Pins, A Table, Works of Art

Abstract

WHEN WE FIND OURSELVES face to face with a work of art it is within our world of objects and limited by our feelings about objects that this experience takes place. A culture in which objects are few, or one in which objects are commonly divided into things touched only by men or by women, or a culture in which the sacred objects are unmistakably distinguished from profane objects-each of these cultures has locked into place competing possibilities into which any new object must fall. So it is with our own industrial culture that has multiplied the numbers of things and filled in the variety of objects almost to the point of a system as extensive in variety, as wasteful in numbers, as the system of nature itself. Implicitly we locate any object by means of model objects that focus our vision in the world of things. These central or typical objects testify to our sense of work and use, our hierarchy of worth in objects and our elemental feelings about the relation of the world of things to the human world. Since the beginning of mass production we have applied two false sets of expectations, two false model objects, to the modern work of art in order to create the largest possible mental distance between the work of art and the world of everyday objects. We bring two models in our hands when we approach the work of art. The first is the museum object which we use to define the destination of works of art. The second is the craft object which we use to define the origin of the work of art. Trapped between a false model of its destination and an equally false model of its origin, the work of art hovers free of our attempted descriptions. Neither the museum object nor the craft object has been questioned as a guide to the logic of the work of art in the modern period. Nor have the framing institutions of the museum and its partner, the modern factory, been explored to locate the definitions each imposes on the nature of things. That we have experienced changes of a fundamental kind in our relation to objects because of mass production and the economy of commodity exchange is, I think, generally accepted. Hannah Arendt summarized the widely held, but I believe fundamentally wrong, claims against mass production when she wrote in The Human Condition that modern society breaks down the difference between labor and work, between objects of consumption and objects of use. The modern solution