Nelson Goodman “When is Art?”

1906-1998
•	Ran an art gallery in the 1930s in Boston.
•	1941 completed Phd.
•	(1906-1998) was a professor of philosophy at Harvard University.  Worked in epistemology and philosophy of science, as well as aesthetics.
•	Languages of Art  1968
•	Ways of Worldmaking 1978 
When is Art?
•	Can you just put in the symbols?
•	Are symbols just extrinsic to the work?
•	When we think of symbolic work we think of Bosch, Goya, Unicorn tapestries, Dali
•	Next slide, “Temptation of St. Anthony” by Heronymous Bosch  1500  Central Panel

Francisco Goya, “Fight with Cudgels” 1823

•	We classify works as symbolic if they have symbols for their subject matter, or they are depicting symbols.
•	So portraits, still-lifes and landscapes count as non-symbolic.

•	But when we classify the non-symbolic we limit ourselves to things without subjects, like abstract art, or buildings.
•	To represent is to symbolize.
•	So representational works are symbolic according to one way of talking, and not according to another.

•	Many contemporary artists and critics want to isolate the work from whatever it symbolizes.  [He is probably thinking of Bell and his followers, especially Clement Greenberg in visual art, and Monroe Beardsley in literature.]
•	Next slide Morris Louis, “Dalet Kaf,” 1959.

•	They [the purists or formalists] advocate the view that what a picture symbolizes is external to it as a work of art. 
•	And that we should concentrate on the intrinsic not the extrinsic.

•	The idea that pure art avoids all external reference seems like sound thinking.
•	But there is a dilemma.

All right and all wrong!
•	If we accept this formalist or purist view we think that the content of Bosch’s or Goya’s work is irrelevant, which would seem wrong.
•	We should recognize the purist position as all right and all wrong.
•	Another wrong part: what a thing symbolizes is not always external to it.  
•	Goodman then gives four examples of words or phrases that apply to themselves, like “having seven syllables.”

•	So, what some symbols symbolize does not lie entirely outside the symbols.
•	Does any work that represents nothing meet the purist demand?  No.  Some of Bosch’s paintings of monsters represent nothing for there are no such monsters anywhere but in such pictures.

•	To say a picture represents a unicorn is to say only that it is a unicorn-picture, not that there are any unicorns. (The Unicorn Tapestry, South Netherlandish

•	Let’s agree however that such pictures are representational in character and so not pure, although this would require modification of the purist claim.
•	Also, an abstract work that represents nothing may express and so symbolize a feeling or idea.  

•	The purist is forced to reject abstract expressionist [like the next image Franz Kline, “Painting #2,” 1954] as well as representational works.
•	A pure work of art would neither represent nor express.
•	Granted the work only has its own properties.
•	However, all the properties any work has are the properties of that work.

•	Helen Frankenthaler,
•	“Canal” 1963
Is there external vs. internal?
•	It might then be claimed that a nonrepresentational non-expressive work has no external properties.
•	But any picture has both external and internal properties:  getting rid of representation and expression does not get rid of external properties.
•	The distinction itself is muddled.  A color or shape is internal but it may be shared by other objects and hence relates the object to other objects having the same colors or shapes.
Formalism
•	Some use the word “formal” instead, but the term cannot mean shape alone:  it must include color [as Bell observed vs. Kant]
•	Which properties are formal?  What about texture, size and material? What is the principle involved in separating properties?

Samples
•	An ordinary swatch of textile in a sample book samples texture, color, weave.
•	Two stories:
•	Mary Tricias wanted material just like the sample and got several hundred small pieces.
•	She then wanted cupcakes just like the sample cupcake and got one huge cake.

•	Moral:  a sample is the sample of some of its properties but not others. 
•	The cupcake sample was a sample of color, shape, AND size, but not of “baked on this day.”

•	Which of its properties the sample is a sample of differs from case to case.  For example, one could use an upholsterer’s sample as a sample of an upholsterer’s sample, and then size and shape would be relevant.
•	A sample exemplifies some of its properties.  

•	Friendship is similar:  my friends are not distinguished by one property or one cluster of properties but only by standing for a period of time in the friendship relationship to me.
•	The properties that count in a purist painting are those that the picture not only possesses but exemplifies.

•	The picture makes them manifest, exhibits them and heightens them in our consciousness. [relate to Danto’s “is”]
•	So even a purist’s purest painting symbolizes in that it exemplifies certain properties, and to exemplify is to symbolize:  exemplification is a kind of reference.

Robert Ryman, Untitled (1958)
10.125 inches square, enamel on linen. Collection SFMOMA.

•	“A work of art …free of representation and expression, is still a symbol even though what it symbolizes be not things or people or feelings but certain patterns of shape, color, texture that it shows forth.”  245
•	Agreed:  what is extraneous is extraneous, and what a picture represents often matters little.
•	But representation and expression are not the only symbolic functions of paintings.
•	There are no works without symbols.

•	This is not to condemn purist art, but to attack the usual manifestos advocating it.
•	Recognition of the symbolic function even of purist painting gives us a clue to the problem of when we have a work of art.
•	 The literature of aesthetics has many desperate attempts to answer “What is art?”  

