Rediscovering the Servitude of Art:

A Manifesto For Artists

By Robin Phillips, 2003

Introduction to this Manifesto

I have a friend with whom I enjoy conversing. MMdMy friend is a painter and I am a philosopher, so our conversation naturally tends to gravitate to philosophy of art. It was during one of our conversations that James, my artist friend, said something that surprised me. He said that he saw himself primarily as a craftsman producing wall decorations.

At first I found it difficult to accept this approach to the visual arts since it apparently turned the functional purpose of a painting – to hang on the wall as decoration – into its primary purpose. Such an account seemed not to elevate painting but to do quite the opposite: to reduce it to something humdrum, prosaic …even banal. Yet there was certainly nothing humdrum or banal in how my friend approached his job as an artist; indeed, he approached it with a spiritual and aesthetic sensitivity that is a rare quality in the art world of today.

Since the above conversation I have had occasion to think this matter through in some depth. I have become convinced that a more simplistic approach to the arts is needed if they are to once again be endowed with the dignity they deserve. For too long the subject has been plagued by obscurity. This can be seen in the great confusion that exists just over the meaning of the term art, to say nothing of the actual work that is now encompassed by the term. What is needed is a renewed vision in which simplicity and beauty can be rediscovered and the arts can be reclaimed with a fresh vision..

I am encouraged to find so many ‘traditional’ artists reacting against the direction contemporary art has taken and who are pursuing art along the lines I have just mentioned. Yet their influence in culture as a whole remains marginal. They lack something that the mainstream contemporary art world possesses, namely, a strong intellectual underpinning. Just as the trends in contemporary art are symptomatic of certain philosophical orientations, so if traditional art will prove a successful challenger of these trends, it must also be undergirded with an intellectual apparatus that can answer the question of why such art is important…and why it is better. This manifesto attempts to pave the way for some answers to such questions.

Art as Anything

If ever there was a time when a renewed approach to the arts was needed, it is surely when art become so meaningless that it can mean anything one wants it to mean. Not so long ago in 1972, when Carl Andre was paid £30,000 to exhibit Equivalent VIII in the Tate gallery, there was at least a public outcry. The outcry was not because people considered Equivalent VIII to be bad art; rather, the outcry was that anyone could consider a rectangular collection of unworked fire bricks to be ‘art’ in the first place. Now, however, we have grown so used to such novelties that they cease to be novel. If a rectangular collection of unworked fire bricks can pass as art, and can even have thousands of pages devoted to it in professional journals, is there anything that definitely is not art? It would seem not, for I am told that even a night’s sleep can become a work of art, as when the art celebrity Andy Warhol took a video of an actor sleeping and then showed it to audiences. The film lasts eight hours. We are told that this is an example of ‘performance art’.

As if that is not enough, the repertoire of musical arts now include many works in which the division between music and noise becomes a fine and often indistinguishable line. I had the fortune, or rather the misfortune, to once attend a performance in which the score called for various objects to be thrown on the floor.

Because no one really knows what is art anymore, the concept has become something shrouded in mystery. A degree of esoteric knowledge is thought necessary to be able to see appreciate the artistic value inherent in objects and performances such as I have mentioned, or even to be able to recognize such things to as being art. I am told that unenlightened workmen at the Tate accidentally threw away Andre’s precious pile of bricks, thinking they were rubbish. I am told further (but have not verified it) that when Andre was commissioned to resupply the exhibition, he went down to the local builder’s merchants, stole 120 bricks, and charged the Tate another £30,000. Other cases exist where the opposite has happened, and an object never intended to be art has been mistaken for it, as in the art gallery that had glass over part of the floor as a result of a broken window. I am told that the broken glass was thought to be art by more than one extremely contemplative onlooker.

