In a previous post I mentioned a conference keynote given by Donald Brook and his claim that “experimental art” is a tautology. Soon after posting I was contacted directly by Brook wishing to politely clarify some points and to offer me a copy of his paper so that I could study it more carefully.
After a momentary impulse to stand my ground and argue the case I decided instead to give his paper a closer look and to try to follow the thesis. This led to a flurry of emails which I’m pleased to say Brook was generous and patient enough to engage in.
In educational theory there is an increasingly popular idea known as “Threshold Concepts” which describes those areas of difficult conceptual terrain encountered as one ventures further into any specialist domain. These thresholds invariably challenge already established conceptual schema (in fact they often overturn them) and once assimilated they transform the learner’s view of the subject forever and may even alter their view of themselves and of the world. Powerful stuff where epistemology and ontology collide!
I’m not entirely sure that Brook’s ideas have been exactly a threshold concept for me but they have certainly proved troublesome, discursive and liminal: all characteristic elements of threshold concept thinking.
Now comes the difficult part – to describe the concept.
The initial idea, as I see it, stems from the identification of a split in the meaning of the word “art”. “Art”, according to Brook, is a homonym and the two senses of the word are so often conflated that any discussion of the term quickly leads into a mire of unnecessary philosophical complexity and specious argument.
Art version 1 or “art#1” as I will call it, is a trans-historical, cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary human capacity for creative innovation and it’s the art we speak of when we discuss the “art of gardening”, the "art of crime" or even the “art of craft” for that matter. Brook dubs this form of art “memetic innovation” (not to be confused with mimetic innovation). Following on from Richard Dawkins’ and others theorisation of memes (which are the cultural equivalent of genes) Brook sees art#1 as those unexpected – and to that extent unintentional - discoveries within all fields of human ingenuity (not just that field where artworks are made) that can be recognized, shared and repeated. This aspect of repeatability is crucial since it is this that allows a mere epiphany to endure beyond being a simple flash in the pan to become a disseminable meme (this raises some very interesting ideas relating to the nature of survival to which I will return shortly).
Memes, like genes, propagate themselves as copies. However, there is an important difference, as Brook writes:
“Genes are replicated, which is a causal process, whereas memes are imitated, which is an intentional and voluntary process. The one thing they have in common is that they may be perfectly replicated (or imitated, as the case may be) or they may be imperfectly replicated (or imitated). Perfect replication (or imitation) ensures the perpetuation of a kind; imperfect replication (or imitation) results—through evolutionary adaptation—in the historical emergence, shaping and extinction of a kind.”
So like genes, memes undergo variations which may or may not be better adapted to their current environment. Those that are, survive and propagate themselves further, those that do not, tend to be superseded or to die off in classic Darwinian fashion.
“Art#2” as it will be known here, is the name the artworld gives to those objects and experiences, in all their myriad forms, that it classifies as art: it is “the class of works of art” as Brook puts it. Brook’s insight into the bifurcated nature of the term "art" allows us to gain powerful conceptual traction when dealing with, for example, what has become known as the “Institutional Theory” of art widely popularized by Arthur Danto and particularly George Dickie in his books Aesthetics: An Introduction (1971) and Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (1974). Simply put, the Institutional Theory of Art claims that art is anything that the artworld says it is. It’s an extremely prevalent justification (most likely because it takes no brain power to trot it out, ie: it’s a resilient meme) used by gallerists or artists like Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst.
In 1980 the British aesthetician Richard Wollheim took the Institutional Theory of Art to task by arguing that art should have reasons for being art. If there are no good reasons then there is likewise no good reason to consider the artifacts claiming to be art as art. Furthermore, if the artworld adopts something as art then we should examine the artworld’s reasons, since the claim that “it’s art because we say so” is simply neither a compelling nor a persuasive justification.
Dickie returned to the debate in 1998 but Wollheim’s emphasis on reasons continues to stack up very well, though it is perhaps true that a few concrete examples of what he meant by reasons would have provided clearer evidence of what was required as necessary and sufficient conditions for considering something as art.
