Artwork as a Social Kind

By Sun Min L

1 Introduction

During the Socratic seminar on aesthetics hosted by the NYU undergraduate philosophy forum, one of the major points of disagreement was ‘what is art?’. This attempt towards defining “art” or “artwork”, however, is not only pertinent to the seminar. In fact, there have too been numerous attempts in history to define what art(work) is. However, even today, philosophers and art theorists alike fail to arrive at a consensus as to both what art is and whether it is even possible to define artwork or not. Clarifying the necessary conditions that are conjointly sufficient in defining artwork is especially difficult because of counterexamples or edge cases, such as Duchamp’s Fountain, John Cage’s 4′33″, or Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, that are created in order to counter the traditional notion of art through their creation.

This challenge in defining art inspired Neo-Wittgensteinians to argue along the line of Wittgenstein’s method of family resemblances to claim that art(work) is impossible to define. In particular, Morris Weitz’s Open Concept Argument, which takes a “resemblance-to-a-paradigm” (Adajian, “The Definition of Art”) approach, emphasizes the openness of the concept of art. The approach states that in order to incorporate the everchanging and expansive nature of art, art should be an open concept and therefore, we must focus on the resemblance between artworks within a paradigm when trying to identify them.

I will further analyze the Neo-Wittgensteinian approach to shed light on its insight - that there exist paradigms in the art world. Then I will use the Kuhnian concept of paradigm model and Semantic Externalism to illustrate that art(work) is an objective kind and that the practice of art and the status of an artwork is socially constructed within the social layers of the artistic community. To this end, I will show that art(work) exists as a social construct.

2 Shortcomings of Neo-Wittgensteinianism and its implications

In trying to define the necessary and sufficient conditions, Wittgenstein put forth the need to “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (PI 66; qtd. in Biletzki, “Ludwig Wittgenstein”), a method commonly known as the family resemblances. This method was later used by several philosophers, classified as Neo-Wittgensteinian, to identify artworks. One notable Neo-Wittgensteinian, Weitz argued that art is impossible to define due to its expansive nature, and that resemblances to existing paradigms is then the only way to identify artworks.

The basic intuition behind the method of family resemblances and the open concept argument is that despite the lack of strict linguistic criteria that define the necessary and sufficient conditions for an object to be what it is called, there is no difficulty in identifying the object from its resemblance to other objects that are identified under the same name (e.g. chair). This too is the case for artworks: for example, paintings are identified with respect to their resemblances to each other, all of which we already consider to be “paintings”.

However, as Carroll points out in his book Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction, this approach is problematic because everything resembles one other in some sense (222-223). For instance, if a miniature of a chair were to be made out of clay, we could point to it and say it looks like a chair because of its physical resemblance to the chairs that we sit on, but would not call that clay chair a chair because of it does not embody the function of a chair. Yet, to focus on functionality is to claim many objects could be defined as other objects: a bed could be a chair too since it is something we can sit on. Thus, the method of family resemblances falls into a major loophole. If objects were to be defined only based on their resemblances to one another, we would be overlooking the intertwined relationship between the linguistic identification of objects, their functionalities, and physical appearances and instead flattening the world into different paradigms of objects that look similar.

This problem can easily be applied to the art world. In 2019, there was an artwork at the Art Basel Miami called Comedian, by Maurizio Cattelan, which was essentially just a banana duct-taped to a wall. If we accept that the Comedian is a piece of art (which the artistic community did by accepting the piece at one of the most respected art fairs in the world), then via the method of family resemblance, the bananas that I purchase every week at the grocery store could be identified as an artwork. Similarly, the toilet in my college dorm room could be a piece of art due to its resemblance to Duchamp’s Fountain, or the silence in the Bobst library on a Friday night could be a piece of art due to its resemblance to John Cage’s 4’33’’. In this way, resemblances are too arbitrary to be a criterion for qualification to be a member of a paradigm.

