Theory

• Theodore Gracyk: Danto, Popular Music, and Indiscernible Counterparts
• Robert Kraut: Aesthetic Theory and Artistic Practice: Danto's Transfiguration of the Artworld
• Brandon Cooke: Why Did Plato Hate Art?
• Stephen Davies: Life is a Passacaglia

Excerpts from each paper below the fold...

• Theodore Gracyk: Danto, Popular Music, and Indiscernible Counterparts
• Robert Kraut: Aesthetic Theory and Artistic Practice: Danto's Transfiguration of the Artworld
• Brandon Cooke: Why Did Plato Hate Art?
• Stephen Davies: Life is a Passacaglia

Excerpts from each paper below the fold...

Theodore Gracyk: Danto, Popular Music, and Indiscernible Counterparts (click to download full pdf version)

Arthur Danto has summarized The Transfiguration of the Commonplace as addressing one question. “Given two things which resemble one another to any chosen degree, but one of which is a work of art and the other an ordinary object, what accounts for this difference in status?” (Danto 2000, 131) Famously, Danto answers this question by proposing that “to see something as art at all demands nothing less than this, an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art” (Danto 1981, 135).

I endorse the idea that works can only be individuated by reference to their historical contexts. But I am not persuaded that Danto offers us any reason to conclude that distinct but indiscernible works are only individuated by their place in art history. (History and theory? Yes. Art history and theory? Not always.) But if that is so, then an important element of Danto’s definition of art must be removed from that definition. Noël Carroll has pointed out that Danto might not really mean art theory. Danto might only require “that artworks must be subtended by some artworld concepts” (Carroll 1990, 115). My main point is related but different. Danto establishes something about historically sensitive interpretation, but it does not follow that either art theory or artworld concepts are necessary.

In this essay, I apply something like Danto’s own method to Danto’s argument. Transfiguration says very little about music. What happens if we construct a series of indiscernibles by locating musical counterparts for Danto’s visual and literary counterparts? We can then compare parallel series. One series will involve artworks (Danto’s various sets of indiscernibles) and the other series will involve music. But we can select musical examples that do not presuppose the importance of distinguishing between artworks and non-artworks. As thought experiments, Danto’s examples and my examples will otherwise resemble each other “to any chosen degree.” Comparing these parallel sets of examples, what accounts for their difference in status such that Danto’s involve works of art while mine involve music but not always art? The crux of the problem is that a musical concept is not necessarily an artworld concept. For many musical examples, a “transfiguring” interpretation can be supplied without reference to the concept of art. If Danto’s method elucidates the essence of art while my sonic counterparts do not, then perhaps most of Danto’s examples do not, either. What emerges is the possibility that, aside from a few very special cases such as Warhol’s Brillo boxes, Danto’s method of indiscernible counterparts does not invite reference to art theory and art history. Perhaps art theory is not the theory that must be brought to bear whenever we properly attend to the transfiguration that occurs in works of art.

Robert Kraut: Aesthetic Theory and Artistic Practice: Danto's Transfiguration of the Artworld (click to download full pdf version)

Philosophy of mathematics seeks to articulate and understand aspects of mathematics and/or mathematical practice; philosophy of physics aims to make explicit one or another aspect of physics and/or physical theorizing; semantic theory seeks to provide systematic codifications and explanations of natural language. In each such case, the theorist is engaged not in constituting the practice under study, but in explicitly identifying and reflecting upon the norms and concepts sustained within it. By analogy, one assumes that aesthetic theory is in the business of articulating aspects of artworld practice: aesthetic theory is about the artworld, not a constituent of the artworld. But Arthur Danto has taught us that there is no artworld without artistic theory: in some important sense, theory makes art possible. Thus the familiar contrasts between a practice and philosophical reflection upon it, or between object language and semantic metalanguage, might have no clear echo in the philosophy of art: for if theory makes art possible, then aesthetic theory cannot be regarded as codification and/or explanation of some already existent practice. It is thus unclear what aesthetic theory is supposed to do, what questions it should be addressing, and what conditions govern acceptable answers.

My goal is to motivate and explore a question inspired by Danto’s work in aesthetic theory: What is the relation between those artistic theories required for the very existence of art, and those aesthetic theories that result from critical systematic reflection upon artworld practices? If no useful distinction can be sustained here, then how are art criticism, evaluation, and creation to be contrasted with the philosophy of art, and how does aesthetic theory compare and contrast with other mainstream philosophical inquires?

