The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [44]
Danto insists on a conceptual distinction between art and utilitarian artifact that would seem on the face of it to be in agreement with what have described so far about both the (real) Sepik peoples and the imaginary) Jungle/Tourist People. Artifacts are not problematic Danto: they are simply nicely made useful objects. Art works are altogether something else, “a compound of thought and matter,” as he puts A utilitarian artifact “is shaped by its function, but the shape of artwork is given by its content . . . To be a work of art, I have argued, embody a thought, to have a content, to express a meaning, and so the works of art that outwardly resemble Primitive artifacts embody thoughts, have contents, express meanings, though the objects [i.e., artifacts] they resemble do not.”
Applying Danto’s way of speaking to my thought experiment, carvings are mere items of merchandise and express little or nothing. Art is opposed either to utilitarian artifacts or tourist kitsch: all parties can agree so far that art objects are those apparently formally objects that express or embody ideas. The difference between imaginary story and Danto’s is that Danto—under the spell of Duchamp’s readymades and Warhol’s Brillo boxes, and affected by the particular of naive Westerners in spotting distinctions between authentic masterworks of primitive art and mere artifacts (or kitsch)—has tried construct a picture of art in which perceptions do not count at all, which interpretation and institutional status determine aesthetic value court. In Danto’s Pot People/Basket Folk world, the cultural outsider never know an artistic masterpiece unless and until some insider comes along with the information that, yes, that’s a work of art.
In contrast to Danto, the implication of my thought experiment is that trained perception, the ability of tribal peoples themselves to systematic differences between expressive art and utilitarian artifact— the ability of the informed eyes of Westerners also to learn to perceive differences—is fundamental. Tribal art works are more often than works of skill that are intended to delight (or dazzle or frighten) the beholder; there are no local Duchamps or Warhols in New Guinea elsewhere in the realms of indigenous, ethnographic arts. Danto is taking the ignorance of the outsider and trying to parlay it into a principle according to which perception would not count at all.
Danto has elsewhere argued that the very existence of art objects on interpretation. He claims that “interpretations are what constitute works.” Interpretations identify what it is that artists have made: The interpretation is not something outside the work: work and interpretation arise together in aesthetic consciousness.” This is a fine way describe a modernist experiment such as Marcel Duchamp’s In Advance the Broken Arm, which was just a hardware-store snow shovel until Duchamp leaned it against the wall of a gallery and “interpreted” it work of art. The conceptual adventures of Europe an modernism are world away from African artists who, along with Sepik artists, countless other artists of tribal societies, create works for the eye as the mind. That these tribal objects are intended to amaze, amuse, ethno-aesthetic fantasy stand, like Duchamp’s readymades, inde pen of perception: for all their artistic differences, the works of the Pot People and the Basket Folk end up as indiscernible. In contrast, the constituting interpretations of real tribal artists normally entail perceptual distinctions.
Learning a primitive art genre is thus not a matter of acquiring knowledge of a cultural context into which objects can be set (and distinguished as artifact or art); it is a