Daniel Quall King

The fine arts are useful to us to the same degree as any of our other activities, but in different ways.  Their languages are among the many languages available to us for the articulation of form and the communication of meaning.  Whatever it may be, or be like, this form and meaning are about what is produced by the interactivity of our mind, in all its aspects, with the world and with one another.

The languages of the arts differ from other languages in that they address the senses, the perceptions, and the person (mind) in a different manner.  The fine arts are not a luxury.  They are ways of perceiving, knowing and feeling.  Since all ways of perceiving, knowing and feeling have features which differentiate them from one another, each must have certain features which are unique.  Since we can never have enough ways of understanding, it is self-evident that it is in our interest to cultivate all of them.

“Useful” means, that which persuades, assists or sustains us in the pursuit of our needs and desires.  Since our needs and desires are invariably subject to natural or moral constraints, usefulness entails ethics and morals.  It is in this very general sense that aesthetics and ethics can be said to be closely related. Among the languages, boundaries and overlappings may be necessarily fluid if we accept the desirability of acknowledging reality as a continuously evolving, or at least a continuously changing state.  This makes boundary-setting definitions relatively unhelpful, except as a means of permitting dialogue to take place.  Alternative ways to provide orientation within a state of flux exist; for example, identifying a central or balancing point in terms of two extremes.

Works of art usually tend to engender a sense of wholeness in our feelings.  This tendency is not necessarily characteristic of other languages, or other uses of languages, but one thinks of it as being characteristic of experiencing a work of art.

We may know at the same time, but in a different way, that such a sense of unity is not ordinarily attainable in other regions of ordinary experience; but it may be attainable in non-art regions of non-ordinary experience of other kinds.

Art can be distinguished from non-art in that

1. It is capable of giving us occasion for aesthetic experience which is not ordinary in kind, in degree, or both; and that
2. It is brought into being with this intention.

Yet, non-ordinary experience can be occasioned by things or events of which it cannot be meaningfully said that there was an intention of this kind involved in their coming into being.  To distinguish art from non-art in this way seems to require additional qualifications related to intention.  These qualifications could lie in domains like communication, discipline, discourse, dialogue.

Aesthetic experience of which we are aware as being such can be described as:

1. That which arises in relation to the man-made, intentional or unintentional;
2. That which arises from the action of natural forces;
3. That which arises from combinations of the two.
4. The distinction is simply between the action of mind and not-mind.

The reality of what is meant by “aesthetic experience” may not be sufficiently accessible to verbal reference to allow comprehensive or even generally acceptable definition; but it can be indicated well enough for reasonable dialogue to take place.

What may help to distinguish the non-ordinary from the ordinary is, the nature of what, and how much, we demand of the work and of ourselves.  A work which does not make certain demands on us is not likely to be of much lasting value.  And on our side, if we make little effort, the experience is also likely to be of little value.  But lasting value, or great meaningfulness, is not always an appropriate expectation of a work of art; it depends on what level of our need the work is addressing us and on what level of need we are addressing the work.  In other words, if we wish to be inclusive rather than exclusive, we can say that ordinary greetings cards can be called works of art, but we don’t go to them for the same reasons (with the same needs) that we go, say, to Goya’s etchings.

It may also be helpful to try to distinguish between art and artwork which is therapeutic in the narrow sense – again, it seems to be a matter of what is intended, and of what purpose the work is mainly for.  Artwork may always have a therapeutic (healing) aspect, of course, like any kind of work.  But it seems to be easy enough to distinguish between artworks which emerge from an awareness and dialogue with preceding and contemporary work and method, and those which may or may not exhibit training in method, but which simply expose parts of the emerging mind of the producer.  Richard Dadd, for example, in his late years, continued to paint with technical accomplishment, but we read his late work more from our curiosity about the meaning of his internal imagery and his disconnection from the world about him than in the expectation of experiencing new meaning or insight related to our own situation.

Most painted or otherwise “art-crafted” work which comes from guided therapeutic situations may have, and often does have, very important value for its maker, but it would be silly to expect it to be able to have the same communicative articulateness or power for others that the work of a trained, experienced and developed ‘pro’ is more likely to have.  Of course, it may have quite a value or power for some others, but this is more likely to be the result of having common experiences of life than of common cultivation of the arts.

To an extent, it may be simply whether or not we wish to be inclusive or exclusive; but I don’t think it’s thus to a particularly meaningful extent in these cases.  The case of L.S. Lowry is instructive.

Art assumes:

1. Ourselves;
2. A medium of existence: space, time, matter, and energy; and
3. Whatever we can use to structure the medium so as to convey meaning.

All this involves a choice of means to create certain kinds of occurrences in the medium.  How we go about this is conditioned by some kind of knowledge about how we and others respond, or might be expected to respond, to the occurrences.  Since how we relate the occurrences to the medium and to one another is conditioned by such knowledge, we can say that whatever is done can contain not only positive rational and non-rational intentions, but also a discipline.  This discipline is not fixed, but fluid; nevertheless, it requires to be coherent at any one time.  It has certain internal demands.  The natures of some of these demands change at different rates, and other perhaps little at all.  The discipline has frontiers, since we can bring into existence things or events which have not occurred in that way before.  How we are likely to respond to them over a period of time is open to discovery.  Such discoveries in turn affect the nature of the demands of the discipline, or at least of some of its elements.

What is done is not arbitrary, although the ways in which it is not arbitrary may require the passage of time to become apparent.  Whether or not what is done can ever be arbitrary seems unlikely, but we can leave this as an open question.

Artists can be distinguished from non-artists merely in that they consider it to be at some time their occupation to make works of art.  But if we accept that ethics and aesthetics are related, there must exist criteria additional to the artist’s self-declaration for deciding how we might wish to distinguish artists from non-artists.  Whether or not we validate an individual’s self-determination as an artist depends upon the interplay of our own values and our responses to the person and the person’s work, or simply to the person’s work.

For example, it is now some time since certain schools of art criticism seems to have arrived at the conclusion that the art critic’s work is somehow essentially itself a work of art.  More recently, there are signs abroad that the same may be the case with certain similar attitudes among historians, journalists, and others.  If these attitudes exist, then the remarks above may have some importance.

We can distinguish between values which pertain to living in general and values which pertain to art, and we can identify values which pertain to both.  It may be that unclarity about the extent of overlap, or about the nature of values which appear to overlap at one point in time, can be an advantage, insofar as it can lead to growth.  But because the languages of art work not so much by imitation as by analogy, it is also likely to be profitable to make efforts to avoid mistaking values pertaining to art for values which pertain to life (or vice versa), where we may need to learn from them in a different way.

It may be that art consists of games of knowing and feeling where the nature of risk is such that effects are shifted onto different levels or time-scales than those of ordinary living; but they are nevertheless capable of being affective.

We may wish to validate the following attitude: “The activity of identifying and exploring ‘problematic areas’ in or about art can itself be a work of art”.  However, this activity does not usually concern itself with producing works of art in quite the sense used here.  It may stimulate such production, but it seems to have more in common with the position, “Life is a work of art”.

If art is about objectification and articulation, can a verbal statement about a work of art be a work of art?  If we wish to be inclusive rather than exclusive, the answer must be “yes”, provided only that the requirement for affect and the requirement for intention are fulfilled.  If any problem remains, it is one of mere classification; that is, whether or not we wish to categorise its language and how we might wish to do so.

Our valuing a work of art can be thought of as always being positive, even in the case of work to which our response seems to be, at some level, negative.  There are three types of positive response: attraction, repulsion, and ambivalence.  Considered in this way, there can be only one genuinely negative response, neutrality or boredom.  But this does not prevent neutrality or boredom themselves from becoming the subject of a strong response.

David Pye: “Elegance is the attainment of a desired end, simply and without waste.”  This kind of economy does not entail simplicity in the ordinary sense; what is entailed is dependent upon what is intended, not to simplicity itself or economy itself.

Thus with appropriateness.  It is that which is most likely to allow, or actively make it possible, for a desired state of affairs to come into being with the greatest conservation of effectiveness.  Since means and ends modify and condition each other in the process of working toward a conclusive state, each situation where choice is exercised is characterised by learning to select for the most appropriate result of this conditioning process.  Works of art to which we attribute qualities like originality and individuality are, among other things, those which are capable of surprising, modifying, or modulating our sense of the appropriate.

We can distinguish between decorative work and works of art which are other than decorative.  Like works of art, decorative work has symbolic content, but it is not usually intended to produce occasion for non-ordinary aesthetic response in quite the sense, or not quite to the extent, considered here.  There are exceptions, of course.  It may be that decorative work addresses a somewhat different set of parts, or different levels, of experiential and evaluative mentality.  Sometimes the identity of an object or event as being one or the other of these, that is, decorative work or a work of art, may be unclear and difficult to ascertain, but on most occasions we seem to be able to distinguish the two quite readily.  If we could clarify the means by which we perform this differentiation, we might also have clarified some significant distinctions among our cognising and evaluating processes, and their relationships to our needs and desires.

Usually we value the decorative work mainly as an object.  One of the things that makes us want to categorise an object as a work of art is that we add to this a valuing of it rather in the way we value the living.

The ultimate concern of art is to point beyond itself.  Whatever is in that beyond gives further energy to the exercise of our creative imagination.