Brandon Cooke: Why Did Plato Hate Music? (click to download full pdf version)

A good thought experiment is one of the best legacies a philosopher can leave. Arthur Danto’s Gallery of Indiscernibles seems to show decisively why the notion that a work of visual art is exhaustively described as a material object is false. One of the great accomplishments of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace was to make that claim look indefensible. But the bulk of the arguments in that book are aimed at developing the positive thesis that artworks are interpreted objects, and that artistic interpretations require art theories. This claim seems broadly correct. However, there seems to be a tension internal to Danto’s articulation of the details of the function of an art theory.

Danto says that art is dependent upon theory for its existence. Art theory is ‘so powerful a thing as to detach objects from the real world and make them part of a different world, an art world, a world of interpreted things.’ (135). But what is the status of art theoretical claims? Are they truth-apt assertions, or are they prescriptions? In what sense are they true, if they are? Danto doesn’t explicitly say, but his arguments suggest an answer that creates difficulties for the role he wants theories to play in constituting artworks. The constitutive role played by theory is one of the distinctive features of Danto’s project, and so I believe he is forced to hold that art theories at their core should be understood as truth-apt, but not true absolutely. This will compel other revisions in Danto’s arguments in TOC, but I think this way retains the most important elements of the theory.

Stephen Davies: Life is a Passacaglia (click to download full pdf version)

Arthur C. Danto taught that an artwork's identity and content depend on "an atmosphere of theory the eye cannot de[s]cry" (1964:580). By "theory", he did not mean the ideas developed by philosophers of art. His point was that an artwork can be properly recognized and appreciated only when seen in relation to the heritage of works, writings, practices, genres, and conventions that form the ground on which it stands out as subject. In brief, the work must be seen against the backdrop of what he dubbed (1964) the art world…

Now, a corollary of Danto's position appears to be that a person cannot recognize or appreciate artworks that had their genesis in an art world other than the one he is familiar with. He seems to acknowledge this in his discussion of another fictional example in which he compares a pair of imaginary African tribes, the Pot People and the Basket Folk, both of which are known for their pots and baskets (1992:95-101). To an outsider, the pots and baskets of the two tribes are perceptually indistinguishable. Nevertheless, the pots of the Pot People are artworks and their baskets are not, whereas the reverse applies to the Basket Folk. In line with his claim about the crucial "atmosphere of theory", Danto observes: "Now the [appropriately knowledgeable] anthropologists accept that the baskets of the Basket Folk—though not the baskets of the Pot People—and the pots of the Pot People—though not the pots of the Basket Folk—have a spiritual identity altogether missing in the indiscernible objects from the other tribe" (1992:98). He goes on: "Because of their striking resemblances, even a highly trained anthropologist is incapable of telling an artwork from the Basket Folk from an artifact from the Pot People" (1992:100). In other words, anthropologists can be justified in accepting that some item in their topic culture is an artwork on the reliable testimony of an expert informant, but their exclusion from the culture's art world prevents them from making the identification for themselves.

Elsewhere, however, Danto seems to contradict himself by allowing that we can sometimes identify another society's artworks as such without being inducted into their cultures and schooled in the histories of their art worlds. He allows that there is African, Japanese, Islamic, Egyptian, Polynesian, Tibetan, and Chinese art and that the respective art worlds of these societies followed an historical curve quite distinct from that of the West. Moreover, though he thinks that there was a profound change when art makers began thinking of themselves as artists, he also believes art was made before this time (1997a:3-4). For instance, he identifies and discusses the pre-Enlightenment art of many Western artists, as well as early styles, such as those of Byzantine art. In doing so, he does not rely solely on the opinions and identifications of cultural insiders. Indeed, he makes insightful comments about the contents and styles of these artworks and about the problems their artists were addressing, and he often seems to base these on his personal experience of the works in question. Yet according to his official view, these works should be experienced as art only by those who relate them to an "atmosphere of theory", an art world history, to which he, as a cultural outsider, is not privy (Davies 2001).

