I intend this to be a long and wide-ranging series on the function and practice of Art, from practical theory (e.g. the distinction between Form, Subject, and Content—a natural division for all the alchemists out there), to its social role, to mystical considerations for practitioners, to basic literacy tips (e.g. look at assumptions rather than statements, attention rather than explanation), to polemics against widely held but absurd ideas (e.g. that Art is completely, or even mostly, subjective). I want to make Art[1] useful to people[2]. So rather than getting into details and specifics, I am going start with the most basic thing: an existence proof. I want to convince you that Art is possible at all.
That demands a definition. Art, like the other world-facing, internal disciplines such as Journalism and Science, is a practice of discovering and conveying something real.[3] The tools, traditions, and verification method(s) that have gathered under the rubric of “Art” make it most suited to convey things about experience that are otherwise ineffable. That is how Art accomplishes the magic of proving to someone that they are not completely alone. That is how It helps us communicate more directly than just prompting and grounding discussions. For an example, imagine walking with a friend of yours through what must be a very respectable gallery and they are trying to explain something that happened to them last night.
“I look up and she’s just sitting there looking at me, right. But like… agh!”
“Like she’s into you? She wants to smash?” You are being ironic, Gentle Reader, to ease your sensitive friend’s frustration. Your friend laughs.
“No, but I mean like, well… It was like… Like that!” they shout, pointing suddenly. “Looking like that!” they whisper excitedly, pulling you over to La Pensée by Renoir[4].
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Your friend has now told you something very specific, and important to them. Something that neither they, nor I, nor perhaps anyone, could get across—at least not without making another piece of Art. You can interrogate it, if you whish. You can compare other Pieces of Art and Literature, commenting and adding caveats as needed. You can, out of your understanding of this “she” as Renoir has helped you grasp her, suggest actions your friend might take and see how she will respond. That is to say, you may perform experiments to test the theories that you have developed based on the content that a piece of Art has communicated to you. Now, you and your friend can be completely fucking wrong about everything in this situation, but we do not throw out the methods of Galilean Science because of Phlogiston[5]. The fact that this is a reasonable course of action—that the “you” and “your friend” in that concocted anecdote don’t sound like unhinged fantasists—shows that you accept that Art can convey objective, true, otherwise inexpressible content about experience and the state of the shared world.
The right way to think about how and why this happens is the loose theme of this entire series. For this first entry, I will propose what I think is the minimal philosophical precept that anyone who has been moved by Art is compelled by experience to accept. Then I will say a few things about how this premise undergirds both the Mechanism and Purpose of Art.
Theorem 1 (The Fundamental Theorem of Art) — There is no human experience that is wholly unique; that is to say that it is in no way shared.
Each of us is different in character and nature. Each of us lives and has lived in different circumstances. And yet, there is nothing any of us have been through that it is (or will remain) unique in history. There is nothing any of us with go through that it is so singular it precludes the existence of someone who can understand. Keep in mind how little I am saying. I am not saying you will ever know you are understood. I am not saying anyone will ever understand. I am saying that someone, at some point, at some time, will share enough of your experience that they can understand. And that is all that Art requires to work as a communicative medium for experience.
At least three corollaries follow, which I hope to elaborate further in future posts:
Corollary 1.1 (The Communicative Corollary) — A Piece is a specific, shared experience over which a person has some degree of control. As such it enables communication about experience.
If you accept that experiences can be shared, then you must accept that the experience of partaking in a Piece of Art can be shared. It does not take much discussion about shared experiences to find that there is a core to them that everyone agrees on (beyond bare facts). That part of the experience itself is shared. I will dig into this more in a later post about Subjectivity in Art but for now, all I ask you to accept is that two people, looking at the same object, can respond to it comparable ways. American photographer and gallery-owner Alfred Stieglitz[6] and American (capital “p”) Photographer Minor White[7] referred to this idea as “Equivalence.” The basic premise being that if someone (in their case, the Artist) responds to seeing something a certain way, there will be someone else who responds to it in the same, or “comparable” way. Those are the people the Piece “reaches.” And that is all we need to for Art to function: that someone, at some time, is able to have the same (or Equivalent) response, if they see it. How much control the Artist has over any of this is a completely different question I will address in a future post.