Even artists themselves are sometimes unable to identify art unless they are told, for I understand that one artist had to be banned from a gallery because he ate Robert Gober’s latest creation – a bag of doughnuts on a pedestal. Then there is Marcel Duchamp’s famous instillation work: a urinal that was christened ‘Fountain.’ Thankfully I have not yet heard of anyone finding out too late that this urinal is meant purely for its aesthetic function. (I had a nightmare once where I was at an art gallery and I needed to use the toilet. I found out too late that the toilet I selected was actually an instillation work. I woke up just as I was frantically trying to find some toilet paper while all the museum goers stared at me in fascination.)

The artist Walter de Maria has gone through much effort to ensure that no one will ever mistake his High Energy Bar for just an ordinary stainless-steel bar. He initiated a licensing procedure in which he gave the steel bar a certificate bearing the name of the work and stating that the bar is a work of art. There is, however, an interesting twist since the certificate states that the bar is a work of art only when the certificate is present with it. Take away the certificate for five minutes and apparently the bar reverts back to just an ordinary bar (and, therefore, dropping in its monetary value) until the certificate is brought back.

You would think that such specificity concerning the status of a work would prevent anyone mistaking it for anything but a work of art. Think again. Might not the certificate, along with the inscription upon it, be a work of art in itself? How do we know that the purpose of the certificate is to refer to the steel bar rather than to be a work in itself? Binkley describes a similar scenario when he visited an exhibition of conceptual art. He came across a small brown spiral notebook. At first Binkley wondered whether the notebook was part of the exhibition until he noticed that it bore the inscription “Not part of the exhibition.” He was just about to disregard the notebook as unworthy of attention when the thought occurred to him that perhaps that notebook with that inscription might be one of the works on exhibition. He finally approached the director of the exhibition and learned directly from her that the notebook was not art.

Perhaps Binkley was satisfied too easily. How could Binkley know that when the director said the notebook was not part of the exhibition, that her act of speaking was part of a ‘performance art’ that she acting? After all, interactive and impromptu performance arts are becoming increasingly popular. If Annie Sprinkle can masturbate as part of her ‘performance art’, if who’s to say that a director of an exhibition can’t lie to spectators as an example of yet another kind of subversive performance?

As more and more works are created with the specific intention of showing that there are no limits to the concept of art, we should not be surprised to see the concept collapsing into paradoxes such as the above. If anything can count as art, what is to save the very concept from being reduced to utter meaninglessness? Nothing, it would seem.

The idea that anything can be art is really a symptom of another idea. This other idea is the idea that art is an autonomous concept. “Art for art’s sake” is a common way of expressing this ideology. Art for art’s sake is a comparatively recent way of viewing the arts, yet it has become so ingrained in our thinking that it is hard to view the arts in any different light. The best way to explain what I mean by the autonomy of art is to contrast the modern day concept with that of past ages.

Art as Technique

If we look at the Greeks to start with, it is interesting that they had no word that corresponds even remotely to our notion of art. The closest word is techné, from which our word ‘technique’ is derived. Aristotle defines techné as the capacity to make. Thus, he lumps joiners and shoemakers in the same category as flautists and sculptors. Aristotle was not arguing for a certain way of viewing the arts, rather, he was following commonly accepted usage. The idea was that anything which involved skill and craft was an art, and thus we find Plato arguing that poetry is not art since it springs spontaneously from the inspiration of the muses and therefore does not involve skill.

For a long time our own culture followed in the Greek’s footsteps, viewing art as creative human activity in all its forms. (The words ‘creative’ and ‘creativity’ have also come to have a narrower use in modern times, but I use them here in the sense of any activity that create/makes something.) According to medieval man, human beings earned a living through nature and art. The earth (nature) was given to man (Gen. 2:15), but man must labour (apply art) to bring forth the abundance that nature provides (Gen. 3:19). Whether one worked as a farmer, physician, merchant or soldier, this labour was called art. The occupations that were not considered art were things such as burglary, exploitation, fraud, usury, since these activities do not involve making anything but are parasitical on the art of others.[1] Also, anything arising merely from inspiration or fantasy was not considered to be art/skill, since skill rested upon the knowledge and application of rules. The rules governing a shipbuilder are different than those governing a musician, but both were equally bound to the precepts of his discipline. Things like grammar, logic and rhetoric were also considered art since they rested on a foundation of rules.

