D SPERRY FINLAYSON

Art is not its content. The arts and the non-verbal mind. • “Quality” and the experts. The compulsion to interpret. • “Anything can be art,” but not everything is. • The craving for < >’ is in some sense religious. < >’ is found, discovered. • Arbitrary divisions between “Fine Arts” and “Crafts.” • The artist (composer, sculptor, novelist) as medium, as receiver and giver of gifts. • Materials give, and they constrain. The “spirit’ of the clay; its materiality. • Machine made objects. • Science, the arts, and “artificial intelligence.” Music and the computer. • Architecture and meaning. • Utility, craftsmanship and art.

Those comfortable with the word [quality] believe that the great tradition of Western art depends on the notion of form—and on ideas of balance, coherence, order, and beauty to which form is attached. If the word quality is repudiated, they fear that all judgements will become relative and chaos will prevail. And they believe that increasing pressure on galleries and museums to select artists on the basis not of quality but of color and sex will result not in social justice but in second and third-rate art.

The reaction against the word quality is just as strong. The political left tends to reject the word and see quality as a European notion that denies the validity of artists for whom content, not form, is the primary issue.

[Michael Brenson, “Is Quality An Idea Whose Time Has Gone?” The New York Times, 7/22/90 p 1]

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Most of the show is dated 1999 or 2000, testifying to a bandwagon in full career. The collective energy level, which is zestful and infectious, helps one suspend judgement about the merits of the individual works of art. This is just as well. Actually, judging is seldom called for with thematic stuff like this, which has the shelf life of milk. If you wish it would go away, you’ll be gratified anon. [The show] typifies a recurrent phenomenon, whereby denizens of the fragmented and generally aimless art world jump on a breaking story [in this case themes of genetics and biotechnology] in the culture at large….

What makes these exercises art? Well, what else could they reasonably be? They perform tasks that no one assigned. They involve real work that is really gratuitous. In a world of tightly knit job descriptions, that’s distinction enough. There’s something discouraging about this, perhaps. Art used to crown civilization. Now it skitters through seams and around corners, eagerly parasitic.

[Peter Schjeldahl, “DNART,” The New Yorker, 10/2/2000]

The idea that art’s reason for being—and our reason for being interested in the arts— lies in any verbally expressible content leads away from art’s true home. It brings us to a sterile and dreary end, where what matters is whether or not we approve, or are intrigued or excited by, the message. The two fragments quoted above mark points separated by ten years in the long life of that idea—an idea not only false, but tenacious because so easy. In reality, art belongs to the conceptual world founded in, though not confined to, the non-verbal mind so abundantly informed by the senses. To choose Snow White over King Lear because we like happy endings, or de Sade over Hemingway because we have peculiar sexual tastes, is to lose the world of art—and of course, there are people who do.

Further on in his review, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl writes,

This is the kind of show where your experience of a work hangs fire until you finish reading the label. Thinking back later, you may decide that the label was your experience…. As usual, the polemical work on hand is unpersuasive—not that it is meant to persuade. It is meant to give a pre-formed “us” a “them” to despise….Meaning may arise from ultimately explicable chemical and electrical events in the brain, but it then takes wing—…[even] across thousands of years directly from somebody else’s mind to ours. The beauty of the sentence clinches its argument..… [emphasis mine]

[Ibid.]

Form is what art has been “about” in every culture in every part of the world and in every time, although it is often used symbolically. This is in not to say that work inspired by science or anything else cannot be art, or that artists will not turn in many directions in their search for new form. The character of the product is the question, the validity or interest of the motivation is not. At the same time, it seems obvious beyond the point of being embarrassing to say that quality has nothing whatever to do with nationality or geography or politics. Chinese landscapes, Benin bronzes, Inca textiles—who could believe that quality is somehow a “European notion”? Quality does however have a great deal to do with craftsmanship, and fine craftsmanship is found at various times and places among all peoples.

