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By Root 970 0

per performances which is not to deny the artistry of some virtuoso players or of their moves). The reason to resist calling such games works of art do with the absence of what must be weighted as one of the most items on the list: (12) imaginative experience. For the ordinary sports fan who cheers the home team, who actually wins the game, not imagination, but in reality, remains the overwhelming issue. For the outcome is the decisive interest-generating issue. Winning and losing the principal source of emotion, which is not expressed, as it is in artistic works, but rather incited in crowds by a real-world sporting outcome. Were sports fans authentic aesthetes, so my speculation goes, they would care little or nothing for scores and results but only enjoy games in terms style and economy of play, skill and virtuosity, and expressiveness movement. There is also the question of how teams engage in a soccer match with each other. A Harlem Globetrotters basketball per for mance true artistic event, because both sides in the match are actually cooperating film: their actions are done for the audience, not simply to win the game—which in championship matches literally puts soccer and football teams at cross-purposes.

A championship game is not essentially (or not enough, anyway) Kantian “pre sentation,” a make-believe event, offered up for imaginative contemplation but is rather a real-world event, rather like an election battle. The fact that soccer and football could have so much in common with accepted art and yet not be instances of it is something that cluster-criteria list can help us to understand. It also leaves open possibility of debate in terms of the list from readers who disagree with this claim. The possibility of fruitful debate and analysis in such cases advantage of my list.

Ideas and objects such as “square root” or “neutron” have come to be grasped alongside the rise of the theories that give them a place in The arts, in ways rough and precise, were created and directly enjoyed long before they came to be objects of theoretical rumination. They are not technical products needing expert analysis but rich, scattered, and variegated realms of human practice and experience that long before phi losophers and art theorists. In this respect, the like other grand, vague, but real and persis tent aspects of human such as religion, the family, friendship, society, or war. Despite disputed borderline cases, they can be in many cases easily recognized across cultures and through history. As for the fear that a definition of might constrain the very creative imagination we observe and encourage the arts, that makes about as much sense as worrying that a definition the word “book” will take us down a slippery slope toward censoring literature, or a definition of “language” will constrain what I have to The arts remain what they are, and will be. Aesthetic theory is merely their handmaiden. It is she who must perfect her tune.

CHAPTER 4

But They Don’t Have Our

Concept of Art”

I

If art is not a technical concept confined to our culture but is a natural, universal phenomenon—like language, tool-making, and kinship systems—we would expect to see evidence of this in the work of anthropologists over the last century. Indeed, there are many invaluable ethnographies of tribal or so-called primitive art (often far from primitive technical expertise and expressive sophistication). Already in the nineteenth century, scholars such as A. C. Haddon were examining Maori traditions, while ethnographers working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs meticulously documenting the arts of Native Americans. Much has made of the “discovery” of African art a hundred years ago by the of Picasso and the art theorist Roger Fry, but invaluable work was already being done by academics such as the Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas and Ruth Bunzel, his student in the 1920s, art historians such Robert Goldwater on African art. All of these people, and many others, created a permanent record of the aesthetic achievements of the small-scale,