TIMOTHY BINKLEY—Contra Aesthetics

My note says:
Fire the
"museum director."

In the twentieth century we have witnessed a proliferation of new media.

By this definition? I'm not so sure.

What has proliferated are media in the sense of avenues of delivery. The preceding paragraph, on the other hand, constructs "media" more or less as Walton's "categories of art." What are the new categories whose conventions tell us to look somewhere or somehow other than we did previously? (In the case of Conceptual Art, it seems we are being told, by the present author and document, precisely where to (and where not) to look! But if we have to be told...)

A medium seems to emerge when new conventions are instituted for isolating aesthetic qualities differently on the basis of new materials or machines.

Yep, lots of new machines came around during the twentieth century. But is this an accurate description of what has happened?

Film became an artistic medium when its unique physical structure was utilized to identify aesthetic qualities in a new way. The filmmaker became an artist when he or she stopped recording the creation of the playwright and discovered that film has resources for creation which theater lacks. The aesthetic qualities that can be presented by a film photographed from the orchestra and obedient to the temporal structure of the play are, basically, the aesthetic properties of the play itself. But when the camera photographs two different actions in two different places at two different times, and the images end up being seen at the same time and place, aesthetic properties can be realized which are inaccessible to theater. A new convention for specifying aesthetic properties has emerged. We say "See this film" instead of "See this play." In each case, what you look for is determined by the conventions of the medium.

Well, the different-times-and-place aspect is hardly determined .

The aesthetic theory of media has given rise to an analogy which seems to be gaining acceptance: a work of art is like a person. The dependence of aesthetic qualities on nonaesthetic ones is similar to the dependence of character traits on the bodily dispositions of persons. As Joseph Margolis has put it, works of art are embodied in a physical object (or physical event) in much the way a person is embodied in a human body:

To say that a work of art is embodied in a physical object is to say that its identity is necessarily linked to the identity of the physical

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object in which it is embodied, though to identify the one is not to identify the other; it is also to say that, qua embodied, a work of art must possess properties other than those ascribed to the physical object in which it is embodied, though it may be said to possess (where relevant) the properties of that physical object as well. Also, if in being embodied, works of art are, specifically, emergent entities, then the properties that a work of art possesses will include properties of a kind that cannot appropriately be ascribed to the object in which it is embodied.

This seems to give the perfect recipe for something different to emerge to/at each and every different audience member!

The "emergent" entities of aesthetic art are aesthetic qualities which are accessible only through direct experience. The aesthetic and physical properties of the artwork fuse into a person-like whole, the former constituting the "mind," the latter the "body" of the work. When we want to locate a person we look for his or her body—likewise, when we want to locate an artwork we look for its "body," namely the physical material in which it is embodied, as delimited by the conventions of media.

Although not universally accepted, this person analogy appears frequently in aesthetic theory because it provides a suitable model for understanding the artwork as a single entity appealing to two markedly different types of interest. It explains, for example, the basis of the connection between Beauty and Money.

The analogy has recently been carried to the extent of claiming that works of art, like persons, have rights . To deface a canvas by Picasso or a sculpture by Michelangelo is not only to violate the rights of its owner, but also to violate certain rights of the work itself. The work is a person; to mar the canvas or marble is to harm this person. So we see that aesthetic works of art are also mortal. Like people, they age and are vulnerable to physical deterioration.

I'm playing a lot of Devil's Advocate here, but this part does seem obviously wrong. It's true that you violate people's rights in defacing artworks, but these people thus wronged are actual people: they are the people, living and unborn, who may yet have the privilege of experiencing a work which lots of other people, previously (and not free of myriad vicissitudes, it is true), have deemed to be just this significant.

4. Art and Works. Aesthetics has used the conventions of media to classify and identify artworks, but its vision of the nature of art does not adequately recognize the thoroughly conventional structure within which artworks appear. This is because aesthetics tends to view a medium as a kind of substance (paint, wood, stone, sound, etc.) instead of as a network of conventions.

