Abstract
A hypothetical artwork is an artwork that exists only as a fictional creation of an art theorist. The explicatory powers of such hypothetical artworks are mainly used by an art theorist to reflect on an art theoretical issue under consideration. Such an artwork has an intriguing and paradoxical nature. On the one hand, it is only fictitious, but, on the other hand, it tries to function as a real token, persuading the reader to trust it as if it were a real artwork. Even though this kind of argumentation can be deceiving, as it presents a statement of real art on the basis of fiction, it has some important explicatory abilities that can be put to good usein the art educational process. In this case, the construction of the hypothetical artwork is handled as the construction of a theoretical model. The author calls such theoretical construction the method of hypothetical artwork modelling, and its result the hypothetical artwork model. Such a hypothetical artwork model can be usefully employed when one wishesto encourage the student to become fictionally involved in the process of creation of an artwork, thus giving him or her more personal experience of problems that accompany the process of creating a real artwork. When such hypothetical experience is gained, the student can more efficiently learn about the considered art issue. In the paper, the authordemonstrates how the explicatory powers of the method of hypothetical artwork modelling can be put into educational practice regarding an issue taken from colour theory (i.e., the primary colours fallacy).
Highlights
The Curious World of Hypothetical ArtA hypothetical artwork is an artwork that exists only as a fictional creation of an art theorist (Selan, 2008, 2010)
It is introduced into the text by the linguistic assertion of supposition; for example, by the use of syntagms: »let us suppose, imagine that, etc.« Since the hypothetical artwork has no life outside the hypothetical world of a particular art theory, its intention is not to fascinate but to explicate
The educational relevance of the two constructed hypothetical artwork models can be summed up as follows. Because these two hypothetical artworks draw attention to the essential difference in printers’ and painters’ primary colours, they can make a student of art experience that when evaluating the correctness of artistic colour theories, such as the theories of Goethe, Itten, Kandinsky, Klee and Albers, one cannot follow a strict division into theory and history of theory, for if one does so one must reject as wrong artworks that are in themselves entirely correct
Summary
A hypothetical artwork is an artwork that exists only as a fictional creation of an art theorist (Selan, 2008, 2010). If Danto had wanted to prove his thesis for all art he would have had to resolve the problem of »too hasty generalisation.« This is precisely the intention of the Polish Rider Made in a Centrifuge: it enables Danto to verify his thesis for the art of Rembrandt’s time and subsequently expand the historical span of evidence to facilitate the logically valid inductive generalisation regarding all artworks in history As it seems to me, this does not work either. The educational relevance of the two constructed hypothetical artwork models can be summed up as follows Because these two hypothetical artworks draw attention to the essential difference in printers’ and painters’ primary colours, they can make a student of art experience that when evaluating the correctness of artistic colour theories, such as the theories of Goethe, Itten, Kandinsky, Klee and Albers, one cannot follow a strict division into theory and history of theory, for if one does so one must reject as wrong artworks that are in themselves entirely correct. Painters’ primary colours should not be understood as axioms, but more as symbols—a kind of »holy trinity«—with the emphasis on their intense cultural significance (e.g., primary colours as a symbol of the Holy Trinity in Christianity), material significance (e.g., the different economic values of colour pigments; the spectral particularities of different colour pigments, etc.) and experiential significance (the different »moral« value of different colour pigments)
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