All tools are works of "art"; all works of "art" are tools.

Our position in the history of what art has been thought to be makes it difficult to appreciate
the importance of technology for art, since we are predisposed to believe that to the degree that artifacts are technological they are not art at all. In broader terms, however, technology is
always the more or less immediate background for everything we call art, and from a
historical point of view the link between techne and art cannot be broken. We eliminate fundamentally significant avenues of historical understanding when we separate and oppose them.—David Summers, Real Spaces

Over and over in my years of teaching "art" history, I have heard students say that they don’t know much about "art." My initial response is to ask if they ever go to the movies, or play video games, or surf the Internet. On the first day of classes each semester I conduct an exercise intended to answer the question, "What is 'art'?" I ask the students to name different "art" forms, and I write these on the whiteboard as they call them out. Inevitably the traditional media are the first to be offered: painting, sculpture, drawing, architecture, dance, literature, music. Photography usually pops up pretty early. Some bold students will then begin to suggest such areas as fashion, cooking, graphic design and even tattoos. Movies eventually get recognized, and video games are finally not far behind. It is obvious that the students are initially giving me what they think I want to hear, which is natural, and then as they begin to recognize my openness to media that their generation is more familiar with, they begin to offer these up.

Still, each time I conduct this exercise many vital contemporary media are consistently left off the list. Movies are identified, but rarely television shows. Graphic design, but never web pages (or computers, for that matter). Skateboards and surfboards, but never cars. When I ask whether a car is a work of "art," the frequent response is, "It can be," by which is meant that a car is a work of "art" when an emphasis has been placed on how it looks, on its design elements, over its functional elements. "So a tricked-out Charger is a work of 'art'," I say to them, "but my Corolla is not." This usually draws a laugh or two, along with nods of agreement. (What can I say? As all veteran teachers know, it helps to keep them entertained!) It is usually at this point that I cut to the chase and let them know that all man-made objects are works of "art." Cars and computers and television commercials are usually left off the list because they are technological, and in this culture we generally make a distinction between technology and "art." Here I point their attention to the above quote from "art" historian David Summers which I have included in my syllabus from the very first class I taught. Basically he says you can’t separate technology from "art," not in the pre-modern world, and not now.

 Renaissance painters were the masters of bustling workshops working at the cutting edge of technology. The master and his assistants weren’t called "artists" the way we use the term today but were considered more what we would call craftsmen. And while much of what they created is today found in museums, these objects were originally created for specific spaces with specific functions. A Renaissance altarpiece, for example, was made as a visual aid for a largely illiterate population, and anyway the liturgy was in Latin. As a modern equivalent to the Renaissance altarpiece, I encourage my students to consider the video screen behind the performers at a rock concert or, on a more prosaic level, the PowerPoint presentation I use to present this lecture. Perhaps because painting was the dominant technology in the visual medium for so long, painting is the format most commonly identified with "art" today. But the dominant visual formats today are certainly film, television and "new media" associated with the Internet and related technologies. And, of course, these are often created in bustling workshops using the very latest technology. I remind my students to think of all the names listed in the credits that roll at the end of a movie.

It’s the first day of classes, so I don’t ask them to take too many notes. But this I ask them to write down: All man-made objects are works of "art." All tools are works of "art," and all works of "art" are tools. I tell them that all of the objects we’ll study, from the Law Code of Hammurabi to the Arena Chapel and beyond were first and foremost utilitarian. They were made to serve a particular purpose, and in this way they can be considered tools. Even objects created after the rise of the notion of the "fine arts" in the eighteenth century must, from a historian’s point of view, be evaluated not so much in terms of how they look but how and why they were made. The confusion arises from the historical reality that the discipline of "art" history came into existence placing a strong emphasis on form (or style), and this emphasis continues to influence the practice of "art" history, as well as the popular notion of what "art" is, to the present day. Works of "art" are said to be fundamentally composed of form and content. Form quite simply is the way an object looks. In painting, form refers to color, line, shape, etc. Content may be more accurately referred to as subject matter, but the binary trope of form and content is firmly established in our cultural lexicon. And the popular notion of "art" refers to those objects which are created with an emphasis on form, so that even some paintings (like, perhaps, those of Jim Harrison) are often not considered "art," or at least not "fine art," because the emphasis is on subject matter. But all man-made objects exist on a continuum with form on one end and content on the other, and objects that are pure form or pure content exist, to borrow a phrase from E. H. Gombrich, only in the imagination. 

