It has so far remained an unquestioned assumption that an artw ork m ust be an artefact; that is, an object created or modified by an agent's intentionally guided action. It is im portant to realise that an artefact cannot merely be an object which we use or one of socio cultural significance, as some apparently hold.^^ Furthermore, as an object we have created or modified, an artefact needn't be of a m aterial nature.60 For example, whether God is an artefact of our culture or not depends upon whether He exists, not upon the socio cultural significance of Christianity. If God does not exist then he is, as a
For example Joseph Margolis makes this assumption in his Art and Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester Press,
1980), pp. 84-87.
60 Many people assume an artefact must be a material object, see, for example, Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art
creation of our thought, an artefact, despite being only a mental and not a m aterial object. The main point here is that recognising 'art' as a cluster concept brings the assumed condition of artefactuality into question. Artefactuality itself, rather than being a precondition of art, may merely be one of the cluster of conditions which make up the concept of art. If this is the case then artw orks are only typically, not necessarily, artefacts. This is supported by the consideration that a piece of driftwood picked up from the beach may be considered an artw ork because it possesses or promotes artistic values to a high degree. The sea formed grooves may be beautifully expressive, the colour and tone delightful, the knots in the wood symbolic and so on.
Those who hold that artefactuality is a necessary condition of art may deny that pieces of driftwood are or could become artworks. For example, Monroe Beardsley denies that such objects could ever be artworks.^ ^ The grounds for tills claim are presumably that only artefacts could possibly fulfil art's function. As we have seen, the functionalist approach to defining art is inadequate, so the point should be modified in terms of artistic goals. Nevertheless, the point does not hold good. If we assume, as Beardsley does, that the prim ary goal of art is aesthetic value, then obviously natural objects may possess aesthetic features and fulfil the prim ary goal of art. Beardsley may deny this by suggesting that an object's purpose is fixed by or requires intentional activity or m anipulation. But in certain cases the socio cultural purpose of an object can come apart from the intended one. For example, a religious icon m ade to promote faith may now be established in the National Gallery as an artwork. VVe mav legitimately go to see such an object in order to appreciate its aesthetic qualities. Just as, in this case, the purpose of an object may vary depending upon cultural practices, so too may the matter of whether an object has any purpose.
We can treat a non-intended object as if it had been created to achieve a particular goal. Of course, there must be good reason for doing so, namely, that it fulfils artistic goals well. Thus, a piece of driftwood may be an artwork but it cannot be bad art, A piece of driftwood may come to be art because, as a contingent matter, it happens to possess aesthetic features or promotes artistic values. We should not be overly surprised at this. That we are able to do so is, of course, parasitic upon our intentionally guided activities which constitute the m ain practice of art. That we are able to recognise non- artefactual objects as artworks is only possible against a background where artworks are understood to be typically artefactual.
It might be further suggested that artefactuality need not even be a typical requirem ent for artwork status. If pieces of driftwood may become artworks, it would seem to be only contingently true that non-artefactual objects prom ote artistic values to a lesser extent than intentionally produced objects. If certain kinds of non-artefactual objects, such as pieces of driftwood, were typically found to
^ * See Monroe Beardsley, “Redefining Art” in M. Wreen and D. Callen (eds.). The Aesthetic Point of View (Ithaca;
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promote arfs value well then they would establish an art form and perhaps could constitute the major part or all of the cultural practice. W hether the object is intentionally created or m anipulated would then be irrelevant to the w ork's status as art. Michel Foucault's comments regarding the minimal significance of the medieval author point towards such a p o s i t i o n . ^ ’ ^ He holds that, as in medieval times, the regulative ideal of maximal value should guide our categorisation and assessment of books and artw orks generally. The constraining conception of intentional action should not be seen as constituting the work's nature: we should be able to make of and value what we will in seeking to maximise the object's value for ourselves. This conclusion is thought to follow from the recognition that an author's intent cannot fully determ ine an object's nature. Therefore, artefactuality may not even be a typical condition of artwork status.
