Whoever is awarded this year's Turner prize on 1st December, we can be sure of one thing: a flurry of articles will appear in the press denying or insisting (mainly denying) that these strange exhibits are proper recipients of the prestigious title "art."
There is some justice in this. After all, the works short-listed for the prize belong to a tradition which places great emphasis on the concept of art. The founding moment of this tradition was the exhibition in 1917 of a urinal, signed R. Mutt and entitled "Fountain," by Marcel Duchamp. This "readymade" is not calculated to appeal by virtue of its visual aspect. We are not meant to stand before it, contemplating its composition, colour or structure. This is not to suggest that the urinal is ugly; although a touch heavy in composition, its gleaming surfaces and smooth curves are charming enough. And there is, in fact, a well-established tradition which seeks to draw attention to and celebrate the visual charms of everyday objects. But if this was what Duchamp was doing, he would never have made it into the annals of art history. In his ability to draw out such charms, Duchamp demonstrated nothing of the sensitivity and skill of contemporaries in that genre, such as Henri Fantin-Latour, let alone that of one of its masters, Vermeer. In "The Milkmaid," Vermeer reveals the beauty of simple objects by placing them in a sympathetic light, by using accents of white to highlight texture. Duchamp, by comparison, is a non-starter when it comes to revealing the qualities of objects.
Duchamp's claim to have done something of interest lies in the fact that he was concerned with ideas about art. His famous bottle rack comes, as it were, wrapped in a cocoon of ideas; it is the ideas, rather than the particular physical object, which carry the weight. Duchamp tried to sabotage people's expectations about art by deliberately sending out contradictory signals. This object is in an art exhibition, so it must be art; but it wasn't made by the artist, so it flouts a core assumption about works of art: that they are the products of skill. His point was to claim that this object was "art"-and this claim was independent of the aesthetic merits of the object. His claim was not "look how nice bottle racks are" but "look, I can make art from anything."
It is in this tradition that many of the most controversial objects of the 20th century belong: Andy Warhol's "Brillo Boxes," Carl Andre's pile of bricks at the Tate, Damien Hirst's "Mother and Child Divided." Regarded as real things, the porcelain, the boxes, the bricks, the pickles are banal items. It is only when they are presented as "art" that they gain attention. Without that magical word they are nothing. The tag "art" brings them into the company of Vermeer, Poussin and Picasso and lets them bathe in the glamour which has, over the centuries, accumulated around that word. The modern inheritors of this tradition like to see such work as expanding the boundaries of art and challenging the received conception of what art is. This is part of their claim to importance. But at some point we must ask: What is it that you are challenging the boundaries of? You say that this urinal is "art," but what do you mean by "art"?
The concept of art which has made the running in connection with the avant-garde has been the "institutional theory of art." This theory claims that whatever is declared "art" by an artist (or some other "agent of the art world") is a work of art. To put it crudely, "it's art because I say so." This view takes inspiration from general ideas about "performative utterances." When a priest declares two people married, the effect of that declaration is that they really are married. They weren't before the words were spoken and they are the moment the declaration is completed. There is nothing odd about the fact that a declaration can change the status of an object (be it a person or a urinal).
We have little difficulty identifying who is entitled to declare a couple married; but who is entitled to declare an object to be a work of art? Views on this have ranged from the liberal-everyone; to the restrictive-only those who have connections with recognised institutions. In practice, people associated with large institutions have managed to make their declarations stick, while I am still having difficulty getting my bathroom scales-entitled "The Dialectic of Enlightenment"-accepted for the masterpiece they are. As a definition of "art" the institutional theory has this going for it: everything which manages to get the word "art" attached to it has indeed been recognised (either at the time of its making or subsequently) as "art" by agents of the art world.
There are two types of definitions of art: those which involve an evaluative component-something is a work of art because it displays certain qualities of beauty, skilfulness or whatever; and those which are evaluation-free. The institutional theory clearly belongs in the second camp. An object does not require to have any kind of merit for the declaration that it is "art" to be legitimate. In fact, the institutional theory has to be evaluation-free if it is to make sense. To continue the analogy: the words of the priest can marry a couple, but they cannot make that couple love one another, be kind, witty, or have any other human qualities.
The trouble with the institutional theory of art is that it is frequently in conflict with the commonsense use of the word. Usually, when people use the word "art" they are seeking to praise something. Although the qualities they wish to impute to the object may be vague, they usually have in mind a notion of excellence, of human worth. The assumption is that "art" is a "success noun"-that "art of no merit" is a contradiction. And the kind of merit which artworks possess is inspired by the works of the great tradition. To say that an object is a work of art is to say that it has the same kind of merit (albeit probably to a lesser degree) as the works of Poussin, Vermeer or Monet. It is this commonsense use which animates doubts about the Turner prize. The artists and curators seem to be asserting that the works exhibited are of the same kind as the works of Vermeer et al.
