Why Is There Still Art?
An essay questioning why art continues to exist after its boundaries have dissolved, proposing that art’s function is to create a fictional world necessary for us to perceive reality.
Today, any object can be subjected to the same questions asked of an art object. These can be aesthetic questions, or they can be questions specific to art itself, such as what art is or where its boundaries begin. There are no artistic or philosophical reasons, beyond historical habits or dogmatic issues, for me not to look at the pencil sharpener and its shavings on my desk as an art object, or to present them as such. Unless you are one of the ancients who believed that things have an essence, you likely sense, even if you do not consciously know, that an art object is merely a temporary node within a network of communication. You probably have little use for such a concept anyway.
These topics were discussed at length long ago by Analytic philosophers like Danto, Dickie, and Carroll. Nelson Goodman states that when it comes to art, the right question is not "Is this art?" but "When is it art?". You can use a Rembrandt painting as kindling, or you can treat it as an art object. You can also evaluate a piece of wood as an art object, or you can burn it. This situation applies, without question, to all works. Therefore, the thing we call a work of art is that which we look at as a work of art in specific contexts. Our perspective could even be a bigoted one that confers artistic status only upon objects with certain properties. There is no problem even in that case, because it is still the human way of modeling the world that makes the object an art object; the object does not become something on its own. Even for it to be an ordinary object, we are necessary.
Picture frames, photographs, gallery spaces, museums, cinema halls, books, and so on offer us spaces to focus on certain objects. Thus, we see the thing inside the frame (this is a conceptual frame) as the art object, and everything outside it as all the other things that are not art objects. Today, we do not necessarily need these formats for such a frame. If we can approach any everyday object with artistic problematics, then why is there still art?
The answer to this question certainly has a relationship with the social environment. But those might be answers for other fields, such as sociology, anthropology, or economics. More fundamentally, the reason for art's existence, it seems to me, stems from its fictionality and our need for this fictionality to be able to comprehend the world.
In his book Art as a Social System, Niklas Luhmann argues that a work of art establishes its own reality, distinct from ordinary reality. In doing so, despite its perceivable facticity, it creates a simultaneous reference to an imaginary or fictional world. According to Luhmann, this act effectively doubles the world into the "real" and the "imaginary," and the function of art lies in the meaning of this very duplication. He posits that the fictional world of art offers a unique standpoint from which the real world can be observed as reality. Without this distinction between the real and the fictional, the world would simply exist as it is. It is only when reality is separated from a fictional counterpart that it becomes a perspective that can be seen and analyzed.
For me to be able to speak of a world, there must be something else outside of that world. This world could be the ordinary world or the world of art objects. If I can now see phenomena in the world as art objects, it is thanks to the perspective I have previously acquired from art. If Turner comes to mind when I look at the sea, it is because I know Turner. If the aesthetic qualities of a long wall rising in the emptiness of a parking lot strike me, it is because I know Abstract Expressionism. If I am "foolish" enough to treat a pair of glasses left on a museum floor as art, it is because I know how Conceptual Art approaches the world. If I label every picture I see on Twitter as a "Renaissance painting," it is because I have a belief, however vague and incorrect, about what Renaissance paintings are like. If I can say, "This disgusting thing is not art," it is because, one way or another, I believe some objects are art.
If the arrangement of garbage in front of my house moves me, if I get lost in watching construction machines, if I watch the gardener pruning trees or the chef cooking with the subtlety of a performance, if I arrange my books with the air of a Minimalist work, if the studios, conversations, and playing with materials of painters are more attractive to me than their paintings, it is because I have learned to look in this way. We can only have learned to look in this way from something outside of those things. There is nothing wrong with me calling this "art."
In other words, for me to be able to model something called "world" in my brain, I need something that is not the world. Otherwise, there would be only one world. But there are many. For this reason, we are essentially doing nothing other than relating one world to another.
In reality, the only difference between the wall in the parking lot and a Barnett Newman painting is that one was made with a specific consciousness, thus granting me a special space to concentrate. In fact, it is my mind that can see what is common in both. So, I might as well be looking at both the parking lot wall and the painting. Is this not why we look down on certain works? The root of our outbursts like, “What kind of painting is this, it looks like a house painter did it,” or “What kind of object is this, it looks just like garbage,” lies in our ability to make this association. We cannot stand it when a mundane object is presented as an art object out of the blue because we think it is presenting us with the world we already know. However, the two are not the same world. Our personal taste determines the degree of difference we demand. Some people want to see an intense difference; others might find this intensity kitsch and unnecessary. These things also change frequently in every era. When we grasp that art is not a special object but an immaterial one, just a boundary drawn by our mind in the medium of communication, these presentations of difference become as ambiguous as possible. We need far less to be able to see the boundary between an art object and a non-art object.
At that point, we can again ask the same question. Since I am looking at the world with the world itself, then why is there still art? The answer is still the same. We need a tool to be able to look at the world with the world. We do not know how to see in any other way, whether its name is art or language. For this reason, while some things are art at that moment, at the instant we focus on that object or event, there must also be things that are not art. At that moment, while some things are the world we know, others must be what is not so. This is a dynamic relationship. It is transient. That is why the "when" question is important. And the people who establish and sometimes present these fleeting relationships, I suppose, are what we call artists.