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The following is an outline for an upcoming post on the subject of art and aesthetics. The flow of the argument is not yet set in stone, and is open to further revisions.
Introduction
1. In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel declared that art is dead.1 He couldn’t have predicted that, after he declared it, there arrived the artistic movements of Cubism, Surrealism, Suprematism, etc., which seemed to prove the continuing vitality of art.
2. Now, however, it may be the case that Hegel’s pronouncement is ringing truer than ever. But does this mean that art really is dead?
3. Let us first define art, or at least grasp a definition of art that is lodged in the collective memory of the doxa.
I. [Traditional Theories of Art]
4. Art is primarily defined from the standpoint of the observer, from the eyes of the audience.
5. What is held to be important is “aesthetic experience,” what the beholder of art feels in the presence of an artwork. Morality is to be bracketed from aesthetic considerations.
6. Collingwood’s discussion of the true definition of art as imaginative experience.2 -- Collingwood placed the work of art solely within the sphere of the observer. That art is only a matter of reception.
7. Kant and the faculty of judgment.3 The judgment of whether or not an artwork is beautiful or not. The introduction of the notion of beauty within the discussion. First glimpse of freedom as that which is constitutive of art.
8. Hegel and beauty.4 Beauty as a property of the artwork, by virtue of being an expression of Spirit. Adorno’s rebuttal -- the role of the ugly in aesthetic judgment.5
9. The distinction between the aesthetic and the artistic.6 The artistic can be aesthetic, but the aesthetic need not be artistic. Discussion of nature and humanity demarcation, to be followed on Part III.
10. Goodman’s nominalism,7 the physical-object hypothesis (Wollheim).8 Shifting the emphasis from the observer to the artwork, its (supposed) singular presence.
11. Correctives to the antinomy of intent and object outlined above. Discussion of Ingarden’s strata of ontological constitution.9 Meaning as material, the materiality of meaning. The artworld as synthesis: the context in which works of art is received and worked through.10
II. [The Material Practice of Art]
12. Art as a material practice.11 Shifting the emphasis from the artwork to the artist. Criticism of the previous approaches of observer-centered aesthetics. Collingwood’s craft theory of art.12 Adorno’s comments from Aesthetic Theory.13
13. The distinction within the material: the “raw material” (“standing reserve” in Heidegger,14 with Wendling’s criticism15) and “technology / technique / technics” (Heidegger, Marcuse)16. Walter Benjamin’s essay on the work of art in the age of technological reproducibility.17 Affordances and constraints bestowed to the artist by the current state of the forces of production (Heteromation book).18
14. Comments on the artistic/artisanal sector of production. Walter Benjamin’s essay on the author as producer and the critique of the publishing industry.19 The structure of commissioning as paradigm of art-production.20 Reference to the old system of patronage in the arts.21
15. Discussion of production in general. Industrial production is entanglement of the human and technical elements in order to produce value. Valorization and subsumption.22 Re-organization of the factory in the wake of the “third industrial revolution”. Cotton gin and steam engine, production line and advertising, computer and database.23 From surplus-value to machinic surplus-value.24
III. [Artificial Intelligence]
16. General overview of AI. Primary references are Dyer-Witheford’s work25 and What Algorithms Want book.26 The historical sedimentation of the digital (Seb Franklin).27
17. How can AI make art? In order for machine learning to work, there must first be a way of collecting data. Goodman’s discussion of faking art and the relatively easy reduction of graphical arts to its material,28 the apparatus of capture,29 the politics of formatting (Koopman).30
18. Can AI-generated illustrations be on the same level as an artist’s work?
Arguably, yes. Discussion of Derrida’s non-concept of iterability.31 This
is not the collapse of meaning, but the collapse of meaning’s
authoritarian dimension. Demonstration of this flattening via reference to the concept of cybertexts, the collaboration of artist and audience in some artworks.32
19. Discussion of copyright and its role in reproducing capitalism, which it precisely fulfills by the assertion of the artist's property rights with regards to the work of art.33
20. Can AI really make art? Current consensus is no. But the implications, nevertheless, must be worked through. The presupposition shared by common sense (with regards to art) with Marxism: only the human being can produce value, the only entity that can bring out something unique from the materials of the world.34 The presupposition of value-production is now currently being shaken by the latest developments in technological research, particularly by the existence of machine learning AI and the artificial general intelligence (AGI) hypothesis.
