The Last Great Unregulated Market: Defining “Art”

Above: This is Art.

This is the first of what will probably be a five part series of articles on art. They are an attempt to translate a lecture I gave last winter on the state of the contemporary art market into a series of short essays. Part one is going to focus on what we mean when we say the word “art.”

“Modern art is merely the means by which we terrorize ourselves.” – Tracey Emin

This article opens with a request: take a minute to come up with a definition of art. If this seems like a daunting or impossible task—an assignment given at art school in hell—just bear with me.

If you’re like most people, the definition you just came up with fits into one of two categories. The first situates art with the audience: “Art is something that creates _____ in the mind of the viewer.”   The thing that art supposedly creates for its audience can be one of any number of things, from “creates an emotional response,” to “explores perceptual reality” (we’ll look at both possibilities).  It is the effect of the image on a viewer that earns the designation “art.”

Above: This is one of the most famous paintings ever.

Munch’s The Scream is a painting that many people relate to because of the emotion it inspires in them: Anxiety, the universal anxiety of modern man.  Not many would contest that it is art.   But is this similar image art?  And does it provoke an emotional response from you?

Above: Arguably, the Homer Simpson Scream should even more successfully convey the “universal anxiety of modern man.”

What about an image like this one. Does it provoke an emotional response? Is it art?

Above: Clearly everything that provokes an emotional response cannot be art

Another quality of The Scream that is commonly praised is how well it expresses a psychological state. But of course, many things express a psychological state that few people would consider art.

Above: My facebook

I’m sure facebook displays as much about a person’s psychological symptoms as any painting ever made, in ways its users are not fully conscious of. Perhaps a psychoanalyst could read it and insinuate various childhood traumas. Should we add facebook to the canon of art?  I don’t think that would be a useful resolution to this dilemma.

What about the claim that artwork explores perceptual reality, making a viewer question how we organize our world and our physiological relationship to it? A famous art piece that illustrates this is Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, a visual expression of Plato’s concept of The Forms. The piece is supposed to ask us how signifiers relate to objects, I mean, WHICH CHAIR IS REAL?? OMG.

Above: OMG I don’t even know which chair is real.

But then, is everything that explores perceptual reality art?

What about this:

Above: I think this is actually better than art.

To push this argument to its endpoint, psychoactive drugs inspire people to explore perceptual reality.  I think it’s safe to say that no one would consider shrooms an art medium.

The second pattern that definitions of art commonly take is to situate the art with the artist: “Art is anything an artist says is art.” Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain seems to work on that principle.

Above: This is really famous too.  You can buy it for about 2.5 million dollars.

But then, what makes someone an artist?  Maybe we have to take their word for it. I went to art school, which is probably one of the only measurable criteria we could ever come up with.  Alright then: I’m an artist and anything I say is art is art. I get to go around with a Midas touch and bestow cultural value on objects as I see fit.

Above: This is my cat. She’s art.

I propose we put her in a gallery and viewers follow her around and interpret her behaviour as my comment on human nature.

Are you taking me seriously? Why not?

A couple years ago an OCAD art student, Jesse Power, and one of his friends, Anthony Wenneker, tortured a cat on video and called it art. Power went to the same art school I went to, but all his art-is-anything-an-artist-says-it-is got him is jail time. It got him expelled as well. OCAD University and the Canadian legal system (along with many animal rights advocates) certainly seem to disagree with this model for identifying art.

So clearly, there are problems with both of these ways of defining art. While we can accept them in our personal lives and practices, they fail to adequately account for the phenomena we observe in the art world. The solution I propose, at least for this series of articles, is to situate the “art” within a third body—unaccounted for in the two prior definitions. Art is not anything an artist says is art, and it’s not anything a viewer says is art. The only thing Munch, Kosuth, and Duchamp have in common is that they’ve all been accepted by art institutions (and that they’re all white men).  Art is anything an art institution says is art. Therefore, artists don’t make art, institutions do.

So how and why do institutions make art? That’s what these articles attempt to examine.

In part two, I’m going to use some more examples to illustrate the different things the word “art” has meant in the past, at different times and different places.