Arthur Danto dismissed “anti-interpretive” concepts as “anti-intellectual.” They are not, unless you believe that “intellectual” and “verbal” mean the same thing. It is simply a matter of insisting, yet once more, that the prime emphasis ought to be on the work under consideration, rather than on what has been said about the work, and that non-verbal experience and thought are at least as “intellectual” as are verbal thinking and verbal interpretation. The human intellect involves the whole cerebral cortex of the brain; thinking is not confined to its left hemisphere, as any creative thinker experiences, and as modern neuroscience is now able to demonstrate with new technologies.[1]

Peter Schjeldahl asks, in reference to an exhibition of works carrying political freight, “What makes these exercises art? Well, what else could they reasonably be?”[2] Perhaps we need new categories: “visual polemic” might be one.[3] It is natural to us to express opinions and observations in visual terms, in a forceful and compelling form, whether out of conviction or to gain attention. Polemic works could carry a qualifying label indicating that their principal claim to attention is as effective propaganda or protest. A work’s value as art could be understood to be a separate subject, independent of content, requiring non-verbal contemplation in the dimension of time. As to the performance of “tasks that no one has assigned,” with no hope of reward: surely such activity is not unusual in human life. True art, like other forms of love, cannot be assigned, though clearly it can happen in the fulfilling of an assignment such as the decoration of the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or the entertainment of a king afloat on his royal barge.

The maker’s motive may be laudable, the message vital and timely, the craftsmanship remarkable. Is < >´ achieved? If so, the product is art, and something to be deeply thankful for. If not, the work is something else, perhaps something for which we should also be grateful, but for different reasons. If < >´ has been achieved, but the content is so offensive that we’d rather do without it, then we will. The fact that it may be art doesn’t mean that we are obliged to countenance it, to turn our faces, and our attention and support, toward it.

The word “quality” is sometimes used to indicate the experience of < >´, but it is also often a term of validation (and sometimes of mystification) awarded by critics to signify that which they, for any number of possible reasons, like. It is assumed that such experts have especially sensitive and well-developed mental, spiritual, and sensory equipment, and it may sometimes be true that they do—certainly their overall and long term interest in the arts, and therefore experience of them, is likely to be greater than that of the average person. But when corporate or academic funding, or the art market, or government policy, or intellectual fashion is a factor in the work’s production, as it so often is today, the experience of art is bound to be distorted, in music and the other arts as inevitably as it is in painting. A message given aesthetic form is a powerful thing, as advertising executives and icon-makers know. Mr. Schjeldahl tells us that “The beauty of the sentence clinches its argument,” and Shakespeare wrote, “Beauty itself doth of itself persuade the eyes of men without an orator.” But is this visual polemic, or this piece of pornography, also art? If it is, then whether it is allowable by the culture (can it be seen as racist? sexist? anti-Semitic? demonstrating prejudice against the handicapped?) is a separate question. This is why the U.S. law allowing pornography if “redeeming artistic content” can be proven is so clumsy and so unnecessarily divisive. That which is pornographic is increasingly considered acceptable, as is the voyeuristic pornography of violence-for-its-own-sake—while that which is racist, or anti-Semitic, and sometimes that which is sexist, or anti-Christian, is not. Material playing near the current boundary with the forbidden is “edgy,” currently a term of approbation. There are still subjects which would—one assumes—probably never be allowed mainstream public exposure. (Think for a minute, and identify your own.)

Arthur Danto asserted that ever since the artworld’s acceptance of Andy Warhol’s soup cans and multiple identical silkscreened photo-portraits, art (by which he meant the accepted art-historical story of art’s progress through time) is dead, since after Warhol, anything at all can be art. I would say instead that what is killing art now is the abandonment of < >´ as goal by artists and critics. It has always been true that anything at all can be art...but not everything is. At other times in Western culture, long-established prejudice found only a fairly narrow range of subjects and materials suitable for the “fine arts:” the Religious, the Aristocratic, the Classical, the Beautiful. Similarly, it was the banal and commercial content of Pop Art that was seen as outrageous—or as familiar and reassuring—in the 1970s. But in fact artists were attempting once again to demonstrate that art is not dependent on content—noble, banal, or even interesting: the subject can be absolutely anything, and artists can take their pleasure, and extend ours, in all directions. At the same time, Andy Warhol’s iconic soup cans are arranged in a bilaterally symmetrical way. They are cheerfully colored; they were designed to be visually appealing. When stacked in a pyramid, they form an entity appreciated since ancient times as one of the simplest and most powerful of forms, one of the Platonic solids. Warhol’s silkscreen prints of celebrity photos are usually square, and arranged in a grid: simple, bilaterally symmetrical in all directions, easily obvious, and apparently sufficient for our age. How is this abandoning form? Claes Oldenburg’s beautiful drawings, though depicting a giant eraser or a giant hamburger, are to my eye entirely convincing as < >´, as well as being delightful fun. Are we to say that a work is not art if we disapprove of, or are bored by, the content? This is the necessary result of the insistence, by authorities like the late Rudolf Arnheim, that verbally expressible content is the fundamental question.

