For the past few years, I’ve been engaged with writing a footnote to an essay with an attempted theoretical explication of what is meant by the word “art”. For a much longer time, I’ve pursued a very abstract but also very specific direction in my own art practice – like any other artist. One little trick I have discovered is to abandon your own taste in favor of a more objective, general view of potential experiences and the conditions which make them possible. What comes out of this pursuit is no less than an attempt at a general theory of art: one without reduction, one necessarily abstract enough to be applied to every pursuit which falls under the artistic category, but one which also exceeds the idea of perfect craftsmanship. This text presents an outline or rather a program for answering such questions as, “How is art possible?” and “What can art do?”, to provide both a critical perspective on the actual state of the field and finding a way past it.
1. Defining art
Let’s get an important point out of the way: art is not a quality; it is a social context within which we put human-made artifacts. As such, there is no art outside of the social conditions that make it possible. This provisional remark is necessary not simply to accommodate the sensibilities of contemporary fine arts, but also to fit in the category of art with the entire plurality of artifacts, situations, industries, disciplines, movements, and eventually, experiences that constitute the history we mean by the term of art.
“Beauty” is a general word for every aesthetic effect we expect from good art, but also something we assume is there even if we don’t see it, as an inherent quality of everything that is labeled artistic. There was a time when codifying beauty and many more effects was a matter of precise taxonomy, tables, systems of tastes, manners or prescriptive mechanics of poetics. But we are long past the stage of static definitions; although, arguably taste is still woven into the fabric of our social relations as a manifestation of values we seek to identify with.
Art, any art, is expected to have poetic qualities. Poetry signifies an abstraction, a coming together of discrete parts into a new whole. Poetry is a possibility of building or discovering a new, imaginary or counterfactual world. The way elements of poetry interconnect can be called “chains of reasoning”, since a single work allows for consistent repetition of certain relations among its materials as elements – but not others. As Longinus long ago stated in an essay entitled “On the Sublime”[1], when we are led by an author to follow a chain of reasoning to the end of an argument and are able to reach a new summit of thought, we feel as if we made the path of reasoning together with the author, and gazing back at the path we experience a feeling called the “sublime”.
What else is there to know about art? To go beyond these basic aspects, we would need to look into the history of different movements, to consider many strands of interpretation of a single work in order to understand what a work is itself, or otherwise simply gesture at art, to exemplify it through poetic writing. Attempts to figure art out have been hopelessly stuck in this latter Benjaminesque approach for long, to the point that poetic writing has become an entrenchment tool for the defense of the irreducibility of art and human experience and so a tool for the preservation of the status quo and its “circulatory system” – its institutions.
We can go much further than this, without dissolving art into naturalized cultural affects or cognitive cues, but also past the limits of poetic language and without a facile prescription for what is art proper and what isn’t. To do so, I need to consider what kind of objects artworks are.
In the mundane sense, the notion of an object crumbles almost immediately if we consider that art is not only a painting or sculpture. It is also a novel, a dance, a concert, a record, a performance, a spoken poem. The form of an object is a mere pragmatic and linguistic convenience, contingent on a very recent history of art, prior to which artworks were not at all discrete, portable objects. A more fitting definition is that of a discrete pattern: the parts which come together to create something new, the elements of poetry arranged by an artist, most often in a material form, using physical materials or linguistic elements, but in a way that makes our perception of such patterns give rise to more complex associations. It is discrete, because there is a border between the conditions arranged by the artist and those of the context of art presentation. Both are abstractions conditioned by circumstances only some of which are material. Therefore an artwork is a discrete pattern of abstraction. If art is any kind of object, it is an abstract one, which is difficult to pin down exactly despite its physical form being trivially simple. But it is a very specific combination of elements that makes some things good art and others a mere repetition of conventions.
2. Making and seeing as two sides of the same coin
Making art and seeing it are two sides of one action. It is impossible to remove either figure from art, and this is counting artists as their own, first, or only audience. However, it is possible to hide both author and audience, for example by deferring to channel a particular style, genre, tradition, or as in recently popular “complex systems art” where the author is present only as an engineer designing an exhibition machine through arranging the conditions, which hopefully produces experiences leading to meaningful inferences.
The author is also still present in an anonymous fragment of an ancient poem – a torn papyrus with a pattern of words arranged by Sappho. Our reading of it is more than an automatic application of the Rebus principle connecting the dots randomly from a pictographic flux. The fragment is written in the language of a culture, representing the movements of thought and feelings intelligible to Sappho’s contemporaries. They saw the same sunsets, shared concepts, ideas, beliefs and had experiences similar enough where one could point at them with a mere gesture of a poem. They felt similarly, so the poem was meaningful to more than its author.
If any work was ever seen outside of all contexts, suspended in total ambiguity, then we could speak of freedom of interpretation and the death of the author, but we would not be able to read that work. Indeed, if we can describe what constitutes a work of art, we should not assume it is a machine which needs no agency to drive it.
Concepts, institutions, artistic and political movements can be described structurally and independently from individuals, but they are not created or put in motion without the motor of agency operating along the lines such structures prescribe or offer. Still, they are real in the sense that we have an ability to live and act accordingly with them, as well as agree, somewhat, on defining them intersubjectively.
Art hardly ever appears to us outside social conventions, because art itself is a convention, a niche which preserves authorial intentions. But art’s message is hardly conventional. Instead, it offers a collection of mental instructions from which associatively a whole spectrum of messages could be inferred. For this to be possible, art is neither autonomous nor universal, but bounded and constituted by rules out of which society is woven.
And yet, despite the consensus that art happens inside the mind of the audience, while the author arranges the pattern which makes this possible within a context – often maintained as physical venues manifesting the continuous tradition of presentation within a particular discipline – we tend to think of artworks as objects existing without our firsthand experience of them. We may even concede that something is there, but we don’t understand it, are unable to access it yet. Even without deep knowledge of their oeuvres, for example, one can easily discern between the music of Iannis Xenakis and Suzanne Ciani.
As Gabriel Catren reminds us,[2] what exists aren’t abstract objects qua phenomena, objectively, for these are constructible and dependent on cultural conditions of rules maintained socially. What exists are the transcendental conditions within which such abstract objects are possible downstream from the fact that we share similar sensors, language, etc., resulting in similarity across our individual transcendental structures which are the result of pressures of the external environment. It is the conditions that are both objective and subject to revision: hence, we can play with the premises of our mental conditions. Is an artist necessary for this?
We can certainly have pleasant aesthetic experiences outside of the context of art, and experience wonder, beauty, and disgust without artworks. But artworks extend our palette of such experiences by providing blueprints for new arrangements. If the logical dimension of thought is limited by our experiential conditions, then art-making is akin to building further possible experiential conditions piecemeal, by using tools and mechanics that, akin to logic, are able to reach beyond the horizon of the human imagination. That is exactly why the experience induced by the artifice of artworks is different from that of finding patterns in nature – the latter are always within the limits of our existing experiential blueprints, while the former are able to strike outwards and outside the limits of the imaginable. Hence the necessity of artists – artificers – for art and the interdependence of seeing and making for an expanded understanding of art’s potential.
3. The language of making art
Hermeneutics and discursive interpretation are second-order effects of art that feedback on the way we see things. However, overcoming the difficulty of describing an abstract object constituted by a pattern requires a language local to art that is a first-order discourse. Neither naturalizing nor explaining the effects of art away helps make it; thus, such a pragmatic language is half invented, half intuited by artists through speaking to one another. The true value of education in art is in letting such a conversation happen, which gradually becomes a blueprint for how one thinks and organizes one’s own practice. Of course, no person holds to just one schema for making decisions in all spheres of life, and artists don’t recite “shop talk” in just one manner. I discern three distinct discursive practices in making and speaking about art:
- Formal schematism: description of an artwork through combination of materials, where the juxtapositions and connections are justified and grounded either by existing works, objects, materials or by the technical necessity of constructive decisions (such as the necessity to use nails in holding two pieces of wood together). Most useful as an approach within a group, it offers clarity for existing examples or material gestures (a whistle like this whistle, a hum like this hum, a dance move like this one). Hence the wide adoption of this approach in art education as well as in commercial production.
- Mood implication: a form of dialogue in which each party understands the work to be a combination of elements which hypothetically elicit a response from the audience, thus shaping the work’s meaning. It sounds like this: “If you do X, the work would feel like Y.” Essentially a conversation about actual and possible moods of the work, this type of discourse about ‘vibes’ requires both parties to interpret abstractions somewhat similarly. “This work reminds me of such and such a moment in childhood” requires a shared background, at least on some level, which is why such conversations easily arise within art schools, but are more difficult to establish outside of relationships built on extended durational proximity.
- Narrative approach: to look at history, biographies, interviews and attempt to distinguish a narrative of an artist or a recipe for an artwork. Ideally, this would be an algorithm of steps one could follow despite different lives and contexts. Much like an attempt to learn lessons from life, here someone else’s life is understood as an historical pattern of decisions, contingencies, ideas and practices developed within their constraints. A small but significant issue with this approach is the conflation of the figure of an artist with a real historical individual, thus establishing a direct causality between an artwork and personal anecdotes.
Of the three approaches, only formal schematism comes close to being systematic and codified at present. It is indeed the language of group critiques in art schools, of applications for grants, residencies, of explanations in public talks, and of exhibition texts. The justification of decisions for the way a work is built – where decisions are made either because it was necessary on a technical level or because there is a certain artwork that had a similar problem-solution conjunction – is ultimately codified in a kind of moodboard: a list of references which becomes a palette of possible decisions. However, saying that “I made X like this because Y is like this”, where Y is an existing artwork, also indexes the idea of the autonomy of art, where art is built in reference to other art, giving rise to the aspiration for art to become its own self-referential language. The price that is paid for this aspiration is the transformation of the “artistic” into the “combinatorial” (art comes out of art, like literature is made of literature), in which art becomes a closed volume of the possible, and artistic imagination limits itself to iteration. Still, this is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to artistic practice, distinguished by the availability of rhetorical tools for its articulation. And yet, the discursive articulation of artistic practice becomes a mode of productive thought, not only a way of describing art to the public.
In other words, the way we learn to speak of something is also the blueprint, the heuristic, for how we arrange our workspace, organize a research, choose where to look for inspiration, and so program ourselves, the skills we choose to learn or not, the tools we pick: all this constitutes artistic practice. This is precisely what a narrative approach is about: to import wholesale not only a recipe for one work distilled from another artist’s life, but the whole set of conditions of possibility for such works, the very way that another artist has already arranged their life. It may appear as deeply problematic to imitate not just an approach for making an object, but a whole lifeform, yet it appears to help resolve the inherent issue of overwhelming complexity in life’s circumstances and the need to make the right decisions in order to make an artwork.
The alternative to the attempt to wear someone else’s skin is to stick to a mood while making a work, as a way to navigate complexity. However, this mode of art-making by mood implication remains the least explicated, albeit the most pragmatic approach. It also immediately forecloses the ability to speak about itself, entailing an intuitive approach of “thinking through hands,” so to speak. One only needs to get into a mood and stick with it, and the work made will be the result of that mood. Therefore, speaking about an artwork in progress, we can talk about moods it actually – and possibly – creates, and from this infer what to do in order to change directions: by changing one’s own mood, I change my approach to what I’m making. All of this is of course awfully speculative, and even in written form sounds far more intangible than in practice. Practice itself requires an arrangement of all three modes of thinking into one, but this is often an unconscious process resulting in the arrangement of one’s own workspace (and workplace) in a contingent manner. And whose mood is it anyway that the artist’s gut feeling intuitively follows?
4. Seeing, mood, vibe, aesthetic
This merits a return to that other part of the equation of art: seeing it. Whatever the expectations of art are, it falls short if it isn’t perceived as specific, if it does not provide an experience that stands out, which summons a particular taste. The aesthetic, the mood, the atmosphere, the vibe: these denote roughly similar phenomena, though each term comes with its own genealogy and connotations. If an artwork, regardless of its medium, makes us feel and think in a specific pattern of associations, such a pattern becomes an acquired taste for the mood of that work. In this view artworks are patterns which produce patterns. An artwork is an object only because of its culturally defined substrate as a discrete, singular object, and also because through it we can discern a distinct experience, through which we can’t help but think of the artwork as an object.
It is the Kantian idea that we may not perceive the thought-independent world except by slicing it with the categories of intuition; in other words, we cannot but automatically think of objects as constituted by the qualities we can perceive aesthetically: through vision, touch, hearing, smell. Aesthetics here are the channels of our perceptive apparatus and so the most outstanding qualities – aesthetic ones – of the objects in the world, are such only because they can be perceived by us. And although we can think using non-perceptive, non-sensual categories, our primary apparatus thinks even of imaginary objects as objects, meaning that our thoughts in general are encoded through the ‘channels’ of our aesthetic faculties of sight, hearing, touch, smell. The notion of economically compressed, folded information structured through the continua of our perceptual categories, which is then represented and navigated as a high dimensional manifold, is vividly developed further by Peli Grietzer in his work on vibe.[3] A vibe – a particularly economic structure of the manifold of sensibility – is most saliently demonstrated within the field of machine learning models, where an agent can be represented as an autoencoder, where retrieving a particular image from memory can be seen as a reference to a particular vibe. Machine learning models also show that many more dimensions can be considered than those outlined by Kant (and so, Aristotle), which consequently means more categories than just those which represent our sensory continua. Mechanized imagination, the prosthetic extension of our reasoning and productive capabilities, exceeds the limits of what we can imagine given our intuitive faculties. A vibe can be expanded, decoded or unfolded into a deeply complex framework of associations, and yet it itself is compact. In popular usage, ‘vibe’ has a similar function of being a shorthand for a mood range that encompasses multiple cultural artifacts, e.g. ‘noir vibe’. Every vibe is constituted by a specific selection of elements, and so, one could say, it is defined by a curated selection of associations that can be summed up in one mood. Such an approach also suggests the idea that our imagination could be modeled topologically as a Riemannian manifold, which really begins in Plato with his interpretation of dialectics as the weaving process conjoining sensory continua, as shown by the scheme of the Divided Line and Cave Allegory, which then has been codified by Kant and numerous scholars, poets and philosophers since (Kitar? Nishida, Paul Valéry, Stéphane Mallarmé come to mind).[4]
I find ‘vibe’ to be a more useful term than ‘mood’, and a more fittingly artificial one. Where ‘mood’ signifies a state of a human individual and connotes the state’s machine-like public apparatus of emotion-signaling (I feel like X=I communicate X=I am in the state X), ‘vibe’ is both less subjective and less anthropomorphic. When it comes to art, a mood is induced like an effect of an artwork, implying a near-automatic Pavlovian reaction to a stimulus, which is absent in real life; whereas a vibe is inherited like a choreography for thoughts from an artwork, where the author originally placed it. As such, physical objects can have vibes because their aesthetic qualities can be read as a pattern which produces affective responses. This pattern can also be described without directly experiencing it, for example through language, but not necessarily natural language. After all, it’s often more convenient to whistle a melody rather than explain a melody’s movements with words. Or, to instead say, “This song made me feel like X”, where X is a known experience which requires little explanation, but contains a similar range of associations to the referenced song.
We should keep in mind, however, that a state-machine of emotions-as-signals is insufficient for conceptual thought, since while an emotion signals the state of the human agent, it too is also a physical state of the system. The state-machine architecture is insufficient for even describing its own states, let alone for creating abstract objects such as concepts in order to discern between different activities and thus conceive of evaluative ideas of art. In order to speak of much higher complexity, we need to decouple the sense from the state, and this is what language as a communal technological project of Reason enables us to do. Although accounting for natural language is best done when we look at it as a symbolic structure of many levels, I believe that the use of emotions-as-state-machine foundations also enables us to think of natural language as wired through emotional states, thus hinting at an answer to the question of how exactly concepts can lead to emotional responses. Such conceptual complexity is necessary for us to discern between languages, activities, and their teleologies, and consider art as a special case. There would be no imaginary worlds without us being able to imagine the difference between the real and the imaginary, which is a matter of conceptual difference.
5. Niche-making
Out of this Kantian idea of aesthetics arises a dilemma, best put by Husserl, which is that the logical dimension of thought is restricted by the structure of our transcendental experience. In other words, our imagination is limited to combining what is already intelligible, and this horizon can only be overcome by producing new intelligibilities; hence, art doesn’t so much invent as mostly ‘riff’ on the invented, arranging it in patterns maximizing affective responses.
Overcoming this theoretical dead-end, which indicates a direction to art that is limited to either existing art or existing experience, where novelty is simply the iteration of complexity in new combinations – a dead-end whose metaphysically-laden limitations to human experience are criticized extensively by Hegel, Cohen, Carnap and Negarestani, with the conclusion that metaphysics is a species of logic that can be pulled apart from experience – requires taking a closer look at the development of artistic practice as a history of developing and arranging a niche. Developing a niche means to partake in the construction of an environment, which in turn modifies the parameters of construction, thus resulting in a push-and-pull or dialectical process where an organism becomes subject to the second- or third-order ecology of consequences of its own actions. When it comes to the human organism – part physical and part cultural – much of its ecology is made up of information, often manipulated physically. Scaled down to a single individual, and narrowed to the field of art, a niche of artistic practice can be characterized by the continuity of a practice of decision-making within a manifold of constraining circumstances. These range from, of course, budget, but also to skills, personal memories, and so on. It is because of the multiplicity of such overlapping circumstances, which are often not just contingent but systematic, that it is often difficult to trace exactly how an artwork came to be: the entire framework of which a single artwork is a product is often opaque and not visible.
While not unique to artists, shaping one’s own environment as an artist means arranging one’s own workspace and as a result making artworks within a well-developed practice, unbinding the logic of the production process as far as possible from its public conditions, and constraining it within an ecology of one’s own making.
6. Putting the formal system of the artist together
The process of making an artwork folds into a simple scheme: an artist, any artist, makes a work by first arranging the circumstances, then starting the process of making the work and stopping when considered done. However, the process begins not with a particular goal but with a range of possible results, a range that keeps changing during the production process, and which stops according to a concept of “completed work” that is often only half-complete before the work starts. The mood or the vibe is the initial guiding light through this process, because it collapses the complex entangled relations of an artist’s life and the rules of an artist’s practice into a more focused and narrow ‘feel’.
What begins as a mechanical process of thinking with hands, i.e. deriving conceptual consequences from mechanical manipulations (building, painting, moving, drawing, writing without a particular goal in mind but with direction and the hope for discovery) is gradually subjected more and more to the needs not of the artist but of the work, of the pattern being woven. Because artistic practice is not purely accidental, like divine inspiration, but a consciously arranged and repeatable process in which inspiration, material and skill choices, initial decisions and conceptual halting decisions are all done consistently, we can speak of a deliberate construction of a system as the true producer of artworks: an informal system of which the artist is a part, but not the sole author. And as chance becomes systematically used on par with other mechanical manipulations, it too is incorporated into the informal system. By then enumerating the dimensions and constraints with which artistic “freedom” is transformed into artistic praxis, we can define the rules of such a system and thus move from the informal towards a formal system of the artist.
An initial answer and provisional conceptual decision for what art is, local to a particular work or practice, will consist of a set of demarcated dimensions and interlinked choices: its context and its audience, the medium and the skills required for it, the materials and their constraints, more abstract implications and possibilities.
As an example, an artistic practice of drawing is constituted by making the conceptual choice of adhering to a medium utilizing material marks or traces (coal, pencil) on other materials (paper, wall), which can vary between representational or purely abstract signs (representational) and symbols (repetitive signs), requiring skills like motoric coordination in order to be done consistently (such that drawn shapes are consistently representational as signs or symbols).
These material and symbolic conditions constitute the horizon of what moves are possible within such an artistic practice, resulting in drawings if one follows existing rules, i.e. publicly acknowledged cultural practices according to which a drawing is indeed a result of leaving various marks with one material on another. The horizon of possibility within such a practice can be called Search Space because it is a constrained space of acting and thinking which narrows down possible moves within it, such that singing is not a fruitful part of drawing, nor are a song or novel its expected outcomes, and thus aren’t parts of drawing practice’s Search Space. However, purely mechanical actions of marking paper with pencil are not the entirety of its Search Space, because what drives the marking, and on what basis the drawing is considered complete, also embody a spectrum of possible choices. Signs, representational marks, are semantically meaningful in that they represent objects, imagery, text, etc. and so technically, the entirety of all possible imagery known by humans is included: all public semantic space.
This suggestion is of course exaggerative, because practice already implies decisions towards which meaningful marks to make impossible; hence, the artist’s choice of topics and interests already constitutively acts like a narrow frame on the public semantic space. Still, an artist could choose potentially any element from any chosen topic, of which there could be myriads of associations. But beyond the artist, any single artwork already has internal rules, even before an artist begins the work. A rule stems from repetition and difference: by leaving a number of similar marks with a pencil on paper, an artist invents and follows a rule through repetition of a shape; by leaving marks that look like something, symbolization instantiates a representation because the marks adhere to the rules of making marks, which together comprise a symbolic image. Thus the choices for what to include and what to leave out are already based on following instantiated local and global rules within the narrow Search Space of a work being made.
On a more general level, then, all of this activity is possible because conceptual decisions are made before, during, and after the drawing, in our example. The choice of tools (and the workplace), materials (and the means to acquire them), topics (and their requisite knowledge), and skills (and the time to acquire them) are all part of the conceptual scheme where the work begins. Long before a brush is put to canvas, or a musician tunes their instrument, the work has already begun, whether an artist is in control of it or not. The making of an artwork starts with the conceptual apprehension of conditions within which it can be produced, within which context it is meaningful, and so with its general shared meaning. By constraining an abstraction of absolute unlimited freedom to a limited Search Space, a work is enabled, within which combinations of semantic and material elements are possibilized and made. Furthermore, a work begins when a human individual starts to think about making art, because her whole life serves as background knowledge – and so semantic material – for the work, and because her whole life amounts to a series of decisions which make the skills, materials, tools, time-affording social position, etc., possible.
There are of course limits to how everyone can act, not only in a judicial sense, but also in terms of the dimensions by which our freedom can be measured. We can move around in space but we cannot jump very high, for instance; we can speak a language but only if we learn it, and so on. The actions an artist can make are similarly determined by the available skills, information, tools, space, finances, language, mobility, age, physical form, knowledge, social position, historical context, known references, genre conventions, discipline, etc., at their disposal. Each of these such constraints can be considered as a dimension within which a range of movement is possible.
An artwork begins with the first steps of construction of an informal (because its principles aren’t always exposed or openly stated) system of an artist: a constructed persona, who, despite the contemporary freedom to have multiple practices, is bound to have a recognizable signature, if not of physical traces such as marks on paper, then as decisions made and relations built. The artist is a system because generations of artists have been making decisions according to a similar, recognizable pattern to which their professional lives are subjected. But the artistic system is not autonomous, like a Deleuzian machine which runs on its own and for which the human is merely one of its kind, nor is it a semi-private language game which the audience witnesses as a puzzle in need of inventing and interpreting meanings for foreign symbols. Artworks do not make themselves without the participation of both artist and audience, and they don’t have their own private lives any more than other information-theoretic facts do, despite being able to change without authorial input. The ‘idea’ for an artwork forms like a crystal in an almost complete but misshapen form, because an artist has already set up conceptual rules mentally and is herself subject to social rules, i.e. has recognized and formulated a Search Space. Whether this process occurs through physical manipulations (sketching, improvising, humming, “letting the work conceive and make itself”) or is purely mental (like a phrase or a poem that appears unwritten) and appears one day like a dream: this is a matter of difference for what the work will look or feel like, but it does not fundamentally change the principles according to which all art is conceived and made. After all, an idea is a conclusion, a statement that is produced by an intersection of mental rules, whether derived from material relations or not, and it serves as a beginning for the making of a work, during which the idea may change dramatically.
Thus the true craft at the heart of making art is the engineering of systems, of constructing rulesets, of organizing the conditions and circumstances of its own making. To maintain a large mental library of associations sorted into moods, of references that give rise to sensual associations, of styles whose application borders on linguistics: these abilities are just as important as being able to arrange the material and social conditions that make art-making and exhibiting possible.
Creativity, if we were to pinpoint its modern usage, is a matter of creating a new ruleset out of existing ones. What seems rationally ‘common sense’ changes shape once seen through a different optic, a different worldview. And, since artists routinely mix everything together while organizing their informal system qua artist-figure, creative artmaking involves organizing a worldview as well as one’s studio space on the same hierarchical level of thought. An artist’s worldview is their workspace, but it is not necessarily bound up with their personal, individual life. This is what we mean by thinking outside of the box: instead of following implicit public rules, one constructs their own out of existing conditions, thus also reorganizing what these conditions mean and are, and potentiating their transcendence.
This bounded situatedness of the artist vindicates the idea of channeling a medium, genre, conventions, etc. because an artist can and should be conscious about the dimensions within which they can act, but more often than not they are not and therefore remain in the position of being locked into seemingly contingent conventions, which greatly narrows down the spectrum of possible moves.
This is also what makes art far from universal: if an artist knows the conventions of a genre within a discipline, then these conventions are known by the audience too. Therefore, adhering to such conventions guarantees mutual understanding between artist and audience, since they follow similar rules. However, “conventions” do not occur naturally – they are the result of the collective, intergenerational abstract labor of their construction and maintenance, the result of being imbued with value.
The alienating gap, between the individual who makes art and the construct of artist qua praxis which constrains the kind of art made, is a necessity. On a purely colloquial level, the figure of the artist and the person behind that figure are not the same because the ‘artist’ is a purely imaginary, socially recognized, and virtual concept which can drive the decisions made by the individual who identifies as an artist. The artist, the brand, the concept, is a collection of rules to follow within a narrowed-down space and is potentially atemporal, while the individual human figure has their own, finite being and physical needs. An inherent flaw in historicist approaches to art history elides the distinction between these two figures and consequently denies the potential for the thought of an artist to be unbound from their historical figure. Although the decisions and events found in biographies of well-known artists, writers, performers, composers, etc. can be read as consequential for their artistic practices, it matters greatly whether the people themselves considered these to be existential or artistic decisions or events. And yet, from the wide spectrum of existing biographies, we know there have been plenty of artistic figures who have subjected their entire lives towards laboring for that imaginary figure of their own artistic praxis-persona, understandably considering the two to be indivisible.
Large language models (LLMs), and particularly their tuned and tweaked, bespoke versions like the one created by Holly Herndon[5] are prime present examples of artists as formal system arrangements. Bespoke LLMs aren’t the first to prove that you can tear apart the artist figure from the person behind the figure: brands, franchises, and the characters within them, and more importantly fictional folk characters, are first historically. But playing with these characters, using them and ventriloquising them, has required skills which aren’t needed when interacting with an LLM. Furthermore, there is the particularly heavy aspect of novelty, which automatically puts the current wave of machine learning generative art into the category of the gimmick, where whatever contents they have are subsumed by the novelty of the form.
However, synthetic languages are the simpler, clearer and more predictably deterministic version of the artist as a formal system. It is important to understand that these formalisms do not have agency: they are surrogate models constituted by honing the rulesets holding them together. Informally, an artist decides on instituting a model the moment they choose to make a work that follows a previous one, never just a work according to completely different ideas, determinations and conditions. The phrase ‘work comes out of work’, coined by Richard Serra, means precisely that kind of continuity.
7. The artwork as a choreography for thought
Artworks aren’t static objects, although they share the quality of being describable much like mathematical objects, or can be decomposed into statements like any theory. But importantly, the fact that there is no strict and precise way to interpret an artwork, but that instead it still offers a relatively narrow space of interpretation, means that accounting for an artwork with a fixed recipe-statement means to miss out on the work’s inherent aspect: its function. The function of an artwork is instructive, like a choreography for thought. It is instructive for both the artist making it – who seeks to establish, discover and unravel relations among elements in the artwork, thus turning these into coherent logics – but also instructive for the audience – who, insofar as they are able to decode the pattern, allow it to choreograph their thought processes by means of eliciting similar aesthetic and thus sensorial associations as those experienced by the artist. These associations, the ‘vibe’ of the work, is not the mood of the artist, but rather the way we mentally compose an object from patterns discerned in the real world. The vibe, or mood, then, is only an entry point, but it is an asymmetric one: for the artist all arrangements lead to a particular mood as a summary and generalization; for the audience all conclusions and interpretations lead from reading that mood and unraveling the general from the particular. Yet, in both cases a vibe or mood is constructed.
Therefore, true invention consists not in recombining existing ideas into a new whole – although, this is a legitimate approach: a genre work, where novelty is not pursued, like in commercial production or art as assets, sketches, or illustration. Instead, invention means invention of a rule which transforms what it is applied to. An artist invents a rule, applies it, incorporates the result, modifies the rule, applies it again, and so on.
But where does the rule come from? How is it itself invented? I have yet to formulate a precise mechanics for it, but it appears that a rule is the result of a hypothesis applied inferentially to existing knowledge, ideas, and objects. Accepting such a hypothesis and building up another leads to a sequence that is like building a bridge into the unknown, supported only by hypothetical supports, occasionally touching down here and there, but hopefully arriving eventually to a point of novel grounding: one accepts a hypothesis and builds with it towards another, even if the prior one will eventually dissolve. When such hypothetical constructions become an intersubjectively used and shared niche, such as with genres or styles, they also become Search Spaces which narrow down the spectrum of possible interpretations, allowing for differential discernment between styles, but also limiting the context within which ideas embedded within such a niche are able to make sense.
Now, we go to a museum and encounter guards minding that the patrons neither touch the displayed artifacts nor speak too loudly. We find the seats in a cinema to be attached to the ground in almost all cases and, surprisingly, find most of the audience stare at the projection screen in darkness for hours. And although I’ve heard an argument multiple times that no force stops me from reading a book by turning its pages in a given order from 1 to 100 and reading the text in that order as well, almost all codex books are designed deliberately in this pattern. The point is that while we are mostly free to behave in any way while in a certain social context of presentation, if we wish to extract the encoded from the encoding patterns of art within a discipline, genre, or media, we have to narrow down the spectrum of all possible meanings and actions, and follow the rules in establishing Search Space.
A painting is not just an object, but a set of instructions, a set of rules for looking at objects. The physical object we call a painting is an object that is made to carry these rules embedded in itself, through being itself made according to them, and thus aesthetically apprehensible. This is something like distributed computation, wherein certain tasks and functions are unloaded onto external prosthetic devices to lighten the load of the task for the computer. In this case, such material surrogates for thought are art. But, we can look at any surface as painting; what changes within an art context isn’t the surface itself – although that can be changed too – but the way we look at it. Thus, the idea of looking at something as a painting could be considered an hypothesis, because whatever we say about the contents of it, or whether we build a whole discourse on painting, it will be reliant on the adoption of such a general hypothesis as a painting. Therefore, the art discourse on painting at large is necessarily built upon such reticulated hypotheses within hypotheses, niches within niches and Search Spaces within Search Spaces, assumptions which are widely adopted and widely contested by many people.
8. Possibility for change within a niche, or worldmaking critique
The dependency art has on such patterns and rules, often manifested in centuries-old institutions (in social, not architectural or organizational terms) becomes even more obvious when we are confronted with cultural artifacts completely alien to us. To read a fragment of a text on ancient papyrus requires knowledge of the used language, but if the fragment is a poem, then it is likely that further and deeper knowledge of that culture will be needed. It is only because of intergenerational continuity of disciplinary practice that we are able to access certain ancient works, because institutionalized discipline contains the rules for practices which constitute the context within which shown, staged, written, and played works are meaningful. We don’t have to be present or involved in such institutions to carry on their rules, but we still have to recognize that for better or worse many of such rules cannot be put in practice extrainstitutionally.
Such compartmentalization raises a number of questions, the most interesting of which pertains to the rare but still ambiently present ambition of art from the early 20th century – that of the potential for real social change through art and the political relevance of artworks generally. There are a number of conceptual avenues in this vein: art as a lifestyle, art as a tool, art as experimental politics. By the year of 2022 it should be clear that in particular contemporary art is invested far too much in its own economy to take its “political” manifestations seriously. Without a doubt, the relations among those in the art scene are very much a continuation of larger social and political processes, and the artistic ambition shouldn’t be mere isolation towards achieving the nominal position outside all classes. The idea worth pursuing is to produce work and build lifestyles within art for export outside, and to influence the general from the position of the local.
However, a more serious problem for any art as experimental politics is that its reliance on the rules constituting art often contradicts the ambition for social change potentially dissolving such rules. What remains from this is art as a lifestyle, a lifestyle itself dependent on a society arranged in a way that provides the possibility of making, showing, exchanging and living off art.
Thus, the idea of art as a platform for experimental politics in the concrete means counterfactual modeling and “worldmaking”. It should be noted that worldmaking in art is meant in a much looser sense than, for example, its robust formulation by Nelson Goodman. Where for artists and the market, for any literary universe, franchise or discernible arrangement of elements in a particular way (like a music album) is already sufficient for worldmaking, to Goodman this would not count even as a version of an existing world. There is a crucial, but often elided, difference in the philosophical formulation of nominalism and its very liberal popular understanding, on which the idea of art as a testing ground for new points of view, ones potentially projectable onto the actual world, rests.
For Goodman, a world is a totality of an episteme (an all encompassing worldview from inside, from outside seen as a Wittgensteinian lifeform) that is robust enough in its grasping of the real so as to become a paradigm, a stage in the development of Hegelian Spirit. A version of the world, then, is an internal variation on that world, where the existing linguistic, scientific, and artistic frameworks are seen as nature, and the particular hermeneutics branch into a version. In this formulation, fictional worlds such as a fantasy novel wouldn’t qualify as worlds or even versions, because their arrangements are dependent on compartmentalized existing rules of which a particular version of a particular world is constituted.
The dependency of the most esoteric fictional world on natural language and concepts of the actual world signifies that art is only ever meaningful if it is not completely original, for otherwise we lack a point of entry. In other words, while it is possible to achieve a totally original way of encoding information, it is not desirable to encode totally original information. Here, once again, we see the difference between mathematics, which can merrily proceed to bootstrap itself within a closed volume of its own formal dimensionality, and art, which comes close to having its own closed volume of discourse (e.g. music that is built upon music, literature that comes out of literature, painting being its own discourse, etc.) but, importantly, loses its value when its original structures of encoding are seen as purely empty, ‘formalist’ constructions, which are actually only meaningful in application and as seen through the conceptual lens of the socially constituted context of art.
Of course, none of this closes the door on the modal possibility of finding a path from aesthetics to ethics, from art to politics. We could very well look at art as a field for the construction of virtual prosthetic formalisms which extend our epistemic capacities, which could perhaps lead to a reconstitution of our point of view, where the ambitions of art come close to theory.
9. Impossibility of a determinate program for art
The final proposition in the program for a formal system of the artist is to explicate the very process of making art, and in particular of what’s colloquially called “creativity”. It would take an entire encyclopedia to list all the existing definitions of art-making, let alone creativity, but that is not my goal here. Still, we can roughly estimate that a significant development has occurred since the times of Ancient Greece, where inspiration – we still use ‘inspiration’ as a term approximately meaning the desire to match the world to its conceived model, i.e. the urge to impose what is not on what is, but my point in what follows is that this urge is constructible – was a matter of divine contingency potentially occurring to anyone, where now today inspiration is a matter of arranging one’s own mental workspace through compiling a canon of references and existing works. Until recently, this was a highly professionalized practice, but which has now become widespread across internet platforms as a common activity in and of itself (see Tumblr for instance, or Tiktok for a more advanced and compressed form, or Twitter’s shitposting genre, all of which are preceded by calibrating yourself and getting inspired, so to speak, by a specific type of content on the platform, and then a producing similar one).
It is within this digital landscape, where every artifact can be quantified – because each artifact is already in a sense pre-filtered from the real world by means of being present online – that aesthetic theories such as the aforementioned theory of ‘vibe’ become salient. This isn’t limited to just artworks either, which is why aesthetics becomes a more and more politically notable concept. If we can quantify the elements constituting the sense of ‘noir’ film, for example, online we can quantify a ‘type of guy’ by enumerating the particular artifacts resulting from the person’s online behavior, and thus construct aesthetic categories of the human, even if these are ironically-laden. A similar operation is possible in offline daily life, but there we might be more likely to sort ‘types of guy’ by their smell or shape of the chin, their sway of the hips while walking, etc. rather than just through the statements and decisions they make. This difference marks an important leap of an essentially aesthetic apparatus into one that works with prearranged information through online representation.
Within this theoretical view, ‘creativity’ becomes a very concrete term signifying the maximization of the affective qualities of a combination of existing elements, therefore choosing such elements that are the most aesthetically titillating and the most compact structurally, while triggering the largest amount of sensations by association. Such a combinatorial approach inches suspiciously close to axiomatic thinking: if we put a few unrelated but aesthetically titillating elements together in a blender, how many possible meaningful combinations will arise? Ideally, if we choose the most concise one, i.e. the shortest possible function that gives rise to the maximum possible aesthetic associations, we get a good artwork. Put differently, a combinatorial approach to art-making has the form of “logical consequences from a set of sentences/elements X” and, with a criterion of complexity encoded in simplicity, it appears to be much more than a brute force method of combining things at random.
Although the idea of building the foundations of mathematics within a formal program through a limited number of axioms, envisioned by Hilbert, has foundered, it has found its way into philosophy. As Mark Wilson has shown,[6] the historical foundations for using axioms to build and account for theories is problematic for a long list of reasons, not least of which is the overt idealization of models and the arbitrary choice of what to include within a model, which axiom to posit, and which to exclude. More importantly for art, axiomatic thinking has a long history as a philosophical mode of bracketing arguments within a closed system. The example of the importance of foundations and unity of mathematics shows that if such a project was achievable we would be able to navigate the whole field of pure math without worry. However, such ambitious projects also hinged on the idea of classic logic being the only true logic, one reflecting the true relations of objects in the universe, then taken to a symbolic level, an argument itself dependent on metaphysical assumptions implicit in its strongest argument by Tarski in the permutation invariance thesis.[7]
It appears to me that Jean Cavaillès’ short treatise On Logic and the Theory of Science[8] points to the problematic of imagining a unity of sciences or even mathematics, because such a proposition would be ahistorical, although not in the sense of historical facts, movements, etc. but in terms of formal history. What Cavaillès had in mind, and what I think uncannily applies to art – in general, within the discipline, but even within one artwork – is that mathematics is a discipline of formal construction with a formal history, which is a concatenation of fields, movements and logics. This takes issue with reduction into one program and one logic, because such reduction would also mean reduction in complexity, as the idea is to provide a way to construct all consequences from a limited set of premises. To date, mathematics has not resolved its problem of bracketing its own system, nor has it provided a tool to enumerate all of its relations within one system (although, category theory seems to be the latest contender).
But, would such a move even be possible for art? Could we say that all art is developed from a similar set of conditions towards quantifiable consequences, with clearly defined logic? It would be possible to argue that the similarity of all human perceptual apparatuses means similar premises, that a conception of a Transumweltic field of all possible experiences would also provide a means to account for the abstractions of art objects as real objects, but from there on out conditions and niches constructed differ dramatically, and it is then a matter of recorded and maintained personal and institutional histories, without which art and the possibility of its experience disappears.
Perhaps we could at least stipulate that a single artwork amounts to a single, closed logical system. But even this is an issue. Consider a song, which consists of overlapping systematic relations: rhythm of its overall sound, words, pitch, tone of singing, etc. Even such a simple list amounts to a very large manifold of associations arising from each “dimension” and each has its own logic of repetition and difference. And of course, the song itself is already a system of systems. In other words, much like any scientific discipline, a single artwork or a whole genre is necessarily a result of grafting many logics onto each other, and not necessarily in a hierarchical manner. Our most effective method of building such an abstract object, through adhering to a most concise folding of it in a vibe or mood, still does not equip us with a way to say that a sad song is both a song and “sad” outside of the edifice of conventions which enable it to be both.
Finally, one wonders in what way, if not through the reduction of first-order predicate logic, we can speak of axioms when it comes to non-formalized subjects. The idea of axiomatic formulation is to draw logical consequences from premises. But mathematics is unambiguous about drawing consequences among its symbols – there is no “second layer of meaning” behind its symbols – while even a single artwork contains multiple dimensions of interpretation, each of which leads down its own associative path, even when contextually confined within a set of social rules according to which an artwork is read and each in turn asserting its own logic. Therefore, I consider a static and closed way of modeling, such as through axioms, insufficient for art. Instead, a dynamic model is needed, one that is as different from a non-deterministic program as to a deterministic one. This would be a program that modifies itself, but the substrate, the device on which it runs, is the figure of an artist put into motion by a human individual.
10. The technical side of creativity; a non-deterministic program
The way a non-deterministic program for making an artwork works would be the following: an artist starts out with an idea as a rough scheme for the range of possible results of the object, then starts making it, holding onto a particular mood within which such an object is meaningful. Although the way the process of making shakes out depends on the media and discipline, in the abstract the process can be described as creating a coherent pattern with repeating elements, each of which elicits a range of associations. This definition provides a good rule-of-thumb target: a concise work, which contains just enough elements to elicit complex associations but requires less input than a comparable artwork which might try to describe such associations literally.
Interrelated elements form systematic relations: for example, a mark made by pencil on paper repeats, and through repetition forms a larger shape. Other shapes may appear, but they still require the repetition of some aspects. The artist keeps adding elements, and they don’t always work out the way they’re conceptualized; in fact, a lot of the time the result differs from what has been imagined. The proper thing to do then is to incorporate the result into the scheme, and instead of attempting to create an element which better represents the previously imagined, to adjust the imagination and the mood to the achieved result. During this interaction the mood of the artist, as a weathervane guiding the artist’s decisions, gets gradually modulated and replaced by the resulting elements. As a result, the artist is not trying to represent what makes sense according to their mood, but rather what makes sense according to the mood of the artwork – hence, the usefulness of the term ‘vibe’, which allows for description of a mood without anthropomorphic constraints.
A sentence with metaphors contains more associative information than a plain one. Construction of such compact multi-logical patterns is prima facie an artist’s job and the specific application of the mechanics of creativity. A simple but meaningful sentence has a certain logic, but the inclusion of elements such as metaphor, analogy, alliteration, etc. introduces a different logic that ideally works in tune with the parent sentence. It is pointless however to introduce just random things – although, variations on a brute force method of matching patterns has always existed in art. The idea is to establish a practice that is able not only to stumble once upon a titillating combination of words but to do so over and over again.
This dialectical way of making can be modeled using Abductive Inference,[9], particularly in the reading of Lorenzo Magnani who has expanded on the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce,[10] but also many others like Thagard, Nersessian, and Hutchins, the latter of whom came up with the idea of experimental maps. For scientists, an experimental map is a choreography of concepts, models and physical objects. Incorporating objects and concepts within one scheme allows one to manipulate and create consistent, coherent, and conclusive relations between formal arguments and objects, as well as informal or unknown arguments. This framework helps to create a model of “creative action” that defines an action which creates new concepts, objects, and artworks. A similar dynamic could be described through the development of logical constructs or other formalisms (e.g. playing with sound may result in music, playing with movement may result in choreography, play with words in poetry: where playing means choosing intuitively what feels a specific way and extending, iterating and repeating the pattern) where logic (in the abstract, not e.g. first-order predicate logic) leads us beyond the limits of the human imagination, which is bounded by our experiential structural encoding of all semanticity through aesthetic categories.
You can write a beautiful sentence, be led by its elements towards something that sounds good, then read it and realize what it means, and finally approve of this new meaning to which you have been led mechanically, that is, by shuffling symbols around one is led towards a new semantic arrangement. Similar principles abound in every other medium: a painter arranges shapes and colors, comes to recognize and accept their logic, and develops it further, although the manipulations are physical rather than mental; a dancer finds a choreography not according to what it feels like to move, but how what it looks like from outside might feel like; a musician finds surprising flows and combinations, and tends to their repetition and development, almost entirely mechanically. These examples indicate how mechanical manipulations can reach outside the limits of the imagination, but they can also be performed mentally, which is what coming up with an idea is like.
Therefore, the idea of creativity is a matter of building upwards by means of succeeding hypotheses, but an object can also serve as a hypothesis. In some cases where art history has been recorded sufficiently, we can trace the path taken by artists through their entire career and sometimes down to the detail of a singular work, although hopefully I’ve made it clear that such a singular account is inevitably dependent on being a product of a niche.
American sculptor Richard Serra provides a fitting example for progressively unbinding the internal logic of his work into a niche of his own making: massive labyrinthine arrangements of serpentine corten steel sculptures are the result of unleashing (with little constraint and bigger budgets) his large-scale urban area works, designed for walking through. These are themselves an adaptation, in a folded form for a confined city space, of his landscape-scale site-specific works in parks, which were themselves the result of stacking big chunks of steel, large-scale drawings and wedging massive plates in gallery corners. This process of leaning lead casts against each other was itself a byproduct of his previous work which involved throwing molten lead at walls, a particular application of his programmatic transitive verbs poetry list, which also included video art with said actions. This was preceded by works with rubber belts which could assume different positions and perform different actions, and these works grew out of interest with Arte Povera-style unusual materials, first tried out in his exhibition of assemblages made with live and stuffed animals.
The point is that there is little connection between those assemblages (based on already-internal art world premises of styles and previous works) and massively indulgent steel sculptures on an architectural scale, except via the artist himself.[11] Serra created a narrative justification for his entire path when he said that all the raw material for his work is contained in the memory of visiting a shipyard and witnessing a ship launch, as the massive heavy object turned into a buoyant and floating one. It also marks a particular sensorial vibe or mood, to which he adhered his whole career, to the idea of recreating the conditions within which it arises. Still, he also said that “work comes out of work” and indeed spent a significant amount of time working in a steel mill. Following such a biographical path reveals two aspects of an artistic career: it is never the achievement of a single person but the result of interaction with an environment made up of other agents and institutions comprising a niche ecology; yet, the resulting step-by-step evolution of thinking and making work is not simply the product of circumstances, contexts, as we would require at least a few more of Serra’s to prove such a thesis. Something else is afoot, a process that amounts to neither ecological determinism (an artist merely summarizes the historical context) nor an exercise of heroically liberated agency (an artist does as she pleases, is always free from circumstances).