Corollary 1.2 (The Evidentiary Corollary) — A Piece you understand proves to you that you have had a shared experience.
One of the most powerful experiences of Art can be summed up by a two-word YouTube comment I saw under an upload of Warren Zevon’s “I Was In The House When The House Burned Down”. It read simply: “He knows.” If you yourself have never had the experience of seeing the deepest cries of your heart—the ones you yourself can barely stand to listen to, the ones everyone you ever dared to murmur them to turned away from the moment you started—drawn across your vision like a banner, with neither fear nor self-flattery, neither apology nor excuse, but with only clarity, understanding, and fierce peace—then, dear Reader, I can only tell you that you can hardly imagine.
Ask any Art Lover “Why?” and you will often get some version of the experience I just described. Proving that Someone else has Been There Too is one of the great, mystical Goods that Art can bestow on an individual. It is a change of state to know that just one other person has been Like That. Even if it is only a single poet, from centuries ago, writing in a language you will never read, devoting themselves to religion you think is hogwash. Now you know it it is not Just You.
As an aside, corollary 1.2 is why “AI” “art” is, and will always remain, extremely weak. Every single part of a piece that Is The Way It Is due to the the underlying statistical distribution (i.e. the “AI”) cannot provide evidence that any human experienced anything at all. I may go deeper into the topic in a later post, but frankly, the counter-position—that that does not matter for some reason—is typically so stupid and inhuman that I can hardly bear to entertain it.
Corollary 1.3 (The Social Corollary) — Art, by being shared experiences over which we have some control, can form a basis for collective understanding.
Since Pieces can be shared between Audience members (not just between the Artist and a single Member) they can form the basis of shared interpersonal understanding (as between you and your friend in the parable I related above), culture (which you share with strangers), and—if they really get out of hand—Myth (which you share with whatever you put higher than yourself). Art in held in common forms a common ground upon to which to build metaphors, and a common store from which to draw allusions. The richness of this shared stock of language influences the ease with which complex ideas[8] can be expressed. I can get a lot further if I do not have to come up with my own illustration of self-over-estimation-getting-the-better-of-someone every time and can just say “flying to close to the sun,” instead. One could argue that a scientific discipline consists almost entirely of just such a shared stock of very precise analogies. It is the richness of those analogies that lets the discipline progress by conversation.
I hope, dear Reader, that we understand each other a little better now and that this will be the beginning of a long and fruitful conversation. I hope this post has made it a little clearer what Art is. I am not setting forth a technical definition upon which I can base other points. I am trying to get at in a natural sense of the term. But I wanted to make it clear that it is a real phenomenon, one which you can believe in, that it is import in itself and so has accrued its august and vaunted reputation. I did not want to persuade you that Art was something radically different than what you thought it was before. I only sought to make clear what you most likely grasped by uncertain intuition and allow us to proceed, knowing what we are talking about.
Yes, I am throwing around capitalization this like movable Latin type is The New Hotness. It’s my blog and I Like That Shit. ↩︎
Tech people in particular. For one, because I feel like they are more alienated from it than others, and for two, they would benefit the most from the kind of partially-logical and science-coded arguments I am going to make. ↩︎
I will get into this more (including WTF a “world-facing, internal discipline” is and what the other options are) in a subsequent post where I closely contrast Art and Science; which differ mostly by their proof mechanism. ↩︎
A title he hated, btw. When he heard that his painting was being called that he protested: “She did not think! She lived! Like a bird!” I, however, quite like that title. Mostly because it lets me tell that story about him. ↩︎
It’s basically anti-oxygen! It’s a very cool example of empirical, disciplined Science getting a little too far ahead of sound theories. ↩︎
Stieglitz, Alfred. 1923. “How I Came to Photograph Clouds.” Amateur Photographer and Photography 56(1819):255. ↩︎
White, Minor. 1963. “Equivalence: The Perennial Trend.” Photographic Society of America Journal 29(7). https://jnevins.com/whitereading.htm. ↩︎
And the content of which ideas are easy to express, it must be said. ↩︎