The possibilities for networks of conventions are significantly determined by kinds of substance , no?

Its preoccupation with perceptual entities leads aesthetics to extol and examine the "work of art," while averting its attention almost entirely from the myriad other aspects of that complex cultural activity we call "art." In other words, art for aesthetics is fundamentally a class of things called works of art which are the sources of aesthetic experience. To talk about art is to talk about a set of objects. To define art is to explain membership

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in this class. Thus we frequently find aesthetic discussions of the question "What is art?" immediately turning to the question "What is a work of art?" as though the two questions are unquestionably identical. Yet they are not the same.

Sounds generally right. So is there anything about these myriad other aspects that drives people to make this separation?

For myself, I can say exactly what it is, and it has never been a mystery to me why (or that) I happen to feel this way: the "other aspects" suggested here are the most general sorts of human vicissitudes. They are the respects in which "art" is like everything else; whereas the question "What is a work of art?" is asking, at least in part, "What distinguishes or separates a work of art from any old object or idea?"

The only interesting about the question "What is art?" is that we still, somehow, have a lot of trouble answering it. For that reason alone it is a worthy preoccupation. But for me personally it has never been very urgent. Other questions which I find more important do not hinge upon the answer. And I'm not seeing much of this actually represented in the papers I'm looking at. Certainly the papers which precede this one in the Anthology deal almost entirely with reception and little with transmission.

What counts as a work of art must be discovered by examining the practice of art. Art, like philosophy, is a cultural phenomenon, and any particular work of art must rely heavily upon its artistic and cultural context in communicating its meaning. L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved looks as much like the Mona Lisa as any reproduction of it does, but their artistic meanings could hardly be more different.

Well okay, now we're really on contested ground. A meaning in this sense must be imposed, because the more this new work looks as much like the Mona Lisa as any reproduction , the less is any other "meaning" than this likely to be found in it.

We can always say that it is, in any case, the intent that could hardly be more different . We probably shouldn't say this, however, and Binkley does not say it.

Just as I cannot tell you what the word "rot" means unless you say whether it is English or German, I cannot explain the meaning of a painting without viewing it immersed in an artistic milieu.

Indeed. And that's why the milieu theory of art, as it appears in a globalized context without community boundaries or sovereignty, is an Elitist rather than a Populist ideology. Transaction in meanings excludes all to whom those meanings are not available. True immersion in any old "milieu" one might please to join, in the sense indicated above, probably isn't even possible, not without full acculturation, be that on the scale of nations or cliques. These "meanings" live where they live. That's why transacting in them so easily becomes a kind of priestcraft.

The analogy to language serves adequately enough as rhetoric, but the difference is that it would be absurd for "critics" and "curators" and "professors" of language to carry on about the meaning of "rot" in the manner that their counterparts have approached the meaning of paintings or symphonies. If "rot" is truly an "arbitrary sign," then there's no moral or transactional obstacle to deploying it differently in different languages. It pains us, meanwhile, to be confronted with the "arbitrary" aspects of an artwork. Probably most artworks are nowhere near as arbitrary as any given three-letter word, but nor is the meaning of an artwork fixed. The really funny thing about plurality of meaning in art is that it shows another way, besides the "aesthetic" way, in which an artwork can "transcend" its milieu-of-origin. And yet the effort to apprehend the work's "meaning" in its context-of-origin easily becomes the effort to (re-)impose that initial meaning upon it for all times-and-places. But really, to say that a work's meaning depends upon its milieu is to say that this meaning is as bound to change as are society and culture, broadly construed, bound to change.

The shock value of Manet's Olympia, for example, is largely lost on modern audiences, although it can be recovered by studying the society in which the painting emerged.

That is a pretty low bar of recovery. More likely a lost  value can merely be "appreciated" this way.