Unless one understands what the artist is saying by means of his shapes and colors or musical sounds, there is no real point in examining the formal conditions by which a picture or dance or sonata is held together.

[Rudolf Arnheim, To The Rescue of Art, p 181]

Ah, the compulsion to interpret! Art must be “saying something” that the critic can identify and “unpack” in words for himself and his readers, or why give it attention?

Let us say instead that the formal “conditions” (of identity and relationship) by which a picture or dance or sonata is held together are infinitely complex and nuanced, like other expressions of Life on earth, and can never be fully catalogued. Even so, the study of them is endlessly interesting and rewarding, since the full mystery remains; each instance is different, and each student approaches mystery from a different position of personality and experience. Unfortunately, the idea that the artist must be “saying something” seems to spring eternal. The composer or writer or artist may, in a given instance, express something the rudiments of which could be stated in words, but the fundamental motivation is to make something, something wonderful in and of itself, a packet or a universe of marvels.[4] The novel is clearly not the plot; even the philosophical basis of the story is not it, not is any other individual part or quality of the work. And since all these things occur so seamlessly together, and are so essentially intrinsic to the form, to discuss them separately is necessarily to do violence to reality, as the twentieth century German philosopher Martin Heidegger pointed out.[5] When anything is whole, no feature of it actually exists as a separate entity.

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The quality of the form achieved by the artist depends first on motive and inspiration, and then on craftsmanship. [6] In an Oldenburg drawing, in an African statue or a panel of Japanese calligraphy, the craftsmanship is entirely adequate and appropriate to the subject; form and content, the medium and the message, are inextricably one. For the expression of heart-rending male emotion, the tenor aria may well be a better form and medium than a concerto for flute or tuba would be. The form must be fully convincing as vehicle for the message—even though the particular message is irrelevant when the whole is considered as art—and, for the form to be thus convincing, an adequate craftsmanship is essential. The form embodies, manifests, is the message: it doesn’t carry the message as a cart carries melons. Yet paradoxically, the form is also independent of the message; its value is entirely in itself.

To focus on craftsmanship as a separate characteristic, as on any other attribute of art, is inevitably to do violence to the whole, but let us proceed, since the fashionable “artworld” now assigns little importance to craft, and in order to talk about it we must categorize. Belgian art historian Dirk de Vos writes of the enabling wonders of craftsmanship as “painterly means:”

[This painting by Roger Van Der Weyden] is one of those rare works of art that immediately lays claim to the viewer. [It] has an unimaginably strong visual impact that is almost physical in its intensity.…It is a creation that transcends time-bound conventions…or theological schemes, a painting that seems to have been made in one piece, a work of granite, yet as clear as stained glass; in short, an absolute masterpiece. Its colors, which were revealed not so long ago from beneath a layer of yellowed varnish and a dark film of dirt now radiate their full power and diversity.

[Dirk De Vos, Rogier Van der Weyden: the Complete Works, p 12]

All painterly means have been employed here to merge, as if by some alchemical process, the paradoxes of stone and flesh, rest and movement, geometry and rhythm, composition and expression, volume and flatness, into a single, higher image.

[Ibid. p 15]

Craft is the maker’s connection to the material, and the material is essential to manifestation and therefore to meaning. Yet in the quest to make the work, whatever craftsmanship the maker commands is employed to a large degree unconsciously, and only to the extent necessary.

Creative workers reporting their processes of production often inadvertently conceal the amount of conscious and voluntary work by their failure to stress it or to consider it in much detail, probably because so much of it belongs primarily or even entirely to the special disciplines of the worker's field and is thought of as wholly a matter of craft or technique.

