A Transinstitutional Nonvoluntary Modelling Theory of Art

Abstract

in terms of some single necessary and sufficient condition that art and only art will satisfy have certainly succumbed to the fatal pincer: it is simply not credible that all works of art are imitative (or revelatory or expressive or therapeutic or beautiful, etc.), and that only works of art are imitative (or revelatory or expressive or therapeutic or beautiful, etc.). Something can be done on behalf of the 'essences' by an ingenious qualification of terms so that words like 'imitation' and 'revelation' gain extremely technical senses distant from ordinary usage. Even so, while one side of the pincer ('all works of art are ...') may thus be resisted, the other ('and only works of art are...) is usually avoided by recourse to an illicit circularity of argument in which the modified essence (imitation, revelation, etc.) is implicitly and covertly defined as being of a sort peculiar to works of art. Of the more recent, roughly post-Wittgensteinean, accounts of art emphasizing the 'openness' or 'opentexturedness' or 'essential contestedness' of the concept, three related versions have shown some plausibility. The 'paradigm case' account did not fail decisively in the museums and galleries until after the mid-century, when disputable candidate objects presented themselves (for example) as suitcases full of rotting cheese on the floor, or as specifications for a hole in the ground. The 'ordinary language' account of art survived reasonably well until ordinary language-users ceased to be able reliably to pick out recent works of art from the jumble of assorted goods in the warehouse.