Let's think all the way through this rhetorical use of "recovery" in the context of the broader account of what is and is not "aesthetic" in art. As with other such rhetoric here, if "recovery" somehow were to cease to be desired or valued, we would have to reformulate such passages as the above, but we would not lose any ammunition. What if artworks were to be received according to the (our) context-of-the-moment rather than according to the (their) context-of-creation? Art would still have a properly extra-aesthetic aspect, but it would now be a different aspect. What we would shed this way is the conceit to be able, ever, to truly "recover" anything vis-a-vis some society in which neither we ourselves nor anyone we'll ever meet could actually have lived in.

Even so simple a question as what a painting represents cannot be answered without some reference to the conventions of depiction which have been adopted. Whether a smaller patch of paint on the canvas is a smaller person or a person farther away—or something else—is determined by conventions of representation. The moribund prejudice against much of the "unrealistic" art of the past comes from misjudging it according to standards which are part of the alien culture of the present.

Hmm. It seems rather a broad prejudice against "unrealistic" art generally, regardless of standards .

Certainly we can fail to grasp what a painting represents if it doesn't look like anything to us. But now we really are neck-deep in Intentionalism whether or not that word appears. We cannot argue that the artist had no intention represent anything in particular merely because we cannot detect any such representational content. In other words, to observe any given conventions of representation is to have an "intention."

The focus always seems to be on what is lost when intention is not considered, but really there's lots (I would say more) to gain this way, and this is as good an example of this as any.

There is no misjudging according to one's own standards . That is a misnomer. There is only the mis-conduct of transacting this judgment on some basis which ought to require that it be more than merely a judgment.

Thus trying to define "art" by defining "work of art" is a bit like trying to define philosophy by saying what constitutes a philosophy book. A work of art cannot stand alone as a member of a set. Set membership is not the structure of that human activity called art. To suppose we can examine the problem of defining art by trying to explain membership in a class of entities is simply a prejudice of aesthetics, which underplays the cultural structure of art for the sake of pursuing perceptual objects. Yet even as paradigmatic an aesthetic work as the Mona Lisa is a thoroughly cultural entity whose artistic and aesthetic meanings adhere to the painting by cultural forces, not by the chemical forces which keep the paint intact for a period of time.

As media proliferated, the aesthetic imperatives implied in their conventions weakened. Art has become increasingly nonaesthetic in the twentieth century, straining the conventions of media to the point where lines between them blur.

So, the road to re-differentiation of media and of forms is the aesthetic road. Why should this be?

Some works of art are presented in "multimedia," others (such as Duchamp's) cannot be placed within a medium at all. The concept of a medium was invented by aesthetics in order to explain the identity of artworks which articulate with aesthetic qualities. As art questions the dictates of aesthetics, it abandons the conventions of media. Let us see why.

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V Art Outside Aesthetics

Art need not be aesthetic. L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved makes the point graphic by duplicating the appearance of the Mona Lisa while depriving it of its aesthetic import. The two works look exactly the same but are completely different. As the risqué joke is compounded by L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved, the Mona Lisa is humiliated.

A certain cohort of stuffed-shirt critics will parse this as a humiliation, certainly. But the work, if we can indeed speak of it almost as if it were a person, is not quite humiliated here. Rather, the Mona Lisa is, to borrow a contemporary coinage, living rent-free in Duchamp's head, and in Binkley's head too by this time.

Though restored to its original appearance, it is not restored to its original state. Duchamp added only the moustache and goatee, but when he removed them the sacred aura of aesthetic qualities vanished as well—it had been a conventional artistic covering which adhered to the moustache and goatee when they were removed, like paint stuck to tape. The original image is intact but literalized; its function in Duchamp's piece is just to denote the Mona Lisa. L.H.O.O.Q. looked naughty, graffiti on a masterpiece. It relies upon our seeing both the aesthetic aura and its impudent violation. But as its successor reinstates the appearance, the masterpiece is ironically ridiculed a second time with the disappearance of the dignity which made L.H.O.O.Q. a transgression.