Our own language still retains a memory of this broader concept of art. For example, we might say that it takes ‘a real art’ to manage this particular business, referring to the skill involved. Or we might refer to ‘the tailor’s art’ or we might say, ‘it’s quite an art’ when talking about the skills required to use a computer. People still sometimes refer to ‘the art of war’, and the humanities subjects are still referred to as “liberal arts.”

Naturally, one must be cautious in inferring too much about how a given people thought from their language. Nevertheless, how a culture communicates can often give us insight into how those people thought. It is not necessarily a coincidence when a culture covers a certain set of activities by the same word, for it often shows that they perceived these things as having some feature in common. The fact that our language covers painting, poetry, drama, music, sculpture and a few other things under the rubric of art suggests that we consider these activities to share something in common. (This does not mean is that there is necessarily some common denominator that these activities share in common, for their inclusion under one term may be quite arbitrary.) On the other hand, the medieval use of the term art seemed to reflect a concept that was integrated with all aspects of life. It was much more expansive than our concept. Art such as painting, poetry, music, dance, existed on the same plane of life as the art of building a ship, making ships or cooking meals. Medieval artists generally did not sign their work anymore than a man building a house would think to sign the house.

Because medieval man saw art as there to serve a purpose, whether it be to sustain life or to enhance it, there was no sense in which certain arts were qualitatively ‘higher’ than other arts. Music, painting, poetry, sculpture, dance and drama were not things that were done for their own sake any more than one would build a ship merely for the sake of building a ship. As one built a ship to serve a functional purpose, so one engaged in the art of music or painting in order to serve a purpose, whether it be to create wall decorations, to uplift the human spirit, to provide an evening’s entertainment, to turn the mind towards God, etc.. The point is that art was not seen as something intrinsically valuable for its own sake; the value was in the ends being achieved.

Fine Arts vs. Mechanical Arts

Even as late as the Renaissance, there was still no division between ‘fine arts’ and ‘mechanical arts’. It was not until the period known as ‘the Enlightenment’ that things began to change. This period saw intense debate and re-evaluation about almost everything, and this naturally included re-evaluating the concept of art. The most influential statement of a new way of viewing art was put forward by Charles Batteux in 1746 in his treatise The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle. In this treatise, Batteux made a distinction between ‘fine arts’ and ‘mechanical arts’, the former being comprised of painting, sculpture, music, poetry and dance. His attempt to find in these activities one common principle has not been of lasting influence, however, his division between fine arts and mechanical arts has lasted.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with defining the arts in this way. In fact, it is quite useful. What we must bare in mind, however, is that the way we communicate about a thing can sometimes change the way we think about that thing.[2] In this case, what is of interest is that with this new way of talking about the arts was concurrent with a new way of thinking about the arts. As Tatarkiewicz writes,

At that time the meaning of the expression ‘art’ changed; its range narrowed, and it now took in only the fine arts, leaving out the crafts and the sciences. It may be said that only the term was preserved, and that a new concept of art had arisen.[3]

Gradually the activities of the ‘fine arts’ began to be seen on a higher plane that other forms of labour. Art began to be something that brought social prestige and separated one from the lower classes. Gradually the arts began to be seen in a way that detached them from every day life. Prior to the Enlightenment period, for example, I am told that there were no art galleries.[4]

Art for Art’s Sake

The existence of art galleries was no doubt symptomatic of this new way of viewing the arts which allowed one to see art as having an intrinsic value for its own sake. Thus, as Tatarkiewics again puts it,

The 18^th century, which isolated art in the modern sense, also found an expression for the singularity of the laws that govern it. …only at the close of the 18^th century was the aphorism uttered: ‘Art is that which laws down its own rule’.[5]

Art laying down it’s own rules – “art’s for art’s sake - does not seem a very strange idea to us. It does not seem as strange as if someone were to speak of, say, ‘technology for technology’s sake.’ If, however, we consider for a moment what ‘technology for technology’s sake’ would mean in practice, we will be possessed of a useful analogy to assist us in understanding the autonomy of art.

