hi this is dr. Gregory Sadler I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called reason IO where we put philosophy into practice I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated and that's where I come in to help students and lifelong learners I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to youtube many viewers say
they find them useful what you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text I hope you find it useful as well in a short essay art and anti-art George Dickey is going to provide us with a way of understanding something that that arises quite often within the field of art I'm also designed and all the conversations surrounding at it that we can call aesthetics in a very broad sense this notion of anti-art is relatively new on the scene there have
been attempts to try to define art as a practice and a product going back millennia as a matter of fact that's one part of aesthetics is it not and within say the the end of the 19th the 20th century and well into our current 21st century there's been a lot of emphasis on subverting the conventions of art and producing something that would as people I say push the envelope get outside of the box do something new and creativity has been often framed as as a central part of this so by being creative you go against
what counts as art you do something different you know we might think in music about the whole DIY and punk ethos that very quickly was assimilated right back into the music scene but gives rise to garage bands every once in a while and we could come up with all sorts of interesting examples so Dickie is interested in this notion of auntie art and what its relation is with art now he is going to frame this in terms of what he calls an institutional definition of art something that's a different theory than the earlier ones which
tended to frame art in terms of imitation or representation on the one hand you might think about going all the way back to Plato and Republic book 10 and all those discussions or Aristotle and his discussion of a maysa in the poetics all the way into the art as expression period or art as something that would connect us together and Dickie is going to take a you might say more sociological view on it which views things is taking place through what he calls an art world taking that term as he mentions from arthur danto so
what we have here is a he says a focus on the social framework in which particular works are embedded and get to be called art so what is this art world idea I'm going to talk about this at greater length elsewhere in reference to some of his other writings but here's the the core that he summarizes here in this article he says that it consists of a corps of creators presenters and appreciators which is then surrounded by critics theorists and philosophers of art and it also includes all the machinery required to present works of art
so what are these three classes of creators presenters and appreciators here's some examples painters writers actors sculptors you know and anybody else who are going to include presenters would be museum directors gallery managers to some degree musicians actors in a different sense he says than those above we might also think about you know dual roles where somebody is a film director right as being part of that and then finally we have the appreciators the people who actually go and consume the art and view it as art and probably play some role in communicating their tastes
to others the museum goers concert goers theater goers what is the apparatus required he says museums concert halls art galleries theaters walls of houses today we might extend this to a whole bevy of websites as well you know so for example think about how artists have their works on Instagram as well as their own gallery page as well as maybe Pinterest or something like that all of that is part of the art world and he says critics are also part of that philosophers of art are also part of that so you know it's it's a
very wide framework and we don't necessarily need to draw rigid lines and say well here is where the art world ends and here's where something else begins because it's not like that it's more like a network so this is going to help us in defining what's going on with aunty art now the institutional definition of art basically says what is art art is what the art world considers to be art what the art world takes seriously enough to call art and this is you know where we find rebuttals to the people who go into an
art museum and they look at a Pollock painting and they're like my kid could do that well your kids not Pollock right the art world doesn't deem what your kid does in splattering paint all around to be and any art worth talking about they might call it lowercase a art but they take Pollock seriously similarly when cage silence as part of a musical composition that's not the same thing as you sitting in your garage not doing anything right why because the art world in it's not infinite wisdom but whatever wisdom it possesses has deemed one
thing arts and another thing not so this this idea has been around for quite a while right and you could see auntie art as a way of kind of you know thumbing your nose at these conventions of what counts as art and what doesn't count as art and Dicky says I'm going to talk about four main sorts of things that we can call anti art the expression itself is he says is both slippery and robbery slippery sometimes it means one thing and sometimes another distinguishing for different types of things will help with that rubbery sometimes
it and its opposite are predicated at the same time so sometimes something is called a work of an anti art and it's also called a work of art again his classification and analysis will help us understand that so what are the four types we have art in which chance plays a part you might think about the automatic writing or you know people like dripping things randomly onto canvases or setting up a computer program to randomly punch holes in a card or anything along those lines as a matter of fact some of the things like let's
say I fill up my mouth with you know die and I spit it out onto a t-shirt right and it's kind of random where you know my teeth and tongue and lips all determine where that that splatter of yellow or green this is kind of oh right and we we say okay well that's not the same thing as art and the artist can say yeah I'm like subverting things man I'm going against the intentionality of art I'm using randomness to do something here okay there there been a lot of compositions done like that art which
