Art Is What It Always Was; Art History Is Bunk
byDonald
Brook,© 2002
Some
of the ideas outlined here, more guardedly qualified and referenced,
have already appeared in print as ‘The Undoing of Art
History (Parts I and 2)’ in Artlink 21 (No.4,
2001): 66-69 and in Artlink 22 (No.1, 2002): 70-73. Also,
as ‘Art and History,’ in Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 60 (No.4, 2002): 331-340, further developed
as ‘Art History?’ (forthcoming).
This is an outline of a rather intricate argument. It is a sketch,
not an ordnance survey map.
Cultural
kinds
The conclusions that are summarised as the title of this essay
can not be argued for independently; they hang together on an
intricate skein of ideas. Pivotal among them is the notion of
a cultural kind, and of the historically shaping power
of a generative principle of kindedness.
Kinds
are collections. They are not abstract or ‘philosophical’
non-particulars like types or classes. They are more like herds
or tribes, enjoying a relatively concrete and precarious temporal
existence, buffeted by fate. To invoke the word that distinguishes
them most sharply from classes: kinds have histories. A
great deal of nonsense is attributable to theorists who have explicitly
asserted, or who have implicitly condoned, the proposition that
the word art is correctly used when it is used as the name of
a kind, of which conventionally so called works of art
are (allegedly) the items.
Cultural
kinds such as the condom, the piano accordion and the Archibald
portrait, are not biological kinds like the broad bean and the
fruit bat; although, like biological kinds, they each have a history.
Every work of conventionally so called art is an item of some
cultural kind. It would be merely truistic to say that each still
life with fruit is an item of the still life with fruit kind,
if it were it not for the profound implication that the still
life with fruit kind has a history. But, as I shall argue, the
history that the still life with fruit kind has is a cultural
history; it is not an art history. With cultural kinds
(just as it is with biological kinds) it does not follow from
the fact that each so called work of art is an item of some
cultural kind that all so called works of art are items of the
same cultural kind, and that this kind is distinguishable
from other kinds in such a way that all of the items of all of
the cultural kinds have a role to play in a single history.
Biological
kinds such as the broad bean and the fruit bat have histories.
Nevertheless, they are different biological kinds, and they have
different histories. What their histories have in common—what
sustains their histories as histories and not as mere stories
standing autonomously upon independent foundations—is a common
intelligibility given by appeal to a set of common or transcending
explanatory principles.
For
biological kinds the basis of the common intelligibility of their
different histories is located in evolutionary theory. To qualify
as a relevant consideration in the history of a biological kind
a candidate event must be compatible with a set of generative
assumptions: notably, that the history of each biological kind
has been shaped by the imperfect replication of parental DNA and
by the exposure of items of the kind to environmental contexts
within which faithful and variant copies differentially survive
to replicate themselves in their turn. The history of the bean
is not the history of the bat, but the intellectual constraints
upon the teller of their histories are constant. For the biological
kinds these constraints are generally Darwinian and are handily
collected together under the rubric of evolutionary theory.
It is the generative principle of biological kindedness—the
chemically coded replication of DNA and the constraints of the
environment—that shapes the history of each kind; with different
results, case by case.
If we
are to speculate as coherently about the histories of cultural
kinds—the screwdriver, the wedding ceremony and the Hellenistic
terracotta—as we speculate about the histories of the cauliflower
and the redback spider we shall need to draw upon a generative
principle of cultural kindedness that is fairly comparable to
the biological generative principle of kindedness, both in its
explanatory power and in the restriction of its range to the appropriate
domain of application.
Of course,
the generative principle that shapes the histories of cultural
kinds can not be the same Darwinian principle as that which shapes
the biological kinds. We can not draw upon the imperfect replication
of DNA—the genetic story—to account for the shaping
of cultural kinds without collapsing together our distinct ideas
of biological nature and of culture. Moreover—and more pragmatically—items
of the refrigerator kind manifestly have no genes. We are quite
sure that this is not a kind that perpetuates itself in the whitegoods
factory by sexual congress, or by spontaneous division.