In this regard, imagine that some time in the distant future you come upon a huge factory. You observe hundreds of workers engaged with various items of complex machinery. As you observe further and notice that all the labour, machinery and skill is directed towards one end: the production of little discs made out of various metals interlaced with plastic substances. You are impressed at the technology and the efficiency with which the entire operation runs. But, you wonder to yourself, what these discs are for? You try to find someone to ask but cannot since they are all so preoccupied with the job at hand. Finally, you find one man who is willing to leave his work long enough to answer your questions. “All these discs that you’re producing,” you say, “can you tell me what they’re for?”

The man takes you by the hand and leads you to the far end of the factory where you see a terminal for the collection of the newly made discs. “What is this for,” you inquire enthusiastically.

“This is the recycling department,” the man replies. “The discs go into this ingenuous machine, where the plastic is separated from the metallic components. The plastic is then fed into this machine which melts it together, while the metal is fid into this machine which melts it together. The metal and plastic are then ready for re-use.”

You’re a little confused. “I don’t understand,” you finally manage to say. “You recycle them, but for what?”

At this the man takes you by the hand and leads you through the factory to the front end. As you go you notice that the recycled materials are conveyed back to the front of the factory on a large conveyer belt. When the materials reach the beginning of the factory they are taken up by the workers who then beginning constructing the discs all over again.

“This doesn’t make sense!” you exclaim. “Do you mean to say that all this amazing technology and all these dedicated people and make these discs simply so that they can be recycled and made all over again.”

“Yes.”

“But why? There’s no purpose in it.”

“Oh, but there you do not understand,” says the man. “This is technology for technology’s sake. You said yourself that this technology was amazing. People used to think that technology had to serve outside ends in order to be valid. But we have been enlightened and now realize that technology carries with it its own value. Technology determines what technology is and we must see where it goes. There are a number of philosophers that are working – literally, working this very minute as we speak – to provide new definitions of technology that will encompass all the current developments and yet provide room for new paradigms not yet conceived.”

You are baffled and make to leave the factory. Before you can escape, however, your guide issues you into an adjoining premises which, at first glance, looks to be the same as the factory you have just existed. There is the same machinery running, the same people working the assembly lines. You look closer, however, and perceive a significant difference. In this factory there are no materials being worked! The machinery is running just as if there were materials, the people are operating the machinery and the assembly lines exactly the same as in the other factory, but the conveyer belts that run along the assembly line are empty. The workers on the assembly line simply do everything as if there were materials on the conveyer belts. Imagine further if your guide, sensing your confusion, explained that this was an example of what is known as ‘invisible technology.’ Imagine further if you were taken into another factory where there was no machinery at all, and you were told that this constituted ‘really invisible technology.’

I don’t think I need to say anything more to make my point.

Now try to imagine how a medieval person would feel if he entered a contemporary art gallery. I don’t think the bewilderment would be any less than how you felt in the above thought experiment. When convinced that certain works are considered art, his next move would probably be to ask what their purpose is. What are they for? What function do they serve? What do they do for us? In some works, say conceptual art, where the answer would be that the work depicts an idea or an emotion, he might be able to vaguely comprehend, even if this involved a significant modification of his idea of art. But how do you think he would respond to those works that are specifically intended not to convey any meaning, not to illustrate any idea, not to serve any function? I have in mind works like the ‘ready-mades’ of the Dadaists that were purposely intended to convey a sense of indifference.

Now take our time traveller – who is thoroughly confused by now – to work that was created for the sole purpose of subverting existing norms. One of these is an example of “found sculpture”, that is, natural objects like pieces of driftwood that were found and then taken to a gallery.

“What is the meaning of this piece of driftwood?” the man inquires, after spotting it amidst the work of a prestigious gallery. “Is this some mistake?”