There are at least two ways of addressing this inconsistency. One is to deny that the artworks and non-artworks of the African tribes could share the same appearance. The other is to argue that Danto is mistaken in suggesting that anthropologists must be incapable of discriminating between the outwardly indiscernible artworks of the two cultures… The second approach challenges one of Danto's assumptions regarding anthropologists and the tribes they study; namely, that there can be no overlap between the "atmospheres of theory" generated by the historical unfolding of culturally independent art worlds, or no easy access for foreigners to the art worlds of other cultures. Danto is careful to choose his examples and he is likely to be correct in claiming that artworks that impersonate mere real things—artworks such as Fountain and Brillo Box—cannot be identified as art by foreigners to the art world in which they occur. But it would be too quick to generalize the point; that is, to assume that all art worlds are always similarly opaque to those who have not been raised in them. I have previously questioned this assumption by arguing that their shared humanity can provide enough in common between people of different cultures and eras to make possible the cross-cultural and trans-historical identification of foreign kinds of art (Davies 1997, 2000)…

With its countless cultural variations based on and laid over the endlessly repeated bass melody of evolution, life is a passacaglia…

Comments

[jerome langguth]

Thanks to Theodore Gracyk for an extremely interesting and provocative paper. I have a few comments related to the idea that a “transfiguring” of sonic properties is possible “outside of some art theory.” The example I find most intriguing is the juxtaposition of the Grateful Dead’s “Feedback” with an indiscernible non-musical counterpart. I agree that this case clearly shows that a transfiguration may occur without reference to the particular art-historical theory of which Cage and Stockhausen are a part (though the comparison does help rather than hinder understanding), but does it show that a transfiguration has occurred without any reference to a concept of art? I am not sure that it does. Let’s say the piece does arise from the Grateful Dead’s interest in “improvisation, electronic instrumentation, and democratic process.” How should we further account for that interest? It is, perhaps, primarily a “musical” interest rooted in the Dead’s activities as a performing and recording band. Further, as Gracyk points out, there is a case to be made for the view that not all music is art. So it is possible that the Dead’s interest in these musical possibilities is unconnected to a concept of art. But is it likely? Is “Feedback” really comparable to a children’s song or an unreflective performance of a folk tune? Or is there perhaps after all a concept of art presupposed here—even if it isn’t one that immediately references John Cage. I would place the Dead in an art-music tradition that includes Charles Mingus, Bill Monroe, Bob Dylan, and Bessie Smith (among many others). I think that the Dead’s interest in collective improvisation, electrified music, and so on, is probably best understood in this context. One might question whether the names mentioned constitute a tradition connected to an “art theory”, or whether all of their music is “art”, but they seem to me to have shared some concept of art. More specifically, they share a broad concept of art that is African-American in origin, that is historically rooted in and emerges out of the blues and jazz, and that emphasizes just those qualities mentioned as motivating the creation of "Feedback" . It is probably the case that the atmosphere of art-theory will be somewhat less thick and reified here than it is in the case of a work by Beethoven, but I think it is nonetheless true that the Grateful Dead were breathing some such air while creating the memorable feedback experiment included on Live Dead. In any case, I found this a most enjoyable paper.

[John Dilworth]

Robert Kraut raises some important issues about artistic theory and practice:

"Danto’s insistence that theory makes art possible forces upon us the question broached at the outset: What is the relation between those artistic theories required for the very existence of art, and those aesthetic theories that result from critical systematic reflection upon artworld practices? If no useful distinction can be sustained here, then how are art criticism, evaluation and creation to be contrasted with the philosophy of art, and how does aesthetic theory compare and contrast with other mainstream philosophical inquiries?"

With respect to other mainstream philosophical inquiries, interestingly enough a similar complex relationship seems to hold between the everyday activities of scientists and the philosophy of science, so that our own complex relations between the artworld and aesthetic theory are not unique. No scientist can do her job absent a Dantoesque 'atmosphere of theory', because any scientific experiment must be part of an attempt to advance or refute a scientific theory. But still, philosophers of science are not scientists, and philosophical attempts to defend scientific realism, or question the status of theoretical entities, are about first-order scientific theories rather than being part of them. Indeed, perhaps a similar point applies to any kind of philosophy of some subject--the philosophy must be about rather than part of the subject, while nevertheless also being philosophically responsive to whatever first-order theories are integral to the subject matter.

[Scott Walden]

I found Robert Kraut’s methodological discussion very helpful. It has fixed much more clearly in my mind the distinctions between making art, art criticism, and the philosophy of art. Also, I find the question he leaves us with fascinating. If Danto is right that the kind of theory that is essential to Brillo Box is also the kind of theory that is sometimes invoked in the philosophy of art, then we do have a puzzling instance in which there is a collapse between art and the philosophy of art. This, as I understand him, is what Danto means when he says we have reached the end of art.

