Artist, n. playing inventively with ideas

In a New York Times op-ed article entitled Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank? Denis Dutton wonders about the long-term value of conceptual art. Acknowledging some fine points, his article raises even more questions for discussion ‘between the lines’.

Summarizing Dutton’s faithfully imaginative examples of the evolutionary history of art, his point is quite agreeable that as far back as we can see human beings tend to admire skillfully crafted artifacts, and that this admiration, awe and wonder persist to the present. He seems to suggest that the more recent phenomenon of ‘conceptual art’ is considerably different from this more established sense of the artistic craft.

Writes Dutton:

What is important today is not technical skill, but skill in playing inventively with ideas.

‘Playing inventively with ideas’… I think that’s a brilliant phrase. Has the age of the image given way to the age of the idea? Can art become ideation? If so, what does that mean for art and artists? To be sure, there are those who take ideation to the level of art form, but don’t miss the point Dutton is raising. Ideation is typically viewed as a tool in the service of producing, yielding or creating something in physical space (whether visual, tactile, audible, etc.) Some ‘artists’ are essentially claiming that their idea (quite apart from its implementation, if any) is actually art.

Conceptual art refers not to an object or artifact crafted by an artist, but to an abstract idea of it, or to the purposeful arrangement of objects. ‘Found art’ could arguably be counted in this category. The conceptual artist provokes a thought or suggests an idea that is experienced as art. Imagine a painter of ideas, or a sculptor of the imagination. These are perhaps the ideal archetypes, but some contemporary conceptual artists elicit large sums of money by affixing their name to someone else’s artistic work and displaying it in a particular way (see Dutton’s article for some recent examples). The price awards the idea rather than the craftsmanship or manifestation of the arrangement of found objects themselves. Is this kind of mental transaction appropriately termed ‘art’ and is it actually worth funding?

Here we must visit the grey area between life lived and life portrayed. Some forms of art such as photography are admired because of the eye or the perspective of the artist more than the paper and ink or the pixels that display the piece (though artistic decisions are made in such details as well). Sometimes a poem’s only praiseworthy quality is that the poet has opened our eyes to see something old in a new way.

In essence, the artistic value is ultimately in the communicative action that reverberates between the artist and the one who encounters the artwork. The artwork itself is a vehicle for ideas. This is not the only viable philosophy of art, however.

Enter another observation by Dutton:

Even when we have lost contact with the social or religious ideas behind the arts of bygone civilizations, we are still able, as with the great bronzes or temples of Greece or ancient China, to respond directly to craftsmanship. The direct response to skill is what makes it possible to find beauty in many tribal arts even though we often know nothing about the beliefs of the people who created them. There is no place on earth where superlative technique in music and dance is not regarded as beautiful.

He is essentially observing the edge of a crisis of definition. What is art? But there is another more subtle question: who is the artist behind the art?

Yesterday, I heard a professor respond humorously to a list of key names that have contributed direction to a major building project. He pointed out that he should be listed among those names because, as a teacher, he had ’shaped and molded’ the man whose name the building bears. Although his comment was in jest, let’s imagine for a moment that it reflects a shift in our culture’s definition of art. At what point do we draw the line of ‘credit’ for the artistic achievement. I thought it was interesting that the architect and developer were not listed among those who have contributed significantly to the project. I’m quite sure, despite this oversight, that the men and women named are not the ones being paid to produce the building. Who are the real artists here, and what criteria will help us discover them?

Perhaps what we’re really experiencing is a cultural crisis of attribution.