“On the contrary,” replies the guide. “This driftwood is an example of a new genre of art called ‘found sculpture.’”

“Art? But I don’t understand how this driftwood can be art. Is all the driftwood on the beach also art? Is the beach art?”

“Oh, no, no, let me explain. It’s like this. Danto wrote that, ‘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…’”[6] That explains what has happened here to this piece of driftwood. You see, by bringing it into the gallery, by conferring the status of ‘art’ upon it, the object is thereby transformed into a work of art. It will never again collapse into just a piece of driftwood, unless of course, it were taken back to the beach. Even then, it could still be art if it was designated as belonging to an ‘earth art’ exhibit.”

The time traveller doesn’t understand. In an attempt to clarify matters the guide transports our medieval friend to New York’s Central Park at the time when they were doing Oldenburg’s Invisible Sculpture behind the Metropolitan Museum. (For those who haven’t heard, the ‘invisible sculpture’ consisted of digging a hole in the ground and then filling it up again.) Before he has a chance to fully digest the esoteric significance of what he has just seen, he is next taken to see the person who repeatedly changes his name, and regards the legal procedures involves in doing so, as well as the change of name itself, as part of his activity as a performance artist.[7] The guide then prepares to transport our medieval friend to a high street in time to see a performance artist paid £20.000 by the council to kick a Curry box from one end of town to the other. They never make there, however, for our poor medieval friend just can’t take anymore. He wonders if the whole thing is one big joke until he is told about all the articles in scholarly journals that analyse the artistic significance of such things as urinals, bicycle wheels, bricks and pickled faeces. It can’t be a joke, he thinks, because everyone seems so extremely serious about it all.

Self-Referential Art

The idea that art can have value for it’s own has meant that the external fixities in which the concept had been rooted becomes replaced by a set a parameters that are self-sustaining. No longer a servant for achieving outside ends, art now defines and sustains itself. As Binkley says, “Art determines what art is and we must see where it goes. Art…has the ability to be self-referential and self-critical.” He thus speaks of “the elusiveness of ‘art’.”[8]

Given the current fixation with linguistical issues that characterizes philosophy today, it is hardly surprising that philosophers have taken up the task of trying to provide a definition of art that will encompasses all the bizarre works being produced today. However, considering the self-referential nature of today’s art, it is hardly surprising to find so many of these definitions collapsing into circularity.[9]

One of the most influential of the modern theories on the definition of art is known as the “institutional theory.” There are many different variations on this theory, but in its original form it states that

A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld).[10]

This is a very complicated way of saying that anything can be art as long as someone says it is. When a member of the institution of the art world selects an artefact for appreciation, the status of art-ness is thereby conferred on the object. So who can do this? Who is a member of the art world? According to Dickie (the inventor of the institutional theory), “every person who sees himself as a member of the artworld is thereby a member.”[11] So for something to become art, at least one person who considers himself a member of the artworld decides that something is a candidate for appreciation and…low and behold, it becomes art. (I have actually attempted this one my wife’s nose which I have long appreciated but only recently thought of conferring art on it. The experiment proved so successful that I have undertaken the more ambitious act of conferring the status of ‘candidate for appreciation’ on the rest of my life as an impromptu performance art!) Apparently the status of artifactuality can also be conferred upon an object,[12] and thus the definition encompasses the numerous examples where an artists ‘creates’ a work simply by specifying some entity as his piece. Robert Barry, for example, specified his piece as being the following:

“All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking – 1:36 P.M.: 15 June 1969, New York”…

Dickie admits that “under the definition anything whatever may become art”[13] and advances this as one of the theory’s advantages.

The problem is that this definition is purely verbal. If something becomes art simply by calling it art – or, in more technical lingo, “conferring a status upon it” - , then there is no substantial difference between art and non-art, only a semantical difference. Danto said that, “Since any definition of art must compass the Brillo boxes it is plain that no such definition can be based upon an examination of artworks.”[14] So with this definition, in which the object itself is relegated to irrelevance.