To make art, I suppose, is to inform matter with thought. The proportions of these two ingredients can be varied, however. In a Serra sculpture the emphasis is on the matter, whereas in a LeWitt set of unrealized instructions the emphasis is on the thought. On the matter side of things, these days, anything goes. Art can be made out of paint or out of elephant dung. On the thought side of things, there is an extremely wide and open-ended range of different kinds of thought that can be used to inform the matter. Everything from various kinds of theological thought to contemporary thought about the role of images in society are included, and many more will surely be forthcoming. But this range of kinds of thought is not unbounded, since making a chair is informing matter with thought, but typically isn’t making art. So the range of thoughts is at once open-end and constrained (this does not seem paradoxical to me, although it is interesting).

Part of good art-making is coming up with new kinds of thought and informing matter with such thoughts in captivating ways. Part of good art criticism is understanding the thoughts that artists have informed their works with, and helping the art audience to understand those thoughts and how those thoughts have been used deftly by the artist to inform the matter of the work. Part of good philosophy of art is to reflect upon the metaphysics of these two activities, helping the philosophical audience to understand in broadest terms the ingredients of artworld practices and the relations between them (thus I agree with John Dilworth when he notes above that “the philosophy must be about rather than part of the subject, while nevertheless also being philosophically responsive to whatever first-order theories are integral to the subject matter.”)

Understood from this very broad perspective, the point that Danto and Kraut make is that, in certain contemporary instances of art, the metaphysical reflections of the philosopher become the very thoughts with which the artist has informed the matter of the artwork. What are we to make of this?

A deflationary answer is that there is no cause for alarm and that this is simply a special instance, one which from a future historical perspective will be seen as simply another way that thought has been used to inform matter. I am sympathetic with this deflationary answer. I, like Danto, find the contemporary period fascinating, and I feel very fortunate to have been born at the right place and the right time. But, for all that, I suspect art will move on, and future art historians will place the era of art-about-art on the art-historical shelf alongside art involving mimesis, art involving worship, art involving political agendas, art involving its own materiality, etc. The only difference is that, in the case of art-about-art, the meta-discourse has been incorporated into the object-level creation—interesting, yes, but not necessarily paradoxical or problematic for the future of art.

That having been said, I can’t resist closing with an art-critical question. Is art-about-art good art? Or should reflections upon the nature of art be left to the philosophers, and handled in essay or book format, rather than via works of visual art?

[davidcarrier]

TG nicely turns to music, which is good since Arthur claims to have a general theory, but doesn't much discuss anything but visual art.

On the Cage, the argument that it is not a musical work of art seems to me totally unconvincing. It's in concert, you listen, and performances differ. Whether it's a good work of art, that's another question. Cage surely does organize sound, asking you to listen, which is different from, say, waiting for the Brahms sonata to begin, not paying attention.

The claim that rock music is too impoverished to be art confuses defining art and asking what is good art. But heavens, think how much very bad baroque painting there is; and how much very good rock music. The examples here are ingenious, but I don't quite see how they illuminate the theory of what art is.

[davidcarrier]

RK asks: what kind of theory does the art world need? My experience as a working critic: aesthetics, including Arthur's is not the theory the art world seeks. The kind of theory found in ARTFORUM in the 1980s and 90s is very far from philosophy-- for better and worse. This practice deserves discussion. Ironically RK's clear discussion is very abstract, i.e. philosophical. I don't believe that the art world would be interested in theory which doesn't engage practice. Contemporary practice. These examples date back a generation. To speak personally, long ago I pushed in ARTFORUM an essay on Goodman. That kind of theory went nowhere-- for better or worse.

[davidcarrier]

BC also asks: what is theory? Here as in the RK paper I don't read closely, not out of lack of respect for smart accounts, but simply because this all is so very abstract. It's theorizing about the practice of art criticism which, well it's like DIckie's book. If you don't engage the practice, then what is the theorizing theorizing about?

Arthur's strength: his link of the concerns of philosophy with the practice of art. I hope that younger philosophers will also deal with this issue in concrete ways, not with a priori arguments.

[davidcarrier]

SD asks: how can we judge art in another culture? One familiar question, of course, is whether the cultures he mentions even have art. Is there human nature and, if so, is it universal enough to allow us to trust our responses.

My A WORLD ART HISTORY (Penn State, 2008) will take up this issue in no doubt too much detail. What I learned in lecturing, this is relevant here, is that this whole subject is very political. 'You are Eurocentric, claiming that the concept of art is universal': that's one good and frequent criticism.

SD offers a very abstract conceptual analysis. I would, but this is my bias, be more interested in a closely detailed discussion of one Islamic decoration, one African mask, one Chinese scroll.

