However complex these distinctions may be, the differences between a spider’s interesting way with a fly and our own participation in a dinner party must begin at some point to draw upon the concept of the meme. The elucidation of this point with absolute precision exceeds both the purpose and the ambition of this essay. The contexts in which memes are exercised are often more complex and extended than their users are able to fully recognise and to monitor continuously by sensory perception. We must invoke, often below the level of immediate consciousness, not only what is presently visible and audible to us but also our recollections of what has previously taken place; of what may therefore be expected to happen and of what, under the circumstances, is likely to qualify as appropriate action. Huge resources of memory and experience will often be drawn upon when memes are exercised. Whether an insult or a compliment has been generated by uttering a certain form of words may

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depend more heavily upon circumstances that are historically and temporally remote—as well as inferential—than it depends upon anything that is plainly visible or audible to a casual bystander. The idea of memetic action assumes the context of a universe that is on the whole regularly ordered, notwithstanding that its regularities may be so complex and so imperfectly grasped that it is difficult for cultural participants to anticipate the consequences of their actions with precision. Meme-users will often be unable to give comprehensive and principled accounts of the expectations that inform their actions. Whether outcomes are or are not predictable in principle, they are certainly not reliably predictable in practice. As it happens—and we should count this a felicity—the imprecision of our expectations is exploitable in a positive way in the cultural domain. For example, we offer up ironies and ambivalences that rely for their buoyancy upon the ocean of uncertainty on which they float. Happily also, there is dry land on which we are able to deploy the more familiar memes that we have acquired with a very high level of confidence. If we raise a hand in a public meeting when the chairperson says ‘Those in favour …?’ we shall normally succeed in generating an item of the voting kind with very little likelihood of provoking a dispute with a taxi driver. Every cultural participant acquires by maturity an enormous repertoire of memes, along with a capacity to orchestrate them both simultaneously and sequentially that should

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be astonishing. Memetic skills are at their most impressive when items of such intricate cultural kinds as extended utterances of speech or writing are continuously constructed, as well as in the performance of a symphony or in the public enactment of a passage of parliamentary legislation. I have already remarked that the human capacity for acquiring and exploiting memes exceeds that of all other presently known animals. Linguistic competence is often cited as the significantly differentiating factor between ourselves and other animal communities in which memetically shaped cultures can to some extent be distinguished from those social formations that are sustained by purely genetic means. However, this is not to say that our memetic abilities are constructed upon a linguistic base. The contrary hypothesis is far more plausible. Indeed, it is hard to see how any account of the emergence of language can be persuasively told except in terms of the developing memetic competences that must in principle have preceded those linguistic cultural kinds that could not otherwise have evolved.

New memes and old ones; absolute and relative

Summary Some distinctions are teased out that will have important relevance to the concept of art; especially the notion of absolute novelty, that I identify as the engine of cultural evolution and identify with art. I argue that the appreciation of works of art (like the appreciation of other things) is heavily intentionalistic. That is to say, they are appreciated as exercises of skill or craft rather than as the open sites of memetic innovation that is the significant basis of our interest in them.

Things are often characterised as new in ways that should not, on the face of it carry great weight of judgement. It is unfortunate that ‘new’ is so often translated as ‘novel,’ an epithet applied as if it were universally understood to signify disparagement. When the artworld began, in the twentieth century, to make a radical break with customary ideas and practices many critics chose to damn much of the new work by characterising it as ‘novelty art’. If we are to assess the significance of new memes in an open-minded way it will be

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important not to bring this prejudice to the task. The attribution of novelty to a cultural item is not in principle an ascription of praise or of blame. Old memes, already familiar to a community of users, have an indispensible place in social life. They are freely imitated by children and other initiates. Some memes with at first only a limited range of familiarity may spread so rapidly that there is an inclination to speak of them as new memes in a more radical sense than they deserve. We should think of them rather, from the point of view of the expanding community of users, as relatively new. All acquirers of a meme that is already familiar to others may be inclined to think of it as altogether new, but because it has been imitatively acquired they must concede that this is only subjectively the case. In the broader social understanding it must be a familiar meme, albeit perhaps a relatively new one. Many of the emerging memes associated with new technologies are welcomed as subjectively new by their grateful acquirers despite the fact that they have already been in public use for some time. Every acquirer of a meme, whether it is acquired by imitation or by revelation, embraces the subjective novelty at the moment of acquisition, whether the new power of action that is conferred is regarded as profound or trivial. Most of the revelations of everyday life, whether or not they flow from an eye-opening example, are minor and quite unlike the legendary epiphany on the road to Damascus. They

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are innumerable, and ongoing. We might wish to say that every new acquisition of a meme, whether or not it follows a precedent, is an epiphany of sorts; although with the qualification that what is revealed can usually be expected to change our lives only minimally. Nevertheless our lives are changed with every meme that we acquire, for each one opens up a prospect of purposeful action within the cultural context that we had not known to be available. In the appropriate circumstances the acquirer of a new meme becomes able to make or to do in a regular and purposeful way something that had not previously been possible. The person who becomes aware that a certain intervention in the world will yield up, with predictable reliability, a brandy sour or a clerihew has no doubt experienced only a small epiphany. Moreover, each revelation may be only a minor contributor to actions that involve a complex orchestration of other memes that are already familiar. Incidentally, we should notice that effective memes might be acquired in the absence of any descriptive language that would enable us to speak about them. The command of an appropriate descriptive and classificatory language will emergeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;if it does emergeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;in the interlocking acquisition of distinctively linguistic memes. The acquisition of an ability to generate items of a new cultural kind such as a form of greeting in which knuckles are touched may occur in a context in which no suitable name is yet

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available. The invention of a structured language well adjusted to our practical activities is a subtle process of memeacquisition. It raises problems with which the appreciators of works of art often wrestle inconclusively for reasons that are obvious enough to artists and art appreciators, who find that certain forms or images are regularly influential upon perceivers in ways for which they cannot find the words. Beyond the subjective newness of every meme to its acquirer there is always the much stronger sense of ‘new’ as this term applies to absolute memetic innovation. No potential user can acquire an absolutely new meme by imitation, for the idea is incoherent. An absolutely new meme is in principle new not only to its first acquirer but to everyone, everywhere, at whatever time. If another user exists then the meme is already old, or only relatively new. A case might be made out for reserving the expression ‘revelation’ to those instances in which absolutely new memes are acquired, were it not for two considerations. One is the strength of the occasional impulse to describe imitable actions easily performed by others as revelatory; as when we are shown in a formula exactly how to relate mass to energy and the speed of light, or we are shown in a picture how to induce a hitherto unfamiliar mood of compassion. The other is that we may stumble upon an absolutely new meme in the course of observing the consequences of a familiar and perhaps exemplary memetic action.

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The paradoxical flavour of this remark can easily be resolved. Here are the critical questions. Is the cultural kind that seems to be recognised by a spectator an item of the kind to which the performer intended that it should belong, or is it an item of some other kind? Might the performer’s action be interpreted quite viably as if an altogether different meme had been enlisted; a meme that the performer did not envisage and that might not even have been within the performer’s repertoire? Could such a meme be without precedent? Whether an exercised meme is interpreted ‘correctly’ (as we might put it, bearing in mind the user’s intention) or ‘mistakenly’ (but nevertheless viably) it may present itself as subjectively new to its spectator. It may be an absolutely new meme in the acquirer’s usage. It is possible that nobody ever intendedly made an item of the variant cultural kind that has now become available. A classic example of this sort often quoted in the literature of creativity is that of the microwave-cooking device. This is a cultural kind that allegedly sprang in a revelatory way into the consciousness of an experimenter whose intentional action was related strictly to improving the efficiency of the magnetron that powered radar during the Second World War. He noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had melted. Thus a new meme—a meme with a claim to absolute novelty—became available. By now everyone knows how to cook food with microwaves.

THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT WHAT ART IS

Epiphanies of this accidental, incidental or inadvertent sort will be given due prominence shortly, when the practices of the artworld are more closely scrutinised. An explanation is long overdue of why it is that artists speak so enthusiastically not only about discovering felicities in the works of others that their authors had not intended, but also about the way they sometimes surprise themselves with what they have done. New memes, whether they are absolutely or only relatively or subjectively new, may fail to recruit a cohort of enthusiastic imitators for a great variety of reasons. There is a strong parallel here with the biological domain. Genetic variations and abnormalities may turn out to have a bare viability such that although they may persist, items of the kinds that are generated do not turn out to shape the kind of which they are the items in a significant way. Alternatively, the consequences may be dramatic. In the cultural domain of the artworld, students of painting often discover incidentally to some more optimistic purpose that mixing all three primaries on their palette yields a muddy colour that is of little or no practical use. Here is a dud revelation; a familiar meme with almost no cultural viability. Contrastingly, the more felicitous meme of mixing blue and yellow pigments to generate a useful range of greens is always joyfully accepted, whether it has been acquired by accident or imitatively from some exemplary demonstration.

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New memes may fail to incite enthusiastic mimicry, not only for reasons of practical utility but also in response to a much broader set of considerations that resonate within a culture. A new meme may be easily and reliably imitable but morally abhorrent or disgusting, or politically intolerable, or illegal. In this respect the factors most powerfully shaping the evolution of a cultural kind differ from those environmental considerations that shape the evolution of a biological kind. No moral, political, religious or ethical climates into which their genes projected variant items of the avian kind in the Galapagos Islands influenced the shaping of the species. A biological historian would not be called upon to take account of such considerations when telling the story of the finch as a cultural historian must take account of them when constructing the story of a cultural kind such as the Cretan blood feud. The acquisition of absolutely new memes cannot be counted in any way an exercise of skill. Epiphanies are not more or less well-performed actions, at which their users can improve with practice. Only when memes have been acquired and their regular efficacy acknowledged are we able to speak intelligibly of their more or less skilful deployment. Once acquired, most memes will be exploitable by their users with degrees of accomplishment that will invite intentionalistic appraisal and judgment. To say this is to say that observers of memetic performances will often be able to estimate, with

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some prospect of reaching agreement, what was intended by the meme-user as well as—somewhat differently—what are the merits of the item that has been generated. The ratio of intention to result has often been touted as the principle of intentionalistic criticism. Those who intend to write a job application or to make a cup of coffee will usually find themselves eligible for more or less applause based upon publicly acknowledged and rationally arguable grounds. Contrastingly, those who say something amusing by accident earn only the different sort of praise that it is heaped upon lottery winners. Because it is not easy to be sure on all occasions what meme has been exercised—a problem that is acute in the case of cultural items generated by dead or absent meme-users—there are often differences of critical opinion that cannot easily be resolved. The very open and unstructured field of discourse that surrounds many cultural activities does not always favour intentionalistic modes of appraisal. Is the vase of deadly nightshade that has been carefully placed on a grave some child’s misguided tribute to the departed soul, or is it a sophisticated adult’s malediction? Should we therefore respond to it as inscrutable, or as funny, or as deplorable? Is a book that has been left on one’s desk by a departed visitor an item of the cultural kind that we should welcome as a gift, or is it a loan? Is it perhaps a tactful hint about some remediable defect in one’s education? Perhaps it is not a

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memetically-generated item of a cultural kind at all. It may amount to no more than the visible and tangible evidence of some accident or oversight. Already, in the difference between the revelatory acquisition of a new meme and the more or less adroit exploitation of an old one, we may begin to find a reason for the popular and ancient distinction between art and craft. The skilful deployment of familiar memes generates items of cultural kinds in a manner that is perfectible with practice, but art (as everybody knows) is somehow more elusive than craft. Art is surprising. It is unpredictable and unresponsive to solicitation and to external discipline. It cannot be summoned up and commanded as exercises of skill can be initiated at will, and shaped responsively to requirements. We might reasonably treat the poem as a very broad cultural kind (analogous to the marsupial as a very broad biological kind). If we do so, then those who compose poems can be said to practise a craft that is familiar, and to a certain extent perfectible with practice. Their performances, however, are not straightforwardly responsive to criticism of the intentionalistic sort. Poets are subject to frustrations that have nothing to do with specifiable intentions that they can clearly state, or with

their

purposeful

compliance

with

publicly

acknowledged standard. Poets are driven by vague desires and intuitions that they can neither describe nor turn in a

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purposeful way into concrete items of the poem kind. Their hopes, and the related public expectations of what they do, are quite different from those that typically modulate the performances of tennis players and cabinetmakers. When they fail, they are likely to fail in ways that make it inappropriate to suggest to them that they should seek advice from coaches, or that they should work harder at perfecting their ears for internal rhyme. Their problem—as they may be inclined to put it to themselves—is that while they know as well as anyone knows how to make what will count as a poem, there is a clear sense in which they do not know any reliable way of summoning art into an intimate relationship with the poems that they are making. They think that they sometimes know when art is manifest in what they have made—although this will usually be uncertain—but they do not know precisely how it came to be there, or how to repeat the felicity, whether by prayer or by fasting or in any other way. I shall argue that this universally acknowledged elusiveness of art presents a problem for us only because the very idea of what art is has been grossly misconceived; especially so in relation to the so-called ‘work of art’ that seems, because it is so explicitly named, to be foolproof. And then, more positively, I shall argue that this misconception can be remedied.