Consider further how the institutional definition refers to the artworld, yet as ‘art’ is the very term being defined, the concept of artworld is only meaningful if we previously (prior to the definition, that is) have some notion of what we mean by art. It is only by unconsciously smuggling this prior notion of art into Dickie’s definition that people feel that he is saying something substantial. In this way, a self-referential theory of art is only meaningful to the degree that it is parasitical on the left-over’s of previous notions.

Dickie acknowledges the inherent circularity to his definition but argues that it is not “viciously circular.” The reason he thinks the circle is not vicious is because he has given us considerable information about the “functional intricacies” of the artworld; consequently, although the definition is ultimately circular, it is a very large circle according to Dickie. But this is unconvincing since Dickie elsewhere says that “only one person is required” to “{act} on behalf of the artworld and {treat} an artefact as a candidate for appreciation…”[15] If only one person can act on behalf of the artworld and confer the status of art on an object, then all the institutional apparatus, all the ‘functional intricacies’ that makes his circular definition so apparently informative (and therefore not ‘vicious’), is really irrelevant. After all, if all that is needed for something to be art is the artist himself, then what is the point of Dickie describing the institution of the artworld at all? In fact, one can apparently eliminate the artist from the act of status conferral without doing injustice to Dickie’s definition; for if, as Dickie argues, “the action of conferring the status of art” was happening all along before people realized it, and if it can happen when the artist is the only person who sees the work, as Dickie also asserts, then when does this mysterious process of conferral actually occur? When the artwork is finished? When the artist stands back and admires his work? When the artist consciously or unconsciously thinks of the work as being ‘art’? (Though if art means what Dickie says it means, few artists or audience will ever have thought about their work as being art, certainly no artists who lived before Dickie’s time!) Or is conferral a gradual process that comes about concurrently with the production of the work?

Despite its logical fallacies, there remains a certain profundity to the institutional definition. Whether we agree with the institutional theory or not, it must be acknowledged that it encapsulates the principle on which so much contemporary art is based, namely, “if someone calls it art, it’s art” (to quote Donald Judd.) Art has become synonymous for anything an artist wants it to be.

Parasitical Art

It has only been comparatively recently that we have seen the full outworking of the autonomy of art. We have seen that art operating under its own rules has led to art to the point where it operates under no rules. This has caused the very concept of art to collapse in on itself. What is interesting, however, is that art has not just caved in on itself, it has collapsed on its own strength. What I mean is this: had there not originally been a concept of art that was grounded in a system of meaning outside itself, there could never have arisen a concept that was self-defining, for such a concept would not have otherwise been meaningful. The collapse of art has only been possible because there has been an entire tradition, structure and genres that enable there to be a language in which the art of today can speak. The language retains enough of the former meaning to enable the non-meaning to be meaningful.

To explain what I mean by “non-meaning being meaningful”, reflect on someone uttering a noise of pure gibberish compared with someone saying a statement like, “There’s a lot of yesterday’s in yellow.” In the former case, the noise coming out of my mouth is just gibberish and therefore it is just heard as sound. It may be considered meaningless but in a different way to the nonsensical statement. The nonsensical statement is really meaningless since it has a meaningful context in which the distortion can occur. That is, there is a language for it to employ badly and a system of logic for it to not conform to. One instinctively feels that it ought to make sense because of the very nature of its being a sentence. Or take another instance: the ranting of a madman may contain more meaning that the babblings of a six month year old baby, yet we worry at the former and not at the later, since the madman’s speech represents a privation or distortion of meaning.

In a similar way, if there were no coherent system of meaning in the language of various artistic mediums, then the contemporary concept of art could never have existed. It could never have come first since it exists as a privation, distortion and corruption of the original forms. Art for art’s sake is posterior to art for life’s sake, not just historically but logically, for to say that art lays down its own rules and exists for its own sake would be to say nothing if we did not first have a notion (however vague) of what is meant by art in the first place. And it is precisely because we do still know vaguely what we mean by art, and the sorts of things it has meant historically, that the privations of these conventions can have a meaning in their non-meaning.

