Art and Context

A friend was telling me recently about a YouTube prank, in which the jokesters took a few generic IKEA wall-art prints or floor rugs—each with a factory-produced abstract design—and mounted them as if they were great works of contemporary art. They then proceeded to ask passing connoisseurs for their estimates of the prices of the masterworks in question. The figures quoted were astronomical, and many a would-be judge of artistic merit pronounced the IKEA prints as showing great signs of genius.

Most of us will chuckle when we hear this—partly with delight at the idea of showing up those we imagine to be poseurs, but also with the guilty thought, "better them than us." I suspect the vast majority of us, after all, would be just as likely to fail the prank's test. Even if we fancy ourselves somewhat "up on" art, we are probably more than capable of confusing an unfamiliar work of abstract expressionism —if we are told that's what it is—with an industrially-produced IKEA rug (which are, after all, designed by former art students just as museum art is).

Too bad for us. I take comfort from the fact that we are at the very least, however, in good company. It turns out that a variant of the "IKEA rug" gag dates back to the earliest days of the disciples of art history and connoisseurship as we know them, and that far greater minds than ours have fallen prey to it. Reading a correspondence between E.H. Gombrich and Quentin Bell (son of Vanessa and Clive, and nephew of Virginia Woolf), one finds the following anecdote. Gombrich refers to an incident involving the great 18th-century art historian Johann Wickelmann, "when he fell for a cruel hoax and went into raptures over the fake antique paintings [Anton Raphael] Mengs had concocted to show him up."

A cruel hoax indeed! As much as one likes to imagine the unknown poseurs of the YouTube video getting pranked, one's heart bleeds for Winckelmann. Even if—like myself—one has never read his works, one cannot help but love him on the basis of the immortal description in Walter Pater's Renaissance studies. One certainly doesn't wish to have the myth Pater so lovingly creates—that of the connoisseur with an absolute commitment and ascetic devotion to his chosen field—tarnished by any mean tricks.

In relating this story, however, Gombrich says something next which is very wise, and which we are relieved to find lets Winckelmann off the hook. If we want to absolve him, though, we are going to have to be just as forgiving of the victims of the YouTube prank, since Gombrich's point applies equally well to them: "we must expect such mishaps," he writes, "since trust is a necessary ingredient in any experience of art."

This is a summation of a thought Gombrich has been developing throughout the exchange, and which reflects his whole theory of aesthetics. There is no such thing as an art historian or critic, Gombrich argues, who simply surveys every work of art and selects from them the greatest. The field is too vast, the range of human creation too extensive, for any one person to have time to learn it all before allowing themselves to have a response to an individual work.

We therefore must to some extent approach a work of art with a tradition already in mind—a set of inherited assumptions about what is likely to possess merit and what is not—and allow this tradition to shape, if not to determine, our aesthetic response. Rimbaud's claim to "love[...] maudlin pictures, the painted panels over doors, stage sets, the back-drops of mountebanks, old inn signs, popular prints" (Varèse trans.) may be appealing, but it is because it sets up a counter-tradition—a demotic inversion of elite taste—rather than because it achieve a genuinely universal eclecticism, which no human life or intellect could be capacious enough to contain.

Part of what we do when we view a work of art, therefore—inevitably—is to accept on authority a certain amount of what we are told by others as to its value, merits, and the context in which it was produced. We have no other choice, because "[w]e cannot examine everything at once," as Gombrich writes, "as little [...] as the scientist can or does."

It is interesting that Gombrich makes the comparison to science of his own accord, since this is essentially the point —or one of the points—Thomas Kuhn was making in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Contrary to our popular textbook epistemologies, Kuhn noted, no scientist actually begins their researches by collating all the experiences that have occurred, past and present, and formulating and testing theories that take them all into account. Indeed, modern professional scientists are often distinctly incurious about the histories of their fields.  The number of previous experiments that a scientist actually replicates in the course of their training is quite small—amounting really only to a few classic instances that have become "paradigmatic" for their respective professional communities.

In proceeding to conduct their own tests on the basis of that paradigm, then, scientists are really taking a certain amount of context on faith—or, more properly, on authority. This is no knock against science, any more than Gombrich's observation is a condemnation of art. It is simply to point out that no human life allows enough time to perform all the possible experiences of humankind that have gone before. In order to contribute to knowledge in any field—indeed to have an experience of any kind—we must approach that experience with some ready-made intellectual categories and ideas about context—paradigms, if you prefer—already in our minds. Scientists and artists alike depend on an intellectual tradition, and this is helpful to, rather than detrimental of, individual innovation and discovery that can take place at that tradition's borders.

Winckelmann was within his rights, therefore, in having a strong aesthetic reaction to a piece of painting he had been told was of great antiquity. This false information had become for him an element of the context through which he experienced the work. And since there is no such thing as an aesthetic experience that is entirely unmediated or devoid of context, it is hardly improper for him to have allowed this piece of false intelligence to influence the way we perceived the work. The same is true for the unfortunate dupes captured on video in the YouTube prank.

An emotional or aesthetic reaction to a work is not a sudden or random spark in the ether, therefore; it is a contextual and social experience. When we respond strongly to a painting, say, it is not just because of its use of light and color, just as a response to a poem is not solely to its words. We are thrilled or disappointed or enchanted in part because of what we know about the person who made it, or the things it depicts, or the historical events to which it alludes.

I had an experience with a friend recently that illustrated this point, when I quoted to him from A.H. Clough's "Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth," because I thought it might buck up his spirits, politically speaking. He was bored, and asked with a shrug what the poem was about. I said that Clough wrote it in response to the defeats and reversals that liberalism had suffered on the European continent after the revolutions of 1848, and that it was intended to reaffirm the value of political struggle even in the face of an ascendant conservative reaction. Now, he was interested, and asked me to read the poem again from the top.

Most of the great art pranks of history—many of them amounting to works in themselves—have turned on this inevitable social and contextual quality of art. Duchamp's inverted urinal was a way of showing that the same item can mean contrasting things, once it has been set in a different context and given the label of "art." A prank by Piero Manzoni—referenced in Quentin Bell as well—was intended to prove much the same point, just as the YouTube video does. The Italian artist filled up small balloons and then marketed them as "artist's breath," charging copious amounts of money, which people were apparently willing to pay.

An inflated balloon is obviously not something you need an overpaid artist to obtain. And no one possessing the item could really perceive the difference between a balloon that had been filled by an "artist" and one that had been inflated by air pump. (And to dwell on the absurdity of this "Artist's Breath" project, by the way, is not even to mention its sequel: "Artist's Shit.") All of this was of course part of Manzoni's point.

But the truth is, nonetheless, that an object has been transformed once it has been mounted on the wall of a museum, or marketed as a work of art, or re-christened as coming from the body of an "artist." Its social meaning has changed, even if it has not visibly been altered. There is a new context in light of which we perceive it, and—as our examples above were intended to show—such context is essential, not incidental, to the definition of art.

This is a point that salvages, I believe, much of the modern abstract, performance, and conceptual art that people often deride as lacking in any distinct technical virtuosity. "I could do that," people say, when confronted with a man chained naked to a stage and barking like a dog. "Anyone could make that," they say, when seeing a balloon full of air or an inverted urinal in a museum (especially if, like Duchamp, we did not make the urinal ourselves, when it was still just a urinal). This is true, but the fact remains that one did not do what Duchamp or the naked man did. Part of the creativity of the artistic act in question was choosing to identify as art something that had never borne that label before.

The idea conveyed by these acts—stunts, if you prefer— is to underline the absurdity of treating something as objective and eternally true when in fact it is social and contextual. To make this point is to convey a statement with intellectual content. It is to say something new, therefore, which the object (the urinal, let's say) had not been saying before. The artistic intervention has therefore achieved something. It has had a transforming effect. All art is social, and to convey this idea persuasively and visually is certainly a fair subject for an artwork to address.

What's odd is that Gombrich suggests this whole line of thinking precisely while engaged in a dispute over realism and relativism in the appraisal of art, in which he—rather than Bell–is  ostensibly rejecting the "relativist" side of the question. We see here perhaps how little a certain kind of realism and relativism actually differ from one another, once we have all been forced by modern philosophy to abandon a position of genuine naivety.

The great insight not just of the unwilling prophets of postmodernism, like Kuhn, but really of the whole tradition of modern philosophy from Kant on, has been that there is no such thing as a direct and unmediated experience of reality. What we mean when we speak of a "perception" or an "experience" is already something that has passed through various mental filters and intellectual categories that have made it intelligible to us. Thus we have the psychological experiment, famously cited by Kuhn, in which people struggled even to accurately perceive a playing card that was both red and a spade, and were only able to do so once told by another what they were looking at.

Nor does this necessarily imply that our perceptions distort reality. Rather, it is simply to say that what we mean when we speak of "reality" can only be that which is accessible to us in experience, and therefore it is already that which has passed through our conceptual apparatus. Kuhn and others have moved from this insight, in turn, to invoke the principle of logical parsimony, also known as Occam's Razor, and use it to deny that the concept of a reality external to human perception (Kant's "Thing-in-Itself") is even a meaningful one at all. "[I]n the absence of some recourse to that hypothetical fixed nature [...,]" writes Kuhn, "the principle of economy will urge us to say that after discovering oxygen Lavoisier worked in a different world."

If the world and our perception of it are one, however, how are we able to negotiate between rival beliefs or truth claims—whether about art or anything else? It's a problem as old as the modern world. If this riddle does not quite date back to the Copernican Revolution, it at least extends back to the Copernican Revolution in Kant's mind. Yeats once summarized it, in the form of a rhetorical question posed in one of his esoteric veins, as quoted by Ellmann, "Does the word belief [...] belong to our age? can I think of the world there and I here judging it?"

Most of us will not be willing to descend quite so far down the rabbit-hole of relativism—or at least, we would not know what to do with ourselves if we did (and neither did Kuhn, of course, and he never pretended otherwise). We can be at least be sure that if the foundations of reality itself are so open to individual interpretation, though, how much more must this be the case with such nebulous matters as aesthetic standards of beauty and value (and then—at yet another derivative of abstraction—the determination of monetary value on the basis of these criteria, which is what the YouTube pranksters asked people to guess).

The YouTube prank, the "cruel hoax" on Winckelmann, Duchamp's "Fountain" and the balloons full of so much artistic hot air—we laugh at these (if we are hard-hearted enough to do so) because they prove that connoisseurs too are not immune to social forces. They have not surveyed all art from atop Parnassus and discovered immutable laws of beauty independent of the one who does the surveying. This is fun to discover, but it ultimately is no more humiliating to connoisseurs than it should be to all humans, since any act of perception we undertake, or any experience, will already occur within social and intellectual frameworks we have partly inherited from others.

I was listening recently to a podcast that featured an interview with a creepy technology guru who is part of the "Transhumanist" movement. At one point, he started waxing poetical about the coming future in which we will all become immortal and all-powerful through the creation of an artificial hyper-intelligence. "We'll be free to know everything, to travel everywhere, to read everything and experience all art and spirituality!" he crowed. We just have to be willing to plug into the hyper-intelligence and sacrifice our selfhood and individuality.

One doesn't need to believe that this prophecy is a remotely plausible take on recent developments in technology to still find it annoying. What particularly provokes me is the false theory of art on which it depends. What exactly would it mean to have an aesthetic response to a novel, for example, if we no longer experience mortality or limitation? What else is the narrative framework of a novel but a sort of mortal span-in-miniature, in which, though the characters, we strive, face obstacles, and triumph or are defeated? What could any of these terms mean in a world in which strife and death have been banished? Why would we still want to read novels, or look at works of art, in a world in which we have no selfhood?

Art may be a social and context-bound activity, but this is only because the self is a social entity to begin with. There is no "I" without a community to which it stands in relation, just as there is no emotional response to a work of art that is not mediated in part by tradition and that which we take on trust from others. A YouTube hoax that presents something as a "great work of art" and later denies it is anything of the sort is nothing more than a betrayal of this trust. It is a reminder of our universal dependence upon a community of others. We need them to have any experience at all, or even a self. And if that makes us ridiculous, we will at least be ridiculous together.