Reclaiming Art's Material Essence — Epoche B2
What "Of a Kind" Commits Dickie To: The Institutional Definition and the Materials It Presupposes Two definitions, routinely confused The institutional theory of art is usually introduced with a single sentence: a work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public [1] . It is then attributed to George Dickie's 1969 paper 'Defining Art' [2] . The sentence is Dickie's [3] , but it is not from 1969. It is from The Art Circle (1984 [4] ), and it replaced the earlier definition because Dickie had come to think the earlier one was wrong. Getting the two apart is not pedantry, because they say different things and are vulnerable to different objections. This essay argues that the mature definition does not compete with an account of art grounded in materials and form. It presupposes one. The phrase "of a kind" carries the whole definition, the kinds it ranges over are practices individuated by what is done with what, and a practice so individuated is a material fact about how things are made and shown. If that is right, the familiar contest between institutional and formal accounts of art is misconceived: they are not rival answers to one question but answers to two, and the institutional answer is the one that depends on the other. The 1969 definition and why Dickie gave it up Dickie's original proposal was a conferral theory. In 'Defining Art' the conferring body is a society or a sub-group of one; the polished formulation of Art and the Aesthetic (1974) has some person acting on behalf of the artworld confer upon an artifact the status of candidate for appreciation. The model is the conferral of a legal status: a ship is named, a couple is married, an object becomes a candidate for appreciation. Nothing about the object need change. Richard Wollheim pressed the decisive objection in the supplementary essays to the second edition of Art and its Objects [5] . Either those who confer the status have reasons for conferring it, or they do not. If they have reasons, then those reasons are what make the object art, and the conferral is a ceremony recording a decision made on other grounds. If they have none, art status is arbitrary, and the theory has no way of distinguishing a considered judgement from a whim. Either way the conferral is not doing the explanatory work. Dickie's response in 1984 was not to defend conferral but to remove it. The new definition says nothing about anyone granting anything. It says the object belongs to a kind whose members are made to be shown. Whether this particular object is ever shown, and whether anyone endorses it, drops out. What the 1984 definition actually claims In The Art Circle the definition of a work of art is one of five that define each other: artist, work, public, artworld and artworld system. Dickie accepts the circularity and argues that it is not vicious, because the terms are learned together as a framework rather than one at a time. Whatever one thinks of that defence, it makes the load-bearing element unmistakable. Everything turns on which kinds there are, since the definition has no other resource for telling a work of art from a shopping list. So the question is: what individuates a kind? Painting is a kind, sculpture is a kind, the readymade is a kind, and so is video installation. What makes each of them one thing rather than a list? Not the intention to present, since that is what the kinds are supposed to explain. What separates painting from sculpture is what is done: pigment carried by a binder is applied to a prepared surface, or material is carved and joined. Even the readymade, the hardest case, is a kind defined by an operation on a pre-existing manufactured object. The kinds are practices, and practices are individuated by their materials and the operations performed on them. A tradition that ran both jobs in one document Xie He's Gu hua pin lu [6] , the classified record of painters, dates from around 500 CE and opens with six laws for painting. The first, qiyun shengdong , is usually rendered as spirit resonance or life motion, and it is the one that gets quoted. The second, gufa yongbi , bone method and use of the brush, is a criterion about brushwork. The fourth concerns applying colour according to the class of thing depicted. The sixth is transmission by copying. The reading and even the punctuation of the six are contested among sinologists, and no translation should be treated as settled; what is not in doubt is that at least three of the six are criteria about handling brush, ink and pigment. The more interesting feature of the text is what kind of document it is. Pin means a grade or class, and the work is a ranking: painters are sorted into classes, first through sixth, with brief judgements attached. This is an institution at work in the plainest sense — an authority, a public, a canon being formed. And it is the same document that lays down the material criteria. That coincidence is the point. A tradition that wanted to grade painters had to say what counted as painting, and it did so by naming operations on materials. It then used those criteria to rank. The material specification is not a rival to the institutional activity; it is the condition of the institutional activity having anything to be about. Read this way the classical Chinese case is evidence for neither party in the modern quarrel and against the assumption they share, namely that a material account and an institutional account are competing for the same job. The claim, stated so it can be denied The claim is this. The 1984 institutional definition of art cannot be stated without quantifying over kinds; the kinds available to it are practices; practices are individuated by materials and the operations performed on them; therefore the institutional definition is not independent of a material account of art but presupposes one. A defender of Dickie who wishes to reject this must show that the relevant kinds can be individuat