This is easy enough to see in such works as Cage’s piano composition 433. It consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, and I have seen part of it performed on television (before my father got fed up and switched channels). The pianists sits in front of a piano with the lid closed! There are many times that we experience four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, but this silence is different. We notice this silence in a different way to other silence. We notice the silence of the piano in a different way to the silence of a piano at other times when no one happens to be playing it. But if I go to a concert, sit in the pews, applaud as the performer makes his entrance, and then stare at him sitting at the piano for four minutes and thirty-three second, the silence is very powerful, even, I would argue, subversive. The silence is saying something. Now silence is a privation of noise as dark is a privation of light, so what I am noticing is the absence of something that I intuitively expect to be there. It is precisely this expectation, this memory of positive musical forms with which the piano and concert are association, that makes a piece like this possible. It is precisely this association that makes 433 so philosophically potent, so intellectually aggressive and so filled with a sense of nothingness. In this way the work is entirely parasitical. Take away the association of that for which it is a privation and the piece becomes meaningless.

The parasitical nature of a work like 433 is obvious, yet I would say that a lot of contemporary art is equally parasitic. Works that were designed with the intent of violating artistic norms, such as the corpus of works produced by the Dadaists, have no meaning except seen side by side the norms they are violating. This is clearly seen in the following quotation from Marcel Duchamp, who is best known for his famous urinal.

“’I had to be careful to avoid the ‘look’ {of being art}. It’s very difficult to choose an object, because after two weeks you either love it or hate it. You have to become so indifferent that you have no aesthetic feeling. The choice of Readymades is always founded on visual indifference and a total lack of good or bad taste.’”[16]

There is something extremely ironic about this ideology of indifference for, of course, if were we truly indifferent to the work then Duchamp would never have been able to exhibit Fountain in the first place. (If we were truly indifferent the only thing to do with Fountain would be to go up to it and use it for the purpose for which it was designed.) The work seems to be advocating indifference to any aesthetic quality as being good taste. It and similar works are again parasitic since their ideology is meaningful only when seen in light of the conventions they are busting to pieces, in this case the convention that aesthetic qualities are an essential component of art. The message is essentially negative since it is one of destruction, as expressed in the following poem by Dr. Kooning.

Every so often a painter has to destroy

painting. Cezanne did it. Picasso did it

with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted

our idea of a painting all to hell. Then

there could be new paintings again.

Oh yes, there can be “new paintings again,” but for how long? We have seen that the process of “busting to pieces” has continued until art itself becomes a vacuous concept. Because iconoclasm was made an end in itself, all the art that was produced with this intention was parasitical on the conventions it was busting, and then became the subject on which other parasites could grow, and so on. But there does reach a limit on how far this can continue. In his book The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe explains how once artists were happy merely getting rid of representational objects. Soon, however, they thought it necessary to get rid of the third dimension altogether. Hence, the fixation with flatness that entered the art world for a while. Then they got rid of airiness, brush strokes and most of the paint. Then the got rid of colour completely. The painting frame was the next thing to go, and Frank Stella turned the canvas into a frame and hung it on the wall with nothing in the middle. Hence, we entered what Wolfe describes as “the era of ‘shaped canvases’…” That went alright for a while until artists such as Robert Hunter and Sol Lewitt challenged the bourgeois idea of hanging pictures up in the first place. They began painting directly on the gallery walls or on the walls outside the gallery window. But hold on…what about the wall itself? Or the gallery? Talk about a convention that needs busting all to hell. So begins “earth Art.” But what of the idea of a permanent work of art at all? Hence, certain works of conceptual art where the process of creation is emphasised over the object itself. But what about the process of creation?[17] What about the artist? What about…iconoclasm itself? Maybe when the remnants of every existing notion of art are thoroughly trodden under foot, the iconoclasts will embrace the final logic of destroying their own iconoclasm. Maybe then they will revolt into the only thing left: sanity.