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It is not only those who claim for themselves or who willingly accept the title ‘artist’ who are troubled by uncertainty about why it is that art seems to be not merely difficult to make but, in the strictest sense, impossible to make. Whoever supposes that ‘art’ is the name of a cultural kind of which items can be purposefully made by exercising the appropriate memes has got hold of the wrong end of the stick. ‘Art’ is not the name of a cultural kind of which items can be generated by exercising some notional art-generating meme or memes. Contrastingly such names as ‘sonnet,’ ‘landscape painting,’ ‘computer’ and ‘tax return’ are the names of cultural kinds and items of these kinds can be more or less well made by every cultural participant who has acquired the appropriate memes. Some general appreciation of what is going forward when items of a familiar cultural kind are under review is also usually available to those of us who have not as a matter fact acquired every skill that would be needed to generate—for example—a computer, or even a plausible landscape painting. Cultural engagement accommodates many degrees and sorts of ‘knowing how.’ So far so good; but more spadework must be done before the issues that have been raised can be fully elucidated.

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4: Biological evolution, cultural evolution and history

Summary The evolutionary pattern of persistence and change in the biological domain is the same as it is in the cultural domain. Art historians are criticised, for their conviction that art, which they mistakenly take to be the name of a class of objects, is historically shaped by a dynamic that is not evolutionary and is properly understood only by those who apply a putative ‘art historical method’. The practices of cultural historians display, either explicitly or implicitly, a far better grasp of the fact that cultural change is evolutionary in character.

Although Darwin himself only used the word ‘evolution’ once, at the end of The Origin of Species, it is indelibly associated with the process that he referred to as ‘descent with modification’. It is, however, often nowadays used in cultural contexts in a careless way, as an alternative to ‘change.’ Many writers also convey a thoroughly un-Darwinian suggestion that only change for the better should count as evolutionary. Alternatively, when it is obvious that certain matters have

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gone from bad to worse, attention is drawn to an ‘evolutionary’ increase in the sheer complexity or the sophistication of cultural items. The cluster bomb and the derivative

investment

instrument

are

characterised

evolutionary, as if a contrastingly progressive simplification— a reduction in the legally permissible forms of torture, for example—would not qualify as evolutionary. Historians have been slow to accommodate the genuinely evolutionary ideas of imitative reproduction, of memetic variation and of contextual adaptation, within their theoretical frame. Putative histories of entities such as cities or football clubs or official ceremonies tend to be narratives in which the maximum drama is extracted from freakish incidents and from the exertions of celebrated individuals. Notable participants in the story are situated as heroes or villains, engaging with a confusion of economic, political and religious forces that are conceived as analogous in their coercive power to such forces as gravity or magnetism, except that their role is usually to be overcome. The cultural historian’s work is not assessed as the probity of the work of the biological zoological historian is assessed, in terms of its consistency with an articulate theory of evolution. This must be disappointing when we come to see that a theory of cultural evolution that matches the theory of biological evolution in its universal structure and in its

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explanatory power can be set out without any sacrifice of dramatic interest. Nevertheless, although its significance is not given theoretical weight, the persistence of cultural kinds does seem to be taken for granted, as if it required no explanation. Possibly this is so because the explanation of persistence is in one way so obvious that nobody supposes it to be worth mentioning. ‘Of course,’ we might say ‘bright ideas, better washing machines and and heart-warming songs are widely appreciated, and this is the reason why they are copied, imitated and plagiarised ad nauseam’. Of course: but it would seem odd to suggest that historians should not take the trouble to theorise conspicuously neglected aspects of their own methodology. Answers to questions about how and why it was that some relatively consistent set of memetically generated items came to solicit imitative responses generation after generation must be as informative as the answers to comparable questions about biological persistence. There are differences between the biological and the cultural domains, some of them by no means trivial. The most striking differences obviously relate to dissimilarities between the material contexts in which organisms find their adaptive niches and the context of ideas, preferences, opinions and competing interests within which items of cultural kinds compete for survival. Unlike memes, genes are not actions and they cannot be understood in the terms of purposeful

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deployment by an intelligence endowed with those expectations about the future that characterises cultural participants. The replication of genes is regularly effective in the appropriate biochemical contexts, but it is not far-sighted. We might say that genes do what we expect of them within the limits of our grasp of the universal regularities, but we cannot sayâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;except in the cultural domain of genetic engineeringâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;that genes are enlisted or guided in an instrumental way by an intelligence that takes note of their progress and modifies its tactics responsively to perceptual feedback. Feedback there must be in biochemical contexts, but not perceptual feedback to a purposefully engaged performer. The ideas of purposefulness, anticipation, expectation and prediction all raise deep questions about the nature of perception and consciousness. A postponement of the rest of this essay until they are solved would put an answer to the question about what art is out of present reach. To make reasonable progress here and now two suppositions must be made. One is that (putting genetic engineers, who are cultural performers, aside) there are no users of genes with a theoretical role comparable to our own role as users of memes. The other is that this consideration should not persuade us that cultural kinds cannot be said to evolve. We should prefer to say that the factors that are most influential upon the adaptive processes in the two cases are different.

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As for common factors: the most salient are easily summarised. Active genes fairly reliably generate similar items of some predictable biological kind, just as activated memes fairly reliably generate similar items of some predictable cultural kind. Simultaneously, and importantly from an evolutionary point of view, the unreliability of genetic replication will ensure that variant items of each biological kind will become available just as the unreliability of memetic imitation ensures that variant items of each cultural kind are presented for adoption or rejection. The significant factors affecting the fortunes of new and variant memes are not, by and large, the factors of climate, vegetation and the availability of food, although such considerations may occasionally be important and sometimes crucial. New and variant memes project their generated items into contexts in which they encounter moral, religious, commercial and other modes of approval and disapproval. They may face proscription and suppression up to and including legal sanctions and suppression by force. Contrastingly, the ideological reasons and tasteful preferences of individual participants and their fellow creatures in purely biological epics of survival will not usually be prominent and of interest to Darwinian historians except in relation to the vicissitudes of a few species notably including our own, with well-developed cultural lives.

THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT WHAT ART IS

It would not be true to say that cultural historians have an entirely different set of interests from those that animate biological historians. There are areas of overlap, and they may be dramatic. The effects of global warming will certainly command the attention of both sorts of historians, and our biological history will continue to include, as it has in the past, significant references to the cultural factors that influence our methods of food production and distribution and our public health practices. Cultural and biological modes of evolution are to some extent entwined, but this is not to say that either is reducible to the other. In particular, it is not to say that cultural evolution is no more than a local aspect or component of biological evolution. In terms of the comparability of the two domains, it is worth mentioning that a problem already partially solved within the theory of biological evolution still awaits a solution in the cultural parallel. This is the broad problem of establishing a plausible taxonomy of kinds that I shall not try to solve in this essay, although it would be derelict not to point it out. How many sorts of cultural kinds are there? How do these sorts of kinds stack, or nest, in relation one to another? Should military salutes be considered itemsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;perhaps variantsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;of the same cultural kind as greetings by handraising, or did they have a different origin? Such questions are problematic in much the same way as questions about the relation between mammals in

4: BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION, CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND HISTORY

general, the great apes and ourselves. In the biological sciences many of these issues have been resolved with more or less success through the taxonomy of phylum, class, order, family, genus, species and variety. There can be no doubt that a fully articulated theory of cultural evolution must develop some comparably hierarchical way of stacking cultural kinds if it is to accommodate the sorts and ranges of distinctions that we shall need to make. In spite of this, and with the reservation that it amounts only to a preliminary move toward a workable theory, the expression ‘cultural kind’ will have to serve as a holdall expression equivalent to the biological term ‘species,’ that functions well enough in all the preliminary drafts or outlines of a theory of biological evolution. Biologists have committed themselves massively to evolutionary theory because the demand for an explanation both of persistence and of change is so manifestly reasonable, because the theory is powerfully explanatory of what we can see for ourselves, and because (so far as we can tell) it is universally applicable. Only astounding evidence to the contrary would persuade us that the alien creatures from outer space who next visit us have no evolutionary history, whether they turn out on close inspection to be biological organisms or cultural artefacts. Evolutionary theories in both domains find themselves confirmed and re-confirmed by an abundance of emerging evidence.

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In the cultural domain the evolutionary evidence is ready and waiting. It, too, is abundant despite the neglect in which it languishes. For a clear case: any library shelf conventionally labelled ‘art history’ will be replete with texts that demonstrate the evolutionary principles driving cultural change. Even those ‘art historians’ who insist that they are not cultural historians confound themselves with many of their practices. ‘Art history’ books will often have a misleading structure, but beneath it or alongside it there is a structure waiting to be picked out: a structure that can only be articulated around the theme of memetically driven evolution. An example that falls into my hand as I reach out almost at random is called The Englishman’s chair, by John Gloag, published by George Allen and Unwin Ltd (1964). We read as follows in the publisher’s promotional text that is printed on its cover. Seats of almost any kind, fixed or moveable, reveal the habits, posture and carriage of the people for whom they were made; and chairs show, more than any other article of furniture, the importance accorded to dignity, elegance or comfort in any period, and indicate whether the social life was formal and rigid, relaxed, casual or careless, and whether fashions were dignified, demanding, graceful or comfortable. The revelations of chairs go still further, and from their shape and decoration and intended use we can learn whether the people who used them were

4: BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION, CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND HISTORY

austere or voluptuous, romantic, imitative, vulgar, affluent, democratically standardised, dull, snobbish, arrogant or poor. Illustrated throughout the book are items of the cultural kind that the author identifies, in a patriarchal way, as the Englishmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chair. They are presented sequentially in a way that clearly shows the memetic basis on which the kind has been perpetuated, and attention is drawn to the circumstantial factors that have promoted variation. The most appreciated items have been massively imitated, but not always with perfect fidelity in all respects. Variation and adaptation is seen to occur responsively to the preferences and motives of users, as well as to the economic factors of time and place. In retrospect, all the successful variations are explicable in terms of social, psychological and material considerations that are open to scrutiny. Unsuccessful variations, on the other hand, are consigned to the historical dustbin from which they are only with difficulty retrieved by photographers and commentators. The task of the cultural historian has been to uncover as comprehensively as possible all of those factors that were influential in determining which items of this kind were most attractive to imitators, and to account persuasively for why this was so, instance by instance. Gloagâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

story

about

the

evolution

this

distinguishable cultural kind is told in sets of overlapping 57

THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT WHAT ART IS

temporal sequences from the 15th to the 20th century. It stresses the relevance of the contexts into which new and variant items were projected and on which they depended for their success, just as Darwin accounted over a longer time scale for the evolution of the Galapagos finches. The author does not make the evolutionary theory on which his practice is founded explicit in the text, and it may not have surfaced clearly in his own mind; nevertheless it is deeply implicit in his method. He takes the persistence of the kind to be accounted for memetically by the succession of willing imitators of popular items, and he takes the shaping of the kind to turn on the generation of variant items within those shifting climates of receptivity to which the adaptation is responsive. Occasional radical changes in the kind, verging upon what biologists would describe as speciation, are clear enough to draw obvious parallels between ways in which the 15 th century Englishmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chair resembles and differs from the 20 th century chair as the wolf resembles and differs from the Alsatian dog. No matter to what extent the detailed factual evidence that he adduces may be challenged, the authority and persuasiveness of his account relies upon its structural compliance with those evolutionary principles that every biologist takes for granted. It cannot be over-emphasised that an evolutionary account of the shaping of a cultural kind is more than a

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chronologically arranged and factually correct account. It will be chronologically arranged, and within the constraints of the historian’s diligence and the resources available it will be deferential to the facts. More significantly, however, it will be an account that imputes regularities to the way in which all cultural kinds are shaped, and it will not be distracted by those accidental and random vicissitudes that differentially shape the lives of individual items. While a chronological order is almost mandatory, historians often invoke shaping principles that are quite unlike those acknowledged within evolutionary theory. The whims of genius and the pattern of the stellar constellations have been popular, as well as the machinations of a grand designer whose plan has been mysteriously disclosed to the historian. ‘Art historians’ in particular tend to make two mistakes that dispose them to construct accounts that are not evolutionary at all. They first misconceive the name ‘art’ as if it were the name of a cultural kind, which it is not. They then develop their stories about the shaping of this pseudo-kind by enlisting the ghostly power of some allegedly dynamic principle, such as a pendulum-like oscillation of styles or the irresistible force of a putatively ‘great tradition’. These aberrations of thought are resistant to argument and their proprietors are generally unmoved by ridicule. As this essay will show there are some good reasons why rational

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argument is not sovereign in the artworld so that, by and large bad reasons prevail over better ones. The true belief that questions of value cannot be settled probatively by the application of a calculus is a bad reason for supposing that the personal

judgments

questions

value

made

commentators who have attained some celebrity or notoriety are more reliable than the judgments of other people. In the artworld a great deal turns on the material value of the most cherished objects, and on the vulnerability of the reputations of those authorites whose voices are relied upon when the status of some object of reverence is challenged. The rather simple andâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as it should beâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;obvious idea that each work of art is an item of some cultural kind and that each cultural kind has its own evolutionary history should not be so threatening. It is an idea that sits consistently with another rather simple idea: the idea that we may have innumerable reasons (as well as sorts of reasons) for liking and for admiring a particular item of any cultural kind more than we like or admire some other item, and these reasons need have no relation to any historical principle whatsoever, whether it is or it is not an evolutionary principle.

Only kinds have histories

Summary Histories are explanatory evolutionary stories about kinds, and kinds are constituted of items related to one another more intimately than merely by shared characteristics. There is a generative principle of kindedness: genetic in the biological domain, and memetic in the cultural domain. Kinds are distinguished from classes, types, and other nonparticulars, as well as from individuals that do not have evolutionary histories. (Individuals of the human kind are said to have biographies). The title ‘history’ should be applied only to explanatory evolutionary stories about the past dealing with the emergence and shaping of kinds. Stories of other sorts have other names: ‘record,’ ‘chronicle,’ report,’ and so on.