Now, that authorial intention cannot wholly fix an artw ork's nature can be supported by argument. Firstly, where an artistic intention fails, an artwork may nevertheless be produced. Richard Wollheim is wrong to hold that if an artefact fails to conform to the artistic intent with which it was produced it cannot thus represent, be expressive or, by extension, be an artwork.^^ Although the w ork is other than it was intended to be it may, nevertheless, be expressive and of artistic value. Secondly, even where the artist's intention is successfully fulfilled, the nature of the artw ork produced is not necessarily fixed. For an action may have accidental or non-intended features which are relevant to th e artefact as art and affect its value. Hence it may be true that the broad expressive brush strokes of late Titian were unintended and can be explained in relation to his failing sight, yet they constitute part of the nature of the work: they add to its value, and the w ork would be essentially different w ithout them. Thus it may be true of both the act and the resultant product that they have unintended features which are essential to the work as art. Although the intention, beliefs and action may explain why th e action occurred, they are not identical with or wholly constitutive of the nature of the act and the work. Furthermore, not only may features of a w ork be independent of the intention with which the action was performed but some may vary across people, time and culture. This is because the relevant features are not just determ ined by authorial intent but also by the prevailing conventions of art. Therefore, independently of w hether the object arises from a retrospectively identifiable successfully fulfilled intention or not, the cultural practice plays a significant role in fixing the nature of the artefact as art.
However, it does not follow from the truth of this claim that artefactuality is not a typical pre-condition of artwork status: i.e. that we can have a practice of art constituted for the most part by non-artefactual objects. The necessary conventionality of a cultural practice does not entail that the
See Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon,
1984), pp. 101-120.
artefactual grounding of art is itself a matter of convention. This would only follow if the condition of artefactuality were shown to be radically contingent and not a necessarily typical conceptual relation. But artwork status cannot be so wholly severed from intentional human activity. Firstly, artefactu ality is required as a typical condition to distinguish the practice of art from the parts of nature which may happen to be aesthetically valuable. Unless we conceive of the world as the intentional product of God's design, it makes no sense to conceive of the natural world as an artwork.
Of course we can conceive of parts of the world as if they were artworks, but only in a parasitic sense. However, this is not to make artefactuality a necessary condition of art. For example, consider a rock whose surface has been naturally eroded in a certain way. If read as if they were English words, they might read as a beautiful poem. Of course, the marks could be taken as meaning something else in a different language. Nonetheless, although not written by an intentional agent, we may take the marks as if they were meaningful words. They correspond to signs within one of our intentionally guided representational systems, in this case the language of English. The words in the rock could not be considered as words if it were not for the hum an intentionally guided, communal practice of linguistic communication, just as we may parasitically consider the marks to be meaningful words, so too we may consider them to constitute a poem. We may parasitically consider a few non-artefactual objects to be art, but only by virtue of the practice itself being grounded upon human intentionally guided activity.
It is also im portant to realise that not just any aspect of nature which can be seen as artistically valuable can be parasitically regarded as art. For example, although an aesthetic piece of driftwood may be considered art, a sunset, no matter how beautiful, cannot be up for artwork status. This is because whereas the driftwood could have been intentionally produced by a human agent, a sunset could not. Only those non-artefactual objects which could have been humanly worked may parasitically be up for artwork status. It must be said that in the future sunsets may come to be up for artwork status, if we come to control and manipulate sunsets as we may landscape, cultivate and order gardens. Art as a cultural practice is grounded upon the intentionally guided production of artefacts of artistic value for appreciation. It is the typical artistic value of what is produced that makes the activity worthwhile and enables non-artefactual objects to be parasitically considered as art.
Artworks are not out there in nature, waiting for us to pluck them from the air. Rather, they rest upon the constructions of hum an activities and practice. Artworks can only parasitically be in nature, grounded upon the prim ary hum an intentionally guided activities which constitute the mainstream of the practice. A rock's markings may be taken as an artwork, but this does not mean the practice of art is divorcable from intentional activity. There could not be a practice where all the artworks, for example, were products of nature and non-intended. If someone were to call such objects art they might mean a different thing by the same word. Alternatively a special explanation w ould have to come in, explaining how artw orks survived only in this special, parasitic sense. One m ight conceivably imagine such a situation in a state where all artefactual artworks w ere destroyed and all
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art making activities banned. However, eventually, sundered from its primary sense, art could no longer survive and the practice would either die or transmute into something else.