21. Like nature, AI lacks agency and intention.35 Like nature, AI can also make objects of aesthetic significance. Discussion of humanity as a part of nature, contrary to humanity’s self-presentation, that everything that human beings do are something that is “allowed” by nature.36
22. Art is now in a dire need of redefinition. Contrary to Hegel’s intentions, what died is not art tout court but a certain regime of art.37 Three considerations: (a) art can no longer be considered a discrete object, separate from its subsequent reproductions and sharply demarcated from the material and cultural contexts from which it emerged; (b) the audience is now on the same level and standing as the artist, not only in terms of art-criticism but also art-production; (c) art can no longer be indifferent to the context that gave birth to it, that the offspring must now answer to the sins of their parents. Art is and must be an act of violence.
23. For there to be true freedom, capitalism must be abolished. However, keep in mind Dean’s criticism of art as a mode of activism (Communist Horizon book).38 There will be no art after the revolution, for all human activities after that will be artistic. Gramsci once said that “everyone is a philosopher”;39 this must be supplemented by a corollary: “and everyone, too, is an artist.”
1. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics.
2. R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art.
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment.
4. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics; Stephen Houlgate (ed.), Hegel and the Arts; William Maker (ed.), Hegel and Aesthetics.
5. T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory.
6. M.M. Eaton, "Art and the Aesthetic," in Peter Kivy (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics.
7. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols.
8. Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects.
9. Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art; The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art; Jeff Mitscherling, Roman Ingarden's Ontology and Aesthetics.
10. George Dickie, "Defining Art: Intension and Extension," in Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, Arthur Danto, "The Artworld," in S.M. Cahn (ed.), Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology; Dickie, "What is Art? An Institutional Analysis," in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology; Wollheim, Art and its Objects.
11. Henry Staten, "The Origin of the Work of Art in Material Practice," New Literary History (Winter 2012, Vol. 43, No. 1).
12. Collingwood, Principles of Art.
13. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory.
14. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays.
15. A.E. Wendling, "Technology and Science," in Marcello Musto (ed.), The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations.
16. Herbert Marcuse, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," in Technology, War and Fascism: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. 1.
17. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," in Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-1938.
18. H.R. Ekbia and B.A. Nardi, Heteromation and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism.
19. Benjamin, "The Author as Producer: Address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, April 27, 1934," in Selected Writings, Vol. 2.2, 1931-1934; "A Critique of the Publishing Industry," in Selected Writings, Vol. 2.1, 1927-1930.
20. Katerina Bantinaki, "Commissioning the (Art)Work: From Singular Authorship to Collective Creatorship," The Journal of Aesthetic Education (Spring 2016, Vol. 50, No. 1).
22. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1.
23. Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on Control Societies," in Negotiations: 1972-1990; A.R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital.
24. C.C. Bueno, The Attention Economy: Labour, Time, and Power in Cognitive Capitalism.
25. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen, and James Steinhoff, Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism.
26. Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing.
27. Seb Franklin, Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic; The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value.
28. Goodman, Languages of Art.
29. P.E. Agre, "Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy," in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (eds.), The New Media Reader.
30. Colin Koopman, How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person; "The Political Theory of Data: Institutions, Algorithms, & Formats in Racial Redlining."
31. Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," in Margins of Philosophy.
32. E.J. Aarseth, "Nonlinearity and Literary Theory," in The New Media Reader.
33. Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons; "Communism of Capital and Cannibalism of the Common: Notes on the Art of Over-Indentification," Leonardo Electronic Almanac (2014, Vol. 20, Issue 1).
34. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1; Dyer-Witheford, Kjøsen, and Steinhoff, Inhuman Power.
35. D.W. Crawford, "The Aesthetics of Nature and the Environment," in Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics.
37. Beverly Best, Marx and the Dynamic of the Capital Formation: An Aesthetics of Political Economy.
38. Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon.
39. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
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