The Limits of Art

Front matter

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN PHILOSOPHY

Jiri Benovsky The Limits of Art On Borderline Cases of Artworks g and their Aesthetic Properties

[OPEN ACCESS 5) springer

Contents

2 Extending the Limits I: Non-visual and Non-auditory AQUIWOPRG x6 4.9.04 dh04 Aw 24 O0Re HEE SS RG SOS HEEEE ES ODY RRR ES

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Chapter 1 A) Introduction: Different Types of Limits get

$1. This book is about exploring interesting borderline cases of art. P’ 11 discuss the cases of gustatory and olfactory artworks (focusing on food), proprioceptive artworks (dance, martial arts, and rock climbing qua proprioceptive experiences), intellectual artworks (philosophical and scientific theories), as well as the vague limits between painting and photography. Perhaps you’ll find it obvious that some or all of these cases are genuine cases of art, and that the claims I will be making are trivial. In that case, Pll be happy to agree and I hope that this book will still be of interest as a fruitful discussion of these cases of artworks and their limits. Perhaps you’ ll find it obvious that some or all of these cases are not genuine cases of art—indeed, all of them, individually, have been denied the status of artworks at some point. In that case, I'll be happy to disagree and Pl try to offer reasons to change your mind. My aim in this short book is thus twofold. First, I hope that the discussion of this series of particular claims about these particular cases will be of interest for its own, first-level, sake; and second, from this discussion, a more general picture about the nature of art and about what counts as an artwork will arise. Indeed, the different cases will allow us to consider different types of limits. Some limits will concern our senses (our different perceptual modalities), some will concern vagueness and fuzzy boundaries between different types of works of art, some will concern the amount of human intention and intervention in the process of creation of an artwork, and some will concern the border between art and science. In these various ways, by understanding better such borderline cases, we will—or so I hope—get a better grip on an understanding of the nature of art.

§2. “What is art?” is a very general and cruelly difficult question. Perhaps, it is so cruelly difficult precisely because it is so very general. Indeed, any precise answer, that is, any definition of art, or artwork, which would precisely define what counts as art and what does not, is always in principle at great risk of leaving some possibilities out and of being open to possible counter-examples. The notion of art, or artwork, is a vague one but this is not only a problem of vagueness. The difficulty of providing a definition also stems from the fact that art evolves with time, that it is culture-relative, and that we need to adapt our understanding of what art is to this

© The Author(s) 2021 1 J. Benovsky, The Limits of Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54795-0_1

2 1 Introduction: Different Types of Limits ever-evolving process. A strict definition of what counts as art and what does not is bound to fail at some point. But not having a definition of something does not mean that this something is inexplicable (contra Adajian (2018, §1)). Indeed, if we keep in mind the ever-evolving nature of art, we can simply realize that there is no need for a definition (why would it be necessary to have one?) and that we simply should continuously update our understanding of what art is, and allow ourselves to be surprised from time to time when new, challenging forms of art emerge. Any definition that would try, for instance, to identify what is common to all artworks would simply be inadequate, perhaps precisely in the sense—highly relevant to the overall purposes of this book—that it would beg the question against non-standard types of artworks and classify them as not being art. In order to resist such a possibly question-begging stance, we can simply resist the need for a definition.'! Walton (2007, p. 148) even suggested that the question does not even make much sense: “It is not at all clear that these words—‘What is art?’ —express anything like a single question, to which competing answers are given [...] The sheer variety of proposed definitions should give us pause. One cannot help wondering whether there is any sense in which they are attempts to [...] address the same issue”. This does not mean, however, that we should somehow become sceptical about the very notion of art and that we should abandon the very idea of trying to understand what an artwork is. On the contrary, the lack of a precise and fixed definition is all the more reason to try to improve our understanding of the nature of art, while embracing its impermanence and vagueness.