The nature and value of an object may change whilst its identity, arising from its originating and causal history, remains. It would be a category mistake to conflate identity with class: the value of an object as art may be independent of w hat it was originally created for. Thus an artefact may be picked out consistently across physical erosion, conceptual change and cultural m odification, independently of its class and value. Thus religious myths, prim itive artefacts and m edieval m anuscripts may change in terms of their value and yet still remain the same artefacts. What is central to an object as art is the question of artistic value. Although the water left is continuous w ith the materials worked upon by the artist for his ice or water sculpture , the puddles he leaves behind may no longer constitute an artwork: they no longer retain the shape and form which made them valuable as art. To identify religious myths, ritualistic artefacts, medieval manuscripts or found objects as art is to assert that they are of value qua art. To identify a novel as art is to say that it is both in a particular established art form and that it has attained the minim al value threshold appropriate to being art within that particular art form.
The artist's purposive actions, the artefact itself and the evolution of the forms of art and the cultural practice in general all symbiotically w ork to determ ine the actual and potential nature, and thus value, of artworks. Indeed, these factors determ ine whether an object qualifies as art at all. The object's narrative and the practice of art thus explains why it has the qualities, value and artw ork status it does at a particular time and place, as well as tentatively indicating possibilities to come. A better understanding of artworks and art must thus involve an appreciation of how and why the practice, form and object are shaped thus. Thus we can recognise both the basis upon which religious artefacts were made and how, despite this, they came to be properly valued as artworks.
However, as we saw earlier, our position should not be confused with the radical claim that if something can be construed as art then it ought to be and thus is art.^^ Stephen Davies has suggested that merely because a 'discoverer' works against a background of art history and conventions of art then her "works must be seen as referring to all the aesthetic techniques and properties that she has eschewed. The same is true of the 'beach artist'. Similarly, the Conceptual artist cannot but refer to the physical properties that are absent for their relevance in his work.''^^^ Thus whether something is art or not has been rendered a matter of complete contingency and luck. The art historical context is confused with the found object itself. The object is understood as necessarily referring to all the absent properties, and thus artistic values, that it does not actually have: from painted and carved media to ugly and beautiful qualities. Presum ably, all other art objects thus construed m ust be the same. Yet we
Arthur Danto’s claims suggest something like this position; namely, if something can be interpreted in an artistically signilicant way then it is art.
discriminate between artworks on the grounds that the relevant features and artistic values are in fact distinct: which is why our critical evaluations of them differ. It is also true that artworks may be other than how we construe them to be. The construal which maximises an object's artistic value may not be a legitimate one.
The point of the practice of art as a whole, and in which its value inheres, is the constraining and opening out of possibilities for our engagement. Found art can only be art if the object could have been made by human activity and if it is of a high artistic value. Our ability to treat such objects as art is parasitic upon our understanding of art and artworks as the result of purposive actions intentionally guided towards the goal and value of art. This is not equivalent to holding that som ething is an artw ork only if a m aker intended an artefact to have artistic value. Although we must regard something as if it were purposively made for it to be art, artefactuality is only a typical requirem ent of artworks. We can properly recognise accidentally or incidentally produced objects as artworks because of their high artistic value. Nevertheless, found art is parasitic upon our understanding of artworks as products of human purposive activity, created in order to realise certain values. A rtefactuality is criterial of art in much the same way as pain behaviour is criterial of pain. That is, we could not have the concept of art w ithout artefactuality. Yet there are parasitic, fringe cases which constitute non- artefactual art in much the same way as there is sim ulated or concealed pain. The link is not a matter of logical deduction, but it is certainly criterial.
The cultural practice and thus the concept of art is value-driven. Of course, since artefactuality is a typical condition, not all of the prim ary characteristics which make up the cluster concept of art are them selves evaluative. Nevertheless, the point and purpose of art fundamentally comes to rest upon artistic value. The value threshold for artw ork status differs depending upon whether the object belongs within established art forms or not, a matter dependent upon the enduring nature of the practice and its constitutive works, t herefore som ething is an artw ork if and only if, as a m em ber of an established art form, it achieves a certain threshold of artistic value, or, if it is outwith established art forms, it is of exceptional value q tia art.
It might be objected that my definition allows the use of drugs to promote otherwise worthless objects into artw ork status. Similarly, it m ight allow artefacts such as Rorschach tests to become artworks since we may find them artistically valuable; our engagement here involves mere projection onto the pattern before us. Indeed, the objection goes, my definition as it is neither rules such cases in or out: it is circular and uninformative. My definition is indeed formally circular, but not viciously so. It is the task of the rest of this thesis to render the definition informative: that is, to explicate exactly