The
differential adaptive responses of cultural items to their environments
is another matter. The shaping power of context is as influential
in the cultural domain as it is in the biological. In a propitious
environment such items of a cultural kind as a greeting
(for example) can easily be generated. One of the varieties of
the greeting kind is constituted by occurrent items in each of
which noses are rubbed together. There are unresponsive cultural
contexts in which this greeting kind is either unknown or else
it is so indignantly discouraged that it finds no foothold. One,
at least, of the factors determining the history of a cultural
kind—the projection of its items into a propitious context—is
in direct analogy with the workings of the generative principle
of biological kindedness. Despite this analogy, however, we need
an answer to the parallel question of replication. How are relevantly
similar items of a cultural kind perpetuated in such a way that
new items, replete with onward-transmissible imperfections and
variations, come to be reproduced generation after generation?
Imitation
The
answer to this question is in one way obvious; in another way
it is obscure. Plainly, the persistence of cultural kinds is somehow
attributable to imitation. Something is imitated by those
cultural participants who are the users of items of cultural kinds.
Imitation is the key, but what lock does it turn? It is far from
obvious what it is, precisely, that is imitated by cultural participants.
Theorists in this domain—the domain that is now fashionably
called memetics—are inclined to make one or the other
of two disastrous mistakes. They are likely to say that cultural
kinds are imitated by cultural participants, and that cultural
kinds are the imitable and imitated memes—let
us take advantage of Dawkins’ felicitous term—whose
onward transmission perpetuates the kinds and gives them their
histories. Or else these theorists—and sometimes, inconsistently,
they are the very same theorists—say that items of
the various cultural kinds are imitated by cultural participants
and that these things—the items themselves—are the imitable
and imitated memes whose replication perpetuates the kinds.
Both
of these claims are incoherent. Kinds, conceived as memes, can
not possibly be held responsible for their own perpetuation. In
spite of this, such cultural kinds as the screwdriver and
the calendar feature prominently among the examples given
by respondents when they are called upon to exemplify a meme.
The suggestion that the screwdriver is a meme is an inchoate
category error, comparable to the claim that the fruit bat
is the very gene whose replication perpetuates the fruit bat kind.
Nor can memes be identified with items of cultural kinds.
To make short work of the argument we need only substitute demonstrative
terms in an otherwise identical reductio. The suggestion
that this (holding a screwdriver aloft for inspection)
is a screwdriver meme is precisely analogous to the absurd suggestion
that this (holding a fruit bat aloft) is a fruit bat gene.
Memes
I propose,
quite differently, that the meme is a behaviour-in-context
such that an item of an identifiable cultural kind is, as matter
fact, normally generated by performing it. For example: there
is a context (a very complicated context, certainly, and difficult
to specify in detail) such that, as I know, if I raise my hand
in just this context I shall more often than not succeed in generating
an item of the cultural kind that we call a greeting. There
is a quite different sort of context such that, as I know, if
I raise my hand in this (other) context I shall more often than
not generate an item of the cultural kind that we call a vote.
There may not be any differences, obvious to a spectator, in the
way I seem to be raising my hand in the two cases; and the unwary
may even be tempted to say that my behaviour is the same.
But this temptation should be resisted. Behaviours-in-context
are by no means mere behaviours. The internal and generally
unseen bodily components of the progress of such different performances
as greeting by, and voting by, hand-raising, as the progress of
each is internally monitored by the performer, are radically different.
It is
my contention that memes are intimately related behaviours-in-context,
performed in such a way as to sustain a justifiable expectation
among cultural co-participants that an item of an identifiable
and predictable cultural kind will thereby be generated. For a
clear case: the handraising-in-context that is regularly generative
of a greeting is a meme that we might call (if we insist upon
having a name for it) the greeting-by-handraising meme.
The different behaviour of handraising that is, in its own context,
generative of a vote is another meme entirely, that we might characterise
as the voting-by-handraising meme. Both memes are learnt
by imitation. As participants we are tireless watchers and copiers
of our co-participants in the shared culture. The successful teaching
of children is massively achieved by displaying memes and by encouraging
their imitation. ‘Look! This is how we make a sandwich. This
is how we make a primed canvas. This (raising an eyebrow) is how
we make an ironic face’. And so on.