§3. To this end, let me list some points I propose to take on board as working criteria for a discussion about what counts as an artwork and what does not. Keeping in mind what I said above, these do not constitute a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Rather, they are merely indicators or pointers that help us clarify the discussion about the nature of art. I take it that this list is rather standard (although it is, of course, controversial),” and I am simply going to use these points as more or less optional guidelines, by examining whether they apply to the various cases I am going to discuss below and whether they are useful or not. As a general rule, I'll work with the idea that if something does not satisfy all of these points, this is not automatically a reason to think that it is not an artwork.

(1) Artworks possess aesthetic properties

(2) Artworks are subject to aesthetic judgements

(3) Artworks have the capacity to trigger aesthetic experiences (4) Artworks have the capacity to trigger emotions

(5) Artworks have the capacity to convey meanings and ideas

(6) Artworks are challenging (both for the artist and the observer) (7) Artworks require skill to be produced

! Adajian (2018) offers an extensive discussion of definitions of art. Discussion concerning the project of defining art can be found, inter alia, in Kennick (1958), Stecker (1996, 2005), Weitz (1950), Ziff (1953).

2Schrenk (2014) uses a similar list. Compare to Gaut’s (2000, 2005) discussion of art as a cluster concept.

1 Introduction: Different Types of Limits 3

(8) Artworks qua objects can have relevant non-aesthetic features and a non-aesthetic function.

(1), (2), (3), and (4) lie at the heart of what I want to take on board as a rough idea of what art is. (Perhaps, (3) and (4) are about the same thing.) In the following chapters, I am going to put these criteria to work, and see what can be learned by applying them to quite non-standard cases.

§4. In addition to these criteria, there are some notions that emerge as being characterizations of works of art that we often appeal to when we talk about art. Let me quickly mention them, since they will also prove to be useful in the discussion of the non-standard cases I am going to focus on in the chapters to come. Harmony (and related notions such as symmetry) is perhaps the most often cited. In Western culture at least, the idea of something that is a coherently integrated whole, where proportion, symmetry, and harmony play an important role, is often central to the way we evaluate it as being a (good) piece of art. While Aristotle insisted especially on symmetry, Plato insisted on unity, and the way we evaluate artworks today has inherited and developed both of these criteria, at least when it comes to classical and standard works of art. The notion of balance is also often put forward, relatedly to harmony, unity, symmetry, and similar notions. These notions are of course implemented in different ways in different kinds of artworks such as music, sculpture, painting, or architecture, but they seem to provide a relatively common ground to such different types of cases.

The notions of complexity and simplicity also often play an important role. While being contradictory, they can both be seen as positive features of an artwork and characterize its aesthetic value. A complex work can be intriguing, intricate, and sophisticated; it can be baroquely appealing, and its overall balance will often be emphasized. Simplicity will often be taken to be elegant in a straightforward way— indeed, simplicity and elegance just seem to go together.

Intensity is another feature of works of art that often plays a crucial role in their appreciation and evaluation. It can manifest itself in different forms, but perhaps what it relates to on a general level is the traditional idea insisted upon by Burke that beauty causes passion in the observer. This lies at the heart of criteria (3) and (4) above, offering a response-dependent understanding of what makes something to be art. As Hume (1740, 299) puts it, beauty “[...] is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul. Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence.” He adds that “beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty” (Hume 1757, 136). This kind of subjectivism is useful to be taken on board; it will, however, need to be weakened and refined (as Hume himself did) in order to account for the fact that more or less objective judgements of the aesthetic value of an artwork can be made—this will be apparent in my discussion of the different types of cases, and I’ll come back to this general issue in due course.

4 1 Introduction: Different Types of Limits

In addition to the criteria (1)—-(8), let us then keep in mind: harmony, symmetry, unity, balance, complexity, simplicity, intensity, passion, pleasure; and let us start exploring some non-standard cases of art.

