Art courtesy of brunhilda87, DeviantArt

If you’ve ever taken a class in philosophy of art or aesthetics, you may have some memory of theories of art but if you, like most of us, haven’t and don’t, I’ll save you the tedium of running through its multiple theories. In general, theories of art deals with the cumbersome task of defining art. Specifically, it deals with defining art in terms of necessary or sufficient conditions which requires of one the impossible task of considering all examples of art (and not art) ever produced and distilling it to an essence by means of language which then must be constructed into a concise definition with the precision of a ship-in-a-bottle builder lest the next analytic philosopher come along and tell you how you got it all wrong and don’t understand art, man! Some part of me suspects they know this is a futile exercise but like a philosophical bug light, it doesn’t stop people from getting drawn into its scintillating allure only to be overturned by the next guy.

I’m reflexively tempted to call on the philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein and assume that art, collectively, has no unifying characteristic but is rather defined by a family of resemblance or maybe, as he ultimately concluded, the most existentially important questions of life are immune to language as their nouminal qualities can only truly be communicated through art or religious iconography. I’ve heard that the Wittgenstein theory of art (or anti-essentialism) is outmoded but it saves me the headache of getting drawn into what I believe to be a self-constructed problem which is governed not only by certain biases to language but also biases of limited cultural and historical perspective.

The social anthropologist, Tim Ingold has written, “Hunters and gatherers of the past were painting and carving, but they were not ‘producing art.’ … We must cease thinking of painting and carving as modalities of the production of art, and view art instead as one rather peculiar, and historically very specific objectification of the activities of painting and carving.” This stands in conjunction with the fact that the all encompassing abstraction we now call art didn’t exist until around the 18th century in the West, when the fine arts were formally established, threading together music, painting, sculpture and various modes of production into a single field. Perhaps that’s why we’re so confused and grappling to come to a satisfying definition. We’re attempting to lump together a baggy monster of activities that have dissimilar human significance through some vague, unifying tendril related to expression. Maybe the blanket term art only serves to eclipse the significance of these individual human activities. This is where I believe a more global or anthropological approach to art is desirable. The Western cannon has defined the terms of art and, by association, the questions asked by philosophers and it would be enriching to learn of the “art” of non-Western societies not as an objectification of an established Western category but to attempt to understand the local metaphysical and cultural significance of these artifacts and rituals. We should attempt to approach them, in the terms of an anthropologist, from an emic or insider perspective.

This all leads me back to the nagging Western problem of defining art and whether its even a comprehensible problem to begin with. Maybe there is some nebulous yet unifying aspect of concept or cognition that ties together oil painting, Tuvan throat singing and macrame but it would, by nature of being so vague, be a very reductive concept. I’m increasingly sympathetic to the artist’s desire not to define art. Pablo Picasso once answered this question by saying, “I don’t know [what art is] and if I did, I wouldn’t tell you” a response that may strike some as a cop out but may be the most wise and sincere answer to such an imprecise question. Just as art has deep and culturally specific meanings to different societies, it also has deep and personal meanings to different artists and to attempt reduce this to a pithy, universal formulation would be flattening out the variety of separate, plausible meanings that simultaneously exist within a very culturally specific umbrella term that has become too broad for its own good or, in the reckoning of Wittgenstein, it is simply attempting to express the ineffable.