I Heart Aesthetics - Part II

Welcome back. Before I continue, I must issue a(nother) disclaimer: I have not thought this discussion of Aesthetics through to completion and thus, by the end of it, I may end up changing my mind about a few things. You should therefore consider this more of an open exploration rather than a lecture entitled "Common Misunderstandings About Aesthetics and Their Solutions" by David Lacalamita. I expect to be wrong at some point, but I will do my best to make this readable and thorough; I have not chosen to write on Aesthetics arbitrarily. These posts are the culmination of many hours of conversation and thought.

We continue where we left off, with the subjectivity of interpretations of a work of art. We arrived at this issue, you'll remember, through our discussion of artistic intent and we concluded that this is largely irrelevant because of the subjectivity of interpretations.

In true philosophical form, let's start with a statement: "All interpretations of works of art are subjective" All in favour? Opposed? Abstentions? Noted. Motion passed. Great. So now all interpretations of works of art are subjective. This means that if I say Beethoven's Fifth is great and you think it sucks, there are no problems. I think Picasso is a genius and his art makes you nauseous so you hate it - great! You like the band Coldplay and my friend Dan Martin thinks they're offensively inoffensive - you get the picture.

These differences of opinion are common. We all like different types of music, different types of art, different styles of theatre, different narrative styles, etc. And it's all fine and dandy until consider the question: What is good art?

This is the point where voices get raised and temperatures rise. The age-old question of quality in art. Is there such a thing? Can we evaluate art? This question is important. It has particular relevance for arts educators because how can you mark someone's art? And it has relevance for the people who pay for art to be made - are they getting their money's worth? What if you had paid John Cage to produce 4:33? Or commissioned Marcel Duchamp and all you got was a urinal?

In order to answer the question, "Can we evaluate art?" we might do well to first define "art". I will go about this by using four examples: our friend Malevich's Black Square, John Cage's 4'33", Marcel Duchamp's Fountain and Iannis Xenakis' Metastasis.

John Cage wrote many pieces incorporating variable elements and elements of chance. One of his more famous works is 4'33", which is a three-movement piece for unspecified instrument(s) (that I had the pleasure of performing last year) comprised entirely of "silence".

*SPOILER ALERT* It turns out that even "silence" is not quite as soundless as you might suppose: an audience makes quite a bit of noise on its own. Thus, the audience becomes the performer and the performer becomes the audience since he or she is to remain truly silent.

The score is a set of instructions. Is this music? Is it art?

Marcel Duchamp's famous stunt at a New York art exhibit where he signed a urinal and placed it on display was just one example of a "Readymade" - an everyday object that is appropriated as a piece of art. Is this art?

Have a listen to this.



Is this music? If you ask my friend Aaron James, (to dangerously put words in his mouth) he will tell you that it most certainly is. One user posted this comment about the video on YouTube: "The difference between noise and music is structure and purpose". We've already discussed purpose but reconsider a few things.

What this user likely meant by "purpose" is "concept". Does the concept matter? Going way back to our friend Malevich and his Black Square I noted that context and intent make a significant impact on an individual's impression of a piece. I also concluded that despite this fact, Malevich's intent is relatively unimportant since interpretations are necessarily subjective. However, without knowledge of Malevich's intent, is the work still art? Considered independent of its intent, a black square might make us sink deep into our souls and ponder our darkest secrets, confront our most basic fears and come to terms with our utter isolation as a human, as a species as a planet. But it might not. More likely, it is perceived as a black square. Thus, its aesthetic value seems to be somewhat in question if we define "aesthetic" as pertaining to the bodily sensations elicited, and one might be inclined to say that it is strictly through its historical or conceptual significance that any value can be derived from Black Square. (I will return to this a bit later)

With the John Cage piece, it is really only because Cage was the first to think of writing a piece for an unspecified instrument in which not a single note is played that anyone cares about this piece at all. Anyone at all could have written a "silent" piece. This is another example where the concept of the piece seems very important. How could a piece in which not a single note is heard be considered music? If we accept that the audience becomes the performer, then are coughs and candy wrappers musical sounds?

A similar question applies to Duchamp's piece. If a toilet can be art, can everything be art? If someone put another urinal in an exhibit, would it be considered art?

And with Xenakis: The score is a graph of pitch over time. Compared with 4'33", it is easy to at least call this music (since there are pitches) but this piece blurs line between "noise" or "sound" and music.

(EDIT 11:15 pm: Aaron informs me that the score is not, in fact, a graph of pitch over time. I knew using Xenakis was risky. The point of this example is to illustrate the blurred boundary between noise and sound. There are likely an infinite number of better examples, but I hope my point is still made.)

All this threatens my previous conclusion about intent: The above examples force people to question the artist's intent and have little value outside of this speculative process. However, I don't the two conclusions are mutually exclusive. The concept behind a work of art may lend a work historical significance, and consequently, it may increase the depth of a work's significance to those who are aware of this concept. But I’m stuck on the subjectivity of individual reactions. No matter how obvious the intent or concept a work and no matter how integral this is to the piece, individual speculations about the artist's intent will always be different depending on our individual experiences - and depending on the expectations that these experiences have established. Psychologically speaking, "learning" takes place when our expectations are exceeded or not met at all (A point I may elaborate on in subsequent posts) and thus, while the "true" intent of an artist remains irrelevant, the process of guessing what his or her intent might be is not.

So then what is art? Where is the line in the sand between art and non-art? I am inclined to suggest that art is any object of aesthetic consideration. The colour black (or, shade if you're being picky), "silence", Readymades, "noise" are all things we experience every day. Art makes us reevaluate what these terms mean and question the nature of the things we experience every day. Essentially, it makes life more exciting.

The question that remains is the nature of “good” art. But I will leave this question for the next post.