The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [32]
Also missing from the list is one further feature that has been inflated academics into a defining criterion of art: being expressive or representative of cultural identity. In the sense that all art arises in a culture and therefore a cultural product, the claim is trivially true. Normally, however, proponents of this position want to wring from it the idea that artists in their work, and audiences expect in their experience, to affirm identity. This is no more true than to claim, for example, that artists intend with their work to be paid, and that audiences expect somehow them: it’s sometimes yes, sometimes no. Incidentally, art tends to used to affirm cultural identity principally in situations of cultural opposition and doubt. It is unlikely that Cervantes, Rembrandt, or Mozart affirming Spanish, Dutch, or Austrian culture as a major function of work (this despite each being a proud Spaniard, Dutchman, and Austrian). Wagner, who set himself overtly against French and Italian music, is a story; he consciously saw himself as promoting a Teutonic identity. It is hard to see Indian music in its homeland as aimed at affirming Indian identity; it usually comes to serve that function only when Indians move abroad and join Indian cultural societies in Stuttgart or Seattle. Local artistic forms offered to their natural, local audiences seldom occasion about affirming cultural identity; such art offers only beauty and entertainment to its closest, most natural audience. In retrospect, we may come regard Shakespeare as affirming Elizabethan cultural values, but that construction we impose on him. His intention was to create theatrical for the Globe audience. Affirming cultural identity, however important it may be, is not a criterion for recognizing instances of art.
IV
While the cluster-criteria approach to understanding art does not specify in advance how many of the criteria need be present to justify calling an object art, the list nevertheless presents in its totality a definition of art: any object that possessed every feature on the list would have to be a work of art. The definition does not exclude fringe art, avant-garde art, enumerating the features of indisputable cases—Rembrandt’s Night Watch, Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody, Brecht’s Mother Courage. Such canonical works, having everything on the list, will therefore stand at one end a continuum that has at its other end non-art objects and perperformances such as ordinary passport photos and the accomplishments skilled plumbers in unclogging drains. These latter may feature a few the list’s criteria, but not enough to make them works of art. The list therefore not a formula that allows us to crank out an answer to every question about whether something is or is not art, but a useful guide assessing hard, marginal, or borderline cases of art.
Consider, for instance, a case that has been repeatedly brought up for discussion by my students: sporting events such as a World Cup final soccer or the American Super Bowl. Such events present spectacles that embody great skill, high drama, and both emotion and plea sure audiences. They display a great sense of occasion and are subject to endless postgame critical discourse. Already, they would seem to fulfill my criteria for (1) pleasure, (2) skill, (5) criticism, (7) special focus, and perhaps (9) emotional saturation.
Nevertheless, many people would resist the idea that such championship matches taken as a whole are works of art or artistic