A competently
participating child will imitatively acquire many thousands, perhaps
millions, of memes. By adulthood she will have acquired the knack
of combining sequences and combinations of memes so seamlesslessly
that she is able to generate, intentionally, not only an item
of an elementary cultural kind such as a greeting by handraising.
She may well have the sophistication to generate an item of such
a rare cultural kind as an altarpiece in three panels in the manner
of Pietro Lorenzetti, dedicated to the virgin in parody of the
cult of Kylie Minogue. Similarly—to reinforce the analogy
with biological kinds—do a myriad of genetic bases on strings
of DNA combine and sequence themselves to generate a cabbage.
Skill,
intention and accident
Memes
are behaviours-in-context that are regularly, reliably (and hence
predictably) generative of items of established cultural kinds.
A purposeful command of the common stock of memes is learnt by
imitation, and the cultural kinds are perpetuated by competent
cultural participants. A cultural kind may be rigid to the extent
that its memes are simple and lend themselves to quasi-mechanical
copying with little variation. The assimilation of memes may,
indeed, be so regular and widespread that in relation to a few
of them—for example, in the generation of such cross-cultural
kinds such as the eyebrow-flash of recognition—there
may well be a case for conceiving of their acquisition as a genetically
hard-wired disposition, rather than as a purely memetic acquisition.
But
let us try to keep the question simple; first distinguishing biology
from culture before seeking to re-join them. Cultural history
would be a less interesting topic than biological history were
it not that the perpetuation of cultural kinds is at no less subject
to variation. Indeed, because of an element of arbitrariness in
the adoption or rejection of new memes (shall we or shall we not
decide to make a fashion statement by preferring pastel colours
this year?) culture might be regarded as more radically plastic
than nature. For a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways
memes can be inexactly imitated, and cultural kinds can be perpetuated
with such florid variations that emergent kinds may speciate more
profusely even than plants and animals. Cultural histories are
probably more— and certainly more rapidly—marked by
innovation than are biological histories.
It is a corollary of this conception of the meme that the intentional
use of memes (in the commonsense meaning of the term ‘intentional,’
equivalent to deliberate) is possible. We can make an omelette
intentionally just because, and only because, we know that
we are very likely to generate an item of the omelette kind if
we begin by breaking eggs.
Simple
skills, using elementary memes, are combined into more broadly
based and elevated skills. At the tops of memetic pyramids there
are the superlative skills of virtuoso pianists, portrait painters
and microsurgeons. Products of skill are recognised, and they
are widely admired, as evidence of their performers’ ability
to marshal imitatively acquired memes toward the generation of
items of the most sophisticated cultural kinds. In spite of this
we are well aware that a great blessing of life—its creative
unpredictability—is attributable not so much to the exercise
of skilful deliberation as to the accident of discovery. To borrow
the sense of the title of a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby:
it is the alchemist in search of the philosophers’ stone
who discovers phosphorus, not the mediaeval phosphorus-seeker
(who knows of no such element).
In the mode of intentional action we use those memes that we expect
will yield an item of the X-kind and we occasionally discover,
to our gratified astonishment, that some accidental variation
of behaviour has occurred, or there has been some anomaly of context,
such that an unintended, unexpected, item of the Y-kind
has instead been generated. And very occasionally the Y-kind may
qualify not as a mere variant of the intended X-kind but as a
new kind entirely. Nobody—or anyhow, none of our co-participants
in the local culture—knew that things of this kind
could be made. But now they know how. A new meme has emerged.
New
memes
Discoveries
are not made memetically, although once they are made the productive
new memes are freely available for exploitation. Discoveries are
not, as is sometimes claimed on their behalf, the products of
skills so high and fine that their authors deserve adulation as
the possessors of an inimitable genius. Discoveries are
necessarily accidental. The secret of creativity is not after
all so very mysterious. We stumble upon the possibility of new
behaviours-in-context with unexpected but regular consequences.
We do this incidentally to the purposeful doing of something else.
Important discoverers no doubt deserve to be celebrated, but not
for their display of inimitable skill. There are no inimitable
skills.
What
is it, then, that makes intentional, memetic, action possible?
