“An atmosphere of artistic theory”
1. The institutional definition of art
Plato said that works of art are imitations of reality, and something like this defintion went mostly unchallenged for a few thousand years, until it was rejected by the Romantics, who said instead that art was an outpouring of the soul’s passion: expression, not imitation. As the pace of artistic revolutions picked up, so did the rate at which new (philosophical) definitions of art were proposed. A turning point came with Duchamp’s readymades: Fountain is a stock-made urinal, In Advance of the Broken Arm is a stock-made snow shovel, and L.H.O.O.Q. shaved is a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa. Despite being indiscernible (Duchamp’s signature aside) from similar urinals, shovels, and postcards not touched by famous artists, these ones were works of art. Neither the art-as-imitation nor the art-as-expression definition could explain why, and both therefore stood refuted.
After the usual delay between a change in a social practice and a change in philosophical thinking about it, philosophers proposed the institutional definition of art. Associated with any institution are institutionally-defined statuses—statues that are created by, and depend on, the institution. The United States Government is an institution, and defines the status of US legal tender; the Catholic Church is an institution, and defines the status of saint; you get the idea. The institutional definition of art postulates an institution, called “the artworld,” and says that work of art is a status defined by that institution. Earning that status, therefore, involves having that status conferred on you, in accord with the institution’s rules. Fans of the institutional definition rarely describe those (alleged) rules in detail, but a natural idea is that, just as one is elevated to the status knight by having an agent of the Monarchy tap you a few times with a sword while saying “I dub thee Sir So and So,” a thing is elevated to the status of work of art by having an agent of the artworld—the most familiar of whom are people we call artists—take that thing, and it can be anything, from a painted canvas to a urinal from Home Depot, and say, presumably silently in their head, this thing is now a work of art.
The radio show Schickele Mix once had a skit about Beethoven walking in the gardens with some underling, who pointed out to the great composer a moment in one of his string quartets where he had written parallel fifths (two instruments staying a fifth apart as they change notes), a no-no according to the rules of classical composition. Beethoven, in a booming voice, responds with “AND WHO HAS FOBIDDEN IT?” This (I presume fictional) episode captures the spirit of the institutional definition. Beethoven is an agent of the artworld, and no minor player; he holds an important position and has accumulated a lot of power. Whatever rules the institution might have against parallel fifths, Beethoven, using the power and authority he has in the artworld, can suspend or even eliminate them, with just a word.
But is the institutional definition right? If so, you would expect that when an artist makes something into a work of art that everyone thinks “breaks the rules ”—everyone thinks it fails to be a work of art—the artist would simply respond, “it doesn’t matter what you think, it is art simply because I say so.” Maybe the Duchamp examples look a little like this (I haven’t read any Duchamp biographies). But others do not.
2. Free Verse
Free verse is non-metric poetry. To be in free verse, a poem must not be in iambic pentameter, or dactylic hexameter, or anything like that. The definition is simple enough, but when poets first started writing free verse, the term sounded like an oxymoron. A poem was thought, by definition, to be a sequence of lines written in meter.1 Now if the institutional definition of art is right, then so presumably is an institutional definition of poetry: poem, like artwork, is an institutionally-defined status. So if that definition is correct, you would expect T. S. Eliot, faced with the complaint that one could not write non-metric poetry, to simply reply “AND WHO HAS FORBIDDEN IT?” You would expect him to pull a Beethoven and simply throw his weight around.
But when Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot started writing free verse they were defensive about it. They did not just publish their poems and say here is the new hotness. They wrote tracts defending free verse. In Eliot’s essay “Reflections on Vers Libre” he does not say that, while maybe poetry had to be metrical in the days of yore, he (following a bunch of French poets) has simply changed the rules, and please get used to it. Instead he says that free verse is, in fact, metrical after all:
What sort of a line that would be which would not scan at all I cannot say...Any line can be divided into feet and accents. The simpler metres are a repetition of one combination, perhaps a long and a short, or a short and a long syllable, five times repeated. There is, however, no reason why, within the single line, there should be any repetition; why there should not be lines (as there are) divisible only into feet of different types.
This is, of course, absurd: to be in a meter just is to consist of a repeated sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables.2 But Eliot felt a need to produce a radical (if false) theory of meter according to which what he wrote was metric (and therefore poetry) after all. Similarly, in other essays Eliot argued that poetry had to be musical in a way that was almost impossible with iambic pentameter (this and other defenses of free verse are described in Timothy Steele’s book Missing Measures). Eliot did not think it would be enough, it seems, to insist that earlier definitions of meter and therefore poetry were wrong, and that his new poems were counterexamples. If the institutional definition is right, Eliot misunderstood what he needed to do to enact his revolution; conversely, if Eliot knew what he was doing, the instutitional definition is wrong.
3. The Artworld and “The Artworld”
The institutional definition of art was inspired by “The Artworld,” a 1964 paper by Arthur Danto. But like Wittgenstein watching with horror as the Logical Positivists claimed to implement his philosophical vision, Danto repeatedly insisted that he did not accept the institutional definition, and that only through misreading and misunderstanding could one extract it from his paper. (The Wittgenstein parallel goes further: one wants to forgive those who forged the institutional definition, as one wants to forgive the positivists, because the texts they drew on to develop their views are opaque, and coy about what exactly they are trying to say.)
So what is Danto’s actual view? Institutions, institutionally-defined statuses, agents of the institution—none of this is really there in the paper. A big role, on the other hand, is reserved for theories of art:
telling artworks from other things is not so simple a matter, even for native speakers, and these days one might not be aware he was on artistic terrain without an artistic theory to tell him so. And part of the reason for this lies in the fact that terrain is constituted artistic in virtue of artistic theories, so that one use of theories, in addition to helping us discriminate art from the rest, consists in making art possible.
What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is.
To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry—an atmosphere of artistic theory.
Somehow (!), on Danto’s view, a theory of art plays a role in making something a work of art. And Danto does not just mean by this the banal thesis that the true theory of art correctly identifies what is and what is not art. Most if not all of the theories that have (according to Danto) been used to “enfranchise” works of art have been false.
When the sun is up I basically have no idea what any of this means. But after the kids go to bed, and I read the Eliot paper, and I squint a little bit, it makes some sense. Eliot sensed that to “elevate” his meterless writing into poetry, he needed a theory of poetry to use as a lever, and selected a theory that included that (false) idea that every sequence of words is in a meter, just may be a super-complicated one.
Only some sense, though. Maybe it is a theory that “takes something up into the world of art,” but the theory cannot act alone. There are legions of art (and poetry) theories out there which are as yet unthought of and have never enfranchised a work of art. At best a theory is a tool an artist, or poet, may use to push something up into the world of art. But once armed with an appropriate theory, what next? How does one use this tool to do the great work of making something into a work of art?
We can ignore here the fact that non-metric poetry was around before Modernism, in, for example, the Bible, and Anglo-Saxon verse.
Actually the definition of “metric poetry” can become quite convoluted; for example, Fabb and Halle, in their book Meter in poetry, define “being in strict iambic pentameter” as, roughly, “consisting of ten-syllable lines where, for each polysyllabic word in a line, the most strongly stressed syllable of that word is the 2nd, or 4th, or (etc) syllable of the line.” They also define a meter they call “loose iambic pentameter”; its definition is too complicated to state here, but, ironically, they claim that “every line in [T. S. Eliot’s The Waste land] is in iambic meter.”