Adajian T (2018) The definition of art. Stanford Encycl Philos. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ art-definition/

Gaut B (2000) ‘Art’ as a Cluster Concept. In: Carroll N (ed) Theories of art today. University of Wisconsin Press, pp 25-44

Gaut B (2005) The cluster account of art defended. Brit J Aesthetics 45(3):273-288

Hume D (1740) A treatise of human nature. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988

Hume D (1757) Of the standard of taste, essays moral and political. George Routledge and Sons, London, 1894

Kennick WE (1958) Does traditional aesthetics rest on a mistake? Mind 67(267):3 17-334

Schrenk M (2014) Is proprioceptive art possible? In: Priest G, Young D (eds) Philosophy and the martial arts. Routledge, New York, pp 101-116

Stecker R (1996) Artworks: meaning, definition, value. Pennsylvania State University Press

Stecker R (2005) Aesthetics and the philosophy of art: an introduction. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Walton K (2007) Aesthetics—What?, Why?, and Wherefore? J Aesthetics Art Criticism 65(2):147— 162

Weitz M (1950) Philosophy of the Arts. Harvard University Press, Cambridge

Ziff P (1953) The task of defining a work of art. Philos Rev 62(1):58-78

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Chapter 2 A) Extending the Limits I: Non-visual ciecie; and Non-auditory Artworks

Abstract We talk about culinary arts, as we also talk about martial arts. Does this mean that a meal or a kata are to be understood as being artworks? In this chapter, I take these and other cases seriously and I claim that they are indeed genuine cases of art, in the same way as paintings, photographs, sculptures, or musical works. My centre of interest concerns non-visual and non-auditory forms of art. Traditionally, visual and auditory arts dominate the debate in aesthetics and philosophy of art, as they dominate the art world in general—our senses of sight and hearing thus dominate our very understanding of what an artwork is. As a consequence, artworks are mostly understood as being public entities, widely shareable in the sense of being available to different spectators/auditors. In this chapter, I explore other senses, which are often neglected; I focus on gastronomic meals as cases of gustatory and olfactory artworks, and on dance, karate, and climbing as cases of proprioceptive artworks. The overall aim of this chapter is thus to extend the limits of what counts as art and what does not. I offer a very inclusive view, and through the discussion of various types of examples, I offer reasons to think that such a view is indeed adequate.

2.1 Introduction

§1. To start the discussion, let me indulge in a short biographical narrative and recount an experience I recently had in the restaurant of the famous French chef Marc Veyrat (in his restaurant La Maison des Bois in the mountains near Annecy). One of the meals on the menu consists in a small, greenish, olive-shaped and -sized, rather strangely looking ‘thing’ with an irregular surface, which does not look very palatable at all. It is prepared by the chef himself in the middle of the restaurant, for all guests at the same time, and it is ‘cooked’ in liquid nitrogen, piece by piece. When the chef gives it to your hand, it’s very cold, it even burns a little, and it emits strange fumes. Once each guest has been given their own piece, the chef then asks everybody to close their eyes and to put the ‘thing’ in their mouths. Let me try to convey the gustatory and olfactory experience which follows: various textures succeed each other, the ‘thing’ being first solid, and then very suddenly liquid and gas at the same time, where both the liquid and the gas ingredients continue to evolve

© The Author(s) 2021 5 J. Benovsky, The Limits of Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54795-0_2 and transform, providing various stages of the overall experience. Each stage brings with itself a different taste and a different scent, ranging from wood, lichen, fir tree, pine cone, forest herbs,... to simply fresh air. The succession of the different stages provides an overall experience of smelling and tasting the forest itself—a gustatory and olfactory walk in a forest. And indeed, that’s what the chef planned to provide as an experience for the guests, reinforcing the experience by telling a story aloud and by asking his guests to imagine, with their eyes always closed, that they are walking through the forest which is just behind the restaurant and where all the ingredients for this ‘meal’ have been collected. The succession of different tastes and odours is so skilfully done and planned that the illusion is very strong indeed and the overall experience simply staggering.