[Brewster Ghiselin ed., The Creative Process, p 28]

When great art is experienced and recognized, the customary divisions between “Fine Arts” and “Crafts” can be seen to be arbitrary and finally pointless, except for organizational purposes. In its derivation, the word “craft” is closely related to the word “crave.”[7] Craft is strength, strategy, and skill used to get what we crave, demand, yearn for, “want greatly.” Craftsmanship is thus fired by motive, which may ask for an appearance of roughness and crudity. The quality of the work is born of both motive and method—plus inspiration, genius, luck. If the motive is money, the work will be crafted only to the level required to make it marketable, as for instance in housing designed to endure only until the mortgage has been paid off, and all possible interest payments have been collected by the lender.

A natural though parenthetical question here: Is a great message necessary to motivate the artist toward the finest work? Certainly a motive strongly felt is needed, though the result may appear simple, as in a Japanese haiku, where an intense experience of nature is provided in just fifteen syllables. The artist, craving new forms of < >´, is always searching for inspiration, wanting to fall in love with something and so to gain courage for the journey. A limited subject can hold abundant possibilities, as we see in Cézanne’s many paintings of Mt. Sainte Victoire, or Morandi’s etchings of various arrangements of the same group of bottles and pitchers: each artist repeatedly searched for < >´ within limited subject matter. As in a haiku, the subject can be seemingly insignificant: T.S. Eliot wrote of Marianne Moore’s poetry,

For a mind of such agility, and for a sensibility so reticent, the minor subject… may be the best release for the major emotions. Only the pedantic literalist could consider the subject-matter to be trivial; the triviality is in himself. We all have to choose whatever subject-matter allows us the most powerful and most secret release; and that is a personal affair.

[T.S. Eliot, in his Introduction to The Selected Poems of Marianne Moore.]

Deep religious feeling can of course be a motivation, but the search for < >´ is in some sense always a religious search, a quest for contact with the fundamental unknown in hope of a return, carrying treasure.

A finely crafted work serves its function, whether that function is to hold and pour liquid, or to carry our highest aspirations. If it feeds our soul while it shelters us from the elements, as in architecture, or delights our mind and senses while it enables us to pour syrup—as in a small Georgian silver pitcher, cunningly made so that the last drop poured is somehow retracted by the lip of the spout—then it has given us what we crave. The pitcher brings grace to the act of pouring, and in a world of mass-produced, relatively crudely functional pitchers it seems like a small miracle, and a delight.

All true art is functional, whether categorized as “fine” or “applied.” It makes life worth living. However its value is outside any system of measurement and therefore it cannot be assigned a meaningful monetary value. Its place in a capitalist system is volatile at best: it depends on the market, as is also the case with collectible salt shakers or baseball cards. Art is a gift, both to and from the artist; it can be neither quantified nor repaid. Art’s true value is in the absolutely unmeasurable degree of < >´ it manifests. In his remarkable book, The Gift, Lewis Hyde writes that gifts “are the agents of that organic cohesion we perceive as liveliness:”

This is one of the things we mean to say, it seems to me, when we speak of a person of strong imagination as being “gifted.” In Biographica Literaria, Coleridge describes the imagination as “essentially vital” and takes as its hallmark its ability “to shape into one”…. The imagination has the power to assemble the elements of our experience into coherent, lively wholes: it has a gift.

An artist who wishes to exercise the…power of the imagination must submit himself to what I shall be calling a “gifted state,” one in which he is able to discern the connections inherent in his materials and…bring the work to life.

[Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Life of Property, p 150]

The artist is somehow a medium, an agent for the work, as so many have testified. The work is received as a gift, and given to its audience as manifest form.

Once an inner gift has been realized, it may be passed along, communicated to the audience. And sometimes this embodied gift—the work—can reproduce the gifted state in the audience that receives it. Let us say that the “suspension of disbelief” by which we become receptive to a work of the imagination is in fact belief, a momentary faith by virtue of which the artist’s gift may enter and act upon our being. Sometimes, then, if we are awake, if the artist really was gifted, the work will induce a moment of grace, a communion, a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives.