Are we merely sinking deeping into Intentionalism by now? Or is there something to this? A two-phase desecration to thoroughly overcome the living-rent-free critique?

The first piece makes fun of the Gioconda, the second piece destroys it in the process of "restoring" it. L.H.O.0.Q. Shaved re-indexes Leonardo's artwork as a derivative of L.H.O.O.Q., reversing the temporal sequence while literalizing the image, i.e., discharging its aesthetic delights. Seen as "L.H.O.O.Q. shaved," the image is sapped of its artistic/aesthetic strength—it seems almost vulgar as it tours the world defiled. This is because it is placed in a context where its aesthetic properties have no meaning and its artistic "person" is reduced to just another piece of painted canvas.

It has already been pointed out that one can know the work L.H.O.O.Q. without having any direct experience of it, and instead by having it described. This it shares with a great deal of recent art which eschews media. When Mel Bochner puts lines on a gallery wall to measure off the degrees of an arc, their purpose is to convey information, not to proffer aesthetic delights. The same is true of On Kawara's "I GOT UP" postcards, which simply note his time of rising each day. What you need to see, to experience, in order to know this art is subject to intersubjective tests—unlike aesthetic art—and this is why description will sometimes be adequate in communicating the artwork.

So what are the consequences (as many of them as we can reasonably anticipate) of knowledge of a work being subject to intersubjective tests ? It seems we are merely being told, again, how to know this art ; told something different, certainly, but being told nonetheless.

When Duchamp wrote "L.H.O.O.Q." beneath the image of the Mona Lisa, he was not demonstrating his penmanship. The beauty of a script depends upon aesthetic properties of its line. The meaning of a sentence written in the script, however, is a function of how the lines fit into the structure of an alphabet. Aesthetics assumes that artistic meaning must be construed according to the first type of relation between meaning and line,

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but not the second. It mistakes the experience of aesthetic qualities for the substance of art. Yet the remarkable thing about even aesthetic art is not its beauty (or any other of its aesthetic qualities), but the fact that it is human-created beauty articulated in a medium.

The flaw in aesthetics is this: how something looks is partly a function of what we bring to it,

WOWSER! The big reveal!!

And somehow this is not true of ideas ?! We do not bring stuff with us there as well?

and art is too culturally dependent to survive in the mere look of things.

Of course it depends on what counts as survival.

The importance of Duchamp's titles is that they call attention to the cultural environment which can either sustain or suffocate the aesthetic demeanor of an object. Duchamp's titles do not name objects; they put handles on things. They call attention to the artistic framework within which works of art are indexed by their titles and by other means. The culture infects the work.

A great deal of art has chosen to articulate in the medium of an aesthetic space, but there is no a priori reason why art must confine itself to the creation of aesthetic objects.

Hmm...this would be the place to neatly list out the reasons, if there are any.

It might opt for articulation in a semantic space instead of an aesthetic one so that artistic meaning is not embodied in a physical object or event according to the conventions of a medium.

Can anything which has been said here Contra Aesthetics also be said against semantics? Most of it, I would think

Duchamp has proven this by creating nonaesthetic art, i.e., art whose meaning is not borne by the appearance of an object.

What is meant here, I assume, is to reiterate the previously-reiterated point that "experiencing" the appearance is not necessary to "know" the work.

If what is meant, on the other hand, is literally that the meaning is not borne by the appearance , then this is clearly wrong. Someone could reasonably intuit the meanings here ascribed to the Duchamp and Rauschenberg works simply from looking at them. This is of course not assured either, which I always suspect is the real reason for the move towards "creating directly with ideas."