The claim that kinds and only kinds have histories has already been staked, but it will need some elaboration and emphasis before the inference that ‘art’ cannot be the name of a cultural kind with a history becomes inescapable. If a clear recognition that the popular ‘discipline’ of Art History is bogus could

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easily have been reached, then its grave would already be stamped flat. First, we should look more closely at the question of what it amounts to for something—anything at all—to count as history. There is a way of conceiving history that most people should not find difficult to reject, despite the ease with which its typical locutions roll off the tongue. I refer to the opinion that ‘history’ is not the name of any sort of story about the past: it is a name for the past, appropriately given to everything that has happened as contrasted with everything that is yet to happen. ‘The Phoenicians (or the dinosaurs …, or whalebone corsets …) are history,’ people say. It would follow if this were true that all of history is available for investigation in principle, if not in practice. A time machine and an immense lifespan would allow us to investigate at first hand, as eyewitnesses, everything that has happened. If we were to bring back from innumerable temporal excursions to every corner of the universe true stories about what we have observed these would not be histories; they would be more or less credible stories about history. They would incidentally be weak in explanatory content, giving no systematic account of why things happened, here and there, in the way they did. Consistently with such an account of the past, ‘the future’ must be the name of everything that has not yet

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happened, and if we are to describe what has not yet happened we shall need to draw upon reserves of patience, as well as an unlimited capacity for travel. We shall have to wait until what used to be the future becomes history, and thus makes itself available for observation. An obvious objection to this idea derives from the physics of relativity. Our current perception from where we stand on Earth on a clear day tells us that the sun is still out there in space, although we may be forced to concede that it might have exploded almost eight minutes ago. The question whether its explosion would in that case already be history has apparently contradictory answers. Philosophers currently shape their responses to this and related puzzles by committing themselves broadly to one or other of two very different theories of time. Very roughly: are we to suppose that temporal events are continuously strung out like distances along a dimension in which it is possible to move (perhaps at different speeds?), or shall we suppose that deep in the heart of ultimate reality all things are eternally (or should we say instantaneously) present? ‘If all time is eternally present,’ T. S. Eliot ruminated in the poem Burnt Norton, ‘all time is unredeemable’. This consideration is not alarming only to Christians. Fortunately for immediate purposes there is a view of history that has the advantage, among its other virtues, of making it unnecessary to wait for a resolution of the deep philosophical conundrum about

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time. If we take ‘history’ not to be the name of everything that has happened but the name of a distinctive sort of story, then the way temporal sequence is structured ‘in reality’ will diminish in importance for all except those whose interest in time is primarily philosophical. What will matter to the rest of us will be the cogency of the reasons for insisting upon the distinctiveness of history stories. They will inevitably have a temporally sequential order because the narrative thread— however tangled it may be—is part of what we mean by ‘story,’ but since all narratives no matter how fanciful have a sequential order more than this will be required of a history. It will certainly not be sufficient to say that a story must be interesting if it is to qualify as history. Sheharezade told interesting stories, and she had the most pressing of all possible motives for securing the rapt attention of her audience. In spite of this, perhaps nobody ever seriously took her stories—unless in the spirit of a temporary suspension of disbelief—to be histories. Nor—and this is perhaps the most significant point— will it be sufficient to add the condition that if it is to qualify as history a story must be true. Many stories that are chronologically ordered as well as interesting and also arguably true do not qualify as histories. It is not easy to put one’s finger immediately on the reason for this, and putting the question a little differently may help to clarify it. Why is it that our own plausibly remembered accounts

5: ONLY KINDS HAVE HISTORIES

of what we did on our seaside holidays do not count as histories despite the fact that cultural historians may make use of such accounts, assembled from many sources, when they set out to construct the history of a certain cultural kind: namely, the seaside holiday? The short answer is that the historian’s account is evolutionary in structure; our own reminiscence is not. There is by now a body of agreement that history is the accumulating product of a form of intellectual labour dedicated not only to describing the past persuasively, but also to explaining why matters took the course that they (allegedly) did. It is likely that most historians nowadays take something like this view, although they differ profoundly about what constitutes a satisfactory explanation. Comparatively few historians will gladly endorse—except in an unguarded moment or in a careless turn of phrase—the opinion that history is not a story at all but either the immense totality of those objects and events that are casually referred to as ‘the past,’ or even an ideally comprehensive list of these events. In recent years truth has been deserted, if not explicitly repudiated, as a qualifying condition for a story to count as history. In its place we have been offered a postmodern range of reasons for finding one story about what has happened not merely more interesting than another story, but more persuasive. On this view of the matter, appeals to the truth of a story take a more or less pathetic place among the many forms

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of persuasion, or ‘rhetorics,’ that are available to the historian. Sophisticated cultural relativists say that persuasiveness ultimately turns on a preferred ideological standpoint, a dominating religious conviction, a gender-bias, a situation within a power relationship or some other consideration that storytellers and their audiences conspire together to regard as compelling. The disharmony of voices raised on these questions does not quite disguise a common tune. For almost all participants in the contemporary debate, history is not what happened. It is an explanatory story of some sort about what happened. There may still be a minority opinion that the universe is itself a story; but they have no clear answers to the question of who is telling this story to whom, and what—if it is a story—is it a story about. History is a matter of pressing concern in relation to the thesis that ‘art’ is the name of a category and therefore it does not have a history as kinds have histories. To make good this claim more must be said about what kinds are, and about why stories about their emergence and shaping are the only stories that can properly be called histories. We must ask ourselves this question: What sort of explanation of what has occurred will distinguish history stories from other sorts of stories, including some sorts of explanatory stories? There are certainly explanatory stories that do not count as histories despite their sequential narrative form.

5: ONLY KINDS HAVE HISTORIES

There are mechanically causal stories for example, modelled on the predictable progress of clockwork; or stories in which the compelling force is irregular or random. We are offered stories in which the explanatory principle is the implicitly consistent (and notionally beneficent) Will of God, or it is the fitfulness of human Genius or the randomness of dice or the interminable wrangle between Good and Evil. Sheer randomness is not popular as a universal explanatory principle, partly because the suggestion that the absence of order explains a manifest appearance of orderliness is either self-contradictory or uninformative, and partly because almost everyone takes for granted that although much of its behaviour is unpredictable in practice, the universe is not a baffling chaos. Even the striking illusion of regularity (if that is what it is) requires an explanation. The prima facie similarities between the temporal order of events wherever we look constitute a pattern that we are challenged to identify. Within the unfolding processes that we encounter everywhere, we ask what pattern is discernible such that, when it is picked out, a dimension of understanding supervenes. What sort of story about what has happened will put an end to wondering about why matters progressed in the way they did, and why they did not unfold in some other way? In one domain at least the answer to this question is by now reasonably clear. Among living organisms the pattern of

THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT WHAT ART IS

evolution is visible everywhere. There are certain entities that show this distinctive pattern in their shaping everywhere and always, in contrast with those entities that do not show it ever or anywhere. These entities are not individuals, nor are they categories. They are kinds, or species. Kinds are made up of, or constituted by individual items, but the morphology of the kind is radically unlike the morphology of the individual. Kinds evolve; the items of a kind do not evolve. Moreover cultural kinds evolve just as biological kinds (or species) evolve; whereas contrastingly neither the items of a cultural kind nor those of a biological species evolve. History stories are evolutionary stories. We should recall that this essay is about art, and it may be timely to emphasise that so much prominence has been given to evolution and history because histories are evolutionary stories about kinds, and ‘art’ is not the name of a kind. It is most certainly not the name of a biological kind, and neither is it the name of a cultural kind. It must be admitted that stories without an evolutionary structure—stories that may well be true—are told about entities other than kinds, and they are often mistakenly conceived as histories. This is a careless tendency against which a strong resistance must be mounted. To accommodate the slipshod customs of ordinary language we might, of course, allow the word ‘history’ be used in whatever way anyone chooses, inventing a technical name

5: ONLY KINDS HAVE HISTORIES

for evolutionary stories about the regular emergence, the shaping, the speciation and the ultimate extinction of kinds. This manoeuvre would not be popular, and it should not be necessary because stories that are not history stories, in the evolutionary sense, are already distinguishable under a range of names. All that is required is that we should relieve the name ‘history’ of its multiple duties as a collective term for all sorts of intellectual engagements with the past, and assign a clear function to it. There are very many sorts of stories about the past that do not properly deserve to be called histories, and their names are readymade. We have records and proceedings, minutes and chronicles, reports and tales, legends and myths and fables. We should be content to use these names—all preferably with a little care—and to reserve ‘history’ for a similarly distinctive use. The underlying point is not trivial, and no amount of emphasis will be wasted. Histories (or whatever name we prefer to give to explanatory stories about the past with an evolutionary structure) are stories about kinds. They are not stories about particulars or about universals, or about categories or classes or types or sorts or bundles. It will not be appropriate here to discuss natural kinds such as the molecules, rocks and galaxies that interest physical scientists. I take the paradigm case to be that of the biological kinds such as the wombat and the watercress that interest biologists, and I take the kind that

THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT WHAT ART IS

we must understand if we are to get a grip on the question of what art is to be the cultural kinds, of which (as we shall see) individual works of art may qualify as items, although art itself, as a category, is not an item of a cultural kind nor is it, itself such a kind. It is a curious fact that it was not in the broad domain of the physical sciences but in plant and animal studies that the evolutionary mode of change, with its huge explanatory power, was first recognised. In the cultural domain we currently lack a mode of explicitly theorised historical storytelling that is comparable in its authority to the authority of biological histories. We do not expect, as biologists would expect in their parallel domain, to find that the history of Mickey Mouse is structurally related to the history of the public execution and the history of Victorian narrative painting. We have a great many ad hoc explanations for all sorts of cultural phenomena, but no patterned way of understanding when, where and why each cultural kind emerged; how and why it grew or declined in popularity and what factors were influential in moving it toward the cultural equivalent either of distinct speciation or of extinction. Stories about the changes manifest in particular objects over time are occasionally more interesting to us than stories about the shaping of kinds because individualsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;persons and thingsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;are always exposed to dramatic accidents. Surprise is

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welcome in storytelling. Stories about individuals have a common topic but they do not have a common structure, and this may well account for some of their attractiveness. Stories about individual animals may be enchanting, but no matter how insightful, moving and demonstrably factual they may be, such stories are not evolutionary. The vicissitudes of an individual creature who attracts the eye of a TV documentary maker will have a negligible effect on the shaping of the kind to which it belongs, except to the extent that its attention-grabbing adventures are not unique. A particular dodo may or may not have been unfortunate enough to endure capture and boiling alive for its oil. It may or may not have died of a broken leg or a broken heart. The first of these interesting incidents is only historically remarkable to the extent that it occurred sufficiently often on Mauritius in 1681 to have a serious effect on the shaping of the kind. The dodo species became extinct largely because most of its breeding items were boiled, but not one of these items became extinct. Each of them died. Drama is one sort of story; history is quite another. Kinds are entities of a sort often characterised by philosophers as nonparticulars. There are several other famous nonparticulars: for example, universals such as shapes and colours of which the greenness of a blade of grass and the circularity of a coin are called â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;instancesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Classes are

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nonparticulars that differ from kinds as well as from universals. It will be easy to keep the difference between kinds and classes in mind by speaking always of kinds as having items while saying that classes have members. Something counts as an item of a kind by virtue of the generative or evolutionary principle of kindedness; something counts as a member of a class by virtue of qualifying conditions. A lion is an item of the lion kind because (putting it very roughly) its parents were lions and its distinctive characteristics have been inherited. A lion is a member of the class of caged animals if and only if it happens to be caged. There are nonparticulars that we call types such as the Australian fifty-cent coin, and we speak of types as constituted by their tokens, rather than by their items or their members. Occasionally, when we are taking care about what we say, we do not speak of types as having instances or members or items, although for many everyday purposes these distinctions are arid or pointless. Drawing them as I do at this point would be a pedantic exercise if it were not that sometimes care must be taken if dark places are to be illuminated. The evolving kind is a dark place because it is far from being common knowledge that the items of a kind are very distinctively related by a generative or evolutionary principle of kindedness. The tokens of a type are not linked by this principle, nor are the members of a class, nor are the instances of a universal.