When using the open concept argument to define what an artwork is, it results in a major logical fallacy that any object could be a work of art. However, this concept still provides two valuable insights: (1) art is incredibly difficult to define and (2) there are paradigms of different arts that we refer to them when we identify art(works). In reality, when we identify artworks, there exist paradigms - binding things of the same “kind” or a movement within the practice of art that we comfortably identify the artworks with (e.g. Expressionist paintings, Science fictions, French New Wave films, etc). Most of the artworks do seem to refer to an existing paradigm, except for a few edge cases of revolutionary artworks that mark a start of a new paradigm (ready-made as an artwork) such as Duchamp’s Fountain. From here, I will argue that these artworks that are deemed as counterexamples by theorists are similar to the anomalies of scientific discovery that sparks crisis science and eventually starts a new paradigm in the Kuhnian philosophy of science.

3 Kuhnian concept of paradigm and its application to the art world

To further delve into the paradigm model and apply it to the art world, it must first be shown what the paradigm model is and what about it makes it a potentially applicable model for understanding the practices of art. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn introduced the paradigmatic model in his writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The concept of paradigm is a framework that the scientific community implements when developing scientific enquiries. Unlike Popper’s popular notion that science is merely about falsification, the everyday practice of science is more of a mundane development of existing paradigms (normal science). It is only when scientific anomalies that deem the existing paradigms inadequate accumulate that the crisis science that investigates those anomalies emerges and eventually shifts the paradigm.

Again, the concept of paradigm gives a valuable intuition for understanding how the artistic community differentiates the status of artwork from a mere artifact. There exist multiple paradigms within the art world, as Weitz suggested, that we adhere to when identifying arts. For instance, when we identify Edgar Allan Poe’s poem as a romantic literature or Jackson Pollock's painting as an abstract expressionist art piece, we are referring to the existing paradigms within the art history that the artifact corresponds to, which shows the existence of various paradigms in the art world. There are few anomalies that cannot be categorized with existing paradigms, such as Duchamp’s fountain or Edmond de Belamy, the first Artificial Intelligence generated portrait that was sold for $432,500 at the auction house Christie's in 2018. These anomalies are not counterexamples that reject the definition of art. Instead, they are revolutionary works of art that start a new paradigm (dadaism and artificial intelligence generated art, respectively).

The major difference between the practice of science and that of the arts in the paradigmatic model is that there lacks a sense of epistemological hierarchy in the art world. When we say that there has been a paradigm shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism, it implies that the paradigm of heliocentrism is closer to the “truth” compared to the paradigm of geocentrism. In this way, paradigm shifts equates progress in science. Yet, there is no dominant paradigm that is epistemologically superior in the practice of art. Although there is a movement that is popular among the artists and viewed as “trendy” by the general public at a given period of time, we generally accept that just because Abstractionist paintings are more modern than Baroque paintings does not mean that it is in any sense better or closer to the objective beauty.

Regardless of the differences, the paradigm model provides an empirically accurate depiction of the practice of arts and sciences. The paradigm model is essentially different from the method of family resemblances as it gives room for the rise of new paradigms that can help provide an explanation for new forms of artwork. I have explained so far how different paradigms of art(work) exist and how that the artistic community contributes to forming such paradigms. Now, I am going to introduce the notion of Semantic Externalism and show how that leads to Art being an objective kind.

4 Art-kind as an objective kind

There is one presupposition that I have to make here in order to argue that art(work) exists as an objective kind: Semantic Externalism is a notion that meaning is partly determined by social and natural factors. According to Haslanger, “terms or concepts pick out an objective type, by virtue of the fact that their meaning is determined by ostension of paradigms together with an implicit extension to things of the same type as the paradigms” (398). In other words, if there are paradigms, which is the case in the arts as the ordinary language users, competently refer to them, there too is an objective type of which the paradigms are paradigms.

If you ask someone, ‘what is art(work)?’, he or she would answer it is what the artists do or make in particular artworks or examples of artifacts that are in the art gallery (folk meaning/concept of art). If you ask the same person ‘what paradigm does Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings belong to?’, he or she would confidently say fantasy fiction, the genre. Even if the ordinary English users do not know the “nature of a kind” or what the precise semantic meaning of art(work) is, there is a “division of linguistic labor” where we defer to the experts to determine the meaning/concept of the artwork in which the determining process would be similar to that of the scientific discovery model in the Kuhnian concept of paradigm. As Lopes puts it: “non-experts who are ignorant about the nature of a kind might share a concept of the kind with experts—those who do know the kind’s nature—by deferring to those experts” (69).