§2. We often talk about “culinary arts”, and I am going to defend the view that this is a case where we can take the “arts” label seriously. I am also going to defend the broader view that many meals and drinks, including but not being exhausted by examples of gastronomic cuisine, give rise to olfactory and gustatory artworks. Perhaps this claim is not actually very controversial and perhaps some might even find it to be rather trivial. But traditionally, visual arts like painting or sculpture, as well as auditory (musical) arts, dominate the debate in aesthetics and philosophy of art, and they of course dominate the art world in general, occupying galleries and museums around the world. In this way, our senses of sight and hearing often dominate our very understanding of what an artwork is. This is one of the reasons why artworks are mostly understood as being public entities—shareable in the sense of being available to different spectators/auditors. (There are of course also other types of public artworks, like novels.) In this chapter, I am going to explore other senses, which are often neglected. I'll discuss the case of gustatory and olfactory artworks and the case of proprioceptive artworks (Ill focus on dance, karate, and rock climbing). The overall aim of this chapter is to push the limits of what counts as art and what does not. I'll offer an inclusive view, and through the discussion of various types of examples in this chapter Ill offer reasons to think that such a view is indeed adequate. (Chap. 3 will then push the limits even further.) Many human activities will thus, in my view, give rise to artworks (or simply be artworks)— perhaps much more often than what is usually thought and accepted. To my mind, this is a good thing. I'll defend this general view and I am going to say why such a view does not lead to a situation where just ‘anything counts’ and where the notion of an artwork would become empty of any genuine meaning by being too broad and too inclusive. In this chapter, I'll focus on gustatory and olfactory artworks as well as on proprioceptive artworks; extending the limits concerning our sensory perceptual modalities. In the next chapter, I'll then focus on intellectual artworks; extending the limits to the domain of scientific and philosophical theories.

2.2 Gustatory and Olfactory Artworks 7

2.2 Gustatory and Olfactory Artworks

$1. To start the discussion about gustatory and olfactory art, two caveats are needed.

First, it is not clear that the two senses, namely taste and smell, are really two. Indeed, it is perhaps more adequate to say that our perceptual system typically integrates information from both of these sensory modalities into a common multi-modal whole. Taste and smell often mingle together to produce an overall experience with these two aspects, which can be distinguished to some extent, but where the resulting whole is as important as their individual contributions.' I thus suggest to talk here, for the sake of brevity, about gustatory experiences and about taste, but when I do so, I intend to fully include olfaction in the story. The sense of touch should also be included in this package, at least partly, since it allows us to feel the textures and the hardness or softness of the objects that we taste, which is highly relevant when it comes to the appreciation of their taste—typically, the way a taste is released and distributed (slowly, suddenly,...) in the mouth depends on the texture (soft, melting, hard, crunchy, ...) of what one is tasting, the texture being also related to the (continuously changing) temperature of the gustandum. Thus, many inter-related factors (and at least three senses) are involved in what I will often refer to, for the sake of brevity, as taste or as a gustatory experience.

Second, when it comes to meals, especially gastronomic meals, it is of course true that they are not only objects of gustatory appreciation, but of visual appreciation as well. Indeed, in a way that is perhaps not very controversial, gastronomic meals qua visually appreciated objects on a table can be understood as being artworks, in the same sense other visually accessible objects can be such (sculpture is perhaps the closest standard case). This is especially important since we typically first see what we eat before we eat it, which creates an amount of expectation from our part, and before we even taste anything we quite naturally imagine what it is going to taste like. This can have a strong influence on our gustatory appreciation, as many experiences involving green-coloured meat, blue-coloured strawberries, etc. have shown. Remember what the chef Marc Veyrat does when he presents his peculiar ‘meal’ to his guests: he asks everybody to close their eyes, and for a very good reason since this piece of food is visually not appealing at all, and since the whole point of the culinary experience is the gustatory aspect of it (again, including olfaction and touch as well). The point is to focus on the gustatory experience (to this end, it would perhaps be even better not to show the ‘thing’ to his guests at all.) This is of course familiar from blindfolded wine-tasting, and it is also the whole point of some popular restaurants where guests find themselves in a fully dark room and where they are thus deprived of their sense of sight. A trained evaluator of food or wine can often manage to free herself from any unwanted influences of the visual aspects of the object of her evaluation (while they are, often, actually wanted and judged to be relevant for the overall appreciation of a meal or a wine), and less-trained evaluators can simply try to do so, in order to isolate the gustatory aspect of their experience.

