On The Objectivity Of Art

Some time ago I was contacted by a Humanities professor. She asked me to respond to a lecture that John Szot gave on the objectivity of art that you can read by clicking here. This is a little bit out of my league, but I gave it a shot regardless. I argued against the objectivity or art and tried to draw the discussion out of an etherial context of "art" and bench mark it against design. The following is my response:

Szot says that art is an issue of presence, an eloquent description that I really love. The analogous term among designers and marketers is experience. Art offers the purest of experiential emotional moments that is unselfish and lacks the machiavellian intent of products or store environment. The people who are experts in all three of these areas, design, art, and marketing, have all reached this point of expertise, not by objective learning, but repeated intersections with the problem at hand (an un-illustrated emotion, a market niche, a specific user group). Designers simply repeatedly employ a design process, marketing is taught on a largely anecdotal basis, and art is taught a set of rules, but only with the intent of then breaking them. These three methods of learning all seem to start with a hazily objective frame, but are then built on with the subjective. The subjective here depend on the experience of repeated intersection with problems and creating their ultimate solutions (not objectivity). Design, art, and marketing all produce a single solution to infinite solution problems. If you present a landscape to 100 artists, you'll get 100 different interpretations of that landscape, all drawing out different aspects of the landscapes presence, all telling a different story. None of the solutions are incorrect. Because of the possibility of endless solutions, how would a single artist narrow down their criteria to make decisions? The decisions are made based on past experience, personal emotions, cultural interpolation, and the list goes on.

Szot's argument for the objectivity of art falls apart when he begins to argue that intense presence is the sole characteristic of art. I'm not sure if I'm misreading his discussion here, but while art is often intensely present, things can have intense presence without being art. He then vacillates that art is not a code or set of signals (something that is very objective in my mind) but something inherently human (a concepts I find to be infinite in scope and therefore subjective.

From a spiritual perspective (and by that I mean a Judeo-Christian, viewpoint buttressed by a literal interpretation of the Bible) we are created in the eyes of an infinite God. While we were created with certain limitations that separate us from God, we were still created with the purpose of interacting with the Lord; capable of blessing Him. This means that our capacity to create presence must be equally infinite to impact God who loves us and cares for us despite our sin; meaning despite our disgusting sinful habits, we still have an intense presence that God desires. If we have an ability to create presence with an infinite God, then there is no real objective path to it, if we are objective beings, then we have lost the ability to choose (yep, I'm definitely not a Calvinist) God, and therefore are just robots to Him. This is not our purpose, we are not robots, we chose sin, something objective beings would not do.

From a cultural perspective we must also look at art that is something closed off from the masses. By the time art reaches the masses it is generally watered down and out of context in the form of product, fashion, or graphic design. Saying that art discovers something new about human nature is ludicrous. Artists do not discover new things about humanity, they are simply discussing them in different contexts and mediums and in new ways. These new ways are then duplicated in a particularly moving purse design for example with a specific aesthetic style that moves a person not based on a visceral aspect of their humanity, but because art that reaches them has been filtered by luck, chance, and culture and duplicated and copied across many different product categories to where the aesthetic is engrained in society. It is the process of engraining that tells the masses to be moved toward an aesthetic, not the aesthetic itself. Therefore it can be said that the process by which a piece of art reaches this mainstream level is not one that is always objective.

This process of engraining aesthetics then brings us back to our discussion about having a point of intersection with a specific problem. Art is appreciated by the masses not because of its presence but because it has faced the test of numerous intersections. Here, quantity of intersections is replaced by the quality intersection of a well experienced expert. On the less mainstream level of art, a curator is at the front line of this process of intersection. Their unique experiences lead them to build specific decision processes due to their intersections with art solutions in the past. The example Szot uses of the painting having new method of applying paint is an excellent example. I hope I'm not being overly cynical when I say this, but a lot of art that gains critical acclaim is garbage. This is a flaw in the process of intersections. A curator or art critic gives kudos to a body of work, not necessarily because of its intense presence, but because it's simply creating a different presence than previous experienced. This leads me to think that art is much more complex (and subjective) than just presence. It is how the art solution intersects with an evaluator that is important. When art is filtered down to the masses it is assumed to be relatively present due to the large number of filters it must have passed through to reach production.

Over all I think my greatest rift with Szot's explanation of art is his dependency on the inherent human nature to define objectivity. I cannot see the connection between human nature without seeing an infinite creator of solutions and variation, something that is very subjective. I also think Szot prematurely rules out environmental influences on how viewers of art make decisions on presence.

I also may be connecting too much the creation of art and the evaluation of art and therefore, when the two are not connecting, I attempt to throw out any notion of objectivity'I don't know

As a designer, I am also skewed in that fact that we are taught what separates art from design, is that design is based on a set of objectives and criteria, while art is not, this has most likely skewed my viewpoint toward this greatly.

Questions I would love to hear Szot answer:

Paintings like De Koonings women series are revered for their process by which he created them (making love to the women, dancing with the women) but this element that creates the great presence of the work cannot be purchased or experienced yet it is still accounted for in the paintings value. If you can't buy or really experience the presence, is it still art? If my subjective imagination is needed to help deliver the presence of a piece of work, is it still art? Can presence be faked? Can I take a concrete wall, create a great lie about its creation and call it art?