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The verbal usages explained and consistently followed in this essay are often, but not always, those of ordinary speech. Nor can I justifiably claim to offer a technical vocabulary that has been authoritatively endorsed by some reputable academy or other. In particular, I enlist the word ‘kind’ as the most appropriate name for the sort of nonparticular whose items are related one to another in an evolutionary way. Some word is required for this special purpose and, of the readily available words in English, ‘kind’ is the most obviously appropriate. It is unfortunate—but by taking a little care not quite disastrous— that in ordinary conversation ‘sort’ and ‘kind’ are treated as virtual synonyms. If we are to understand what art is, the distinction between sorts and kinds on which I place so much reliance must be kept sharp. Contrastingly with the word ‘kind’ I use ‘sort’ in the most general way, so that it is possible to speak of kinds as just one of the many sorts of things we might want to talk about while it is not appropriate to speak of sorts as being one of the many kinds of things in which we take an interest. Sorts are constituted in all manner of ways; kinds are constituted only in the special way that gives them evolutionary histories. A big horse and a big cow, considered as large animals, are things of the same sort but they are not things of the same kind. Categories, among which art is to be counted, are nonparticulars of which the examples are conceived as immune

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to change whether it is change of an evolutionary sort, an accidental sort, or any other sort. We make sense to one another only by consenting together to a conception of some things, such as invention or discovery or memetic innovation, as being nowadays exactly what invention or discovery or memetic innovation was ten thousand years ago. The fact that the things invented or discovered and the memetic innovations made today differ from those that were encountered or made millennia ago is irrelevant. Because memetic innovation has not changed in any way it certainly has not changed in an evolutionary way, and we can therefore be quite sure that it has no history. My appropriation of the word ‘art’ as the best name for the category of memetic innovation has the necessary consequence that art does not have a history. This conclusion is strenuously resisted by ‘art historians’ for whom the supposition that art has a history is not merely an article of faith; it is the foundation upon which an entire academic profession has been precariously built. This structure is not, of course, entirely bogus: there is something that can be said both to be of special interest to members of this profession and to have a history. But whatever this may be, it cannot possibly be the category of art. What is of interest to ‘art historians’ is primarily the class called ‘the work of art,’ along with a selection of members of this class that have been assembled for scrutiny on somewhat murky principles. The

5: ONLY KINDS HAVE HISTORIES

work of art (or ‘works of art’) is a very curiously constructed class about which a good deal more will be said in due course. For the moment we should notice that each of its members is likely to be an item of some cultural kind (just as some of the members of the class of caged animals may well be items of the lion kind). To the extent that a work of art is an item of a cultural kind, the kind of which it is an item will have a history; and thus to the extent that an ‘art historian’ is concerned with such a history all may be well. But in practice, all is seldom well. These crucial distinctions are already noticed within the un-theorised practice of those ‘art historians’ who consciously and conscientiously prefer to be called cultural historians. These are historians for whom the mystificatory word ‘art’ is something of an embarrassment. Ernst Gombrich, the

doyen

‘art

historians,’

once

mistakenly

but

understandably remarked ‘There is really no such thing as art’. He seems never to have noticed that there is indeed such a thing but that it does not have a history; and perhaps, despite his genius for it, it would have been an embarrassment to him to concede that cultural history is all that we can expect and often more than we can expect. Cultural

historians

may

interest

themselves

landscape paintings, or in the items of some other cultural kind that happen conventionally to be classified as works of art,

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while finding themselves perplexed and theoretically distracted by the principles of their classification. It may not be at all obvious to them why the pictures of landscapes found in newspapers or in real estate agents’ windows should not be classified in the same way. To ‘art historians’ this will usually seem obvious; although their accounts of why it is so range from the unpersuasive to the downright baffling. The early stages of a conceptual revolution are always difficult. The language in which revolution is proclaimed is the very language in which the errors to which attention would be drawn are deeply—and all too often imperceptibly—embedded. Misunderstanding easily flows from an unfamiliar use of words that seem to be familiar. The deviations made by the innovator together with the reasons for them must be made explicit. Those who take an interest in the items of cultural kinds that attract ‘art historians,’ but who consider themselves rather to be cultural historians have at least begun to grasp this nettle. At present, in the early part of the twenty-first century, the main polemic of cultural historians is still directed toward challenging the fragile distinction between ‘high art’ (or ‘high culture’) on the one hand and ‘low art’ (or ‘popular culture’) on the other. This is a project with much common sense on its side bearing in mind the exemplary works of such toilers in the field of popular culture as William Shakespeare, but it does not go to the heart of the problem. For a solution it will be essential to

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see not only that the distinction between high and low is problematic to the point of indiscernibility, but that even if it can be clearly drawn in a few cases it will still not be the case that either ‘high art’ or ‘low art’ will emerge as the names of evolving cultural kinds. Both expressions are—at the most optimistic assessment—the names of non-evolving classes into which items of interest might be sorted. Art does not change, and no explanation of its change is therefore needed. Individual works of art change over time, but they do not change in an evolutionary way. Individual works of art are, in this respect, like individual people. They suffer vicissitudes, of which narrative accounts may be more or less interesting despite the fact that they do not qualify as histories. Narratives about individual humans are called biographies. Historians recognise the inappropriateness of the suggestion that they might write a history of Napoleon; although they will readily embark on a history of the French Revolution that takes account of Napoleon’s role. Most of them, however, seem not to have seriously thought about the compelling reason why this is so. Individual works of art have adventures and vicissitudes, as do items of every cultural kind including the forklift truck, the vegetable marrow and the sock drawer. Undoubtedly some of the actions of such remarkable individuals as the Corsican general must be cited in any history of a cultural kind, such as European monarchical government,

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just as Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon must be cited in any account of the evolution of European figurative painting. Nevertheless, people’s biographies share with narratives about particular works of art and particular artists a crucial characteristic: they are not structured in terms of the evolutionary pattern of replication or imitation, genetic or memetic variation and environmental adaptation. At best their structure is chronologically coherent and satisfyingly dramatic, with sufficient attention paid to verifiability to be sure that a charge of fiction can be rebutted.

Beauty, revelation and memetic innovation

Summary The notion that beauty is the distinctive property of art is criticised. A revelation theory is proposed, in which art is associated with the acquisition of new memes. Works of art may reward an aesthetic interest but so may other things such as plants, animals and machines when they are subjected to a detached form of contemplation that also encourages appreciation on moral, political and other grounds. These points are crucial. They are further elaborated and implications are drawn from them in the following Section.

Even when they have been shown good reason to do so â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;art historiansâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; find it difficult to abandon a conviction that is loosely related to their belief that art has a history; a conviction that they acquired in the same way as most other people, as part of their early language learning. This is a conviction that what fundamentally distinguishes the objects to which their professional attention is

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directed from things of every other sort is the possession by these objects of a unique, distinctive and intimate association with beauty; or if not with beauty, then with something very like beauty that they call ‘aesthetic value’. The supposition that beauty stands somehow at the foundation of all the deep questions about art, and may even need to figure in a definition of the word, has waxed and waned since its popularisation following the Renaissance and more especially since the eighteenth century in Europe. Although displaced from time to time by other theories, a commitment to the beautiful is still rife among participants in the international artworld, seducing not only ‘art historians’ but also many artists as well as most of their critics, their appreciators, their commentators, collectors and dealers. It was noticed in the introductory section of this essay that the supposedly crucial nexus between art and beauty or ‘aesthetic

quality’

was

dismissively

mocked

naïve

‘essentialism’ by both Anglo-American analytic philosophers and by radical European cultural relativists in the period following the Second World War. Despite all their scepticism, an association of art with beauty or ‘aesthetic quality’ has lost little of its popular appeal. Those philosophers who maintained their conviction that works of visual art (principally exemplified until quite recently by oil paintings) were objects of serious intellectual interest took to calling themselves aestheticians, as

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if—whatever else might be in question—the only disciplined approach to art must be ‘aesthetic’ on some understanding of this word with a lifeline to the beautiful. An association of art with beauty did not come under full frontal assault in the art galleries until the second half of the twentieth century, when they began brazenly inviting their visitors to wade in mud or to bestow their admiration—as well as their investment capital—upon the canned ordure of an artist. The heroic phase of modernism was followed by a steep decline in the artworld’s confidence about the location of firm theoretical ground. Philosophers only very occasionally visited art galleries and they learned about the depravity of the avantgarde mainly by hearsay, but they had already begun to develop their reasons for feeling uncomfortable about beauty. Beauty has a venerable association in the popular mind with nature as well as with nature’s more pleasantly associated forms of pictorial and sculptural representation; but pleasantly configured depictions of attractive objects were rapidly losing or had already lost their paradigm status as works as art. The newly popular works became progressively less plainly related to anything natural, as well as progressively less beautiful in any of the senses in which children pick up the meaning of the word by hearing it used. Works of art began to flaunt their repulsive qualities, and artists pointed in self-justification to repellent but nevertheless celebrated images from the past.

THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT WHAT ART IS

Much sophistry went into promoting the paradox—as if it were profoundly insightful—that the ugly may be beautiful. The most radical defence of overtly distasteful presentations often attributed to the Roman dramatist Terence (that nihil humanum alienum est or ‘nothing human is alien to me’) seems to be mounted only when some oblique moral justification is available, or when disgusting content is allegedly redeemed by a commendably tailored form. In the face of such practical repudiation and despite its excoriation by analytic philosophers as well as postmodernists, the dogma that works of art are essentially artefacts incarnating a distinctive ‘aesthetic quality’ somehow survived. Long after the end of modernism and by now in the twilight of its postmodern successor a few philosophers have taken to prowling the graveyard of the essences seeking to restore the credentials of beauty; although now with the aid of neuroscience. This project seems to be motivated in part by a utopian conviction that neuroscience has overtaken sliced bread in the race to a perfect world and become the ultimate explanatory engine, as if we might expect to solve the main problems of philosophy by noticing where the brain typically busies itself while the rest of the body is engaging with the world. This rescue mission is no doubt also motivated by a genuine concern—however misguidedly it may be directed—

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about the distress of practising artists who have been left by their philosophical guides uncomfortably mired in a swamp of postmodernity. Only a callous philosopher will turn a deaf ear to the lamentations of a profession that must rely on the jury of the Turner Prize for answers to their questions about what art is, and must wait for the auctioneer’s hammer to determine authoritatively which works are the best. As matters stand the artist’s confidence must be low. In 1997 Tony Kaye presented a homeless steel worker to the Turner jury for recognition as a work of art, and failed; presumably not on any ground related to the beauty of the candidate. (The serious issues raised in this frivolous way will be addressed more circumspectly in the next two sections of this essay). Despite the freedom that postmodernism promised there are several reasons why artists might want to find their way out of the morass of relativism, and why philosophers may wish to help them, even at the risk of re-embracing one of those essentialisms that appeared so recently to be irremediably beyond salvation. With or without appeal to such regularities as might one day be disclosed by neuroscience, partisans on the side of beauty are not alone in their search for a reliable map of artistic reality. My own suggestion that ‘art’ is the best name we can find for the category of memetic innovation is superficially vulnerable to the taunt of essentialism. Translated into a popular slogan of ordinary language, ‘art is memetic

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innovation’ might be rendered as ‘art is revelation.’ This is a motto with the same superficial form as ‘art is beauty’ and ‘art is expression;’ both of these being formulae that, until very recently, nobody expected to revisit. To help clarify what is at stake when an ‘aesthetic,’ or beauty-related, theory of art is rejected I turn to a comparatively recent moment in the ‘discourse’ about beauty. In a 1995 symposium on The Nature of Beauty in Contemporary Art sponsored by the New York Open Center and the International Society for Consciousness in the Arts, the popular theorist Suzi Gablik nailed her colours to the following mast. She wrote: [Hilton] Kramer is in the forefront of those who believe that when art is actively engaged with the world, its aesthetic quality is necessarily compromised. I, on the other hand, consider that such art is often intensely aesthetic, because in responding compassionately to whatever it touches, it is helping to create a more beautiful world. Artists whose work helps to heal our soulless attitudes toward the physical world have my full respect and attention because, for me, beauty is an activity rather than an entity, a consciousness of, and reverence for, the beauty of the world. What we should first notice in this ardent passage is not Suzi Gablik’s addiction to the beautiful, whether in nature or in art, but two of the main components of her case. She

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characterises art as an activity rather than as an entity or collection of entities, and she implies that the reverence she feels for ‘the beauty of the world’ (and relatedly for the beauty of art) is transhistorical and trans-cultural. I am sure that she is right on both of these counts, and that the relativists are mistaken. Nevertheless I suggest that her belief that it is the beauty of the world to which we should direct our reverence as art appreciators is grievously wrong. Rather we should be in awe of the world responsively to its seemingly inexhaustible potential to reveal to us previously unsuspected possibilities for purposeful action; and in particular we should celebrate our expectation that memes will be disclosed to us that are not merely relatively new, but absolutely new. Here is the crux of the argument against beauty, as the good and sufficient reason for reverence of the world. Irrespective of the question whether an attribution of beauty to some contemplated object is justified, every such attribution embodies a favourable judgment. The seal of the judge’s approval is placed upon whatever is judged to be beautiful. It would be absurd to say that something to which we draw attention is beautiful, and that this is the very ground on which we urge other people to disapprove of it and to withhold their admiration from it. When we demonstrate of our approval of the world by characterising it as beautiful we may or may not be charged

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with flattery; we shall not have shown our respect for it as an object of reverence. A truly reverential attitude to the world will not situate it as an entity designed or predisposed to solicit our approval. It should rather be conceived as an immense reservoir of as-yet undisclosed possibilities, many of whichâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;notably including our own extinction as a speciesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;we are likely to find thoroughly uncongenial. True reverence for the world is an attitude or a state of mind more closely akin to awe than it is to gratitude. A reverential stance must acknowledge that there is a great deal about the world that we presently find unfathomable, and when we do begin to fathom it what we discover may well turn be dissatisfying, disturbing and distressing. A world that is already disposed to offer up for our contemplation George W. Bush and the Ebola virus may excite our wonder, but it is not primarily structured in such a way as to solicit expressions of appreciative gratitude. This is the heart of the matter. Whether we approve or disapprove of those things that are made available for our contemplation, and for whatever reason our judgmental responses may be elicited, the world endlessly discloses new possibilities that were not expressly designed to give us satisfaction. Whether we welcome a new insight into the regularities of the universal order, offering up a fresh prospect of purposeful action especially in the form of some absolutely