There are also other kinds of influences, wanted or not, that can have an impact on a gustatory experience. To mention again the case of Marc Veyrat, he not only asks his guests to close their eyes, but he also tells aloud, in the restaurant, a story about a walk in the nearby forest, thus reinforcing the overall experience of “tasting the forest”. Indeed, what he does is that he uses his uncanny meal as an imagination-triggering tool where the object he submits for gustatory appreciation to his guests prescribes imagining a specific narrative, which is then reinforced by the narrative that he explicitly voices aloud (I’ll come back to this in section V below, where PI make a comparison with Walton’s similar view about depiction).

§2. With all this in mind, can we say that there are gustatory artworks? Roger Scruton (who focuses on wine?) denies that there are because “[...] smells cannot be organized as sounds are organized: put them together and they mingle, losing their character [...] they remain free-floating and unrelated, unable to generate expectation, tension, harmony, suspension or release” (Scruton 2009, p. 122). But, we have just seen a striking counter-example to this, namely Marc Veyrat’s peculiar meal. In this case, tastes (and smells and textures) are quite precisely orchestrated and provide an organized succession of individual gustatory experiences which constitute a coherent whole, which is not only surprising but also balanced, harmonious, unified, complex, and which provides intense gustatory pleasure to the appreciator. This is a particularly elaborated case. But even if in a perhaps less strong way, this applies perfectly well to wine as well, and—perhaps even quite trivially—this is also true of many meals, especially (but not only) gastronomic meals. The idea of balance and harmony on the one hand, and surprise on the other hand, and the idea that a meal should be a complex but unified whole which provides intensity and pleasure lies probably at the core of concern of any chef who takes her cooking at heart. We are here in a situation where the various typical features of artworks I mentioned in Chap. 1 ($3-4) are quite clearly found. Such meals (or drinks), gua objects of taste, thus exhibit aesthetic properties based on these various features, and they can be evaluated, appreciated and judged to be of aesthetic value by any trained (or even less trained) evaluator. As it is the case with Marc Veyrat’s guests, and as it is the case in many other situations of food tasting, wine tasting, and similar, the gustatorily accessible whole made of smells, textures, and tastes thus provides pleasure (or displeasure) which can be quite intense and trigger an emotional response, thus triggering a typical state in which we find ourselves when we appreciate the beauty of something. Thus, contra Scruton, it appears that the criteria (1)-(4) from Chap. 1 (§3) are in many cases of gustatory experiences fully satisfied and that such gustatory objects of appreciation can in this sense very well be understood as objects of aesthetic appreciation, where the successful (sufficiently developed) cases constitute cases of being artworks.

>For a critical discussion and a fully-developed view about wine, see Todd (2010).

3“[...] many meals are intended by their cooks to be considered largely in this way—to be savoured, appraised, thought about, discussed—any many eaters consider them in this way. Such meals also serve the functions of relieving hunger and providing nourishment, but they are of a kind which shows that this is not the main point of them.” (Telfer 2008, p. 16).