Similar paths can be traced not only through the careers of famous artists, but through the making of any object, physical or not, that we call art. The relevance of the example of Serra’s arriving at his most successful work is not as a biographical exegesis, or a blueprint for how to be an artist, but in its explication of niche construction, a process that develops historically and takes its own results as premises for further bootstrapping and revision. Colloquially, this is precisely what people refer to when they talk about artistic freedom, although paradoxically, such freedom is constituted by inventing constraints within an ever-narrowing mental workspace. It is the freedom of a conceptual-informal system of the artist, but not of the individual behind it. Furthermore, we do not need to know the genealogy of the art we see in order to engage with it, although in my experience this biographical, historical contextualization remains the most approachable way to enter any work or to follow its rules. We may follow the rules of a game without having a formal understanding but only mere acquaintance of seeing it played. We may be subject to the rule either because we are on the receiving end of its application, or because we do not yet have an adequate conceptual apparatus to grasp it, or because we see it as contingent but not repeatable due to our situated point of view.
11. Unresolved questions and value theory.
Coming to the end of this outline, I must acknowledge that unresolved problems remain, and they aren’t trivial. The most significant problem is that of a theory of value, which is akin to the theory of general relativity explaining the gravity of choices and decisions within the described framework coming into conflict with all the intricate logics and mechanics on the lower level of individual artworks. One approach is to relate thought to sensation as grounding, that is, in order for thought not to seem like it’s spinning in the void, grasping nothing in particular, it ought to “catch” onto something, and that catching is empirically affirmed, or to put it simply, felt. It is important to remember that if all our thought is ultimately either encoded or leads to sense-associations capable of triggering emotional states, then we can also reconstruct such associations mentally and have constructed experiences. In a way, this is exactly what art deals in. Yet this also contradicts the idea that if something feels right it is most likely right in the real world, because the edifice of any such experience is constructible.
A good artwork is like a bite of a fresh apple. It is unpleasant to imagine a flavorless world, one where culture is mere information, none of which resonates in aesthetic ways. But we should still remember that the pleasure of taste is not equal to truth, even if it is all we have. It may be enough for an artist and often sufficient in daily life, but it does not move us even a little bit towards understanding why certain apples taste fresh or why certain political movements are paradoxically appealing.
The feeling of being right is not an indication of perceiving the hidden structure of the real in nature but rather the possibility of such a structure within the nature of our knowledge. This feeling, then, is a logical, constructive possibility within our actual worldview. This describes a reality akin to that of mathematicians’ understanding of Platonism: we do not necessarily imbue belief into immanent invisible objects but into the reality of such objects, because it is realistic to construct them, i.e. the conditions of mathematical possibility are equated with modal possibility and thus reality.
Perhaps the true solution to the problem of the theory of value as the theory of mental gravity lies in avoiding the outdated manner of modeling it through a substance-theoretical position of a static model. It is no secret that many subjects change upon our inquiring into them, and that we lack physical tools for accessing human thought. But whenever we come up with theoretical tools to account for the contents of our minds, we inevitably also change our minds. The revolution in thinking inflected by formal logic is an indicative example of such change, a revolution that also warps our understanding of prior logics. Perhaps today we are amidst a similar revolution where the volume of information accessible online necessitates its compression into ‘vibes’, where we automatically sort information into mood-domains. All of such changes are stages, perhaps in the development of Hegelian Spirit – although I’m inclined to say there is more than one, in Goodmanian fashion.
Therefore, it seems to me that a theory of value isn’t static either, and what gives weight to certain thoughts but not others should have a functionalist, process-based model which describes not what value or its formula is but what it does and how it does it. Perhaps, at the end of such an inquiry there is a different answer than the one I currently give to the question of whether there is a path from art to ethics and thus to social change.
12. Conclusion
To be an artist is to invent a figure of the artist, an abstraction by which you as a person may become known, and then work for its fulfillment, ventriloquising that abstraction while living your life in a way that benefits this abstraction. One could say this is nominalism in praxis, a conscious development of a specific, unique and individual worldview. But no such informal system of an artist, no such figure exists entirely free from the conventions by which it is in fact constituted. Conversely, this abstraction is meaningful only insofar as it is constructed within the given, existing dimensions which are social rules. Do artists have real freedom? Or are they merely extensions of global social currents? It seems to me that, within a smaller, confined space of niches they can weave, there is true freedom. But this is not the total freedom of making both your works and your life as you wish. An artist is a symbol of social boundaries and playing by and with its rules. And, to find a way beyond these representational, social, genre, disciplinary and media conventions, we should at least be conscious of what constitutes us, as this given map may be recognized not as our nature, but as an artifice which is subject to revision.
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Notes
[1] See Longinus, “On the Sublime” in Aristotle: Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
[2] See Gabriel Catren, “Pleromatica, or Elsinore’s Drunkenness” in BREAKING THE SPELL: Contemporary Realism under Discussion eds. Sarah De Sanctis and Anna Longo (Mimesis International, 2015).
[3] See Peli Grietzer, “A Theory of Vibe” in Glass Bead Site 1 (2017). <(http://www.glass-bead.org/article/a-theory-of-vibe/?lang=enview)>.
[4] Note how the idea of compressing complexity within a vibe is reliant on a structuration of the world that is being encoded, meaning both the thought-independent world as perceived and the world of thoughts. There is a bifurcation here which forces us to choose between either a phenomenology of the world-structure grasped through aesthetics, or a linguistic structuration where natural language plays the primary role of providing the surrogate inferential framework for the world with which we primarily interact and reference, and of which phenomena are the second order effects. I tend to hold the latter position. For more on the necessities of an inferential framework within art, see J.-P. Caron, “On Constitutive Dissociations as a Means of World-Unmaking: Henry Flynt and Generative Aesthetics Redefined” in e-flux #115 (2021). <https://www.e-flux.com/journal/115/374421/on-constitutive-dissociations-as-a-means-of-world-unmaking-henry-flynt-and-generative-aesthetics-redefined/> See also J.-P. Caron, “Place and Scale” in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 17:2 (2021): 162–184. Retrieved from <https://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/991>.
[5] See https://holly.plus/ and https://mirror.xyz/herndondryhurst.eth/eZG6mucl9fqU897XvJs0vUUMnm5OITpSWN8S-6KWamY.
[6] See Mark Wilson, Imitation of Rigor: An Alternative History of Analytic Philosophy (OUP, 2021).
[7] See Catarina Dutilh Novaes, “The Different Ways in which Logic is (said to be) Formal” in History and Philosophy of Logic 32:4 (2011): 303 – 332.
[8] See Jean Cavaillès, On Logic and the Theory of Science trans. and eds. Knox Peden and Robin Mackay (Falmouth/New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2021).
[9] Abductive inference or cognition is a tighter, cleaner formulation of the principles of dialectic which were stated first by Plato. But, it fundamentally depends on the assertion of a rule.
[10] See Lorenzo Magnani, Abductive Cognition. The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning (Heidelberg/Berlin: Springer Science+Business Media, 2009).
[11] In fact the epic legal battle against the removal of his Tilted Ark sculpture is example enough that not only his work, but his thinking, were by this point unbound from the public.