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new meme, we must recognise the disclosure as a revelation. What we contemplate is the awe-inspiring prospect of endlessly acquiring new powers to generate items of cultural kinds that we had not known to be possible. With each of these epiphanies there comes the responsibility for exercising these powers, or of staying our hand. Knowing as we do that the exercise of a newly acquired meme may not have beneficial consequences, responsibility is unavoidable. Items of the cultural kinds that continuously emerge into availability will be judged admirable or abominable, and their generative memes will or will not be imitated. Everything that is done and made is exposed to appraisal in any of the myriad ways in which a community of cultural participants constructs its shared values. Reverence for the world flows from the way these considerations—surprise and responsibility—resonate in our minds in ways in which, as we suppose, they have little or no impact upon the minds of beetles. Most people are not distressed by the words of the limerick ‘… I learn with regret that I am/ a creature that moves in predestinate grooves/ in fact, not a bus but a tram’. We suppose ourselves to have a degree of freedom to choose whether, when and how, we shall exercise the powers that are made available to us when we acquire new memes, just as we are free to respond with appreciation or with disgust to ways in

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which their powers are exercised by others. Some decisions about what we shall do may be out of our own hands, but this is not because it is meaningless to speak of exercising choice. Shall we or shall we not embrace nuclear energy? Shall we preferentially picture war as Goya pictured it, or describe it as Kurt Vonnegut did? Shall we act as if we suppose that ‘terror’ and ‘drugs’ are the names of entities against which warfare can intelligibly be conducted? Shall we clone ourselves, if this mode of cultural intervention in the processes of biological evolution becomes available? The case I make about reverence for the world relies upon the conviction I share with Ms Gablik that a transhistorical and transcultural account of art is required. However, my prescription is altogether different. Whereas beautiful things are necessarily pleasing, new memes are not. Nor are pleasures or satisfactions the only grounds of admiration. Reverence, I suggest, would be only condescendingly bestowed upon the world in acknowledgment of its imputed disposition to serve our interests, to unfold in a way that is advantageous to us, or to give us pleasure. To the extent that the world can be said to have such a disposition we must also concede that it has other dispositions, of which our concept of art should take note. The intuition that art engages with reality and that reality is not anthropocentrically disposed is neither new nor should

seem

remarkable,

although

many

those

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philosophers who have identified art with revelation have also believed in something akin to a natural—and perhaps divinely initiated—beneficence that offers art as a word to the wise about its underlying plot. It is well worth calling to mind the way traditional revelation theories of art found expression, before they capitulated to the modern assault upon essentialism. In 1949, at a time of radical philosophical upheaval when the youthful Baudrillard would have been among his loudest detractors, H. D. Lewis published an influential paper called ‘Revelation and Art’. He wrote, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 23, as follows: For the artist is, in the first instance, a seer [whose] essential function, in relation to others, is to make them see something to which they are normally blind. This may be something in Nature or in human life; it does not matter which. But we must in some way be made aware of objects and events in a fashion which is like seeing them for the first time. The artist wrests their secrets from objects and makes them glow with a distinctiveness which escapes normal consciousness of them. This illumination of the world, which almost amounts to a transformation, is the essential function of art, and where some special sense of clarity and penetration is lacking, where there is no heightened consciousness of inhabiting a world which thrusts itself upon the mind with a peculiar sharpness and insistence, there is no art.

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Some rather obvious changes must be made if this doctrine is to survive the twenty-first century. Few of those who live outside the borders of the artworld will countenance the unnatural and perhaps even supernatural power of divination that Professor Lewis attributes to artists when he characterises them as ‘seers’. People undoubtedly differ in their acuities, in their imaginations and their insights, but the acquisition of new memes is not unusual. Unless epiphanies are taken to be majestic by definition they are commonplace occurrences, not made available only—or certainly not distinctively—to those individuals who choose a career in the artworld. Revelations come to people who work in every domain of human activity. Moreover, if we are to find in the concept of memetic innovation a key to the distinction between art and craft we cannot suppose that epiphanies flow only from the pursuit of those craft skills upon which professional artists lean most heavily. Notwithstanding the case charmingly made by Margaret and Rudolf Wittkower in 1963, in Born under Saturn, artists are really very much like other people. One difference, that is attributable to the peculiar nature of the domain in which they work and will be explored in the next section, is this. Artists are encouraged to look with a radically open mind at their own work, in the hope of finding in it something that they had not intended. In the course of exercising memes that are

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already familiar to them, or of seeing such memes exercised by other people, everybody now and again discovers something that was not expected by the observer and may not have been intended by the performer. In recent times, artists have been explicitly urged to try to surprise themselves with what they are making or doing. ‘Automatism’ is a practice that was explicitly theorised and institutionalised in the popular form of Surrealism that drew upon so-called ‘automatic writing’ as well as accidental marking. It may seem a paradoxical way of courting success, and it is certainly not a strategy that is enthusiastically promoted in such practical crafts such as brain surgery and aircraft engine maintenance, where only the skilful exercise of familiar memes is expected and rewarded. An exaggerated estimate of artists’ powers of divination is not the only objectionable element in H. D. Lewis’s account of art as revelation. The breadth and universality of his claim has more than a hint of grandiosity, as if revelations were always and only events deserving admiration for their splendour. But the mundane fact is that the overwhelming majority of absolutely new memes—no matter to whom or in what context they arrived as epiphanies—are so minor and so trivial that they excite little if any respect and few imitators. Moreover, when their impact is significant it may be either distasteful or maleficent in its effect and baleful in its consequences. Many new memes, far from commanding

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admiration rapidly gain popularity and spread through the cultural garden like invasive weeds. The importation of a positive value loading into a classical revelation theory of art such as that of H. D. Lewis parallels the importation of a favourable judgment into beauty theories of art. It is implicit in both dogmas that the elusive quality allegedly definitive of art, or criterial of art, is an indubitably good, admirable or beneficial quality. Who but the most miserable iconoclast and wrecker of dreams (unless he is Plato) would dare to suggest that art might be a culturally Bad Thing? In spite of this we must face the fact: momentous revelations are rare in any context, and they are not necessarily welcome. The road to Damascus is not confined to a corridor traversing the great galleries of art. It passes also through the supermarket and the factory floor of common experience. Triviality in innovation at least, if not innovation as a natural blight, is easily exemplified. The spectacle of a light bulb switched on and off in the Tate Modern discloses to us a regular way of generating items of a new cultural kind, but the evidence that this will flourish as a meme is meagre. In the art schools we know that imitation of whatever has attracted the imprimatur of the leading galleries is almost obligatory, but it will be surprising if items of this cultural kind should come to be generated as enthusiastically as prints of Van Goghâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s writhing sunflowers came to be displayed on living room walls

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and to be the inspiration of innumerable variations and pastiches. In summary: reverence is appropriate to a world that we take to have an apparently inexhaustible capacity to disclose its exploitable regularities, enabling us to see as if a veil had been lifted from our eyes something that we can now expect to make or do in a regular way that we had not known to lie within our competence. These epiphanies are characteristically marked by the exclamation ‘Aha!’ that is a more profound expression of reverence for the world than any appreciative judgement signifying our appreciation of some imitable item of a cultural kind on the ground that it is beautiful. It is of course possible that neuroscience will find regular correlations between brain processes and the revelatory acquisition of absolutely new memes. I should think this unlikely however, because the salient characteristic of absolutely new memes is that the purposeful and predictably efficacious actions associated with them rely upon the prospect of initiating neural patterns that had not previously been established. Using the popular metaphor of electrical circuitry, to think in terms of absolute memetic innovation is to contemplate new wirings; it is not to point toward the regular use of the wirings that are already established. No doubt there are regular correlations between mental processes and so called ‘instinctive’ or genetically perpetuated

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human preferences; and implications may flow from this concerning biological evolution. Nevertheless, a credible theory of art must take into account far more than the bio-evolutionary implications and consequences of inherited dispositions. Some respect must be paid to the fact that cultural evolution accommodates the fact that people find reasons to admire things that they are not inherently disposed to like, and they may like things that they find good reasons to deplore. Beauty may or may not be construable in terms of some regular array of creaturely preferences, with a distinctive significance for biological evolution. Even if this turns out to be the case, and if some works of artâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;like many other thingsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;are occasionally deferential in one way or another to our biological imperatives, we must recognise that cultural evolution and biological evolution are distinct. Cultural evolution is not primarily shaped by natural and genetically transmissible appetites or dispositions. It is driven by memetic innovation, and the success or failure of new memes has only an incidental relation to the shaping of biological evolution. One might say that works of art have as much right and reason to be beautiful as other things, but it would grossly misstate their cultural role to insist that beauty is required of them, or that their beauty is the single good and sufficient reason for admiring them.

The category of art and the class of works of art

Summary The issue of the ‘found object’ on which the artist has done no work is reviewed, and the usefulness of the institutional theory of art is acknowledged for its ability to reconcile combatants over the question whether works of art must be artefacts. When recognising candidates as works of art the artworld need not act consistently and its reasons need not be good. In particular, ‘aesthetic’ qualifications have no logical priority. The question ‘What is a work of art?’ is not philosophically interesting, unlike the question ‘What is art?’ to which the answer does more than describe a social practice. It locates the engine of cultural evolution. An attachment of the name ‘art’ to the category of memetic innovation brings to the surface what must seem to be an internal confusion, if not a contradiction, within the expression ‘work of art’. If ‘art’ is not the name applicable to a particular object, and in particular if it is not the appropriate name for an object that has been purposefully made, then how can an object that must have been purposefully made—a work, in short—qualify as a work of art?

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Fortunately for our peace of mind the source of this quandary lies only skin-deep; although it is a skin that has turned out to be remarkably opaque. First of all we should notice that the expression ‘work of art’ as it is ordinarily used, like ‘domestic appliance’ or ‘swimwear,’ is not taken by its users to be the name of a kind in the strict sense of the word that has been developed in this essay. It is ordinarily taken to be the name of a certain class of objects, on the basis that every member of this class notionally satisfies a set of (admittedly contested and hard-to-specify) conditions among which ‘being an artefact’ and ‘having aesthetic value’ are typically and often cited. Some

the

conditions

that

candidates

for

classification as works of art are conventionally expected to satisfy are taken to be necessary, which is to say that they are satisfied by all works of art. Others are taken to be sufficient; which is to say that only works of art will satisfy them. The inability of theorists to spell out precisely what these conditions are, and to sort out their status as necessary or sufficient in a way that everyone will accept, is puzzling. It suggests that the problem is not just intractable, as the problem of proving Fermat’s last theorem remained for over three hundred years until 1995. It may be insoluble, like the problem of deciding what is to count as the length of a piece of string.

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Why is this so? The obvious answer that the problem is insoluble because there are no such conditions to be found is almost right, but not exactly so. A correct solution to the puzzle must recognise that there may be unusual classes into which members may from time to time be enrolled for entirely different reasons. The qualifying conditions may change from time to time in an unsystematic way. A candidate might be classified as a work of art because it satisfies conditions A, B and C, but at another time another candidate might be admitted because it satisfies conditions D, E and F (or perhaps A, B and D). Most interestingly of all as recent events have shown, it is not impossible for a candidate to be admitted to membership of the class of works of art in a way that seems entirely unprincipled, without any reference at all to qualifying conditions. This may seem odd, but it is at least consistent in its curiosity with the fact that acknowledged members of the class of works of art cannot be expelled, as a lion can be expelled from membership of the class of caged animals by being released into the wild. There must be something atypical about the class of works of art that makes it impossible to imagine how Donatelloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s David, admitted to membership in Florence some time around 1430, might now be stripped of its membership. Classifying is something that is done by classifiers, as gardening is done by gardeners. The natural regularities of the

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world do not impose upon us any requirement that we shall classify things under an agreed label in a consistent way and for consistent reasons. Language is massively memetic and malleable, and in the case of some of the classifying expressions in common use—among which the expression ‘work of art’ is an egregious case—the evolution of the use of the expression ‘work of art,’ which is of course a cultural kind, may be rapid and dramatic. Etymologists already address the task of uncovering the evolutionary histories of usages in a systematic way, and it is worth remarking in passing that although it would do them no harm, etymology is not the discipline that ‘art historians’ take to stand at the foundation of the so called ‘art historical method’. If we concentrate upon our own time and attend particularly to the middle and latter parts of the twentieth century, we see that a radically new consensus about the way the expression ‘work of art’ should be used was under construction. The charge was led by linguistic philosophers and by many people within the artworld who fell, however briefly, under their influence. It was a consensus legitimised by a novel theory that its initiators called the institutional theory of art. This name was misleading to the extent that, if ‘art’ is indeed the name of a category, it was not a theory about art at all. It was a theory about the way in which the classifying label ‘work of art’ is—and should be—used.

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The institutional theory of art is still influential, even among those of its subscribers who do not recognise it under that name but have inherited it from the tendency of postmodern sociological thinkers to see all cultural practices as relativistic socio-linguistic constructions. Whatever name they give to their theory, proponents share the core conviction that a social formation, usually now called the artworld, decides for itself in its own way, in its own time and for its own shifting reasons, which presented candidates shall and which shall not qualify as works of art. If principles are invoked at all by the artworld, they are local and temporal. The artworld is thus conceived as asserting its hegemony over the use of the phrase ‘work of art’ in ways that may not only differ according to time and place but may, at any given time and place, be no more principled than choices made by spinning a coin. Across time and space the practices of the artworld may present as incoherent or selfcontradictory. Various efforts have been made to soften the blow. For example, an ‘aesthetic’ qualifying condition was rather timidly reintroduced in some versions of institutional theory with the suggestion that candidates for recognition as works of art must be proposed by sponsors whose conviction it is that their nomination has qualities that will reward an ‘aesthetic’ scrutiny. But this suggestion seems only to renege from the original insight, effectively returning us to the

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intellectual chaos that the institutional theory promised to bring to order. I believe that if the institutional theory is correctly understood to be a theory about the way the expression ‘work of art’ is as a matter of fact used, it is irrefutable. However, to the extent that it is mistaken for a theory about what art is, it is off the mark. It is not difficult at all to live with these two conclusions. Much that was obscure becomes clear if we take the institutional theory to elucidate the use of the expression ‘work of art,’ while insisting that ‘art’ is the name of the category of memetic innovation. Only in this way can we expect to resolve the paradox to which attention was drawn a few paragraphs ago: if absolute memetic innovation of a revelatory sort cannot be deliberately contrived, and if work is essentially a process that is deliberately undertaken, then how can anything be a work of art? Let us examine first the role that is played by the word ‘work’ in the expression ‘work of art’. We have a deceptively comfortable way of sorting everything in the world in two ways: as natural objects and artefacts. The principle seems to be that we take artefacts, unlike natural objects, to have had work purposefully done on them. But this distinction is not simple. It may be unclear whether work that has been performed on a natural object was purposefully directed or, if so, then whether it was directed in the appropriate way. For example, it is now usual to take the

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landscape of the Australian bush which the Europeans who originally expropriated it considered natural, to be an artefact of human use and purposeful shaping over countless generations. But the work that was done on it by its first human users over some tens of thousands of years may not have been intended by any of these artificers to display all—or even the most significant—of those features to which a team of landscape architects would have directed their attention. Work done on the land and on its vegetation and its animal populations was certainly deliberate, but it was not performed with the explicit intention that the landscape we see today should emerge. It was certainly not designed as a ‘bush landscape,’ in the sense in which a mining company would now rehabilitate terrain that it has first devastated by mineral extraction. The point about intention can be even more sharply illustrated. A high-spirited friend who intends no harm may jocularly push a companion into what turns out to be the path of a falling tree. Shall we identify the resultant injury as natural, on the ground that nobody intended to create it, or as artefactual on the ground that without purposeful human intervention in the course of events no injury would have been created? If we choose the latter option, then will consistency of reasoning demand of us a judgment that the footprints we leave after traversing a muddy field are artefacts? In that case, what shall

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we say of the footprints left by our dog that we take to be as natural as a pattern of hailstones? In everyday life we follow, usually without penalty, a handful of paradigms that conveniently blur troublesome distinctions like these. We take a wildflower blooming in a field to be natural but a black rose bred in a glasshouse to be an artefact. Everyone agrees that the immense open pit of the Mount Newman mine is an artefact, but the planet into which it has been carved is not regarded as a sculpture. If, in such a case, the crucial issue is not purposeful work but some relativity of quantities or of effect, then what are we to say of a minimal painting in which a vast canvas is inflected with a microscopic dot? Paradigms are often handy, but they will not always serve to dispel art-theoretical anxieties. Charitably pretending that it is unproblematic, the bare test of artefacture has traditionally been regarded as the first, the most fundamental and the absolutely necessary condition that must be satisfied for a candidate object to be recognised as a work of art. Until comparatively recently nobody doubted that if the candidate fails this test, then further scrutiny of its more elusive qualifications for membership of the class of works of art must be a waste of time. It was also supposed not only that purposeful work must have been done: it must have been done with the explicit intention that the product should be good or true or beautiful, or somehow admirable or virtuous in the

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distinctive way in which works of art are allegedly distinguishable from artefacts of other sorts. In the absence of such a supplementary condition (so the argument ran) it would not be possible to distinguish a work of art from a work of political or a moral persuasion, or a work of practical utility. The historian Nikolaus Pevsner, who did not expect correction over his assumption that works of architecture are works of art by definition, once famously remarked: ‘A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture’. Let us put aside the distracting question whether candidate objects that are classifiable in other ways—as Christian churches for example, or as Mohawk haircuts or as Times obituaries or as bicycle sheds—might also qualify as works of art so that we can focus on the one qualifying condition that seemed to pose no problem. Everyone supposed that if a work of art is to be generated, then some purposeful work must be done. Such work, it was generally acknowledged, might be minimally laborious, as when a feather—or perhaps one’s hair—is transformed into a work of art by sticking one component into the other. Nevertheless (so the dogma went) some work, however little, must have been done on a candidate for classification as a work of art or it will not be eligible to proceed to round two of the inquisition. The first serious challenge to this contention came early in the twentieth century, with the emergence of

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readymades. It was strongly resisted. First of all—as we clearly see in the case of Duchamp’s Fountain in 1917—radically minded enthusiasts argued that the admission of this porcelain urinal to the class of works of art turned on an already familiar consideration. The work required need not have been performed by the artist himself. Everyone could cite precedents in which artists used assistants and artificers, authenticating the work as their own by nothing more than a signature. Relatedly (and neglecting Duchamp’s playful adoption of a pseudonym), the point was made that the actual artificers of candidate objects need not themselves have had an artistic intention, being required only to follow instructions or to copy or scale up a design. Why, then, should not artists occasionally find items readymade in forms that already anticipate their intentions? Why should not an artistic intention spring to the artist’s mind, as soon as the way of achieving it is presented in concrete form? The last move on this slippery slope almost amounts to a concession that the artefactual qualification might be dispensed with. Why should not a found object—whether it is natural or artefactual, a boulder or a urinal—that happens to spark the admiration of a bona fide artist qualify as a work of art? Finally, and most radically: could the artist’s authentically provoked admiration be dispensed with? This ultimate concession was implicit in Duchamp’s ‘rendezvous’ proposal, arriving in the form of a declaration that whatever he happened

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to find himself contemplating at some nominated moment in the future would be a work of art. An object selected in this arbitrary way may well turn out not be an artefact and—what is worse than this—it may not even seem to the artist to be good, beautiful, expressive, or admirable in any way. This was the prospect that most seriously challenged the mindset of the early modernist artworld. Suppose the participants in a rendezvous were to find themselves at the nominated moment in the future contemplating nothing more artefactual or ‘aesthetically’ admirable than a patch of sky or hole in the ground? An apparatus of theory that would be capable of recognising such randomly encountered objects as works of art did not become available until the institutional theory emerged half a century after Duchamp anticipated its dramatic implications. We might remind ourselves that the institutional theory holds that the question whether a candidate object is or is not a work of art comes up for settlement by the artworld without any necessary appeal to transhistorical and transcultural principles or to consistency of reasoning or practice. The artworld, for whatever reasons or for no reason, simply decides, and its decisions are consolidated in the ‘art history’ books. Like the on-field decisions of a cricket umpire, the artworld’s decisions are final; although there are differences. Unlike that of the cricket umpire, the authority of the artworld lacks codification

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or legislative backing; and although an umpire’s decision is not reversible it may become a rationally grounded consensus within the cricket world that a particular umpire’s decision was erroneously made. No so in the artworld. Rhetorical charges that certain celebrated objects have been erroneously admitted to the class of works of art can always be laid, but no case comes to mind in which they have been sustained. Galleries may de-accession because they become convinced that they have chosen badly, but not because they admit to having mistakenly taken their lame acquisition to be a work of art when ‘really’ it was not. The artworld is a social institution adjacent to the worlds of theatre, music, dance, literature and film. There is a nexus of ideas and practices associated with a range of entertainments conventionally sheltered under the umbrella of ‘the arts’. While the entire range could appropriately have been called ‘the artworld,’ the fact is that this name has been conventionally adopted to mark a domain that was originally identified as ‘the fine arts’ before it was expanded in scope and—still somewhat contentiously—demoted to become ‘the visual arts’. The boundaries of the artworld have moved and merged, losing their restricted application to painting, sculpture and architecture. Ordinary language easily accommodates the benign inconsistency that allows a patron of the arts to conceive

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of musical compositions and poems as works of art while pondering the question whether to commission a work of art or a poem or a musical composition. Demarcation questions about whether the creators of CD labels and fireworks displays should count as participants in the artworld, or even in the wider world of ‘the arts,’ may turn on such considerations as whether the influential art magazines have been illustrating examples of the sort and commenting solemnly upon them, in recent articles. In spite of the loose and malleable structure of the artworld, the institutional theory insists that it relates to the entire spectrum of social life in much the same way as do other institutions such as those of banking and religion and sport. That is to say, every institutionally conceived ‘world’ has its own structure, conventions, traditions, modes of selfperpetuation, and so forth. We find out how things are actually classified within these worlds not by applying abstract reason but by investigating practice on the ground, domain by domain. The artworld is unqualified to rule on the question whether a certain candidate for canonisation is or is not a saint just as the religious institutions have no grip on the question whether an unemployed steel worker is or is not a work of art. The relevant financial institutions determine whether a metal disk issued by the Reserve Bank and engraved with the words ‘1 dollar’ is money, and the courts and legislatures determine—and they determine differently from time to

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time—whether certain behaviours are or are not criminal. At one time and in one place cowrie shells will qualify as money; elsewhere metal disks will serve the purpose, or printed scraps of paper. At one time and in one place a homosexual act or a misleading advertisement will qualify as criminal, at another time and place they will not. What the shells of the largest subclass of gastropods— the Prosobranchia group including periwinkles, limpets, whelks, conchs and abalones—have in common with metal disks and printed paper is not any transhistorical and transcultural monetary ‘essence.’ Nor is the question of what shall count as money determined by any universal set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Only one condition counts and this is the condition that the relevant institution has as a matter fact, for whatever reason, so decided. Spokespeople are often nominated by the artworld to speak publicly on its behalf. In dutiful defence of their institutional probity they may strive to make its ongoing practices—especially in relation to the identification of works of art—seem both reasonable and justified by precedents. Nevertheless, when reasons are given for eyebrow-raising innovations they do not need to be good reasons, nor is it essential to preserve consistency with reasons given on previous occasions. The shifting rationales offered in support of novel practices that arouse the collective enthusiasm of the

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artworld are of interest to cultural historians whose intellectual labour it will be (in the jargon that is already passing out of fashion) to ‘deconstruct’ them. Those philosophers who share with ‘art historians’ a conviction that they practise a discipline that is distinct from Cultural History often maintain a respect for coherence and consistency that inclines them to bestow upon the utterances of artworld ‘theorists’ a curiosity bordering sometimes on the incredulous. Although some excursions have been made—indeed, because of them—we are now in a position to return to the question of work and its role in the expression ‘work of art,’ that was left not quite resolved. A wide dissemination of the institutional theory of art soon forced a compromise that even its strongest opponents have found irresistible in practice. Manifestly some sort of understanding had to be reached on the vexed questions of art, artefacture and artistic intention, for the problems pressed too hard to be ignored. It was not long before all but the most intransigent of traditionalists came—often with reluctance—to the following conclusion. The work that had traditionally been demanded of a work of art need not be the artist’s own work; nor need it even be the work of an artificer acting under the artist’s direction. It may be the work that is done by the artworld itself in the very act of granting recognition to a candidate object.

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This expenditure of purposefully directed effort might not be arduous enough to qualify as work in the sense in which this word is used about what builders’ labourers do, but it does formally satisfy the ‘artefacture’ condition. Not only will the primary condition mentioned in the traditional formula be satisfied in this way; it might even be possible to persuade oneself

that

the

granting

institutional

recognition

simultaneously confers a value upon the recognised candidate. There are ample precedents: for example, doesn’t our recognition of certain people as friends confer a value upon them? Because of the role they play, or might play, in our lives we appreciate them in a way in which we do not appreciate strangers. The opinion that the very act of classifying something as a work of art, whatever its properties or qualities may be, confers an artefactual status upon it has obvious consequences for the artworld. No principled consideration of a transhistorical and transcultural sort prevents the artworld from recognising, let us say, the second Thursday in May as a work of art should it choose to do so. Whoever feels the impulse to have this come about must lobby for it in the appropriate ways, and must face the possibility of failure. Such candidates are ill-adapted to some of the traditional roles of a work of art, such as being visibly displayed on a museum wall or mounted on a plinth; but the precedents for this have by now accumulated irreversibly.

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Whether the second Thursday in May might attract capital appreciation—another cultural use of works of art—is a moot point. The artworld’s marketing arm is resourceful, and ways of incorporating suitably embodied references to this date can easily achieve tangible forms as investment commodities. It is certainly not the case that the second Thursday in May will be subject to disqualification if it does not prove to be beautiful, expressive, emotionally cathartic or spiritually uplifting; although promoting the potential of this date to reward appreciators in one or more of these ways will be among the moves available to art critics. It is by now beyond question that if this nomination were to be made and if it were to be well received by the artworld, then documentation and commentary would quickly consolidate around it. The ratification would be complete, and irreversible. Those books, catalogues, records and documents that the artworld typically generates will probably continue for the time being to be shelved under the label ‘art history’ rather than ‘cultural history,’ but this disappointing thought only testifies to the momentum of an ongoing state of confusion in which the class of works of art is taken to have a history, as if it were a kind. So it comes to this. The artworld has, and according to institutional theory it has always had, hegemony over the classificatory use of the expression ‘work of art’ despite the fact that it is only during the last fifty years or so that we have come

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to understand that this so, and why it is so. Its decision having been made, the artworld cannot be mistaken about whether Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) is a work of art, just as the Reserve Bank cannot be mistaken about whether the official interest rate stands at the rate that it has just set. Should anyone ask today whether the second Thursday in May is a work of art the answer will probably be ‘No, but it could become a work of art.’ The inquiry is not and never was a question with a philosophical dimension, in the sense in which ‘What is art?’ is a philosophical question. ‘Is this a work of art?’ is merely a request for information about the current state of cultural practice in the artworld. The artworld is not committed to philosophical probity, and a philosophically motivated decision to use the word ‘art’ as a name for the category of memetic innovation has implications that extend far beyond the boundaries of the artworld. A revelatory episode in which a new meme is acquired may occur in the course of scrutinising any object whatsoever, whether it is or it is not currently enrolled in the class of works of art. Epiphanies, including those that yield up absolutely new memes, occur in all cultural domains. The question why it may plausible to think that they occur more frequently in the artworld than in the worlds of insurance underwriting and podiatry will be addressed in the final section of this essay.