In particular, the role of line in L.H.O.O.Q. is more like its role in a sentence than in a drawing or painting. This is why the appearance of the moustache and goatee are insignificant to the art. The first version of L.H.O.O.Q. was executed not by Duchamp, but by Picabia on Duchamp's instructions, and the goatee was left off. It would be an idle curiosity to speculate about whose version is better or more interesting on the basis of how each looks. The point of the artwork cannot be ascertained by scrutinizing its appearance. It is not a person-like union of physical and perceptual qualities. Its salient artistic features do not depend upon nonaesthetic qualities in the sense of being embodied in them. The aesthetic qualities of L.H.O.O.Q., like the aesthetic qualities of Rauschenberg's erased DeKooning, are not offered up by the artist for aesthetic delectation, but rather are incidental features of the work, like its weight or its age. Line is perceived in Duchamp's piece just as it is in a sentence in a book, and in both cases we can descry the presence of aesthetic qualities. But the point of neither can be read off its physiognomy.

The point ? Or the intended point?

He does seem to be saying here that appearances in this case must fail, tout court, to convey "the point." I'll have to think about that some more. It seems nonsensical.

(Of course it is at least imaginable that such a work could be made.)

The lines are used to convey information, not to conjure up appearances; consequently the relationship of meaning to material is similar to what it is in a drawing of a triangle in a geometry book.

If an artwork is a person, Duchamp has stripped her bare of aesthetic aura. L.H.O.O.Q. treats a person as an object by means of the joke produced by reading the letters in French. It also treats an artwork as a "mere thing." The presence of the moustache violates the Mona Lisa's

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aesthetic rights and hence violates the artwork "person." In making fun of these persons, Duchamp's piece denies its own personhood.

Aesthetics is limited by reading the artwork on the model of a person Some person-like entities are works of art, but not all artworks are persons. If not a person, what is an artwork?

VI What Is an Artwork?

An artwork is a piece. The concept "work of art" does not isolate a class of peculiar aesthetic personages. The concept marks an indexical function in the artworld. To be a piece of art, an item need only be indexed as an artwork by an artist. Simply recategorizing an unsuspecting entity will suffice. Thus "Is it art?" is a question of little interest. The question is "So what if it is?" Art is an epiphenomenon over the class of its works.

The conventions of titling works of art and publishing catalogues facilitate the practice of indexing art. However, it is important to distinguish between the artist's act of indexing by creating and the curator's act of indexing by publishing the catalogue. It is the former act which makes art; the latter act usually indexes what is already art under more specific headings, such as works by a certain artist, works in a particular show, works owned by a person or a museum, etc. To make art is, basically, to isolate something (an object, an idea,...) and say of it, "This is a work of art," thereby cataloguing it under "Artworks." This may seem to devolve responsibility for arthood upon the official creators of art called artists, and the question of determining arthood turns into a question of determining who the artists are. But this wrongly places emphasis upon entities again, overshadowing the practice of art. Anyone can be an artist. To be an artist is to utilize (or perhaps invent) artistic conventions to index a piece. These might be the conventions of a medium which provide for the indexing of an aesthetic piece by means of nonaesthetic materials. But even the aesthetic artist has to stand back from the painting or play at a certain point and say "That's it. It's done." This is the point where the artist relies upon the basic indexing conventions of art. The fundamental art-making (piece-making) act is the specification of a piece: "The piece is———." Putting paint on canvas—or making any kind of product—is just one way of specifying what the work of art is. When Duchamp wrote "L.H.O.O.Q." below the reproduction, or when Rauschenberg erased the DeKooning, it was not the work (the labor) they did which made the art. A work of art is not necessarily something worked on; it is basically something conceived. To be an artist is not always to make something, but rather to engage in a cultural enterprise in which artistic pieces are proffered for consideration. Robert Barry once had an exhibition in which nothing was exhibited:

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My exhibition at the Art & Project Gallery in Amsterdam in December, '69, will last two weeks. I asked them to lock the door and nail my announcement to it, reading: "For the exhibition the gallery wil be closed."

The fact that someone could be an artist by just christening his or her radio or anxiety to be an artwork may seem preposterous.

Not anymore! It's totally accepted and blasé, and believe it or not after all I've written above, I actually think that's really shitty.

