edenism

The difficulty in assessing art, and especially in giving criteria for assessing art in general, is that it is impossible to separate the art from the discourse. That is to say, the mere fact of assessing an artwork is already discourse. In fact, this essay is discourse relevant to the assessment of art: as people read this document, the state of the discourse surrounding the assessment, appreciation, and interpretation of art could change, and this essay should be able to account for that fact. Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) already provides some useful techniques for trying to discern what the true nature of an object is. For instance, OOO rejects the notion (undermining) that you can reduce an object to all of its pieces (a novel cannot be explained just by all of the words in it). It also rejects the notion (overmining) that an object can be explained solely in terms of some larger structure (a novel cannot be explained just as its effects on the world right now). The key insight of OOO, then, is that it takes a common issue that people involved in art deal with on a regular basis and inverts it: instead of asking why we can never fully explain an artwork, we realize that it is precisely what we cannot explain that is the “essence” of the artwork. We can make a generalization from these two techniques of OOO, and realize that what makes an object “more” of an object is precisely its ability to be discursively inexhaustible. This seems like a position that is shallow and easy to refute: if the goal is to make art that does not yield to discourse, then the best art should be meaningless, right? Ironically, this is not true, because meaningless art is the art that is the most easily destroyed in discourse: we simply say “it is meaningless.” In this way, it is not possible to create art that is inexhaustible by attempting to create art that is inexhaustible. There must be the intermediate step of trying to create art with meaning and that thereby should yield to discourse. Another easy way to refute this stance is by calling it overmining: as claiming that the art is determined entirely by its effects. This still is not true, though, because part of what makes the artistic object is its possible future effects in new contexts / discourses, which implies the relevance of some potentiality inherent in the object. There is a common assertion that something is not old enough to be considered “classic” yet, for precisely this reason. The efficacy of an artwork in one particular discourse does not imply it will be similarly inexhaustible in future (or another culture's) discourse. The ideal artwork, then, will resist yielding fully to any human discourse.