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An understanding of the word ‘art’ as unrestricted in its application makes a strong contrast with an understanding of the expression ‘work of art’ as a proprietary function of the artworld. It may distress some artists, but it resonates with the practices of the wider world in which a concept of art as memetic innovation is already familiar in practical if not in theoretical dress. We have always, and perhaps often rightly, spoken of creative pastry-cooks and jewel thieves as artists. Not only does everyone know that there are arts of war and of motor cycle maintenance; everyone already knows that art is not craft. Why otherwise should we need two words? Most people understand well enough for practical purposes that art is not even high, refined, superior, or beautiful craft. Common

speech

has

always

unclearly

expressed

this

understanding by insisting that art is somehow important and deserving of respect, while conceding that although it is by no means rare and can be encountered anywhere it cannot be made or summoned at will as one can make or summon a meal or a taxi—or for that matter a sonnet or a picture of a bowl of fruit. The intuition that art is unresponsive to command is easily stripped of its unfashionable spookiness by recognising that our power to generate items of a cultural kind are confined to the purposeful exercise of those memes that we have already acquired, and always open to the discovery that we can do more. Art brings with it responsibility. Every addition to our

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repertoire of memes makes possible the generation of items of kinds that we consider abhorrent, as well as of kinds that we admire. Not every revelation is a blessing; nor is every work of art.

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Art and the artworld

Summary The artworld is one of many cultural domains that we characterise as entertainments. Entertainment has the important function of separating participants into performers and spectators who are not collusive with the performers’ intentions. The appreciators of works of art are ideally ‘disinterested’. That is to say, they are open to the acquisition of new memes. The artworld makes available to participants what is potentially the most productive site of both relative and absolute epiphanies,. The unity of human culture is attributable to the fact that memetic innovation may occur in any domain: the artworld is distinctive, but not unique. If the correct use of the expression ‘work of art’ is settled by the artworld with no necessary relation or reference to the transhistorical and transcultural meaning of the word art, then an obvious question springs to mind. It is this. If the artworld is only accidentally (or incidentally, or confusedly) interested in art, then why do we need it? There must be plenty of scope

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for memetically driven evolution within a culture that has never constructed an artworld, or has dispensed with its artworld as unnecessary or (in a Platonic fit of mistrust) as dangerous. The argument that there are, as a matter of fact, no cultures without an artworld feeds upon an illicit premise. It is probably true that all human cultures generate artefacts with either a decorative or a representational appearance, but to suppose that all such things are works of art is to beg a serious question with a preposterous definition. The answer flows naturally enough from the trend of the discussion to this point. Although it is undoubtedly true that epiphanies cannot be generated by the active exercise of appropriate memes, as stone carvings of American presidents can be generated, there may nevertheless be a context that is somehow more propitious than others; a context in which the acquisition of new memes can be eagerly awaited—and may even come to be expected—with a little more than normal optimism. The recognition and the institutionalisation of such a propitious context is itself an artefact of cultural evolution. It must be doubted whether the request ‘Tell us everything you know about your artworld’ would be translatable into a form that participants in a creative Neolithic culture would have found intelligible. We owe our present disposition to classify their rock markings and decorative items as works of art rather

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than as useful artefacts to the conceptual engineering processes of our own artworld, not to theirs. In daily life we busy ourselves for the most part with the exercise of familiar memes. When (as is very often the case) our actions are goal-directed, with specifiable purposes, there is often some sort of penalty to be paid for misreading or mistaking what it is that we and others are deliberately making and doing. This is so whether we have ourselves initiated the actions to which we are paying attention, or they are the actions of other people. But in contrast with the domains of practicality in which we are usually immersed there is a domain of social life in which items are more or less skilfully produced for contemplation by spectators who are free, without any utilitarian penalty, to misread or mistake what it is that is being made or done for their contemplation. Misreadings and mistakes about what has been intended are likely to be repudiated by the performers of the actions under scrutiny. Nevertheless they may occasionally be viable readings of what could have been done, or what might have been done and consequently of what can now be deliberately done despite the fact that these possibilities had previously occurred to nobody. Items, perhaps with a superficial similarity to those that have been purposefully generated before our eyes, can now be more or less skilfully produced as items that are quite differently conceived and may be given altogether

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new cultural roles. They may be items of new cultural kinds; or they may be counted to be of the same kinds but in significantly variant forms. A new meme, whether it qualifies as relative or absolute, may derive its efficacy from a variation in some aspect of the bodily movement that is enlisted by the performer, or it may derive from a previously unnoticed aspect of the context in which the action goes forward. One may come to see for the first time that a small modification of a routinely polite gesture will render it predictably insulting; or one may see that the same gesture performed in a different context will have other consequences altogether. We may see for the first time how to enlist the support of universal regularities that had previously gone unnoticed but have suddenly become as exploitable as any of those regularities upon which the memes that already lay within our repertoire depend. The domain in which items of familiar cultural kinds are produced and around which spectators or audiences are assembled, from which they are separated by a convention of detachment from the performersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; specific intentions, has a general name. It is called the domain of entertainment. Entertainments collect their spectators around the actions and products of performers in a way that explicitly distances the two parties in a stadium, a theatre, a concert hall, a gallery, a cinema or a circus tent. Even the personal armchair

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provides for the distancing of an audience of bysitters to literary or televisual performances. Entertainments are thus prime sites for the facilitation of memetic epiphanies, precisely because the takes and mistakes of the spectators about what is going forward are, to a significant degree, detached from any collusive relationship with the performer. To the extent that performers and spectators find themselves emotionally in purposeful collusion, as spectatorsupporters are likely to be in purposeful collusion with the efforts of an athlete, the context resolves more closely to one in which essentially familiar skills are presented for appreciation, as

for

example

set-piece

gymnastics.

becomes

progressively unlikely that such contexts will be sites of revelation, and it will become progressively less appropriate to call them â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;entertainmentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; the more nearly one approaches such theatres for the exercise of skill as the hospital operating table. Even so, the anatomy lesson has its classical theatre and we are presented occasionally with observation windows through which we can monitor the progress of work on a building site. To speak of entertainment in such cases would not be absurd; and neither would it be unthinkable that such encounters might be the sites of revelation. In art theory since the eighteenth century the significance

audienceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

detachment

from

the

performances of entertainers has been obscured in two ways.

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One of these has been through the emergence of the doctrine of ‘disinterestedness’. Originally, in eighteenth century thought, an economic concept related to selfish and unselfish factors in the marketplace it was soon adopted by aestheticians and mistranslated as a peculiar state of mind sometimes called ‘aesthetic distance’. The ‘distance’ implies a detachment that is not to be equated with lack of concern. ‘Aesthetic distance’ is allegedly a condition or state of mind in which the detachment of an audience from a performance is crucial but the significance of this detachment is mistaken, confused or blurred. Only in this state of ‘disinterested’ aesthetic receptivity—so it was said—can a work of art be properly appreciated. It was also claimed that although this putative inner state or condition is difficult to characterise in objective terms it is nevertheless infallibly recognised by introspection. For the truly disinterested spectator the authentically ‘aesthetic’ nature of the experience is indubitable. Moreover, it is criterial of the presence of art. Art and only art allegedly promotes states of aesthetic

disinterestedness

detachment

sensitive

perceivers. If the presence of such a state is confidently introspected, then the object promoting it cannot but be a work of art. This is the theme of Clive Bell’s remarkably influential book called Art. It is a theme that has exercised a fascination for aestheticians inversely proportional to its cogency ever since its

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publication in 1914. In the latter part of the twentieth century the same circular logic drove the speculations of the authoritarian and immensely influential art critic Clement Greenberg, whose own indubitable introspections persuaded the artworld that what he called ‘the history of art’ had passed from European management into the hands of the new American abstract painters. Oddly, it was not to the artists but to their allegedly most competent critics (notably, himself) that he attributed superior powers of introspection. Artists were credited instead, and far more plausibly, with responsibility for the exploitation of new memes flowing from the revelatory insight that paintings are flat. The origins of this revelation have often been traced back primarily to Cézanne; although it would be more realistic to attribute it to early modernist appreciators such as Roger Fry. If Cézanne himself can be called an early modernist it is certainly not a characterisation of himself or his intentions that he would have recognised. A reciprocal confusion about disinterestedness in art theory emerges as a countervailing tendency in which the idea that the audience should be detached from the performance is actively repudiated. As entertainments have become more professionally conceived and presented, a tendency has developed for them to become dominated by displays of familiar but remarkably well honed skills. The appropriate form of appreciation of these skills is strongly intentionalistic.

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That is to say, the ideal respondent to an entertainer’s performance is conceived as a person who is thoroughly familiar with the memes that have been professionally enlisted and deployed, whose task is to identify correctly and to reward with justifiable praise whatever it may be that the performer can be assumed to have done deliberately and to have done exceptionally well. Solo musical performances are typically treated in this way. There is a place for appreciation of this sort in every domain of human interest, including the visual artworld. Nevertheless, no matter how valuable a competent appreciation of the memes exercised by a professional entertainer may be, appreciation of this sort does not take us to the core of the issue about what art is. We need to move in the other direction. When those memes that are intentionally deployed by performers are already familiar to spectators, only a radical openness or inattentiveness to these displays of skill—no matter how spectacular they may be—will expose the spectators to a prospect of revelation. Openness of mind, detachment or disinterestedness struggle against the pressure to construct our appreciation in the manner of sophisticated and well-informed experts. This is a pressure felt in the art gallery as powerfully as it is in the stands on the tennis court. Indeed, the increasing popularity of competitive prize giving in the artworld—as if making works of art were a bloodless gladiatorial spectacle

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pitting

accomplished

winners

against

the

less

accomplished losers—is a clear indication of this. In practice what is demanded of all entertainers— whether they generate items that are recognised by the artworld as works of art or they participate generatively in sporting contests or forms of travel or dining experiences that are reported on adjacent pages of the newspapers—is that they shall make some effort to impress an audience with their command of currently popular memes. There is nothing deplorable about this and there is no disparagement of skill implicit in the intuition, almost universally shared, that art is something else. The deeper significance of all forms of entertainment—and especially in the arts—is that a prospect of revelation is opened up to spectators precisely to the extent that through their participation they discover and bring within their own repertoire some possibility of regular purposeful action that was not already familiar to them. Whether whatever it may be that the illuminated spectator supposes to have been done and can now recognise again is what the artist actually intended to do is, in relation to the concept of art, irrelevant. The entertainments offered within the artworld engage a vast range of human purposes and interests. Despite the obsession of beauty theorists, not one of the many sorts

human

interest—moral,

prudential,

political,

psychological, aesthetic, practical, etc—is more closely associated with revelatory insight than any other. Objects have

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been recognised by the artworld as works of art, and they have been more or less justifiably celebrated on the ground that they decorate a wall agreeably; that they effectively propagate some political or religious ideology; that they are the handiwork of a celebrated cultural hero; that they perpetuate (or that they initiate, or terminate) some cultural tradition; that they assist the generation of wealth by capital appreciation; that they make one laugh or cry and, not least, that they are beautiful, or expressive, or cathartic. Not only do these and innumerable other considerations enter into the artworld’s shifting schemes of appreciation; they are all valid grounds on which recognised works of art are more or less entitled to praise or condemnation, just as things that are not recognised as works of art are more or less entitled to praise or condemnation. There is not one of these grounds, nor is there any distinctive set of them, that is uniquely appropriate to the appraisal of works of art considered ‘as such’. Works of art, considered ‘as such,’ are merely items that have been recognised by a radically unprincipled artworld. They are also, as individuals, items of innumerable different cultural kinds, each with its own history. They are also—as is any other object to which attention is paid—items that may offer up incoercible epiphanies to precisely the extent that their spectators are encouraged to view them with detachment. This is the only distinctive and properly art-related function of the artworld. Some

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of these points might be more concretely made by offering an illustration. J. M. W. Turner’s painting The Fighting Temeraire (1838) was presented as an entertainment in an exhibition to which Thackeray responded in the following way.