However, the case of the Sunday Painter who rarely shows his or her paintings to anyone is not substantially different. We need to beware of confusing issues about arthood with issues about good or recognized arthood. The amateur indexer may index trivially, and the effortlessness of the task will only seem to compound the artistic inconsequence. But things are not so different when the Sunday Painter produces a few terrible watercolors which are artistically uninteresting. Despite their artistic failures, both the casual indexer and the casual painter are still artists, and the pieces they produce are works of art, just as the economics student's term paper is a piece of economics, however naive or poorly done. Simply by making a piece, a person makes an artistic "statement"; good art is distinguished by the interest or significance of what it says. Of course, interesting art, like interesting economics, is usually produced by people who, in some sense, are considered "professionals." Thus there are senses of "artist" and "economist" which refer to people who pursue their disciplines with special dedication. But what these "professionals" do is no different from what the amateurs do; it is just a difference in whether the activity is selected as a vocation. This shows that the question "Is that person an artist?" like the question "Is that thing an artwork?" is not a question with great artistic import.

A useful analogy is suggested. Art is a practised discipline of thought and action, like mathematics, economics, philosophy, or history. The major difference between art and the others is that doing art is simply employing indexing conventions defined by the practice. The reason for this is that the general focus of art is creation and conception for the sake of creation and conception, and consequently the discipline of art has devised a piece-making convention which places no limits on the content of what is created. In other words, art, unlike economics, has no general subject matter. The artworld develops and evolves through a complex network of interrelated interests, so it does have the general structure of "discipline." But part of the recent history of art includes the loosening of conventions on what can be art until they are purely "formal." The wider use of the term "piece" instead of "work" reflects this liberalization, as does the decreasing importance of media. "Work of art" suggests an object. "Piece" suggests an item indexed within a practice. There are many

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kinds of "pieces," differing according to the practices they are indexed within. A "piece" could be a piece of mathematics or economics or art; and some pieces may be addressed to several disciplines. An artwork is just a piece (of art), an entity specified by conventions of the practice of art.

This view of art has one very important point of difference with aesthetics. Media are set up to identify works extensionally. Joseph Margolis relies on this idea when he argues that the identity of an artwork depends upon the identity of the physical object in which it is embodied:

So works of art are said to be the particular objects they are, in intensional contexts, although they may be identified, by the linkage of embodiment, through the identity of what may be identified in extensional contexts. That is, works of art are identified extensionally, in the sense that their identity (whatever they are) is controlled by the identity of what they are embodied in.

Some difficulties for this view are already suggested by Duchamp's "double painting," a single stretcher with Paradise painted on one side and The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes on the other. The decisive cases, however, are found among artworks which are produced merely by indexing, such as Duchamp's readymades. Indexes index their items intensionally: from the fact that "the morning star" occurs in an index, one cannot infer that "the evening star" occurs there also, even though the two expressions denote the same object. L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved could, for the sake of argument, be construed as residing in the same physical object as the Mona Lisa itself. Then there is one extensionally specified object, but two intensionally specified artworks.

So how much of indexing is mere "intention?"

The above, once again, veritably reeks of "idealism," now a twentieth-century pastiche of the eighteenth-century classic.

But the upshot, again and again here, is that suddenly we are more than halfway to a fully pluralistic theory of reception. We just needed to wait our turn for more socially palatable demonstrations of the point to be developed. i.e. We had to wait for (1) the flux of time-and-place to be minted and christened as "cultural contingency" by which mechanism art is too culturally dependent to survive in the mere look of things ; and (2) the acknowledgment of artists' (i.e. anyone's) ability to intensionally specify infinite artworks from fixed materials without anyone outside of their own heads needing to be told of it, and indeed having no other way of finding out that it had been done at all but simply to be told so by some act of indexing . All of this being so, mere absolutism of interpretation, of intentionalism, of critical edict, these absolutisms then need never have had any legs. The more remarkable thing is that they ever did. Suddenly the point requiring explanation is the lack of plurarity, not the abundance of it.

