Extending Art Historically

Abstract

Virtually all concepts, we may safely venture, are subject to historical evolution. In any event, concept of is clearly no exception. What was understood by term art in 1790 is not same thing as is understood by term today, a mere two centuries later; what items or activities would have counted, reasons why they would have so counted, and what would have been paradigms with reference to which counting would have been assessed, were dramatically different. What I have tried to locate, though, in two previous essays, is most general concept of that we have now, one that seems adequate to of today, but can also be seen to comprehend all that its predecessors did as well, that is to say, all of our past that has ever been recognized as such.1 I was interested, in other words, in whether we can demonstrate a minimal thread of continuity between what it is to be in 1990 and what it was to be in, say, 990 B.C., to go back no further, and to do that without appeal to social, political and economic structures that surround making of at different times-including those which are denoted by label the Artworld which seem too contingent and tangential for purpose at hand, and arguably absent or only minimally present in some circumstances in which art-making seems to occur nevertheless. I suggest that an intentional-historical characterization of art-making along lines that I have sketched is what fills bill, i.e., demonstrates continuity we want between what it is to be now and what it was to be two millennia ago, in such fashion that extension of art now includes everything ever rightly in extension of art in past, and where sense in which all such things are art is univocal. According to that characterization, to be is, roughly, to be an object connected in a particular manner, in intention of a maker or profferer, with preceding or art-regards: agent in question intends object for regard (treatment, assessment, reception, doing with) in some way or ways that what are acknowledged as already artworks, are or were correctly regarded or done with. And as explained in those earlier essays, he or she may effect this connection in virtue of merely intentionally relating his or her activity to some existent artwork or artworks, or to domain of existing as a whole, conceived and identified as such, or else by intentionally projecting a sort of regard or doing with that as a matter of fact is in repository of authorized regards or treatments for some that already exists. (The former of these I labelled relational mode of art-making and latter intrinsical mode.) My claim is that when most unlikely things are offered by current day performance artists, photographic appropriationists, musical paradoxicalists, literary anarchists, and rest, and when Picasso offers his Demoiselles d 'Avignon, Beethoven his Eroica Symphony, Sappho her odes and ancient Egyptians their hieratic murals, there is something common in what is going on in these cases which allows us to recognize all upshots as from our current perspective, despite fact that a lot is going on which differentiates them, and despite fact that concepts of prevailing at those various times are by no means same, and in some cases-the earlier ones-may even be absent. Not surprisingly, I think common thing going on is right sort of intentional connection to preceding art, perhaps provisionally identified, or with treatments such (or ur-art) was appropriately accorded. I'm suggesting that

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