The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [41]
Now as it happens, the Basket Folk also make pots, as the Pot People manufacture baskets. Though Basket Folk pots are admired by ethnographers, the Basket Folk attach no special importance to them: they merely utensils, “of a piece with fish nets and arrow heads, textiles bark and flax.” Similar is the attitude of the Pot People to their baskets: the tribesmen who make them are regarded as artisans but not honored as artists in their homeland.
In Danto’s narrative, a difficulty looms when objects acquired from Pot People and the Basket Folk are put on display in a Fine Arts Museum and a Natural History Museum. As you would expect, People pots and Basket Folk baskets, being works of art, are housed Primitive Wing of the Fine Arts Museum, while pots of the Basket Folk and baskets of the Pot People are displayed alongside other utilitarian artifacts in the Natural History Museum. The Natural History Museum does, however, present two dioramas of everyday life—tribesmen People are given a kind of privileged place in their respective dioramas . . . standing apart, perhaps objects of rapt attention.” A guided school group is shown both dioramas. A schoolgirl among them proclaims that she can see no difference between the baskets venerated Basket Folk diorama and the baskets strewn about, some broken, used, in the Pot People diorama.
The child is fobbed off with assurances that experts can tell the difference, but her problem remains: if we can’t see the differences that make one class of objects into works of art while leaving the other class utilitarian artifacts, should the distinction make any difference to Physical scientific criteria are dismissed, and rightly so, by Danto: these cannot be the differences that matter. Yet the child’s question will, think, touch a nerve with anyone who has worried about cross-cultural aesthetic perception. Danto’s example challenges at its very heart aesthetic criticism applied to the art of remote cultures because it raises the possibility that what a pot or basket meant to a tribe, or whether meant anything at all, might be irrelevant to our aesthetic appreciation it. No one who has admired a work of tribal art, or been moved thrilled by a mask or carving, can avoid the awkward implications raised: Did it move its maker? Is it a good one in the tribe’s eyes? Is it piece of special spiritual significance? Is it a purely utilitarian object? piece of tourist kitsch?
Danto never identifies the relevant experts whose supposed knowledge is (falsely) used to deflect the little girl’s question; we are left supposing they would be museum scientists or curators, and in his thought experiment we are required to imagine that in reality not even they the difference from visual inspection: the same visual inspection works of art that ought to give aesthetic pleasure. But Danto has omitted from the discussion what seems to me a crucially important group potential experts who might actually be able to see a difference. What about the Pot People potters themselves? Could we imagine Pot People culture just as Danto describes it—with its mythology, its significations, sense of life packed into the concept of the pot, and incarnated in individual pots of the tribe—and yet entertain the hypothesis that Pot People potters would themselves be unable to distinguish their own creations from the utilitarian artifacts of another tribe over the mountains?
Danto’s story, after all, is not just about the foibles of curatorship; it is about the artistic life of the tribes themselves. And every aspect and of my own experience of tribal art—both in museum collections in fieldwork in the jungles of New Guinea—suggests that Danto’s tribes are humanly