It must be acknowledged that the rhetorical dichotomy of form and content was conceived with regard to the visual arts, and this dichotomy must be reexamined when we broaden the scope of what we consider "art." Even if the student is not yet ready to accept a pair of channel locks into the domain of "art," she must recognize that museums are filled with utility objects, from suits of armor at the Met to helicopters at MoMA. It may be easy to identify the subject matter of Nighthawks, but what exactly is the subject matter of a suit of armor?

On the continuum of form and content, style is equated with form and subject matter is equated with content. In the all-inclusive definition of "art" we can place design on the side of form, and on the side of content we can place function. The function of a Renaissance altarpiece is to add to the observers’ understanding of the tenets of Christianity, and this is primarily accomplished through subject matter. (Form, of course, can enhance this function.) This approach also allows us to determine the "subject matter" of a "purely formal" work of "art," like the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock. There may be no recognizable subject matter in these paintings but, as I remind my students every year, nobody does anything in this world for nothing. These pictures were painted at the very least to decorate a wall. On a potentially more profound level, they were painted to express an idea. And, truth be told, they were also painted to be offered for sale. Each of these things may be what the paintings are about, which is a synonym for subject matter. (When we ask what a movie or a book is about, we mean, "What is the subject matter?")

Now, in the case of the channel locks, it appears that design and function are inextricably bound, that there is no daylight between the two. Channel locks must be designed the way they are in order to function as they and only they do. But what about channel locks with pink grips? What is the function of the pink grips? The pink grips serve to indicate that these channel locks are for the ladies. I ask my students to think about the clothes they wear. What is the function of clothing? The function of clothing is to protect us from the elements and to cover up our private parts. But there are different styles of dress—there are different fashions—and they are not merely decorative. They have a function. The way we dress identifies the subculture we wish to be associated with: businessman, hipster doofus, goth, skater chick. No clothes, no matter how plain, are pure function; and no clothes, no matter how ostentatious, are pure form.

The example I close with is that of the book. Broadly speaking, there are two types of books: nonfiction and fiction. For the sake of argument, let’s narrow it down to the textbook and the novel.  Between the two, the novel is the one more commonly considered "art." The textbook is considered a utility object. The textbook is more concerned with subject matter and the novel is more concerned with form.  The writer of the textbook wishes to impart information in the clearest manner possible, while the novelist may wish to present a more complex narrative and experiment with language. On the continuum of form and function, the textbook typically trends more toward the function end and the novel trends more toward the form end. But even a textbook should be well-written, and the best novels are going to teach us something. And a well-written textbook is better than a bad novel. But better isn't what makes a thing "art." "Art" cannot be synonymous with beauty (good form), because beauty famously resides in the eye of the beholder.  I’m often asked, "When does a thing become 'art'?" The answer is, "The minute it is created."

I place the word "art" in quotation marks because it is a term so broad as to be virtually devoid of meaning. In the classroom, believe it or not, I try not to use the word "art." I prefer to call each medium by its name: painting, filmmaking, mechanical engineering, what have you. I am amused when I visit a bookstore and see sections for literature, history, biography, self-help, and then I see a section for "art." This would be comparable (to channel Gilbert Ryle) to visiting a college campus and seeing buildings for humanities, sciences, journalism, athletics, and then seeing a building marked "university." It’s all the university. And it’s all "art."

 

Series

All man-made objects are more or less conventional. When we first set out to create a thing, many of our decisions are already made for us. If we wish to make a feature film, the format is pretty much already decided for us. In terms of content, we’re most likely going to present a narrative in which characters interact through dialogue, facial expression, and body language; we may cut between certain scenes for dramatic effect; we may present montages of activity to show the passage of time or the development of a relationship; we may introduce secondary characters; and ideally there should be a conflict that gets resolved. These are some of the conventions of the feature film. Even if we introduce certain unconventional elements in the hope of setting our film apart from others of its kind, we must nevertheless work largely within the conventions of the feature film, otherwise our work simply will not be recognized as a feature film.

Take the 1994 film Pulp Fiction. This was regarded as a relatively unconventional film, with its non-linear narrative, harsh lighting, fragmented title sequence and self-referential characters. And yet it was filmed in Hollywood with recognizable actors, shot on film, edited to a standard length, distributed to theaters and is altogether recognizable as a feature film.  

