Abstract
The question of what art is and why certain objects and events are considered art is examined. In the light of John Searle’s Social Philosophy, a hybrid Institutionalist-Functionalist explanation of what counts as art is presented. However, Searle’s apparatus applied to the ontology of the work of art is not enough to answer the question of why art has the status it exhibits. The proposal is to trace back the ontology of art to the origins of the dichotomy between freedom and necessity, and more specifically to the notion of “end in itself” presented by Kant, as the status that persons have. Ultimately, the ontology of art emerges as a projection of the status “end in itself”, of personhood, to objects and events.
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Notes
A summary of this debate can be found in R. Stecker (2000).
G. Dickie’s institutionalist reformulations have moved in the direction of a rule-based institutional approach (Dickie 1984, 2001). Asa Kasher’s (1977) contribution of pragmatic competence as a constitutive system of rules within different institutional levels has also found an application to the artworld as a system of rules (Kasher 1990). David Graves (2010) completed this approach by presenting a framework that could nest Dickie’s interlocking definitions of art with different institutional sub-systems with varying degree of specificity working in the artworld.
This example is mentioned by A. Danto (2003).
For the role of language in the constitution of social objects, see Chapter 3 of J.R. Searle (1995).
Ibid.
Aufheben is also commonly used in German as “to pick up”. ‘Hegel may be said to visualize how something is picked up in order that it may no longer be there just the way it was, although, it is not cancelled altogether but lifted up to be kept on a different level’ in Walter Kaufmann (1966, 144).
For the iteration of status functions, see Chapter 3 of J.R. Searle (1995).
Ibid. It is in this context that we can understand why G. Dickie had to embrace the circularity nested in the definition of art as he presented in the Art Circle. For an explantion of the inevitability of this circularity see Asa Kasher (1990).
I follow here Berys Gaut’s proposal (2000) for the cluster definition of art.
Kant 1984.
Ibid.
‘Kant never raises this possibility explicitly. But there is evidence that he may well have been attracted to an analogy between works of art and persons which would, if sufficiently articulated, provide a way of describing the former as participating in the moral status of the latter.’ In C. Haskins (1989, 50). Whether it is an accurate historical interpretation of Kant’s theory of art is not the problem I am addressing here. However, this is an intuition that can help us understand the status function that works of art acquire. Haskins’ reading of Kant asserts that works of art could be viewed as though “they were persons exhibiting the kind of moral autonomy Kant elsewhere (and without qualification) attributes to wills or persons and to ends in themselves” (ibid.).
I. Kant (2008) “Critique of Aesthetic Judgement” 44: 306. Notice that I am following Haskins translation of für sich selbst zweckmassi as “purposive for itself.”
Ibid. 54:336.
I. Kant (1964) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 435.
Ibid.
C. Haskins (1989, 50).
Ibid. See Groundwork, Ak. 428.
J.R. Searle (1995).
We can question if other entities, like pets, exhibit an end in itself status, and that we do not regard as works of art. However, the proposal is not that everything that exhibits an “end in itself character” is a work of art, but that when we grant the artistic status we project into objects and activities (not living things or even people) the status persona.
This talk about art’s “desires” and “wants” does not entail that the work of art possesses any intrinsic intentionality, but only that people’s intention underlying the creation of the work of art attributes an ontological status that surpasses its normal or associated function.
References
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Vega, M. Once Again, What Counts as Art?. Philosophia 44, 633–644 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9696-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9696-9