What has happened is that two very different sorts of activity have been called by the same name-to the detriment of both. The institutional theory has encouraged this; it picks out a minimal connection between the works of Vermeer and the works of the Turner prize. But it is a connection pitched at such a degree of abstraction that it cannot acknowledge the huge differences between the things it yokes together.
But consider this simple illustration of the difference. How would the works associated with the Turner prize make their way in the world without the protective banner of "art"? If we simply called the works of Vermeer painted pictures (with no reference to "art") their merits would not be diminished. The moving evocation of silence, the play of light, the subtlety of composition, the capacity to seize on a precious contemplative aspect, all of these things would remain. We do not need a concept of art to appreciate them. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"-when we are concerned with qualities, names are of secondary significance; nothing comes to have the qualities it does because of what it is called.
But if we just called Duchamp's bottle rack a bottle rack, or considered Warhol's boxes as boxes, their standing would be radically diminished. The standing of these objects is dependent upon the application to them of the word "art." Yet the term "art" itself has been emptied of positive evaluative significance; and in calling these things "art" we are simply saying that they have the string of letters "a-r-t" appended to them by certain people. These objects are in the precarious position of balancing their cultural position on the label which is given them; take away their label and their own qualities would not sustain them.
There is a tendency in modern life to overestimate the importance of labels. Arthur Koestler tells the story of a woman who is given a Picasso drawing. Underestimating the generosity of her admirer, she imagines that it is a print and hangs it in the staircase. When she learns of her mistake she promotes the picture to the drawing room and hangs it above the fireplace. Why has she done this? She says that she sees it differently. But in what way? Questioned by Koestler, she cannot identify any particular thing about the picture which looks different; any aesthetic quality which has come into view in the light of finding out that it is an original. The glow which attaches to the object now is not based upon an appreciation of it, but upon snobbery. (Normally, the difference in artistic value of copy and original is based on discernible differences between the two and upon the difference in aesthetic character which this produces.)
The Koestler story is indicative of the way in which calling something "art" can influence the way people see it. Learning that a certain work is art can seduce us into supposing that we are pleased, or intrigued by the object. Glamour is transferred from the world of the old masters to the world of the new, not because there is a real connection, but because the same word is used to designate their creations.
We reach for labels when we are uncertain how to judge for ourselves. The arts tend to provoke anxiety: the anxiety of ridiculing what the cognoscenti praise, or praising what they condemn. The vision of being like those unfortunates who laughed at the Impressionists and refused to buy the pictures of Van Gogh haunts the modern gallery-goer. It is also genuinely hard to know how to make up your mind when it comes to art; to have confidence in the authority of your own judgment. The thought that because it is art it must be good is kin to the unthinking veneration which is sometimes applied to the old masters. The remedy in both cases is the same; forget about the labels. Don't think-it is by X therefore I must like it, or, it is art therefore it must have some special and deep significance. We should attend to the object-not to what it is called.
reflection on what poets, painters and their kind do has a long history in western thought. But it is striking that the discussions of Plato and Aristotle are concerned not with art in general but with the dangers, or benefits, of specific works: the poetry of Homer and the plays of the Tragedians. Neither Plato nor Aristotle was concerned with classification; they did not ask "is Oedipus Rex, or the Iliad, a work of art?" Instead they attempted to evaluate plays and poems. It was only in the 18th century-with Bateaux's System of Arts Reduced to a Single Principle-that an attempt was made to characterise the common nature and value of the arts. We may call this the "heroic" phase of the search for a definition, the period when these two problems were pursued in tandem: to search for the common nature of the arts was to search for what makes works of art valuable.
The heroic stage lasted until the middle of this century. One of the best versions, put forward in the 1930s by the Oxford philosopher RG Collingwood, focused on the expression of emotion and considered art as a vehicle for the exploration of our inner life. But many things which are called art do not qualify on this criterion. Duchamp's bottle rack is called a work of art, but it does not aspire to, or achieve, this kind of value. Collingwood insisted that other uses were simply wrong; but for better or worse, his theories did not change general use.