What's more, we have here also a good enscapsulation of just what Becker's infamous "dualism" of the bodily and the symbolic consists of. It is underwhelming, certainly, and that is the whole point: we are gods who shit. Dare I venture that the circle could be completed and Binkley's riff here could be applied back to anthropology, where Becker gets his start: as we see so often, one person's spouse is another person's sibling and yet other people's parent; there is but one extensionally specified human object, but two or more intensionally specified kinship relations; and in a certain kind of "dysfunctional family," the friction of vicissitudes arising from this plurality can be highly destructive. For the family to come back together, each person must become aware of both their own demands and the demands of others; these demands must be brought out of the shadows; it is precisely the opacity of everyone's needs and motivations which is crippling. But when all demands are openly articulated, both to self and to others, everyone can see immediately what is untenable about the situation and begin to come to terms with a more equitable and sustainable way forward.

The family is elemental whereas art is elective, and in that respect there would seem to be no reason why a mere object of art could not serve anyone, anyhow. What we see in practice, I think, is that this is possible only privately, and that it really ought to stay private but rarely does. If desiring subjects have nothing else at all in common, we all seem to share the compulsion to socially transact our ideal "intensionally specified" versions of artworks as well as of people, of religions, of just about anything. The various large and small points of distinction among all of these human institutions are dwarfed by the sameness of our transactional dealings in them. And of course what Becker did was arrogate to say precisely what drives this broader impulse: "social life is the saga of the working out of one's problems and ambitions on others" (Escape From Evil, p. 49).

The failure of the Duchampian moment, then, is the same failure as most every "social" practice humans have yet devised. Success in "escaping" the priestly and transactional functions of contemporary art requires a kind of determination, detachment and wherewithal that is all but superhuman. Escaping aesthetics, tradition, critical absolutism, disciplinary boundaries, and extensional specification has not been enough, because even then there remains plenty in which to transact, and it doesn't take much of this kind of temptation for human beings to succumb, instantly and totally, to the "saga" of "social life."

There is of course a whole "theory of art" which constructs art itself as belonging entirely to this social sphere. It is the great virtue of Rank, Becker's muse, to have articulated in brilliant detail what would have to happen for this no longer to be the case.

Rauschenberg has suggested this possibility since the only things of substance he changed by erasing the DeKooning drawing were aesthetic qualities. To complete the cycle in the way Duchamp did, Rauschenberg should buy a DeKooning painting and exhibit it in his next show: "Unerased DeKooning." The point is that artworks are identified intensionally, not extensionally. The reason L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved and the Mona Lisa are different artworks is not that they are different objects, but rather that they are different ideas. They are specified as different pieces in the art practice.

That an artwork is a piece and not a person was established by the Readymade. Duchamp selected several common objects and converted them into art simply by indexing them as artworks. Sometimes this was accomplished in conjunction with explicit indexing ceremonies, such as signing and dating a work, giving it a title, entering it in a show. But always what separates the readymade artwork from the "readymade" object it was ready-made from is a simple act of indexing. Duchamp says,

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"A point I want very much to establish is that the choice of these Readymades was never dictated by aesthetic delectation. The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with a total absence of good or bad taste." The Readymade demonstrates the indexical nature of the concept "work of art" by showing that whether something is an artwork is not determined by its appearance but by how it is regarded in the artworld. The same shovel can be a mere hardware item at one time and an artwork at another depending upon how the artworld stands in relation to it. Even an old work of art can be converted into a new one without changing the appearance of the old work, but only "creating a new idea for it," as Duchamp has said of the urinal readymade called Fountain. The significance of the title of this piece has not been fully appreciated. A urinal is a fountain; that is, it is an object designed for discharging a stream of water. The reason most urinals are not fountains, despite their designs, is that their locations and use differ from similar devices we do consider fountains. The objects are structurally similar, but their cultural roles are very different. Putting a urinal in a gallery makes it visible as a "fountain" and as a work of art because the context has been changed. Cultural contexts endow objects with special meanings; and they determine arthood.