[Ibid. p. 151]

This “moment of grace…a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives” is the most profound Meaning. We crave a conscious life, to be ecstatically aware of ourselves living fully in the world. Art wakes us up, brings us to awareness of the < >´ of reality, and itself gives us < >´. [8]

When the order and animation of art, the “organic cohesion we perceive as liveliness” is absent, the most superb craftsmanship is impressive but in the end comparatively uninteresting; to contemplate it is the work of duty, however admiring, not the discovery of joy. If craftsmanship is the ultimate goal the work will lack vitality. Once, during a visit to the great cathedral at Burgos in Spain, an importunate would-be guide followed us closely, remarking of every elaborate wrought iron screen, every intricately carved stone drapery: “Think of the patience! Think of the time!” He was rightly in awe of the craftsmanship displayed, but we were after something more. And yet it is craftsmanship which enables the artist to get what he or she “wants greatly,” that is, to express it fully.

So-called “outsider” artists, those working outside the worlds of schools and galleries and concert halls, are not outside craftsmanship. The artist uses the materials at hand to make what he or she craves, which is < >´, and the level of skill need only be adequate to the work undertaken. A kind of magic, of alchemy, occurs then. I have seen and coveted an image of a ferry boat, painted with automobile paints on a piece of metal by an elderly African American man, whose name I don’t know. I couldn’t afford to buy it from the gallery, but the image stays in my mind, in its clear intensity and joyfulness, bright pennants flying in the wind, white caps on the waves. I will never forget it. The artist’s level of craftsmanship was integral to the character of that work; his “pure heartedness”—his honesty—was patent. In the paintings of children we find instance after instance of strongly evocative imagery produced with minimal technical skill: the force and sincerity of the artist’s motivation seem able to overwhelm all obstacles. Perhaps in a reaction to the all-pervasive presence of machine-made objects around us—each smooth object owing its form to the limitations of machine production and to an accommodation to the market—we find a degree of crudity, when combined with sincerity, to be robust and convincing. It is a sign of life. Quality of motivation is again the essential thing—ineptitude and carelessness, actual or affected, and especially with a commercial intent, set the nerves on edge, as in the “local crafts” for sale in tourist shops all over the world. At the same time, the distinguished British craftsman David Pye observed what he called “a widespread aversion from skill” in the fine arts and elsewhere:

[We] have lately tried to make execution as accidental as possible, or at least to give the impression of ineptitude. In music and sport we prefer that few should have skill while we watch. In making we try to eliminate [the need for] skill by using…determining systems.

[David Pye, The Nature of Design p 56]

Certainly it is easier and cheaper to let the machines do it, and their prowess in manufacturing is by now generally more impressive than ours, though there’s little life in the product. What life there is comes entirely from their design, from the relationships among the parts and between those parts and the total form. A machine-made object, or a machine itself, can be stunningly handsome. Gorgeous, perhaps, but not alive.

Craftsmanship demands a respect for materials, since they dictate what is possible; materials give, and they constrain. Both Japanese and Native American potters speak of the spirit of the clay, that is, its manifest reality, its exact physical qualities and properties, and of their desire to be faithful to it:

Simply, the Japanese craftsman allowed materials to speak directly. This does not mean sloppy work or lackadaisical technique, or a surrender to natural forces…the country potter dug his own clay and knew in intimate detail just how to refine and age it according to its nature….This knowledge was all directed toward the single aim of making the pot be totally itself, of letting clay and glaze (if any) and decoration all work together while each keeps its own identity….At the very heart of this is the craftsman’s faith and his respect for the natural, god-given materials that connect man to his sources.

[Amy Sylvester Katoh, Japan Country Living: Spirit, Tradition, Style, p 137]

Roger Lipsey, in An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art, writes of the craft tradition in general:

The ideals and insights of the craft tradition are not easily summarized. There is an insight into human nature and into the discipline of body and mind that allows the craftsperson to work harmoniously. There is acknowledgement of the distinctiveness of materials, the sacredness of Nature, and the craftsperson’s participation in materials and impressive natural law. There is an intuition of the Logos informing both Nature and human nature, accompanied by recognition that the Logos hides and must be perseveringly sought. [emphasis mine]

[Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art, p 469]

