Daphne Stone could not decide what to do with her favourite exhibit. As curator of the art gallery, she had always adored an untitled piece by Henry Moore, only posthumously discovered. She admired the combination of its sensuous contours and geometric balance, which together captured the mathematical and spiritual aspects of nature.
At least, that’s what she thought up until last week, when it was revealed that it wasn’t a Moore at all. Worse, it wasn’t shaped by human hand but by wind and rain. Moore had bought the stone to work on, only to conclude that he couldn’t improve on nature. But when it was found, everyone assumed that Moore must have carved it.
Stone was stunned by the discovery and her immediate reaction was to remove the ‘work’ from display. But then she realised that this revelation had not changed the stone itself, which still had all the qualities she had admired. Why should her new knowledge of how the stone came to be change her opinion of what it is now, in itself?
The idea that we need to understand what an artist wanted to achieve in order to appreciate their works properly has fallen out of fashion since Wimsatt and Beardsley criticised it as the ‘intentional fallacy’ in the 1950s. The new orthodoxy was that, once created, art works take on lives of their own, independent of their creators. The artist’s interpretation of the work has no special authority.
The gap between the artist and her work had been opened up many decades before. The idea that artists had to have a hand in creating their work was challenged in 1917, when Duchamp signed and exhibited a urinal. ‘Found’ objects, or ‘readymades’, had just as much claim to the status of art as the Mona Lisa.
In this historical perspective, it would seem that the fact that Moore didn’t carve Stone’s exhibit should not matter. And yet it seems it does. The artist can be separated from her work, but not eliminated altogether.
Consider the Mona Lisa. Our admiration for it may not depend on knowing what Leonardo had in mind while he was painting it, but it surely is rooted in our knowledge that it is a human artefact. Even with Duchamp’s urinal, our awareness that it was not created as a work of art but that Duchamp selected it and placed it in the context of art is essential to us seeing it as art. In both cases, the role of human agency is vital.
So it is no wonder that it does make a difference to Stone whether or not Moore carved the rock. It doesn’t change what she sees, but it transforms how she sees it.
Does this justify downgrading the rock to ‘non-art’? For sure, there are many forms of appreciation no longer appropriate for it: we cannot admire the skill of its creator, how it fits into his wider oeuvre or vision, how it responded to and shaped the history of sculpture and so on. But we can still appreciate its formal features – its beauty, symmetry, colours and balance – as well as respond to what it suggests to us about nature or sensual experience.
Perhaps the problem is simply that art is many faceted, and Stone’s rock does not share many of art’s most common features. But if it shares some, and those are among the most important and valuable, why should this matter?
If we accept this we then go one step further than Duchamp. First, art was created by artists. Then, with Duchamp, art became only what the artists decreed was art. Finally, art became whatever is seen as art. But if art really is in the eye of the beholder, hasn’t the very notion of art become so thin as to be meaningless? Surely my deciding that my spice rack is a work of art can’t just make it art? If art is to mean anything at all, don’t we need a more rigorous way to distinguish art from non-art?
See also
| 12. | Picasso on the beach |
| 48. | Evil genius |
| 66. | The forger |
| 86. | Art for art’s sake |