has as he calls it strikingly unusual content this is a rather relative term isn't it art that has striking the unusual content you know if if we depict figurative things that usually aren't looked at as being worthy of artistic representation that's strikingly unusual content until it's not right or we might use different media you know I'm gonna do a drawing of ants but I'm gonna do it by using ink that is derived from grinding up ants I guess that's unusual content and we can come up with all sorts of examples of that as well the
idea there is that I'm doing something that goes beyond the the normal in the art world and therefore it's an T art then we have ready-mades this is where somebody takes something like for example this tie and you know puts it inside of a frame or on a wall and says here you go this is a work of art time number 15 or red tie or let's call it oceans because that's a pocket of a something right and people have been doing this for quite a while right he brings up Marcel Duchamp who famously would
take you know things like urinals and put them in a museum and say aha work of art right is that a work of art or is it a work of ante art is he sort of thumbing his nose at the art establishment by doing so then we have actions that are done by artists and he he's got this great example here of the New York artist Vito a Conchie who periodically notifies the art world by mail that on certain ates he will mount a stool in his studio X number of times and that this work
may be viewed at the designated hours he also did other works in quotes and like counting his pulse beats and moving the contents of his apartment to an art gallery you know we might think of you know taking the video of somebody picking their nose if they're an artist so I said well this is performance art right and this is easily recognizable to us now in the 21st century is something that's been done many many times right but it was conceived of as being an T art as doing something different than creating a painting that
you know and an artists are continually trying to push the envelope in new media as a matter of fact we just watched a old episode of house in which there was a performance artist who is making a performance out of her medical diagnosis and all of that and you know you can do any sort of thing along those lines and cuff you say that's a anti art now Dickey goes on and he says that the first two kinds of ante art works which employ chants and works with bizarre content raise no theoretical problems they're easily
assimilated developments within art so they're easy to suck back in and you know you let a decade pass and what was the revolutionary ante art of the past people I call halt yes I've seen that all before that's so 1994 now we're on to this whether it be art in which chance plays a part or art that has strikingly unusual content ready mates presents a somewhat different and more rich problem he goes on and he says that with them something strange has happened and he goes on and he says that how can a ready-made which
certainly seems entitled to the label auntie art because it's senseless to contemplate it nevertheless be a work of art the answer is reference to the institutional definition of art he says that duchamp's ready-mades acquired the status of art because of his declarations now here he makes a differentiation his non public behind the hand stressing x' to his chuckling cohorts that his ready-mades were not art had no effect the large public was willing to say well I don't quite understand this but I guess it's in a museum so I guess it's arts everybody else you know
who is in the in the joke right there oh no no look at these stupid people they think that this is art and eventually it becomes art and there's kind of an interesting dynamic here where things that are being presented in this ready-made fashion as like found objects quickly just become another genre of art that we recognize as arts and art that's you know only important because it's it's within the institutional structure he says that the relation of his public declaration his privates dressings is rather like the relation of testimony under oath to gossip under
the gatepost it's a testimony that actually counts so what about the fourth type of anti art here this has a bit of a better candidacy to remain anti art he says let's consider the anti art of a Conchie and friends these artists go Duchamp one better they perform an action and make a declaration but they don't produce that is end up with an object which in any way resembles traditional paintings or sculptures so they may end up with a video or they may end up with the only thing that's left behind being a postcard or
the costume that they wore or something along those lines and then that is placed within a museum context or put online or whatever it's going to be may be retained only in our our minds so he says the only thing left to do is for an artist let's call them zero to make a declaration and not do anything now here's where it gets really interesting in terms of analysis this is what Dickey says a cone she is exercising the machinery of the art world and conferring the status of art on something which is radically different
from traditional paintings and sculptures and even radically different from ready-mades what is he doing here he calls this a mere exercising of the machinery of the art world he's using the art world's machinery of museums and you know art history classes and blogs about arts and all these sorts of things to make something that we wouldn't normally think of his art into an T art that also becomes art so he goes on and he says that a koan cheese art is real an T art why art because they use the framework of the art world
an T because they do nothing with it they don't actually produce something that we can easily recognize as being art and so if there's any subversion taking place that seems to be where it's really happening ready-mades aren't as subversive as people think they are you know or doing strange content is not really that subversive nor is letting chance decide all that can be easily sucked right back into the art world it's a little bit tougher according to Dickie with these actions by artists that are turned into art I don't know if that's still the case
today maybe we've had enough of performance art and it's publishes a ssin you know I mentioned you know a television show playing around with that as part of its plot for an episode maybe if you're doing that it no longer can resist being sucked back into the notion of art so you know that's something to consider as we end with thinking about this this question that Dicky I think is illuminated quite well for us what is aunty art you