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In its most basic meaning, the word “art” signifies a skill or ability. “One who has acquired a skill may be designated an artisan or artist according to whether his skills are directed principally toward a utilitarian or an aesthetic purpose”[9]—that is, dependent on the motivation at work. Currently, if the product is to be mass-produced by a machine rather than by an artist or artisan, the originator is called a “designer.”[10] Such machine-made objects are now quite often exhibited in museums and many of them are good to look at, deserving admiration and respect as original and particular examples of balance, harmony, ingenuity, craftsmanship, and function. They are usually bilaterally symmetrical, for reasons of production and shipping cost—and perhaps because bilateral symmetry is the relatively easier road toward harmonious form, as we have seen. Hand-made objects are usually not perfectly bilaterally symmetrical, and must always exhibit small irregularities in their form; this is one reason why, if the level of craftsmanship is high enough, we tend to prefer them. The human artisan must pursue perfection with a focused intensity, knowing that it is finally, and perhaps blessedly, unreachable. If perfection is too closely approached we may find the work cold and to a degree dull, as in certain spliced and re-recorded renderings of music performed by technically astounding classical pianists and “listened” to by the machines of the sound studio.

Scientists have long been fascinated by the human mental activities necessary for problem-solving in the arts,[11] and since 1956, when the term “artificial intelligence” was first used, attempts have been made to quantify such mental processes in order to replicate them with computers. Professor Gerhard Widmer is a Viennese computer scientist trained as a classical pianist. In 2001, he undertook a computer-enabled project to try to quantify the complexities of nuance, emphasis, and irregularity essential to great musical performance. The work was funded by a million-dollar grant from the Austrian government.

A Wired magazine article in 2001 described Dr. Widmer as obsessed with discovering what the writer calls “the blips and fault lines, deviations and inventions, that transform music into something more than code and just slightly less than magic”—the mysterious process, the craft, involved in producing the “elusive, often rapturously mythologized” sound of music.[12] Earlier researchers had investigated the creative process of musical composition, with generally unsatisfactory results. Widmer decided instead to study musical performance as a vast and incredibly complex system of aesthetic choices through time, “the complexities of nuance and irregularity essential to a great…performance,” the accidents and even errors involved in a craft in which trained body and trained mind work together in inspired collaboration.

“Classical musicology has spanned hundreds of years studying compositions as if the score itself were the music,” Widmer says. “There are tons of papers about the structure of Mozart sonatas or Beethoven symphonies. But the score itself is a dead piece of paper and specifies not nearly enough detail for making a performance. It leaves so many things implicit.”

…If genetic decoding is about discovering what we are physically, deconstructing and quantifying the act of making music may tell us more about what we are psychically.

[Wired magazine, Sept. 2001, p 100-102]

David Cope, a professor of music at U.C. Santa Cruz said of Widmer’s work, “We have no idea what music really is—we haven’t a clue.…We know it’s important and precious, but that’s it. The question is, how close can you get toward understanding music? I think Gerhard will go really far.”[13]

In Widmer’s ongoing project, computer technology was used to deduce “rules” implicit in performances by analyzing one virtuoso playing one composer—Roland Batik, thirteen piano sonatas by Mozart, 160,000 notes. The goal was the ability to program computers to play other, equally complex musical scores with the complexity of great human performances (with all that this could mean in the programming of more commercially profitable forms of mechanical “intelligence”). If the computer is mistaken, if it has miscalculated, and has arrived at false or unnecessary rules, then its musical performance will be mechanical and awkward. However if Widmer and his system have in fact discovered valid rules for playing Mozart, the music will be “nuanced, delicate, and perhaps even touching.”[14] As of 2001, the “rules” detected already incorporated hours of human sorting; they were therefore the result of many human and necessarily subjective decisions as to the relevance of one or another piece of computer-generated data.[15] At that time, the project was expected to continue for six years or more. In 2009 Dr. Widmer received the Wittgenstein Award, a prestigious 1.5 million Euro prize given once a year to an Austrian scientist; it is tied to further research over a period of six years.

Like piano performance, every highly evolved human craft is vastly complex. There is an unpredictable and indefinite—a “shimmering”—difference between a sterile, mechanical perfection and that which lives. We have the capacity to make such life happen, and when it does, we can recognize it and take joy in it.