Based on Problem Cases!
•	“found art” [think of Duchamp’s “Fountain”]
•	Consider a stone picked up in a driveway and exhibited in a museum. 
Is a smashed automobile fender in an art gallery a work of art?.
John Chamberlain, S 1959

•	What of digging and filling in of a hole in Central Park.  Claes Oldenberg?
•	“October 1, 1967, gravediggers hired by Claes Oldenburg worked from 10:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. to create a 6-foot-wide by 3-foot-deep hole in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After a lunch break, the work which he named "Placid Civic Monument" was refilled and smoothed over. "The Hole", details the making of this work.”  Wikipedia
Vs. Danto and Dickie
•	Then are all stones in the driveway works of art?
•	What distinguishes what is a work of art from what is not?
•	Is it that an artist calls it a work of art or that it is exhibited in a museum? [he is thinking of Danto and Dickie here.]  Not convincing.
•	A thing may function as a work of art at one time and not at another.

•	Just by virtue of functioning as a symbol in a certain way does an object become, while so functioning, a work of art.
•	A stone may do so when on display in an art museum, where it exemplifies certain properties of shape, color, texture.
•	A Rembrandt painting may cease to function as a work of art when used as a blanket.  [Danto’s Testadura case?]

•	To function as a symbol is not in itself to function as a work of art, for example the swatch of cloth, or the stone in the geology museum.
•	What symbolizing constitutes functioning as a work of art?  Tentative thought.
Five Symptoms of the Aesthetic
•	Syntactic density.  Finest differences distinguishing symbols.
•	Semantic density.  Finest differences [within] as in ordinary English.
•	Relative repleteness.  Comparatively many aspects of a symbol are significant.  Next image: Hokusai “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” 1820
•	Exemplification, literal or metaphorical
•	Multiple and complex reference.

•	They provide no definition [of art or the aesthetic]:  they are clues.
•	To be a definition might call on redrawing the boundaries of art.
•	They tend to focus on the symbol rather than what it refers to:  we cannot just look through the symbol to what it refers to, unlike a traffic light.

•	This emphasizes the nontransparency of a work of art, the primacy of the work over what it refers to.
•	The answer to “when is art?” is in terms of symbolic function.
•	Possibility that he is overstating his case:  the Rembrandt remains a work of art while functioning as a blanket.

•	But [if so] what an art does is more important than what it is.
•	A work of art may symbolize different things at different times.
•	How an object functions as a work explains how it may contribute to a vision of, and to the making of, a world.

Languages of Art
•	People say a good picture is pretty or at a higher level beautiful, although some are ugly, which would mean “beautiful” cannot define aesthetic merit.
•	Problems with satisfaction as the criterion of aesthetic merit:  cannot be identified with pleasure or a special aesthetic feeling [vs. Bell] maybe aesthetically satisfactory.
•	What makes a work satisfactory?

•	Being satisfactory is relative to function and purpose.  A good furnace, a good scientific theory.
•	Art works serve one or more referential functions:  representation, description, exemplification, and/or expression.
•	What purpose does such symbolization serve?
Three Inadequate Answers
•	It helps develop our abilities to cope:  a gymnasium workout equipping us for survival, and it channels surplus energy.
•	Symbolization is an irrepressible propensity of man:  men symbolize.
•	Communication as the purpose of symbolizing.
Correct Answer
•	What all three miss is that the drive is curiosity and the aim is enlightenment.
•	Use of symbols beyond immediate need is for the sake of understanding:  the primary purpose is cognition in and for itself, and the other purposes depend on this.

•	What a Manet or a Monet does to our perception of the world afterwards is as relevant to their evaluation as direct confrontation with the work. 
•	Aesthetic experience is not insular!
•	Next image:  Claude Monet “Water Lillies” 1916.

•	Theme and variation in art is also explained by its role in cognition.  
•	Abstraction and elaboration, for example, are processes of constructive search.
•	Delicacy of discrimination is too.

Devaluing Aesthetic Value
•	Excessive concentration on the question of excellence has distorted aesthetic inquiry.
•	To say a work of art is good does not provide much information about it.  It doesn’t tell us, for example, whether it is evocative or robust.  
•	Works of art are not race-horses.
•	Judgments of aesthetic value are often, rather, means towards discovering particular characteristics of works.

•	A connoisseur telling me that one of two Cycladic idols that seem almost indistinguishable is much finer inspires me to find differences between them.

•	Estimates of excellence are among the minor aids to insight. 

Art and Understanding
•	Aesthetic experience is cognitive experience distinguished by dominance of certain symbolic characteristics and judged by cognitive usefulness.
•	Some may argue that in science, unlike art, the ultimate test is truth.
•	But truth matters little in science:  there are tons of them.
•	Even if true, scientific hypotheses are worthless without having scope and specificity and without raising or answering significant questions.

•	And the noblest scientific laws are seldom quite true:  science sometimes even denies its data.
•	Also given the assembled evidence, there are often several alternative hypotheses that fit. 
•	We judge between them by simplicity and strength, not truth.
Is truth still a consideration of science and not of art?   

•	Truth of a hypothesis is a matter of fit with a body of theory, and between theory and the data at hand.
•	Theory is adjusted to facts and facts to theory, with the aim of comfort and look.
•	This is also relevant to the art:  both truth and [beauty] are a matter of appropriateness.
•	although we reserve terms like “true” for symbols in the form of sentences.
•	There is no big gap between science and the aesthetic.

•	But the distinction between art and science is not obliterated.  
•	Rather, the affinities are deeper than supposed.
•	The difference is not between feeling and fact, truth and beauty, or a number of other things.