The Elusiveness of Art

“To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions…”[18] So writes Clive Bell who was an influential proponent of the formalist school of art.

One of the saddest consequences of this direction in which art has gone is that it has become detached from the realm of everyday life. The effect is that art has gradually taking on an esoteric quality. It has gone the way of so many other activities by becoming the domain of elitists and specialists. Faced with art that is completely obscure and inaccessible, the ordinary person may conclude that to appreciate art you must have a certain artistic eye, a certain kind of enlightenment that makes this esoteric world accessible.[19] After observing the millions of pounds that are spent on art each year, such a person may naturally conclude that there must be something to it, even if he can’t perceive what the whole point is and even if we would just prefer something beautiful to hang on his wall.

The same could be said of many other disciplines which were once integrated with the entire fabric of life and culture but which now are off-limits to all but the specialists, or at least thought to be.[20] Take classical music. Surveys show that although the amount of people who listen to classical music is on the rise (since it is used for relaxation) the general ignorance about it is also on the rise. Many people treat a knowledge of classical music like they treat appreciation of Shakespeare. When I was working at a job I happened to mention how much I like Shakespeare. There was a moment of silence as I was eyed suspiciously. “That’s the sort of thing you study in school,” someone finally said, “but not something that you enjoy!” It emerged later that the people had felt threatened when I mentioned my love of Shakespeare, thinking that I was implying that I was superior to them because I liked Shakespeare and they didn’t. As I later reflected on the strange incident and the bizarre way in which my tastes equated me with a snobbish pride, I realized just how many activities people view as ‘high brow’ in the pejorative sense. We know from history that art, poetry, philosophy, drama, opera, knowledge about classical music, appreciation of eloquence, and many other things have all been savoured, at one time or another, by what we would call ‘the man on the street’.

There is a way for art to be lifted out of the abyss into which it has so deeply fallen and to once again be integrated with all of life. Art must again be elevated and the only way for this to happen is for art to again be seen, not as something autonomous, but as a servant.

Art as Servant

To say that art is a servant is to emphasize that it is a means to higher ends, whatever those higher ends may be. Art must cease to be seen as something self-referential that can float along on its own, but instead as something we can take hold of and use for our own benefit to enhance our lives. Just as the value of building a ship lies in the end for which a ship is designed, and just as the value of making shoes lies in the end for which shoes were designed, so art-craft in all its variations is only valuable as a mean to various ends. That is why the linguistic association that art once had with these other crafts was helpful – it reminded us that art is no different than any honest activity to which man applies his labour and skill. It emphasised that the process was not an end in itself. When labour is made an end itself, man loses his initiative to work. Men could endure tremendous labour in Nazi concentration camps, but when pointless labour was introduced (shifting piles of stones back and forth from one spot to another and back again) the men went mad. That is also why the glorification of labour in the Marxist work state sucked the work force of its life.

Not surprisingly, we see just such lifelessness and despair in the work of many contemporary artists. Art is the perfect medium for conveying despair. We recognize blindness as being bad in a person but not bad in a stone, because sight is in the proper nature of human beings; similarly, we think twice about the ugliness, meaningless-ness and despair that we see in contemporary works of art because they are privations of the proper nature of art. We do not pause to contemplate the ugliness in the toilet before we flush it, but we do contemplate the artist who pickled his faeces and then exhibits them in jars before a world of spectators, for we know instinctively that something is missing. We know instinctively that there is a difference Carl Andre’s bricks and Michelandgelo’s La Pietà even if ‘experts’ tell us that the difference is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

It is only through recapturing this sense of service that art can again become integrated with all of life in a vital and exciting way. Then, though for the sake of convenience we may continue to lump such things as painting, sculpture, music, drama, poetry and architecture under the category of ‘fine arts’, we will see such activities as essentially no different to any craft or skill to which man diligently applies himself. We will see such works as having value, not for what they are in themselves; rather, the value of such activities will be seen as resting in what these things can do for us; in what they can do to enhance and beautify our lives.