Another way of articulating this concept is to say that all man-made objects belong to various series. Pulp Fiction belongs to the series of feature films; another example from this series is Citizen Kane. Pulp Fiction belongs to the series of movies about gangsters; another film in this series is White Heat. Pulp Fiction belongs to the series of gangster movies that glamorize the main characters even as they are depicted committing horrible acts of violence; another movie in this series is Bonnie and Clyde. Pulp Fiction belongs to the series of movies containing a MacGuffin, a series which would include any number of Alfred Hitchcock films. Pulp Fiction is a buddy movie, in the same series as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Pulp Fiction belongs to the series of, well, pulp fiction, a series exemplified by writers like Dashiell Hammett and Elmore Leonard. And Pulp Fiction belongs to the series of films in which the main characters make frequent reference to elements of popular culture. This was another of the unconventional aspects of Pulp Fiction and can be seen as having initiated a new series, one which would seem to include pretty much every Hollywood movie from Get Shorty to Men in Black III (which I haven’t seen).

The purpose of such an exercise is to place an object in its historical context. This exercise is also employed in the practice of authentication. Say I come across something at a yard sale that looks like a late medieval altarpiece and I want to know whether it’s worth a hundred million dollars or not. I’m going to try to determine what series it belongs to. It obviously belongs to most of the series associated with late medieval altarpieces, otherwise I wouldn’t have entertained the notion of its being such an artifact. But when I look closer I find that it does not belong to the series of objects made of wood, and it does not belong to the series of images painted in tempera with gold leaf. It belongs to the series of objects made of pressboard and painted in acrylic, neither of which existed in the Middle Ages.

We have a tendency to think of painting, sculpture, printmaking and the like as "art" because these were for so long the dominant formats. Before the twentieth century, these were the formats that constituted the broad series of "art," and we continue to place contemporary examples of these formats into this series. The painting of former president George W. Bush that was recently unveiled at the White House belongs to the series of paintings produced in oil on canvas. Another example from this series would be Rigaud’s iconic portrait of Louis XIV. Of course, these paintings also belong to the series of state portraits. But the Bush portrait does not belong to another important series that the Rigaud portrait does belong to, namely state portraits produced in the dominant format of a given period in history. A contemporary example from this series would be a campaign video, something we are not typically inclined to call "art." (And while a campaign ad would be inappropriate for a White House portrait, it is possible to imagine future state portraits being presented in the video format.)

Most of the objects that we learn about in "art" history belong to the series of things found in museums, and so again we tend to believe that only things resembling those found in museums are "art." But none of these objects was initially intended to be viewed in a museum. Each was created for a specific function, usually in the context of a highly developed social space. Raphael’s School of Athens and related frescoes were not intended simply as decorations on the walls of the pope’s library. They were expressly conceived to present a specific ideology, and they were produced using the conventional technique of the day (linear perspective). Another object belonging to this series is The Social Network. This artifact obviously uses the conventional technique of our day (film); each of these techniques, incidentally, belongs to the series of technological advances based on the science of optics.

The persistent objection to the inclusion of campaign ads and popular feature films in the category of "art" is (among others) their perceived lack of personal expression. But emphasis on personal expression engenders the most self-indulgent nonsense that is only taken seriously because an ancient authority retains some interest in identifying it and only it as "art," to the exclusion of other, often more vital formats. We’ve actually seen this movie before. All the films, television shows, advertisements, web pages and the rest that are not considered "art" today belong to the same series as the paintings of Courbet, Manet and the Impressionists that were rejected by the academy in another place and time.    

Capital

The biggest obstacle that I run into as I seek to convince my students that all man-made objects are works of “art” is when the students interpret this to mean that everything can be considered “beautiful.” This is an indication of how deeply ingrained the common definition of “art” is in our culture. I advise them to think about it from the other end of the spectrum. Rather than thinking that all objects can be considered "beautiful" (a term which, like “art” itself, I try not to use), think about the potential for each object to tell us something about the people who made it.

One of my favorite recent examples of the common misconception of the notion of “art” appeared in a New York Times article from February, around the time of the Super Bowl. The story focused on a company called Sport Graphics and the “giant vinyl decal” of the Lombardi Trophy that they affixed to the façade of a hotel in downtown Indianapolis, the site of the game. The article proclaimed that the company’s owner “may never be mistaken for an installation artist like Christo, who along with his wife, Jeanne-Claude, attained international fame for wrapping big things in colorful fabric.” In other words, he’s not an “artist,” he’s an entrepreneur.