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The tea room is unimpressive in appearance. It is smaller than the smallest of Japanese houses, while the materials used in its construction are intended to give the suggestion of refined poverty. Yet we must remember that all this is the result of profound artistic forethought, and that the details have been worked out with care perhaps even greater than that expended on the building of the richest palaces and temples…. Indeed the carpenters employed by the tea masters form a distinct and highly honored class among artisans, their work being no less delicate than that of the makers of lacquer cabinets.

[Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea, p 56]

The function of the tea room is to house an experience of < >´, of the Logos both forming and animating all nature. This is among the most important of functions, once the needs for food and shelter have been met. The craving for it is at the same time our highest aspiration and our deepest need; it is craving for God. The craftsmanship must be the artist’s very best and most judicious, whether elemental or sophisticated. But the swept path to the tea house is scattered with leaves, and the bowl used for the tea ceremony has been found, not purposefully made—an accidental treasure discovered among the cheapest mass-produced pottery. Or the bowl may be ancient and broken, now re-assembled using gold as the solder so that the pattern of cracks has become a costly decoration celebrating the sometimes sublime workings of chance. The lesson is that < >´ can be found anywhere, in the simplest of circumstances, in the most mundane of activities—or purely by chance.

Again: being useful does not prevent a thing from being art. However, goaded by the present mistaken division between “fine” and “applied” art, craftspeople now produce chairs on which no one could sit, teapots that could never pour tea. Sometimes written messages are added to the work to make sure it is recognized as art—not humble nursery fragments like “Polly Put the Kettle On,” of course, but potent sayings like “War Kills Children.” Yet an anti-war teapot or a pornographic teapot could certainly be made so that it could steep and pour tea, and could nevertheless be a work of art.

Great architecture is an obvious example of usefulness; if no use can be found for a building it will be torn down and cleared away or allowed to disintegrate. But its usefulness does not have to be as shelter. A few buildings, like the ruins of the Parthenon, exist as art, serving no functions but those of art and historical testimony.[16] Some of the Christian cathedrals of Europe have arrived at this condition; they are maintained not by the faithful but by governments, as national treasures and tourist attractions.

Do we have the right to insist that we be able to sit on a chair or that an art museum be an optimal place for looking at art, or that a concert hall have good acoustics? In the case of the chair we may decide that it doesn’t matter. We have other chairs. But what about a concert hall or an art museum? Since tourism is now the world’s biggest peacetime business, and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao is notably successful as a tourist destination, it can be seen as an internationally important work of architectural sculpture. It has brought status and financial benefits to an otherwise depressed and dangerous city. Perhaps it is an upscale tourist attraction called, for convenience, an art museum. The question of whether it functions well as an art museum is now, in some circles, seen as irrelevant. We have other museums. In direct contrast to such an understanding of architecture we have the following, published in America in 1797:

In the art of building, an intelligent and expert carpenter is entitled to the foremost place, or first degree of eminence…. His profession demands the most practical application of the most plain, simple, and unerring principles; and more pleasure results from the view, as well as more comfort from the use, of a neat well-constructed common house, than from the most superb but ill-contrived palace, where fanciful ornaments are frequently introduced with no better intention than to disguise blemishes in proportion and symmetry. Strength and convenience are the two most essential elements in building; the due proportion and correspondence of parts constituting a beauty that first attracts the eye; and where that beauty is wanting, carving and gilding only excite disgust.

[William Pain, The Carpenter’s Pocket Directory: Containing the Best Methods of Framing Timber Buildings]

This clear and dignified prose came out of the general sensibility that produced the beautiful meetinghouses and farm buildings of early New England. “Nothing special” as Zen texts say, and most definitely of another time. The term “ill-contrived palace” perfectly describes the “mansionettes” built all over the United States during the real estate frenzy of the early 21st century.

When costly structures built less than fifty years ago have become obsolete and are being torn down, it is amazing and significant that a simple barn in the country, even in a state of ruin, can continue to benefit and enrich its surroundings after two centuries. And when that barn is threatened by a new housing development, it is usually the old barn that seems attractive, while the new buildings look grotesque—until, of course, the old barn is removed and we can become accustomed to the sameness of mediocre design.