[Robert Kraut]

Reply to Carrier

Robert Kraut

I am slightly puzzled by David Carrier's reaction to my paper, though perhaps he answers one of the questions I tried to raise. He seems to be demanding a form of currency which, if I am right, it is not incumbent upon an aesthetic theorist to provide. He says

"RK asks: what kind of theory does the art world need? My experience as a working critic: aesthetics, including Arthur's is not the theory the art world seeks. The kind of theory found in ARTFORUM in the 1980s and 90s is very far from philosophy-- for better and worse. This practice deserves discussion. Ironically RK's clear discussion is very abstract, i.e. philosophical. I don't believe that the art world would be interested in theory which doesn't engage practice. Contemporary practice. These examples date back a generation."

I apologize about the vintage of my examples (which "date back a generation"); my involvement in the artworld is as a musician, not a historian and/or critic of the pictorial arts, and I am somewhat handicapped (as is any theorist) by a lack of certain data. Nevertheless, were I to cite instances of what presently happens in the music world (rather than what happened a generation ago), the conclusions would be the same. The cases I cite suffice to make the point: theoretical reflection upon artworld practice is not to be assimilated to artworld practice (despite the existence of "art about art") any more than the philosophy of mathematics is to be assimilated to the philosophy of mathematics. Most working mathematicians have little interest in "foundational" questions, just as most athletes have little interest in (or, for that matter, requisite training for thinking about) the neurochemistry of performance stress or the psychobiology of muscle tension. Theory is not for everyone.

Part of the challenge, of course, is to pin down the meaning of 'theory' in such contexts: that is one of the problems my discussion seeks to engage. As for Carrier's "... I don't believe that the art world would be interested in theory which doesn't engage practice. Contemporary practice.", I can only say that aesthetic theories prompted by Stravinsky's work are of no less interest to theoretically-minded musicians (or: musically-minded theorists) than theories prompted by the work of players currently touring and recording. True, not all artforms generate the same problems: theoretical issues associated with Avant Garde (or "free") jazz, for example, might differ from those prompted by Seattle Grunge. But any well-informed artworld theorist ought to be interested in all such problems, whether or not the practitioners themselves are.

[Robert Kraut]

Erratum

In my recent post ("Reply to Carrier"), I meant to say

The cases I cite suffice to make the point: theoretical reflection upon artworld practice is not to be assimilated to artworld practice (despite the existence of "art about art") any more than the philosophy of mathematics is to be assimilated to mathematics.

[jerome langguth]

Thanks very much to Robert Kraut for raising these important issues in connection with the work of Arthur Danto. I would like to ask for a clarification on a couple of points from Kraut’s paper. First, as Kraut acknowledges, the central question here is what is meant by ‘theory’ in the artworld and in the world of philosophical aesthetics respectively. The question has to do with how ‘theory’ in one realm is related to ‘theory’ in the other. Kraut’s main claim is that, whatever the right story here turns out to be, philosophical theorizing about art should avoid at all costs “assimilation” by artworld theorizing. The idea of a neat division of labor here is interesting and tempting, but is it really tenable? Take the example (offered by Kraut in his reply to the comments) of free jazz. It is quite plausible that avant-garde jazz raises theoretical problems for the philosopher that it does not (necessarily) raise for the practitioner. One could wonder, for example, whether latest philosophical account of expression in music helped to make sense of the improvisational practices of the free jazz musician. This is a problem that might interest the philosopher of music considerably, while the practicing free jazz musician would probably not be overly worried it. And it makes sense in cases like this to say that the problem about expression is a problem for the philosopher, not the musician. The jazz musician, on the other hand, might develop a theory of improvisational practice meant to be actualized on the bandstand or in a recording session. Ornette Coleman, for example, theorizes frequently in the liner notes of his albums about the nature of sound and music. These musings inform his practice, and are presumably not primarily meant as responses to questions about music coming out of the world of philosophical aesthetics. The more tantalizing question Kraut’s position raises, for me anyway, concerns what one’s attitude as a philosopher ought to be towards a “practitioner theory” such as those of Coleman. It does seem right to distinguish between kinds of theory here, but it seems equally clear (to me) that it would be possible and maybe even desirable, to initiate a conversation at some stage between philosophical theory and practitioner theory. If, for example, Coleman claims that his music does not “express”, the philosopher wants to know what he means by that. The philosopher of music might also reasonably be expected to understand enough about Coleman to examine how the latter’s theories affect his playing. But is merely addressing these questions a “slide into artworld theorizing”? And if this is not a case of assimilation, then what, exactly, would be?