Although Collingwood's approach has fallen out of fashion, it exhibits an important characteristic: it draws our attention to the object. It demands that we examine the object itself and try to grasp what it expresses and how that expression is achieved. Traditional attempts to define "art" similarly attempted to identify a particular field of value and thus guide the spectator's appreciation. So the early thesis that art is imitation was linked to theories about why it is good to imitate and what makes one imitation superior to another. This approach did not assert that what makes an object valuable is that it is a work of art; on the contrary, it reserved the word "art" for the achievement of that species of value. It is the species of value-the quality of the imitation-which counts, call it what you will. This theory was held to fail as a definition of "art" because there are many things called art by popular consent which are not imitations.
Or take the example of John Ruskin. Following in the tradition of Plato's definition of beauty, he described "art" as that which brings together the head, the heart and the hand. When you call something a work of art you are praising it in a particular way: you are alluding to the power some objects have to integrate and harmonise aspects of human life-objects which display the artistry and sure touch of the maker, which are also intellectually and emotionally satisfying. This, again, will not suffice as a definition of all that is called "art." But it remains a viable description of a sophisticated virtue which some things called art have, and it directs our attention to that virtue.
While the definition of, say, "fish" or "atom" is a question strictly for specialists, the definition of "art" has become a philosophical question. But it is not as if philosophers have some special knowledge of art; rather, philosophy in this case acts as a holding ground when we don't really know who to look to for an answer.
confusion about how to define art has led to a false sense of continuity between two radically different kinds of enterprise-Vermeer and Duchamp-and has sponsored an overestimation of the human significance of what (some) contemporary artists are up to. When we think about what the Turner prize people are up to, it turns out to be all about shocking convention, challenging received beliefs, or "about" politicised conceptions of identity and sexuality.
The word "about" is the most abused term in the critical vocabulary. It is common, for example, to regard Hirst's "Away From the Flock" not simply as a sheep, but as a statement "about" individuality and isolation, "about" the human condition and, as Hirst likes to say, "about the way we live now." Technically, of course, it is easy to make a work which is "about" any topic under the sun. By placing my tea cup upside down on the saucer I make a work which is "about" inversion and the "container/contained" relationship; it is about the link between normality and the unexpected, and the place of art in everyday life. The commonsense implication of "about," however, is that one has something pertinent to say on the topic referred to. In this sense, my upside-down cup isn't really about any of those grand topics-it has nothing to say "about" normality and the unexpected.
Moreover, it is unlikely that any work of non-literary art will make a serious contribution to an intellectual debate; such works lack the resources to sustain argument, to make qualifications, to marshal evidence, to sum-up opposing views and all the other techniques which are central to a serious discussion. No work of art, no old master or modern installation, has ever had much serious contribution to an intellectual debate.
It is, in the end, quite unclear what Hirst's sheep is supposed to be saying about isolation or individuality or modern life. By the standards of discussion set by, say, Durkheim or Winnicott, Hirst seems almost absurdly lacking in ideas, insight, evidence. Hirst refers to grand themes, but the works themselves are not treatises and do not have a proper contribution to make to these complex topics.
But then, if we said of Turner prize-type works that they simply referred to (but do not elaborate on) individuality or the fragmented body-or whatever-then the apparent glamour of the works would be diminished. As with the power of the word "art," the word "about" functions to import glamour from another area of intellectual debate.
The malign effect of calling two very different things by a common name works in both directions. Works of the past are often seen through the distorting preoccupations of the present. Thus, any day of the week, you can overhear a National Gallery guide telling a gaggle of school children of the "subversive" agenda of (for example) Gainsborough, or the way in which his early landscape "Mr and Mrs Andrews"-a modest little picture showing the young couple by a tree, with a portion of their estate visible to the right-is "about" the ideology of ownership and sexual identity. What we are hearing is the transfer of the claims of certain modern art objects into the past, facilitated by the fact that both the landscape and the modern piece are called "art."
According to the Turner prize agenda, Gainsborough's significance must lie in what his work is "about." It seems impossible from this perspective that the value of his work might reside in its sensitivity to the look of things, to its evocation of landscape in its everyday, working character. Applying a theory of "art" retrospectively can make us insensitive to the qualities of the works we approach. When we go from the past to the present there is an unwarranted transfer of glamour; when we go from the present to the past, we run the risk of losing sight of the more modest (but perhaps more real) ambition of painters.
In its modern use, free from evaluation and divorced from a vision of how to engage with objects, the word "art" has become a burden-the source of confusion rather than illumination. It would be better to abandon the word altogether and be more explicit about the way we categorise objects. Without the word "art" people who make things would have to rely a little more on the explicit qualities of the things they produce and less upon the unearned mystique which is carried by a name; and spectators would be liberated to engage, not with glamour or reputations, but with the real merits of the object before them.