…There was once a magnificent old barn that was torn down because a gasoline company wanted the land it stood on and paid a huge sum for it. A local historical society had a plaque made and erected nearby, telling about the barn and its history. But a sense of history is an apology for the absence of beauty; it is in no way a substitute.

[Eric Sloane, An Age of Barns, Funk & Wagnalls, 1966. New York p 13]

As the historical society well knows, its plaque is a mere message. It cannot begin to satisfy our craving for a meaningful reality.

Accomplished and careful craftsmanship in the works of human beings can delight and nourish us, while careless and brutal making is depressing to both maker and audience. Fine craftsmanship allows < >´ to shine clearly in art. The awe-inspiring, lively perfection of everything healthy in nature is the foundation for a conception of God as ultimate craftsman; the function of art is to embody < >´, “for the glory of God and the delectation of the human spirit,” just as Bach said.

[1] These findings will be discussed in chapter 19.

[2] Page 136 here.

[3] We could suggest “propaganda,” but since the early 20th century the word has a negative connotation, as meaning necessarily false and misleading. Originally it was the name of a committee of cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church established in 1622 to oversee missionary activities in foreign countries.

[4] Arthur Danto, one of those who might have strongly disagreed here, quoted Charles Lamb on the engravings of Hogarth: ‘Other pictures we look at, his was read.’ He continues, ‘And indeed those deeply narrative, not to say moralistic pictures, have to be worked out in a detail to match the detail of the individual engravings, to the point where giving a reading of Hogarth could become, as it did, a genre of interpretative literature. I am certain that working through the prints is part of what experiencing the prints consists in, that they are meant to transform the reader through his identification of the sordid stories they depict.’ [In The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, p 74] I would agree, but as I’ve said here, I’d prefer to call the images visual polemic, and to consider the appreciation of their value as art a different activity, a necessarily non-verbal activity. Mr. Danto goes on to discuss images occurring in a narrative series, like the Buddhist Ox-herding pictures, where the verbally expressible content of one is clear only in the context of the others. Serial visual polemic, in other words, with or without value as art depending on the formal quality of the images. Again, visual image is indeed a powerful carrier of symbolic meaning: the closer to < >´ the image, the more potent the message thus carried.

[5] Martin Heidegger, in David Farrell Kell ed., Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, p 159

[6] The American poet Brewster Ghiselin wrote, in the introduction to his anthology The Creative Process: “[The] self-surrender so familiar to creative minds is nearly always hard to achieve. It calls for a purity of motive that is rarely sustained except through dedication and discipline.”

[7] The Oxford Dictionary of Etymology

[8] The imagery, the visual organization of a powerful film affects our vision after we leave the theatre. For a time, the world looks like the world of the film. Waking from an overwhelming dream, we sometimes find that our experience of the world is altered by it; we are “haunted” by the dream. All the arts have this power to organize our minds anew.

[9] Encyclopedia Britannica Vol. 2 p 484 c. The division between art and design is somewhat blurred, since the two fields are so similarly motivated—but not identically. And the difference is crucial. (Some of the best of those who used to be called “computer programmers” now prefer to be known as “software architects,” and aspire to “elegance” and to Christopher Alexander’s “quality without a name,” known as “qwan,” in their work. Aesthetic considerations in contemporary computer technology will be mentioned again on p 292.)

[10] Ibid. Vol. 7 p 163 b.

[11] Such research can attract funding from a variety of government, military, and corporate sources, at least in part because of its possible applications in robotics, i.e. in warfare and commerce.

[12] Wired magazine, September 2001, p 100-102

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid. p 108

[15] This appears to be a standard way of using the vast outpourings of data generated by computers. A prepared human mind discriminates intuitively and subjectively as to what may be, or probably is not, relevant. And that process is of course exactly analogous to the way we use chance operations in art. Chance offers many unexpected possibilities: the artist chooses among them for her own purposes.

[16] It is interesting to wonder how it is that a fragment of a fully-realized work—the ruin of a great building, one small section or “detail” of a painting printed in a book, one movement, or even a brief passages, of a great concerto played by itself—can possess a convincing presence somehow related to that experienced in the wholeness from which it is taken.