[Robert Kraut]

In response to Jerome Langguth

Robert Kraut

Thanks to Jerome Langguth for his questions and concerns.

For those unfamiliar with Ornette Coleman's music (and the bigger picture), here's a relevant blurb I just pulled off the internet:

"Coleman is the creator of a concept of music called "harmolodic," a musical form which is equally applicable as a life philosophy. The richness of harmolodics derives from the unique interaction between the players. Breaking out of the prison bars of rigid meters and conventional harmonic or structural expectations, harmolodic musicians improvise equally together in what Coleman calls compositional improvisation, while always keeping deeply in tune with the flow, direction and needs of their fellow players. In this process, harmony becomes melody becomes harmony. Ornette describes it as "Removing the caste system from sound." On a broader level, harmolodics equates with the freedom to be as you please, as long as you listen to others and work with them to develop your own individual harmony." [http://www.harmolodic.com/ornette/home_text.html]

Languth challenges me--quite rightly--to say whether this sort of "harmolodic" theorizing is part of practice or theory, and to reconcile it with what Langguth calls (and correctly attributes to me) a "neat division of labor" between practitioner and theorist. Languth says

"The jazz musician, on the other hand, might develop a theory of improvisational practice meant to be actualized on the bandstand or in a recording session. Ornette Coleman, for example, theorizes frequently in the liner notes of his albums about the nature of sound and music. These musings inform his practice, and are presumably not primarily meant as responses to questions about music coming out of the world of philosophical aesthetics."

Quite right; such cases must surely be accommodated. Here is a suggestion about how to proceed--again invoking the sort of linguistic analogy that I find so intriguing:

Imagine a native speaker of English whose utterances consist of, among other things, remarks about the syntax and semantics of her own language. Not only must we attend to our speaker's utterances about rabbits, automobiles, and global warming; our speaker is, inter alia, a reflective theorist, trying to articulate aspects of her own linguistic practices. Her semantic reflections are part of the data that the theorist must accommodate. How does this speaker's reflective theorizing bear on the traditional divide between object language and metalanguage--between verbal behavior and the semantic theories intended to codify and/or explain such behavior?

That's the question, and engaging it points toward an approach to Langguth's question. Coleman is rare among jazz players in having articulated (and systematically developed) such self-reflective theorizing; such theorizing is part of the data that must be accommodated by any adequate aesthetic theory of Coleman's artistic practice.

But this strategy leads to an inevitable question, clearly identified by Langguth, about initiating "...a conversation at some stage between philosophical theory and practitioner theory":

"If, for example, Coleman claims that his music does not “express”, the philosopher wants to know what he means by that. The philosopher of music might also reasonably be expected to understand enough about Coleman to examine how the latter’s theories affect his playing. But is merely addressing these questions a “slide into artworld theorizing”? And if this is not a case of assimilation, then what, exactly, would be?"

This is precisely to the point. I do have some tentative responses in mind; but here I invite other conference participants to contribute their own insights. Anyone interested in Danto's theories about the role of artworld theories must, sooner or later, confront some variant of this question.

[Julie Kuhlken]

Theodore Gracyk’s effort to extend Arthur’s notion of transfiguration outside the bounds of art is quite intriguing. In that Arthur first developed it in order to distinguish art from non-art, one would expect that transfiguration could not survive outside its original context. It returns to Lydia and Richard’s discussions of the connection between art and religion in Arthur’s philosophy. Before Arthur came along, someone of a certain religious disposition could have said about transfiguration (in a religious context) what I just said about transfiguration in an aesthetic context, and assert that transfiguration could not survive the context of religious faith. It begs the question what other contexts one could imagine it operating in. For instance, I wonder if politics isn’t a possible candidate, as Michael hints at. And then there is also the case of philosophy. Nietzsche’s statement “One must first be a Wagnerian” is only really true within the context of the philosophy in which it appears. And Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am” only has its strange quasi-religious quality of performance when understood philosophically.

[Stephen davies]

In his paper, TG refers to an argument of mine to the effect that John Cage's 4'33" is not a musical work. DC finds that argument "totally unconvincing" because "It's in concert, you listen, and performances differ … Cage surely does organize sound, asking you to listen."