The article actually opened with the following line: “If Christo were a capitalist, he would want to work for Sport Graphics.” Funny thing is, Christo is a capitalist. Christo’s projects are privately funded through the sale of books, prints and other objects related to each installation. (“Installation” is a term of art from the “art” world. Interestingly, Sport Graphic’s website contains the following statement: “The local and national media highlighted one of our Super Bowl XLVI installations.” Sounds like they think it’s “art.”)

But most people don’t consider this “art.” Christo’s work is “art.” Christo positions himself as part of the traditional “art” world. Most of the objects related to his projects are drawings and photographs, and these have been exhibited in “art” galleries. But the deeper reason that Christo’s work is considered “art” (and formats like the hotel wrap and graphic design in general are not) is that Christo’s work is primarily composed of form, usually with no recognizable subject matter.

In Real Spaces, David Summers argues that the modern notion of the “fine arts” has consigned “resemblant and narrative ‘subject-matter’” to a status “secondary to ‘form.’” Christo’s most famous work, The Gates, is composed entirely of shapes and colors, with no words or images. Form without subject matter. In fact, the movement from subject matter to form in modern “art” was fundamentally tied to the development of the modern notion of “art” that I am arguing against. The separation of form from subject matter—even in objects where subject matter remains present—has lead to the modern Western emphasis on personal expression, which is at the root of the common definition of “art.”

But this definition privileges certain objects and marginalizes others. Summers says, “While all this has been going on in the newly specialized modern realm of ‘art’, however, we have also come to be inundated with images in unprecedented profusion,” a phenomenon which has been “shielded from art-historical consideration by the sharp distinction of ‘fine art’ and technology.” But, he asserts, “we cannot begin to understand our own art history” unless we address the “images we make and use without thinking of them as ‘art’.”

A Renaissance altarpiece belongs to the same series as The Starry Night in that they are both paintings. But the Renaissance altarpiece also belongs to the same series as the Super Bowl hotel graphic in that they are both examples of the most advanced visual technology of their respective eras. Each was produced by many hands in the workshop of a master. And like Duccio’s Maestà, which was paraded triumphantly through the streets of Siena by a proud populace, people marveled at the hotel image, taking pictures of themselves in front of it.

My mantra every semester is, “All man-made objects are works of art,” but this is usually taken to mean that we should look for personal expression and beauty even in the most mundane objects. I need to come at it from the other direction. “Art” consists of everything a culture produces, whether you like it or not.

Pop!

One of my former students e-mailed me last week asking for guidance on a project she is working on, the subject of which is Pop art, specifically political images in Pop art. She gave me a list of Pop artists who have incorporated political images into their works. There were the usual suspects, of course: Warhol, Rauschenberg, Fairey. But there were also some artists who would only be recognizable to scholars and New York/L.A. art gallery mavens.

I’ll start by sharing an excerpt from my e-mail reply to her: “All man-made objects are works of art,” I reminded her, since this is the subject of my first lecture each semester. “Everything that a culture produces is the art of that culture. However, we live in a culture where ‘art’ is generally considered to be what you see in ‘art’ galleries. This ‘art’ is generally thought to be concerned with personal expression, and the more inscrutable, the more esoteric, the more ‘high-minded,’ the better.

“But most people don't go to art galleries. Most people watch T.V., surf the Internet, and go to movie theaters. And while much of the stuff that they experience in these places is not particularly ‘high-minded,’ it has a huge impact on what they believe and how they behave. If you want to understand what is happening in a particular culture, look at the culture. Frankly, I've never heard of John Stango or Perry Milou. But I've heard of Bill O'Reilly, and I would say that he is probably the most popular Pop artist in America today, he and Barack Obama.

“Look at facebook (everybody else is). Andy Warhol famously said, ‘In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.’ The funny thing is, Andy Warhol got it. He understood the impact of the media. That was his whole thing. And the ‘art’ world got it too, but they promptly forgot it. And they forgot it largely because they were and are invested in their own deals. Warhol said that art is what you see on the way to the museum, but the museum doesn't want you to know this.”