2.2 Gustatory and Olfactory Artworks 9

Criterion (5) (namely, the idea that artworks have the capacity to convey meanings and ideas) is perhaps less present in the case of gustatory artworks than, say, in the case of paintings, but it is present to some extent. As already mentioned, the whole point of the gustatory experience provided by Marc Veyrat is a kind of a gustatory walk in the forest, which conveys something like the concept of a Shinrin-yoku (FRAKYS—a ‘forest bath’), which is all about the idea of connecting us to nature, to the forest, and which allows us to reflect on our often too urban lifestyles. Most meals do not have such a precise meaning, and perhaps many meals do not provide any clear meaning at all. This does not constitute an objection to the idea that there are gustatory artworks. First, because criterion (5) is not a necessary condition for being an artwork, it is simply something that many artworks provide. Second, because even if the idea conveyed by a gustatory artwork is merely a less sophisticated idea of harmony, balance, and pleasure, it is enough for us to aesthetically appreciate it. And third, the gustatory experience can trigger our imagination in such a way that as a reaction to it we can provide a further meaning—for instance, when tasting an exotic meal, the idea of where the ingredients come from, both culturally and geographically speaking, can arise.

Criterion (6) is about the idea that artworks are/should be challenging. This can be understood in many ways, and it is of course usually meant to apply to standard arts like music or painting. But one simple way in which it can be applied to the case of gustatory artworks is that discovering new tastes or new combinations of tastes can be challenging both in an immediate and intrinsic way, simply as a new gustatory sensation (where its various features such as balance, harmony, complexity, etc. play an important role), and also as a basis for cultural comparison and debate (which relates (6) to (5))—a sharp, strong and stinky Bleu d’ Auvergne cheese is quite typical of one cultural background; earthy and musky Fenugreek spices are typical of another; umami (3 * 4—‘pleasant savoury taste’) is typical of yet another, and so on. It is common nowadays, at least in developed countries around the world, to have easy access to any type of food and tastes, so we are not any more so easily surprised and challenged, but the first time we taste something new, or when we taste a new combination of tastes, we do (at least sometimes) have a challenging gustatory experience. When it comes to very sophisticated gastronomic meals, wines, or whiskeys, the whole point is sometimes (not always) to provide a novel, surprising and challenging experience to the appreciator.

Concerning (7) and (8), quite trivially, it is the case that food, again especially when it comes to elaborated meals, as well as wine or whiskey, requires tremendous skill to be produced (this is (7)), and that it is of course highly relevant also as a non-aesthetic object and has a non-aesthetic function—we do need to eat to stay alive, after all (this is (8)). Focusing on the gustatory (and olfactory) aspect of food, since this is the issue here, tastes and smells are of paramount importance when it comes to spot unhealthy or rotten food, for instance.

§3. Quite clearly, what precedes indicates that we may consider gustatory artworks as being genuine artworks indeed. There is of course the question about what kind of food provides a gustatory experience which counts as an artwork and which does not. The taste of a quickly, unskilfully, and badly made burger would hardly be such that it would give rise to a gustatory artwork. But this does not provide an objection to the claim that at least some gustatory experiences are artworks. The various features we have seen above, namely harmony, unity, balance, complexity, simplicity, intensity, passion, or pleasure, will be found in some gustatory experiences and not in others. The same is true of any other type of art—my 6-years-old son’s drawings and Dali’s paintings do not exhibit the same amount of potential for being artworks either (which does not imply that a child’s drawing cannot be an artwork). In section IV below, Pll come back to this general issue when Pll examine the claim that ‘not anything counts’ (that not everything turns out automatically to count as art in my rather inclusive view), and also that not everybody’s taste provides a good ground for evaluation.

Before we get there, let us turn our attention, in the next section, to another type of non-visual and non-auditory artworks.

§1. Proprioception is an inner sense—the inner perception which provides us with information about the position, the posture, and movements of our body. While writing this book on my computer in my office, I am sitting on a chair and I know, via proprioception, where my legs are and in what position they are, without having to look at them. I don’t always (actually, almost never, in this situation) think about the position or movements of my legs while I am writing this book, but the information is readily and immediately available.