Let me repeat the argument in brief: If musical works are organize sounds, then it must be possible that some sounds could count as ambient, sounding as the work is performed without being part of the performance or the work. But Cage's piece accepts all sounds during its performance as the contents of that performance. In other words, its contents are the sounds that for most musical works would count as ambient. Because no sounds could be ambient to a performance of 4'33", the work is not comprised of organized sounds and is not a musical work, supposing the truth of the conditional with which we started. It is an important artwork though. As such, it is best construed as a performance piece about music.

If I invite and encourage you to listen to the sounds that are going on around us, I do not thereby organize those sounds; instead, I draw your attention to them. And there are lots of sounds I can listen to at a concert that are not part of any musical work. So neither of DC's observations are relevant to my argument

[T. Gracyk]

Thank you, Jerome, for your reply. It gives me a lot to think about. My first reaction is that you are right to ask what tradition helps us to make sense of “Feedback”, and then I look at your list of four musicians. What strikes me right away is that I agree that there’s one sense in which all four are artists. All four have are engaged in a craft and each displays (when successful) a very high level of excellence. While I know that both Mingus and Dylan thought consciously of the art status of their work, I was puzzled at the inclusion of Bill Monroe and Bessie Smith (and I wondered how you clairvoyantly knew that I was listening to Mingus yesterday while revising an essay that discusses Bill Monroe at length). Then I saw your reason: “they share a broad concept of art that is African-American in origin.” Substitute ‘music’ for ‘art’ in that claim, and what have you lost in making sense of the Grateful Dead? Nothing that I can see, and that is one of the points that I was trying to make. A related point is that your urge to say ‘art’ instead of ‘music’ is a function of your contrast class; I grant that the Dead’s music is much more sophisticated than “a children’s song or an unreflective performance of a folk tune,” but that does not make me want to explain the difference by invoking the concept of art. The Dead didn’t get to where they are by moving directly from the simpler stuff to the complex stuff. Rather, they did it by jumping off from relatively complex material (including all four of the musicians you cite), which is to say they can think of their musical sources simply as such (as their musical sources) without themselves having to think about the gulf between a children’s song and what they are attempting. They don’t have to worry about the ‘art’ status. They can simply take up music that’s all around them in the culture, and work from there without concern for the historical question of whether any of it is art.

[jerome langguth]

Thanks very much, Theodore, for your helpful reply to my earlier comment. I would like to briefly respond to one of the points you made in your post. You wrote:

“My first reaction is that you are right to ask what tradition helps us to make sense of “Feedback”, and then I look at your list of four musicians. What strikes me right away is that I agree that there’s one sense in which all four are artists. All four have are engaged in a craft and each displays (when successful) a very high level of excellence. While I know that both Mingus and Dylan thought consciously of the art status of their work, I was puzzled at the inclusion of Bill Monroe and Bessie Smith ... Then I saw your reason: “they share a broad concept of art that is African-American in origin.” Substitute ‘music’ for ‘art’ in that claim, and what have you lost in making sense of the Grateful Dead? Nothing that I can see, and that is one of the points that I was trying to make.”

I do think that a number of things are lost in substituting ‘music’ for ‘art’ here. First, I would not want to restrict membership in the art tradition under discussion to musicians. A more provocative list might have included various writers, sculptors, painters, poets, and dancers in addition to the musicians that I named. The Dead are surely indebted to some extent to the Beat poets, to cite just one example. So part of what is lost in your proposed substitution is a framework within which we might understand the relationship between the music of the Dead and the other arts. Second, it is still unclear to me why the specifically musical tradition of which the Dead are arguably a part doesn’t count as an art-music tradition. I understand that in cases like the songs of children one might want to claim that there we have music but not necessarily art, and that a similar case might be made for some popular music. But what are the specific criteria by which we can distinguish between an art music-tradition and a tradition of musical practice lacking an art concept? Perhaps more anecdotally, Dennis McNally’s book on the Dead reports that the KMPX radio broadcasts curated by Garcia and Lesh included works by Mingus, James Brown, Charles Lloyd, Charles Ives, and the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic. These pieces were played alongside music that the Dead had just recorded (Anthem of the Sun, I believe). That kind of eclecticism, it seems to me, is at least circumstantial evidence for some kind of concept of art music in the atmosphere surrounding the creation of “Feedback.” With respect to the recording of Live Dead, Garcia is quoted as having said “We were after a serious long composition, musically, and then a recording of it.” These seem to me to be the words of someone who is quite self-consciously involved in the creation of music that is also art.