If you are particularly anxious to know what is the best picture in the room … I must request you to turn your attention to a noble river-piece by J. W. M. Turner, Esquire, R.A., The Fighting Temeraire, as grand a painting as ever figured on the walls of any Academy, or came from the easel of any painter. The old Temeraire is dragged to her last home by a little, spiteful, diabolical steamer. A mighty red sun, amidst a host of flaring clouds, sinks to rest on one side of the picture, and illumines a river that seems interminable, and a countless navy that fades away into such a wonderful distance as never was painted before. The little demon of a steamer is belching out a volume … of foul, lurid, red-hot, malignant smoke, paddling furiously, and lashing up the water round about it; while behind it (a cold grey moon looking down on it), slow, sad, and majestic, follows the brave old ship, with death, as it were, written on her. I think … we ought not, in common gratitude, to sacrifice entirely these noble old champions of ours, but that we should have somewhere a museum of their skeletons, which our children might visit, and think of the brave deeds which were done in them. The bones of the Agamemnon and the Captain, the Vanguard, the Culloden, and the Victory ought to be sacred relics, for

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Englishmen to worship almost. Think of them when alive, and braving the battle and the breeze, they carried Nelson and his heroes victorious by the Cape of Saint Vincent, in the dark waters of Aboukir, and through the fatal conflict of Trafalgar. It is absurd, you will say (and with a great deal of reason), for Titmarsh [a Thackeray character] or any other Briton to grow so politically enthusiastic about a four-foot canvas, representing a ship, a steamer, a river, and a sunset. But herein surely lies the power of the great artist. He makes you see and think of a great deal more than the objects before you; he knows how to soothe or intoxicate, to fire or to depress, by a few notes, or forms, or colours, of which we cannot trace the effect to the source, but only acknowledge the power.

It might be thought that in this passage of appreciation Thackeray was following the standard critical practice of elucidating the artist’s intentions. No doubt this is what he told himself, but it is clear that he did not consult the artist about these attributed purposes, nor would he have been much put out if the painter had disowned them. The fact is that the intentionalistic formula provided him with a frame in which to display his intuitive commitment to a revelation theory of art. He finds abundant new memes that—in his own experience at least—had not been visibly exercised in the corpus of contemporary painting. These memes resonate mainly with the

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values of sentimental nationalism, and he attributes their invocation to the artist as if the painting manifested Turner’s supernatural power of divination; a power that supposedly only the greatest artists command. Two things are very clear. One, already noticed, is that the artist may not have had in mind much or indeed any of the jingoistic enthusiasm to which—as Thackeray discloses—the painting interpretively lent itself. More significantly, the passage ‘… he knows how to soothe or intoxicate … by a few notes, or forms, or colours, of which we cannot trace the effect to the source, but only acknowledge the power’ betrays Thackeray’s own capitulation to a mystificatory account of genius. That he was mistaken is obvious. Of course people were able to ‘trace the effect to the source’. Very quickly Turner’s pictorial memes, with a new range of uses that were more or less welcome according to the viewers’ systems of value, attracted a host of imitators. It would be absurd to reject Thackeray’s revelatory reasons for admiring Turner’s painting on the ground that they are not aesthetic reasons, just as it would be absurd to reject Freud’s Freudian reason for admiring a womb-shaped pot in his collection. It may refer to his personal nostalgia for an idyllic childhood, but the ground may still be universal. It is the radical absence of restriction on the range of appropriate responses, whether they are of approval or distaste,

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which distinguishes appreciation in the entire domain of entertainment from the responses that are appropriately made in more practical and purposeful contexts. The display of motor cycles in the Guggenheim Museum in 1998 may well have been misguidedly expected to focus the attention of art-lovers on such putatively aesthetic qualities as might be discerned in personal transport machinery, but the true significance of the exhibition is quite different. The artworld’s effort to corral memetic innovation (usually mis-identified with ‘aesthetic quality’) inside the class of works of art is too restrictive. The tacitly acknowledged fact is that art is everywhere, although a bemused audience may need to be brought into an art gallery to see that this is so. The awful truth about what art is differs profoundly from the awful truth about the artworld. The artworld is a sprawling, often productively corrupt, cultural institution located within the broader domain of entertainment. It singles out objects for attention in a historically and culturally relativistic way, seeking more or less arbitrarily to restrict the range of considerations that will be regarded as relevant to the appreciation of these things. Contrastingly, the awful truth about what art is requires consent to a transhistorical and transcultural principle. ‘Art,’ we must concede, is the most appropriate name for the transhistorical and transcultural category of memetic innovation. If we find ourselves for some

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reason unwilling to make this concession then we shall need another name for this category and we shall need a better account than has been offered of the difference between art and craft. We shall also need some other explanation of why it is that—as everybody knows—we can neither associate art with all works of art, nor can we associate art only with works of art. Those participants in the artworld who are not handcuffed to aesthetical mystification should find this freedom liberating. Among those who stand to benefit from an acknowledgment that they may say whatsoever they please about works of art without provoking any philosophical outrage—although they may be sacked by their newspapers— are those professional critics who, for the most part, submit to a code of propriety that they can neither fully understand nor explain to others. When, as occasionally happens, epiphanies fall upon them in the presence of works of art so that new memes become available to them—and to others as a consequence—everyone should be grateful. At very least, whether professional critics are or are not determined to parade a restricted expertise, a public in search of entertainment is entitled to expect some engaging prose from them. There is a cohort of ‘art historians’ established within the academies that is still deluded by the supposition that ‘art’ is the name of a cultural kind with a history, and that this is a history that can only be uncovered by applying a distinctive method. Without

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question, the works of art in which they interest themselves belong to innumerable cultural kinds, each with its own history. ‘Attic redfigure vase,’ Byzantine mosaic’ and ‘American-type abstract expressionist painting’ are typically the names of such cultural kinds, and each one has its own evolutionary history. This is a history that is accessible in principle to diligent cultural historians who have no commitment to the notorious ‘art historical method’. ‘Art’ is not the name of any one of these kinds, and neither is it the name of something other than a kind—a class, for example, or a particular individual—that has been shaped in a way that was not evolutionary. We may well ask why it is that the class of works of art is held in some general respect and individual items may be revered to the extent that they are regarded as immensely valuable and possibly not for sale at any price. Why are so many of them protected in controlled environments against the natural elements and secured in vaults or behind armoured glass against human marauders? That they are often without doubt items of cultural interest may be part of the reason, but in this respect they do not greatly outshine many other significant memorabilia stored in museums of other sorts. The response that works of art are outstandingly beautiful objects, and that beauty is the one human value that is recognised by the market to be almost immune to the control of its invisible hand, is not credible.

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The most credible answer seems to be that throughout the period of market supervenience the domain of entertainment in which until quite recently works of art commanded serious attention is the domain in which, before the advent of the scientific worldview, epiphanies were most widely sought and most abundantly found. This is a heritage reason for treating them with respect, and it does tend to distinguish works of art favourably from other sorts of culturally significant artefacts. Innumerable people, educated and uneducated, have learnt what it is possible to do, what it is possible to know, what can be understood and what can be felt, from such objects. It is entirely unsurprising that they have come to figure among the more popular collectibles. A characterisation of works of art as collectibles is often resented, if it is not rejected outright; sometimes even more fiercely than a characterisation of the artworld as a provider of entertainment. It is an observation of the sort that is condemned in a parallel cultural domain as impiety or irreverence. Nevertheless, works of art are collectibles in just the same sense as postage stamps are collectibles, along with the discarded clothing of celebrities, remarkable mineral formations, first editions and cereal packages; especially those with claims to uniqueness and rarity. Uniqueness and rarity are characteristic of works of art, and in some cases such as the painting and the limited print they

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are inescapable. These virtues from the collectors’ point of view are

widely shared

however.

Admiral

Nelson’s

bloodstained waistcoat would no doubt command a huge price on the auction block, not only from bidders who shared Thackeray’s enthusiasms. The reasons why collectibles of all sorts are dramatically coveted may be complex but they are seldom an unfathomable mystery. Mystery supervenes only when we are assured that the immense value of some work of art is attributable to its incomparable beauty or to its possession of a distinctive ‘aesthetic quality’ that is not to be found in an ancient carpet or a 1940s plastic radio. The myth of works of art as objects entitled to a sort of admiration not due to things that have been classified in other ways is persistent. We see it clearly in passages of critical commentary such as the following, by Arifa Akbar and appearing in The Independent newspaper on 8th March 2008. The thrust may be intendedly rhetorical, but its logic is plain enough.

When Damien Hirst unveiled a diamondencrusted human skull worth £50m, his fans hailed it as a haunting work of genius which fully deserved to become the most expensive piece of contemporary art ever made. Nearly a year later, For the Love of God is still creating a stir – but possibly not for the reasons Hirst had hoped. 132

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Yesterday, Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery in London, issued a devastating critique of the work's artistic merit, discounting it as a ‘decorative object’ which, despite the attention it received, marked a less than glittering moment in its creator's career. ‘It's not challenging or fresh. It's a decorative object that is not particularly well done. What is so interesting about it?’ What is interesting about this object is, of course, precisely what has provoked the storm of media coverage surrounding it. The quoted spokesperson for the artworld seems to intuit, correctly, that memetic innovation—in this case an obscenely gross memento mori—is significant. But he also assumes, mistakenly, that decorative objects are in principle incapable of rewarding the contemplator with epiphanies of the sort that, as he seems to suppose, can only be expected in confrontation with works of art. The question whether this outrageously decorated skull is or is not ‘particularly well done’ is curiously marginal. In these few lines of typical artworld prose we stumble into the very fog of confusion that it has been the ambition of this essay to disperse. In summary: the first point to be made is that ‘art’ is not the name of a cultural kind with a history. Art is memetic innovation, and memetic innovation is what it always was. Moreover, the fact that art is what it always was should cause us to rejoice because our transhistorical and transcultural openness

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to memetic innovation is the engine of cultural evolution. This is a conclusion that should come as a surprise to nobody, although the artworld has tried hard to conceal it in several ways: notably, by attributing a history to art; by using ‘art’ and ‘work of art’ as if they were codesignative classifying expressions and by failing to understand that only kinds have evolutionary histories. At present an aura of unlimited wealth (that we might well imagine Hirst’s skull invokes, whether this is or is not what he intended) gives a specious solidity and permanence to an artworld that continues to generate record-breaking auction prices. Diamonds are forever. In spite of this, the authority of the artworld is in decline against the competition from popular entertainments and popular media. It seems likely that the inevitably increasing rarity of the items hoarded in the artworld’s collections will ensure that they remain covetable, but the task of sustaining the myth that the value of works of art is a value of a different order from that of other collectibles will become harder to sustain on any basis other than that of their real cultural significance, as the de facto loci of memetic innovation. Epiphanies occurring in cultural domains outside the range of entertainments—most dramatically nowadays in such domains as cosmology and molecular biology—are less accessible to most of us just because these fields are dominated

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by the narrow focus of the expert mind. Displays of purposefully directed skill are more generously rewarded with praise by scientific commentators than they are by even art critics. In spite of this, C. P. Snow was mistaken in his effort to distinguish two cultures. Performers and spectators may not be formally separated in the laboratories and workshops of science and technology, as they are in the entertainment spaces of theatres and art galleries, but the unity of human culture is guaranteed by its dependence in every domain upon a single driving force and a common shaping principle. The name of this driving force is memetic innovation. The name of the shaping principle is the evolution of cultural kinds. The shortest and most convenient name of the felicity of which we should stand in awe because it continuously delivers up to us powers of intentional action that we had not known to be ours, is revelation.

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Biographical Note Donald Brook is Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts in the Flinders University. He was variously educated in Engineering at the University of Leeds; in Fine Arts at the King Edward VII School of Art in the University of Durham and in Philosophy at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Australian National University. After postgraduate work on Cycladic and Archaic sculpture in Greece and Crete he taught in the nineteen-fifties at the Ahmadu Bello University in Northern Nigeria, after which he resumed his professional practice as a sculptor in London. He continued this practice briefly in Canberra until 1968, when he was appointed senior lecturer in the new Power Department of Fine Arts in the University of Sydney. In the nineteen-sixties and early ’seventies he was successively art critic of The Canberra Times, The Sydney Morning Herald and Nation Review, and was one of the founders of the Tin Sheds workshop. He was appointed to the inaugural chair of Visual Arts in the Flinders University in 1974, and initiated the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide shortly thereafter. Since his retirement from academic teaching in 1989 he has continued to publish extensively, especially in the areas of art theory and pictorial representation, with occasional excursions into fiction. He is currently working on an extended paper entitled ‘The awful truth about what pictures are’ that is intended to complement the present essay.

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ABOUT THIS BOOK The awful truth about what art is was commissioned by Artlink magazine to put before the general reader a radically new answer to a pair of questions that are have been made insoluble by running them together as if they were a single question. One of them is What is art? The other is How do we know whether something is a work of art? The awful truth extracts the main themes from forty years of the authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lectures, discussions and essays. He identifies art as the engine of cultural evolution and argues, wittily and persuasively, that cultural kinds such as the cubist painting and the food mixer evolve by imitation and adaptation just as biological species evolve by replication and adaptation. In both of these evolutionary processes the unintended and the unexpected are crucial elements. Turning from abstraction to the artworld, he shows that natural objects and random artifacts may be recognised by the artworld as works of art for any reason, or for no reason. The artworld may classify the switching of a light bulb on and off as a work of art if it so chooses, but as the audience for this entertainment we may assign to it no significant role in cultural evolution. Art (when it is properly understood) and works of art (as they are recognised by the artworld) are only accidentally related. Donald Brook is presently working on the companion title: The awful truth about what pictures are. He brings to both these revelatory constructions his insights as an engineer, an artist and a philosopher. He was a founder of the Tin Sheds in Sydney in 1969 and of the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide in 1974, and is Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at Flinders University of South Australia. He has influenced generations of students smart enough to recognise that here is a truly original thinker. Now in his early eighties, he is an iconoclastic living treasure. Artlink was founded in 1981 in Adelaide by Stephanie Britton. Its first issue included an article by Donald Brook, and this is Artlinkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first book.