To this end, to determine the extension of the word “art” or “artwork”, we must first identify the paradigm it refers to, such as a painting or a derivative of the kind like an abstract painting. Then we must extend the reference to the same kinds. The ostension to paradigms implies that the meaning or the concept of the word is an objective type when presupposing semantic-- or as Haslanger phrases, objective type - externalism.

Haslanger’s argument on extending the reference of paradigms to the same kinds by looking at the similarities may seem to resemble the method of family resemblance and its fallacy. However, the critical difference is that while the method of family resemblance does not provide an explanation on how we assign or value similarities, Haslanger’s argument explains the process in which we divide the linguistic labor of judging the similarity. According to Haslanger, we defer to the linguistic and social community the task of determining the nature of a kind, yet still refer to the same kind.

5 Art-kind as a social kind

If semantic externalism is true and art exists as an objective kind, then what is its kind (as it is clearly not a natural kind)? Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art states that:

(1) An artist is a person who participates with understanding in the making of a work of art.

(2) A work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public.

(3) A public is a set of persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to understand an object which is presented to them.

(4) The artworld is the totality of all artworld systems.

(5) An artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public

(Dickie 1984; qtd. in Caroll, 227)

What Dickie’s framework reveals is that the action of granting an object the status as an artwork is done through underlying social rules within a social network called the art world. The ontological status of an art is constituted in a social structure (artistic community). Therefore, the act of making, designating, and understanding art are all social affairs. This resembles the aforementioned application of the Kuhnian paradigm model to the practice of art in a sense it proposes an empirically true framework or account in which the artistic community (art world) engages in the development of art(work).

Searle gives an account on how social institutions confer a status of being a social kind:

what it is for some social kind, F, to be F is for it to be collectively believed to be F

(Searle 1995; qtd. in Adajian, “The Definition of Art'')

This matches the semantic of the folk concept of the art(work), which is that art is art because it is collectively believed by the consensus of the artistic community that certain artifacts refer to an artistic paradigm.

One might object to the institutional theory on the grounds of elitism and argue that there exists art(work) outside of the art world. If a man residing on a deserted island crafts a magnificent sculpture, why would not it be a work of art? Is a theory that accounts only for the known art or artworks within a social network enough?

My response to the objection is that I can draw a stick figure doodle on my notebook or conduct a pseudo-scientific experiment by dropping a mentos to coca-cola to examine the eruption and call it a practice of art and science, respectively. However, neither the experts nor the ordinary English users would view my endeavors as a work of science or art. Unless we accept a radically pluralist definition of art in which everything can be/is an art, there should be a certain normative criterion for distinguishing art and non-art.

6 Conclusion

What I wanted to do here is to try to explain the discrepancy between puzzlement caused by anomalies when defining art and our confident categorization of artworks to specific paradigms. It seems to me to be the case that we defer to the artistic community when identifying artworks and that the artistic community ultimately confers the status of being an artwork to artifacts. To conclude, work of art is a social construct as the identification and realization of the meaning is done within a social environment called the artistic community or the art world.

Works Cited

Adajian, Thomas. “The Definition of Art.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2018, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2018. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/art-definition/.

Biletzki, Anat, and Anat Matar. “Ludwig Wittgenstein.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2020, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2020. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/wittgenstein/.

Bird, Alexander. “Thomas Kuhn.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2018, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2018. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entrieshomas-kuhn/.

Carroll, Noël (1999). Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction. Routledge.

Haslanger, Sally. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford University Press. oxford.universitypressscholarship.com, https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199892631.001.0001/acprof-9780199892631. Accessed 23 Mar. 2021.

Lopes, Dominic McIver. Beyond Theories of Art. Oxford University Press. oxford.universitypressscholarship.com, https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199591558.001.0001/acprof-9780199591558-chapter-2. Accessed 19 Mar. 2021.