Standing behind every meme we must suppose that there are universal
regularities without which repetitive behaviours-in-context would
not have predictable consequences. Part of the delight that attaches
to the discovery of a new meme is surely attributable to the contribution
that each one makes to our practical and intellectual grasp of
the mysterious regularities of the universe. It is essentially
a metaphysical delight, and it is no wonder that creativity—when
it is understood in this way—is much appreciated. We should
rather wonder why it is that theorists have tried to associate
creativity distinctively with conventionally so called art,
when it is so clearly manifest in every domain of human interest.
Entertainments
A possible
explanation comes to mind. It is a plausible thought that memetic
innovation is most likely to occur when the standard use of memes
to generate familiar cultural items is observed by spectators
who are free—as the performers are relatively unfree—to
‘misread’ what is being intentionally made and done.
Such ‘misreadings’ may well be repudiated by the performers,
but in spite of this they may be no less viable accounts of what
might have been done, and of what might therefore be
done again, than are the performers’ own readings upon
which their claims to have acted deliberately rest.
Those activities and products of action around which bystanders
are assembled with an assumption of personal detachment have a
general name. They are called entertainments. Classic entertainments
make provision for a non-participatory audience, quarantined in
the auditorium of a stadium, a theatre, a concert hall, a gallery
or circus tent. Entertainments are prime sites of memetic innovation
precisely because the bystanders’ productive readings—or,
as one might prefer to say, their felicitous mis-readings—of
what has been made or done and of how it might be made or done
again is significantly out of collusion with the entertainers’
intentions.
A story
of this kind about the potency of entertainments is to some extent
consistent with the familiar post-Kantian art-theoretical dogma
of disinterestedness; but it parts company with such teachings
in that it does not pretend to offer a criterion by which the
artistic domain is to be distinguished from the scientific or
the economic or the political or any other domain. Why, indeed,
should we expect to find such a criterion? Why should we not instead
abandon the use of the term ‘art’ that is currently
conventional and revert to an older and more general use, in which
its application is indifferent as between domains? Demotic speech
still encourages us to speak of the surgeons, chefs and criminals
who stumble upon powerful new memes as artists; and there
is no reason why this usage should not be restored to its earlier,
still vestigial, status as the literal and not the metaphorical
use of the word.
Art
is what it always was
In short,
current linguistic practice had much better be modified in the
following ways. First: the word ‘art’ should not be
used as the name of a kind for the absolutely knock-down reason
that there is no such kind. It should be used instead as the name
of the category of memetic innovation.
I offer
the word ‘category’ here because, although its meaning
is contested among philosophers, it is at least clear that a category
is not a kind and that, unlike kinds, categories do not have histories.
Memetic innovation—the discovery of new ways in which the
regularities of the universe can be consistently and predictably
exploited—is what it always was. Memetic innovation is, was
and always will be, memetic innovation. Without memetic innovation
we should live in a culturally frozen universe, just as without
genetic innovation we should live in a biologically frozen universe.
Hence, in my proposed use of the term: art is what it always
was. It has no history. Art history is bunk. When she ruminates
upon the history of the archaic Kouros or of American-type abstract
expressionism the so called ‘art historian’ is functioning
as a cultural historian, elucidating the histories of cultural
kinds all shaped by a common generative principle of cultural
kindedness. She should be free to do this without the impossible
burden of elucidating concurrently the history of something else
that has no history, popularly mis-called the history
of art.
This
adjustment to our use of the term ‘art’ forces upon
us the need for a better way of dealing with the cognate expression
‘work of art’. Currently we try, incoherently, to speak
of works of art as if they were items of an art kind despite the
fact that because there is no such kind there are no such items.
I suggest instead that we should understand ‘work of art’
in the following way:
Works
of art are those things to which attention is paid in the hope
that reflection upon them may deliver up to a disengaged contemplator
the prospect of some memetic innovation.
The
conventionally so called works of art that are collected for many
different reasons in the art galleries and the art museums are
not, of course, disqualified absolutely by their status as works
of art conventionally so called from counting as works of art
properly so called. In the same way, objects of innumerable cultural
kinds bundled together in various ways beyond the domain of conventionally
so called art are not disqualified by their exclusion from counting
as works of art properly so called.
This was Duchamp’s point, I imagine; although he did not
spell it out explicitly. Or if after all this was not his point,
then it should have been.
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