Ars gratia artis

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth”
~ Pablo Picasso

 

While I'm still being pretentious, let me talk a moment about what I think it means for art to be made. One can, with only a little exercise of the imagination, picture a rock formation which is a perfect or near-perfect analogue of some abstract sculpture - perhaps by Henry Moore - and then pose oneself the question: which of these is Art? We can skirt Paley and assume that the rock formation is not a 'made thing' in the sense of being the product of willed agency; we might then conclude that the sculpture is Art, while the rock formation is not, because of the artist. From that point, we can then, with only a very tiny further exertion of our imagination, conceive of a grilled-cheese sandwich, likewise made by the willed agency of that same Henry Moore, and assert that this would not be Art. This assertion would not necessarily invalidate our thesis; we could evolve it slightly to suggest that what makes an artwork is the willed intention of the artist to make Art. This concept achieves its apotheosis in the artist who makes Art simply by declaring of something that pre-existed that it has become Art - a clarifying elaboration of this concept actually won a Turner Prize for the artist Simon Starling a few years back, and will again be something to which we return (assuming, as I must no less than I assume your existence reading this in the metanow, that you are still with me when Starling reappears in this narrative). We could make different assertions concerning rock and sculpture and sandwich - we could imagine an aesthetic in which only the sandwich were Art, or in which none of these things were Art - and there might indeed be some profit in following these alternative aesthetics to their conclusion (and you can find counterparts to Starling for any of them, from Chris Ofili to Tracey Emin to Andres Serrano). But I will advance here, without at this point providing anything substantive by way of justification, the argument that Art is made by the intuition of the Artist in the eye of the Observer.

To really elaborate on that it's necessary to return to an earlier, and similarly unsupported, argument: I can only be, I said, without troubling to define any of those terms. I'm now going to embark on one of the more foolhardy quests available to the philosopher, and examine what I understand being to ... be. In doing so, I make no presumption of authority, nor even of adequacy to the task. I simply intend to express, to my own satisfaction and with my own nebulous appreciation of the broader form of my expression as a whole, what it may be to be a being: in what senses some entity may be understood to be.