I for one find it plausible that the significance of the title has in fact been sufficiently appreciated. Calling the fountain and the Fountain structurally similar seems more than a little bit disingenuous. It's true that there is a structural similarity, but something more needs to be established about the nature of this similarity before it can do the heavy lifting Binkley demands of it here. A social ecologist or eco-semiotist certainly would not accept this passage as written.

Regardless, it is inarguable that cultural contexts do endow objects with special meanings . One merely wishes for a better illustrative example than this. What makes for a "better" example? The very "best" would involve the selfsame object in both contexts-of-comparison. There are fewer of these examples available, because...well, you know why.

It has been pointed out that Fountain was accepted as a work of art only because Duchamp had already established his status as an artist by producing works in traditional forms. This is probably true: not just anyone could have carried it off. You cannot revolutionize the accepted conventions for indexing unless you have some recognition in the artworld already. However, this does not mean that Duchamp's piece is only marginal art and that anyone desiring to follow his act of indexing has to become a painter first.

Certainly not. But if not, then the moment has well and truly passed.

You should become whatever you want. But if you do not become something else first then you are not following in the path of Duchamp (or whoever else) and hence you don't get to claim that you are. You're also not following your own path (at least not in this respect) if teeming hordes of your peers have gone about things this same way. That is all.

When Duchamp made his first nonaesthetic work, the conventions for indexing artworks were more or less the media of aesthetics: to make an artwork was to articulate in a medium. Duchamp did not simply make an exception to these conventions, he instituted a new convention, the indexing convention which countenances nonaesthetic art, though perhaps it should be said rather that Duchamp uncovered the convention, since it lies behind even the use of media, which are specialized ways of indexing aesthetic qualities. In any event, once the new convention is instituted anyone can follow it as easily as he or she can follow the indexing conventions of aesthetics. The Sunday Indexer can have just as good a time as the Sunday Painter.

VI Duchamp's Legacy

Because of Duchamp's wit and humor, it was easy at first to dismiss his art, or maybe just to be confused by it. Yet it is not trivial because it is

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funny. With the art of Duchamp, art emerged openly as a practice. His Large Glass, whose meaning is inaccessible to anyone who merely examines the physical object, stands as the first monument to an art of the mind.

Idealism anyone?!

Have we merely uncovered idealism from beneath the six feet of earth heaped upon it by the Logical Positivists?

This kind of art developed historically; it is not an anomaly. Probably it originates in what Clement Greenberg calls " Modernism ," whose characteristic feature is self-criticism. Like philosophy, art developed to the point where a critical act about the discipline (or part of it) could be part of the discipline itself. Once embarked on self-scrutiny, art came to realize that its scope could include much more than making aesthetic objects. It is a practice, which is why jokes about art can be art in the way jokes about philosophy can be philosophy. Art is a practice which can be characterized about as well and as usefully as philosophy can be. Defining art is not likely to be a very interesting pursuit. An artwork is a piece indexed within conventions of this practice, and its being an artwork is determined not by its properties, but by its location in the artworld. Its properties are used to say what the particular work is.

If art must be aesthetic, the tools of the art indexer must be media, whether mixed or pure. To make a work of art is to use a medium to join together literal physical qualities and created aesthetic qualities. An aesthetic person is born in the intercourse.

Aesthetics treats aesthetic experience, not art. Anything, from music to mathematics, can be seen aesthetically.

Gee, what about ideas ?

This is the basis for the traditional preoccupation of aesthetics with Beauty, a quality found in both art and nature. Aesthetics deals with art and other things under the heading of aesthetic experience. Conversely, not all art is aesthetic. Seeing its marriage to aesthetics as a forced union, art reaches out to find meaning beyond skin-deep looks. The indexers create with ideas. The tools of indexing are the languages of ideas, even when the ideas are aesthetic.

Notes

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