The art history textbook of the future will wrap up the history of painting sometime in the 1950s and continue from there with the history of television, film and related mass media. This is why Warhol is such a pivotal figure. He wasn’t just commenting on the impact of mass media, he was assimilating its methods. He was a commercial artist. He created his work in a Factory. He made films, produced the Velvet Underground and started a celebrity magazine. He understood the power of marketing. Of course, his supreme creation was himself, the image of the artist as celebrity. The music industry, to take but one example, from the Beatles to Lady Gaga, doesn’t look the way it does without Andy Warhol.

The most important images, the most influential images from our culture are not made by “artists,” they are made by filmmakers, television producers, ad agencies, and so many others, up to and including random people uploading memes to the Internet (like this one). The history of Western image-making since the Renaissance has been the introduction of one technological advancement after another: linear perspective, the printing press, the development of oil paints, newspapers, photography. Even photography had a difficult time making it into the traditional narrative. Then television arrived in the 1950s and Pop! that was the end of painting as the dominant “art” form. But you wouldn’t know it from reading the standard art history textbook.

“Museums and galleries,” writes David Summers in Real Spaces, “are only a tiny part of the social space of the modern world, and the art of museums and galleries will take us only so far in understanding the conditional transformations of Western modernity. To keep to the theme of images, the world in which we live as modern people differs from [every previous culture] in being utterly and continuously saturated with images, printed and electronic.” Beginning with television, the electronic media take their place in the history of Western culture, and it is there that we must look for our Pop “art.”

The common definition of "art"

The purpose of this blog is to present over a succession of related posts an argument for a reconsideration of the way we use the word “art.” The word may seem innocuous enough, but I believe there is a general misunderstanding as to what actually constitutes “art,” and I believe that this misunderstanding leads to larger, much more dangerous misunderstandings and conflicts.

I’m serious.

The common definition of “art” today refers to unique man-made objects that represent personal expression. “Art” objects are contrasted with mass-produced objects, the general belief being that the more technological an object is the less it is “art.” Indeed, the modern notion of the “fine arts” developed concurrently with and as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution.  Before this cataclysm in human history, even the most technologically advanced object usually revealed some evidence of the hand or hands that made it. More precise machines all but eliminated this evidence, and the rise of the modern notion of “art” can be seen as a product of the Romanticist nostalgia for the past.

Lost in this new attitude toward human making is the fact that, as David Summers writes in Real Spaces, “technology is always the more or less immediate background for everything we call art,” whether we’re talking about the Parthenon or the Mona Lisa or the iPad. A Renaissance altarpiece was not classified as “art” the way the term is used today. It was a functional component of a complex social space, and it was produced by a bustling workshop utilizing the very latest technology. One of its equivalents today would be a PowerPoint presentation at a community planning meeting, which is not something that we are inclined to call “art.”

Another current use of the word “art” is quite simply to mean “good.” This is the intended meaning when one says of another’s work, “You’ve really created a work of art.” This is the intended meaning when a movie theater is referred to as an “art house.” The most immediate problem with this formulation, of course, is that what is good is subjective, and deeming something as not “art” amounts to little more than saying that you don’t like it.

But there are more consequential problems with this formulation. The Romantic definition of “art” has led to the now pervasive view in the West that anything can be “art.” And this is true, but it also leads to the assertion that if an artifact doesn’t serve its purpose well, the fault lies with the beholder. If the artist’s intentions are inscrutable, well, that’s how artists are in today’s culture. One can do anything and call it “art.”

Which is fine, as long as you’re not drowning puppies. But there are at least two disturbing consequences of this refined definition of “art.” The first is that we end up sanctioning the purveyance of outright lies in the name of “art” (like, for instance, this). The second and even more serious consequence is that we end up minimizing the significance of the most dominant visual media in our culture: film, television, and the World Wide Web. If “art” is synonymous with “good,” “important” or “high-minded,” then we have a tendency to dismiss all the stuff we consider “bad,” “trivial” or “low-brow” as inconsequential, even as it continues to have a massive impact on the way people behave.

What is art?

Between leading online discussion groups with my college students and posting long-ass comments on friends' Facebook pages concerning the nature of "art," I decided it was time to revive this blog. Though it was created over a year ago ostensibly for people to upload pictures of red crape myrtles (the rarest hue), I always envisioned it as a place for me to present broader ideas. Perhaps the broadest idea of all in my world of ideas is my belief that the popular conception of "art" is problematic, for reasons which I shall explain through definition and example.