[T. Gracyk]

This is to continue the exchange with Jerome L., who says "That kind of eclecticism, it seems to me, is at least circumstantial evidence for some kind of concept of art music in the atmosphere surrounding the creation of 'Feedback'."
Why take eclecticism as evidence of anything but eclecticism? Suppose that in a single day I watch a Kurosawa film, listen to Dolly Parton's song "Coat of Many Colors" when it's on the radio, and read a short story by Henry James. Suppose that it occurs to me that they share something in common (they're all about class distinctions and social divides). I don't see why the connections I've made have to be supplemented by an additional concept of art. And the music of the Grateful Dead and many other musicians might be enriched by their non-musical sources without recourse to a unifying concept of art.

Now let's take up their association with the Beat poets. I don't see why this required them to apply any concept of art to their borrowings. For them, it might very well have been a more localized response to people they knew, using a less sweeping concept. For them, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a guy who made his real living running a very good bookstore in their neighborhood, and who occasionally published poetry on the side; why is it necessary that they have thought of Ferlinghetti and his friend Allen Ginsberg under the concept of art in addition to the concept of poet? By way of anaology, I know a non-philosopher who was quite surprised to find that I think of Hilary Putnam as a philosopher when I think of him; my non-philosopher friend conceptualizes Putnam as a family friend and pays no attention to the fact that others categorize him as a philosopher. Perhaps I'm endorsing something that Robert Kraut noted in his contributions to this conference: the kind of theory that drives artworld practice does not map all that neatly onto the kind of theory that philosophers want to construct.

What then interests me is to ask what we are trying to justify (perhaps about ourselves, as listeners) in preferring to locate the Grateful Dead in an ART-music tradition rather than, say, an AMERICAN music tradition. And if it helps, I seem to recall that in Phil Lesh's autobiography, Lesh explains that his attempts to get the others to listen to Charles Ives didn't meet with much success.

[Jerome Langguth]

In reply to Theodore Gracyk’s last post:

I certainly see and appreciate what you are trying to say here, and I agree with you and Robert Kraut that art-world theory does not always map easily onto philosophical theory. Indeed, I think that our exchange thus far illustrates many of the difficulties Kraut is getting at in his paper. Let me try one more time to say why I think that some of this art world material might be relevant to the questions that you raised in your paper. First, my observations on the Dead’s programming on their radio show were labeled by me “possibly anecdotal”— which I meant as an acknowledgement of Kraut’s (and your) concerns. It is true that one can be eclectic without thinking much about it, as your example shows. Being eclectic in and of itself means nothing. But the Dead’s eclecticism did occur in the context of a radio show featuring their own music and music that influenced them. I would think that, at the very least, this indicates that they were self-consciously eclectic. They made choices about how to present their music, and these choices reflect something of their tastes and influences. It is true as well, and this I think supports your view, that the kind of eclecticism this shows was characteristic of the wider musical milieu to which the Dead belonged. Everybody (and especially musicians) listened to a wide range of musical styles in the 60s. So maybe you are right that their radio show choices don’t tell us much about their understanding of art. You are also right to point out that I can think about what various art works might have in common without appeal to a unifying concept of art.

You also claim that my point about the Beats influencing the Dead doesn’t of itself prove much. Jerry Garcia may not have thought of Gary Snyder as “an artist.” Perhaps he just thought Snyder’s poetry was cool. But here I didn’t mean to be anecdotal. The idea was that the broader concept of art might yield a richer understanding of the Dead’s work, if only because it allows us to see the ways in which their music relates to other developments in the artworld. But I think this is precisely what you want to deny. You are not so sure that American popular music is part of the art world at all, and you are questioning our tendency to want to place it there at all costs. The musical tradition of which the Dead are a part is not an artistic tradition in the same sense that the tradition which gave us Cage and Stockhausen is. And this is not to devalue American music. It can get along fine without Art. It seems to me that the crucial question underlying all of this is that of what it means to have a concept of art. I agree with you that the jazz-blues tradition we are discussing is importantly different from the European art tradition. It is, for one thing, far less interested in “artifacts’ (or vehicles). And music rather than the visual arts seems to define it. I also am quite happy to view the Grateful Dead as far less theoretically minded than John Cage. But I still think that the tradition to which they belong is not “just” a musical tradition. The aesthetic values at work in the blues and jazz can be traced to a broader set of aesthetic values and practices, and these values and practices are embodied in many creative works that are not musical. Maybe my desire to assimilate all of this activity under a concept of ‘art’ is suspect, and all that we need is to specify a concept of creativity that arises out of African-American culture and experience. In any case, I have greatly enjoyed reading your paper and discussing these matters with you.