Brook’s theory allows us to take this argument one step further and by a completely different route dispensing entirely with the field of aesthetics which Brook views as spurious. Through it we are able to establish that the art that Dickie and the Institutional Theorists speak of (the art that most of us think of when we hear ‘authorities’ speak of art) is predominantly art#2. It may also contain examples of art#1 (memetic innovation) but the Institutional Theory provides no purchase upon this distinction.
In an essay of 1947, on the subject of Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell writes:
"In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is 'good' ... Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion."
This aspect of survival, which pertains equally to artworks as it does to literature, can be seen as an analogue of memetic replication. Memes survive by being imitated, and culture, as a closely woven tapestry of memes, reproduces itself through the imitation of these memes and evolves as a direct consequence of memetic innovation: through favourable variations in imitation that are recognised and exploited. The test of literary, artistic or cultural merit, according to this theory of memetic innovation therefore, is not simply measured by survival but through the continuing duplication of its underlying memes. Art#2 survives by being repeatedly made in the likeness of previous art and is fuelled by those rare, unpredictable and invaluable variations that comprise art#1.
Art then (or rather the art#1 of art) comprises all those firsts of a kind: the first use of perspective, the first use of cubism, the first work of abstraction and so forth. Everything else is merely a repetition of a then recognizable form*. There may be a certain latitude for the refinement of a newly discovered meme (think for instance of Picasso’s refinement of Braque’s invention of Synthetic Cubism) though this is arguably simply the exercise of greater determination, deviousness or quick wittedness on the part of Picasso and is therefore not a form of memetic innovation but simply the skillful exercise of art#2. Art#2 can quite comfortably be thought of as craft: bereft of innovation what else could it be? This is not to say that art#2 lacks skill or meaning or is an entirely redundant form of cultural production and discourse but simply that the initial insight or discovery (the art of art) is only ever manifested in the first of its kind: the originary memetic innovation.
If the implications of all this have not struck you yet it may well be that, as in my case, you initially perceive all this as fairly straightforward. However, to return to the theory of Threshold Concepts for a moment: a further characteristic of Threshold Concepts is that they are reconstitutive ie: it’s not so much the initial acquisition of the theory that is troublesome but the consequences of the application of the theory for ones conceptual schema and this only emerges once one begins to apply the theory to already existing examples (like the idea that cultural survival – Ars Longa - is intrinsically linked to the replication of memes). Also, due to the nuances and complexity of many Threshold Concepts, it can take time to fully assimilate the theory with the result that learners often find themselves switching between feeling that they’ve grasped the concept one moment only to find the next moment that they need to start right back at square one (as I often have). On a side note, I imagine there is some very interesting – perhaps even innovative - work to be done on the nature of Threshold Concepts as memes and the importance of reproducibility and digestibility in concept formation and dissemination (Threshold Concepts are invariably the hummingbirds of the meme world: highly specialised). Equally, there is perhaps a challenge for Brook to package the theory of memetic innovation such that it might itself become a meme rather than a rather thorny academic epiphany.
There’s much more to say about this theory and I’ve already skirted over a lot of the important details (like his claim “there's no way to make art; only to find it?”) but this blog post is already far too bloated. Inevitably there are more questions raised than answers provided here but if you have a desire to follow up on the theory I have included a couple of links below. There’s also a 145 page book available, published by Artlink, Australia - though the price tag is prohibitive. It’s also likely that the organisers of the Conference where Donald Brook presented his keynote will publish his paper. If so I’ll post a link here too (here).
*Brook also points out that: “It’s important to see that there is both absolute memetic innovation (nobody could do whatever-it –is before somebody did it) and relative or subjective memetic innovation (lots of people could do it, but nobody had mentioned it to me). You might be astonished to find that something working as a merely repetitive commonplace for you is a revelation for me!”
Links:
“The Aweful Truth About What Art Is” is now available for download as an eBook here
Here’s a good review of “The Aweful Truth About What Art Is”:
And several edifying and entertaining essays can be found here, some quite closely related to the ideas of Memetic Innovation:
