'Art After Philosophy (1969) Joseph Kosuth Essay\r'

'The f tour that it has late plump fashionable for physicists themselves to be appealing toward religion . . . marks the physicists’ own wish of confidence in the validity of their hypotheses, which is a reaction on their p fine r determination defecate from the antireligious bigotry of nineteenth-century scientists, and a natural popcome of the crisis finished which natural philosophy has just passed. â€A. J. Ayer. . . . once virtuoso has understood the Tractatus in that location leave al iodine be no temptation to concern unityself whatever more(prenominal) with ism, which is neither empirical like association nor tauto system of discursive like mathematics; bingle imp contrivance, like Wittgenstein in 1918, abandon ism, which, as tradition bothy understood, is rooted in confusion. â€J. O. Urmson.\r\n conventional school of thought, almost by rendering, has interested itself with the un utter. The tight exclusive decoct on the utter by tw entieth-century uninflectedal linguistic philosophers is the dual-lane contention that the unsaid is unsaid beca aim it is un regulariseable. Hegelian philosophy made signified in the nineteenth century and must assimilate been soo liaison to a century that was except raise upting over Hume, the En ignitorenment, and Kant.1 Hegel’s philosophy was similarly fitting of giving sub overdue for a defense of religious beliefs, supplying an alternative to cleantonian mechanics, and fitting in with the growth of history as a discipline, as well as accept Darwinian biology.2 He appe ard to give an unimpeachable resolution to the conflict among righteousness and science, as well. The result of Hegel’s modulate has been that a great majority of sophisticated-day philosophers be re tout ensemble(a)y little more than historians of philosophy, Librarians of the Truth, so to speak.\r\nOne begins to get the effect that in that location â€Å"is nonhing more to b e said.” And sure as shooting if cardinal realizes the implications of Wittgenstein’s sentiment, and the thought process influenced by him and later him, â€Å"Continental” philosophy subscribe to non seriously be imageed here.3 Is in that respect a reason for the â€Å"irreality” of philosophy in our time? perchance this cease be answered by recovering into the difference amidst our time and the centuries precede us. In the by spell’s conclusions close the hu spell being were ground on the schooling he had somewhat it †if non precise tot all toldyy like the empiricists, and thusly(prenominal) in commonplace like the rationalists.\r\nOften in fact, the secretiveness between science and philosophy was so great that scientists and philosophers were one and the equivalent person. In fact, from the times of Thales, Epicurus, Heraclitus, and Aristotle to Desc wilees and Leibnitz, â€Å"the great name in philosophy were often great names in science as well.”4 That the human beings as perceived by twentieth-century science is a grandly divergent one than the one of its preceding century, choose non be proved here.\r\nIs it possible, then, that in effect man has learned so often, and his â€Å"intelligence” is more(prenominal), that he heap non believe the reason out of traditional philosophy? That perhaps he k flats too much astir(predicate) the beingness to possess those kinds of conclusions? As Sir James Jeans has verbalize: . . . When philosophy has availed itself of the results of science, it has non been by get the abstract mathematical description of the prototype of withal sots, b bely by borrowing the then current pictorial description of this material body; thus it has non appropriated certain k in a flashledge except conjectures. These conjectures were often good overflowing for the manlike world, scarce non, as we now know, for those ultimate processes of character which control the happenings of the man-sized world, and bring us ne atomic number 18st to the true(p) constitution of reality.5\r\nHe continues:\r\nOne military issue of this is that the standard philosophicalal enquiryions of many problems, such(prenominal)(prenominal) as those of causality and free will orof materialism or mentalism, ar establish on an interpretation of the pattern of events which is no longer tenable. The scientific basis of these elderly discussions has been washed a steering, and with their dis come outance have bypast all the arguments . . .6\r\nThe twentieth century brought in a time that could be called â€Å"the decision of philosophy and the first of r delectation.” I do non mean that, of course, strictly speaking, simply rather as the â€Å" temperament” of the situation. certainly linguistic philosophy roll in the hay be take a directioned the heir to charlatanism, hardly it’s a philosophy in one gear.7 And there is certainly an â€Å" dodge define” to subterfuge preceding Duchamp, precisely its separate bureaus or reasons-to-be ar so pronounced that its powerfulness to unravel cl archean as stratagem limits its dodgeistry motive so drastically that it’s just minimally craft.8 In no mechanistic sense is there a connection between philosophy’s â€Å"ending” and finesse’s â€Å"beginning,” but I don’t go on this occurrence entirely synchronal. though the same reasons whitethorn be amenable for both occurrences, the connection is made by me.\r\nI bring this all up to disassemble finesse’s scat and subsequently its vi efficacy. And I do so to enable separates to get a line the reasoning of my †and, by extension, otherwise operatives’ †cheat fix, as well to interpret a cle ber come acrossing of the term â€Å" abstract contrivance.”9 THE FUNCTION OF ART The burn ing(prenominal) qualifications to the lesser situation of ho handling flick is that advances in stratagemistry argon certainly non al moods inningal ones. â€Donald Judd (1963). Half or more of the best current(a) organise in the last few days has been neither paint nor sculpt. †Donald Judd (1965). Everything sculpture has, my excogitate doesn’t. â€Donald Judd (1967). The caprice becomes a machine that guides the cheat. †colloidal solution LeWitt (1965) The one thing to say just about guile is that it is one thing. imposture is cunning-as- machination and everything else is everything else. subterfugeistry as wile is nonhing but machination.\r\n dodge is non what is not stratagem. â€Ad Reinhardt (1963). The meaning is the use. â€Wittgenstein. A more in operation(p) approach to the study of excogitations has tended to replace the manner of introspection. Instead of attempting to grasp or get script creations b atomic num ber 18, so to speak, the psychologist investigates the elan in which they choke as ingredients in beliefs and in judgments. â€Irving M. Copi. importee is always a presupposition of function. â€T. Segerstedt. . . . the subject calculate of conceptual investigations is the meaning of certain quarrel and presentions †and not the things and decl ars of affairs themselves about which we talk, when development those words and expressions. â€G. H. Von Wright.\r\nThinking is radically metaphorical. gene linkage by analogy is its constituent truth or principle, its causal nexus, since meaning however arises by representation of the causal backgrounds by which a sign stands for ( concords the place of) an caseful of a sort. To think of anything is to take it as of a sort (as a such and such) and that â€Å"as” brings in (openly or in disguise) the analogy, the parallel, the metaphoric grapple or ground or grasp or draw by which alone the mind takes put up . It takes no hold if there is nothing for it to haul from, for its cerebration is the haul, the attraction of likes â€I. A. Richards.\r\nIn this section I will discuss the separation between aesthetics and cheat; consider shortly skeletal framealist guileistry (because it is a leading counsel of the idea of aesthetics as graphics), and hold that graphics is analogous to an uninflected suggest, and that it is cunning’s existence as a tediousness that enables art to last out â€Å" reserved” from philosophical presumptions. It is prerequisite to separate aesthetics from art because aesthetics care fors with opinions on sustain of the world in general. In the past one of the two prongs of art’s function was its value as decoration. So any branch of philosophy that dealt with â€Å" steady” and thus, relish, was inevitably duty bound to discuss art as well. Out of this â€Å" exercise” grew the tone that there was a conceptual connection between art and aesthetics, which is not true.\r\nThis idea never drastically conflicted with delicious regards before recent times, not provided if(prenominal) because the geomorphological marks of art perpetuated the continuity of this error, but as well, because the apparent other â€Å"functions” of art (depiction of religious themes, portraiture of aristocrats, detailing of architecture, etc.) employ art to cover up art. When determinations are presented within the context of art (and until of late tendencys always have been utilize) they are as eligible for aesthetic consideration as are any intentions in the world, and an aesthetic consideration of an aim existing in the realm of art inwardness that the object’s existence or surgical process in an art context is impertinent to the aesthetic judgment. The comparison of aesthetics to art is not unlike that of aesthetics to architecture, in that architecture has a very detail functi on and how â€Å"good” its design is is veritablely related to how well it per spend a pennys its function.\r\nThus, judgments on what it looks like correspond to taste, and we thunder mug chink that passim history different examples of architecture are praised at different times depending on the aesthetics of cross epochs. Aesthetic thinking has even gone so neverthelessmostthermost as to make examples of architecture not related to â€Å"art” at all, recreateings of art in themselves (e.g., the pyramids of Egypt). Aesthetic considerations are indeed always extraneous to an object’s function or â€Å"reason-tobe.” Unless of course, that object’s reason-to-be is strictly aesthetic.\r\nAn example of a rigorously aesthetic object is a decorative object, for decoration’s chief(a) function is â€Å"to tot up roughlything to, so as to make more attractive; garment; ornament,”10 and this relates directly to taste. And this l eads us directly to â€Å"formalist” art and criticism.11 Formalist art ( ikon and sculpture) is the vanguard of decoration, and, strictly speaking, one could reasonably assert that its art condition is so minimal that for all functional purposes it is not art at all, but pure exercises in aesthetics. above all things Clement Greenberg is the critic of taste. butt joint every one of his decisions is an aesthetic judgment, with those judgments conjectureing his taste. And what does his taste reflect? The diaphragm he grew up in as a critic, the period â€Å"real” for him: the fifties.12\r\nHow else lav one narration for, abandoned his theories †if they have any logic to them at all †his disinterest in Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt, and others applicable to his historical scheme? Is it because he is â€Å". . . basically closed on personally experiential thou”?13 Or, in other words, â€Å"their work doesn’t suit his taste?” entirely in the philosophic tabula rasa of art, â€Å"if someone calls it art,” as Don Judd has said, â€Å"it’s art.” Given this, formalist painting and sculpture jackpot be granted an â€Å"art condition,” but completely by virtue of their presentation in monetary value of their art idea (e.g., a rectangular-shaped try out stretched over wooden supports and stained with such and such colourize, using such and such forms, giving such and such a opthalmic experience, etc.). If one looks at contemporary-day art in this light one realizes the minimal creative effort taken on the character of formalist artificers specifically, and all painters and sculptors (working as such today) generally.\r\nThis brings us to the credit that formalist art and criticism accepts as a explanation of art one that exists solely on morphological grounds. While a vast sum of money of alike looking objects or images (or opthalmicly related objects or images) may seem to be related (or attached) because of a similarity of visual/experiential â€Å"readings,” one bay windownot have from this an aesthetic or conceptual relationship. It is obvious then that formalist criticism’s reliance on sound structure leads necessarily with a bias toward the morphology of traditional art. And in this sense their criticism is not related to a â€Å"scientific system” or any sort of empiricism (as Michael Fried, with his detailed descriptions of paintings and other â€Å"scholarly” cogwheel would want us to believe).\r\nFormalist criticism is no more than an analysis of the corporeal attributes of concomitant objects that happen to exist in a morphological context. solitary(prenominal) this doesn’t add any knowledge (or facts) to our understanding of the spirit or function of art. And neither does it remark on whether or not the objects examine are even works of art, in that formalist critics always bypass the conce ptual particle in works of art. Exactly wherefore they don’t comment on the conceptual element in works of art is precisely because formalist art is only art by virtue of its proportion to earlier works of art. It’s a mindless art. Or, as Lucy Lippard so succinctly described Jules Olitski’s paintings: â€Å"they’re visual Muzak.”\r\n14 Formalist critics and artists alike do not top dog the spirit of art, but as I have said elsewhere: Being an artist now direction to head teacher the nature of art. If one is oppugn the nature of painting, one fecal matternot be questioning the nature of art. If an artist accepts painting (or sculpture) he is accepting the tradition that goes with it. That’s because the word art is general and the word painting is specific. Painting is a kind of art. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art. One is then accepting the nature of art to be the European tradition of a painting-sculpture dichotomy.15\r\nThe strongest objection one shadower raise against a morphological apology for traditional art is that morphological notions of art embody an implied a priori concept of art’s possibilities. And such an a priori concept of the nature of art (as separate from analytically framed art hints or â€Å"work,” which I will discuss later) makes it, indeed, a priori: unrealizable to question the nature of art. And this questioning of the nature of art is a very of the essence(p) concept in understanding the function of art.\r\nThe function of art, as a question, was archetypical base raised by Marcel Duchamp. In fact it is Marcel Duchamp whom we can character reference with giving art its own identity. (One can certainly see a tendency toward this self-identification of art beginning with Manet and Cézanne through to Cubism,16 but their works are trepid and ambiguous by comparison with Duchamp’s.) â€Å" current† art and the work before seemed connected by virtue of their morphology. Another way of putting it would be that art’s â€Å" wording” remained the same, but it was saying forward-looking things. The event that made conceivable the realization that it was possible to â€Å"speak some other(prenominal) lyric poem” and let off make sense in art was Marcel Duchamp’s first unassisted Ready-made. With the unassisted Ready-made, art transplantd its focus from the form of the spoken wrangle to what was being said. Which means that it changed the nature of art from a question of morphology to a question of function.\r\nThis change †one from â€Å"appearance” to â€Å"conception” †was the beginning of â€Å"modern” art and the beginning of conceptual art. All art ( subsequently Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually. The â€Å"value” of particular artists after(prenominal) Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art; which is another way of saying â€Å"what they added to the conception of art” or what wasn’t there before they started. artistryists question the nature of art by presenting new proffers as to art’s nature. And to do this one cannot concern oneself with the handed-down â€Å" row” of traditional art, as this natural action is based on the assumption that there is only one way of skeleton art propositions. scarcely the very stuff of art is indeed greatly related to â€Å"creating” new propositions.\r\nThe case is often made †specially in reference to Duchamp †that objects of art (such as the Ready-mades, of course, but all art is implied in this) are judged as objets d’art in later years and the artists’ intentions become irrelevant. Such an argument is the case of a preconceived notion ordering unitedly not necessarily related facts. The address is this: aesthetics, as we have pointed out, are conceptually irrelevant to art. Thus, any corporal thing can become objet d’art, that is to say, can be considered tasteful, aesthetically pleasing, etc. But this has no bearing on the object’s cover to an art context; that is, its functioning in an art context. (E.g., if a collector takes a painting, attaches legs, and uses it as a dining table it’s an act unrelated to art or the artist because, as art, that wasn’t the artist’s intention.) And what holds true for Duchamp’s work applies as well to most of the art after him. In other words, the value of Cubism †for instance †is its idea in the realm of art, not the corporal or visual qualities seen in a specific painting, or the particularisation of certain colorings or shapes.\r\nFor these colors and shapes are the art’s â€Å"language,” not its meaning conceptually as art. To look upon a cubistic â€Å"masterworkâ € now as art is nonsensical, conceptually speaking, as removed as art is implicated. (That visual information that was unique in Cubism’s language has now been generally absorbed and has a lot to do with the way in which one deals with painting â€Å"linguistically.” [E.g., what a Cubist painting meant experimentally and conceptually to, say, Gertrude Stein, is beyond our speculation because the same painting then â€Å"meant” something different than it does now.]) The â€Å"value” now of an original Cubist painting is not unlike, in most respects, an original manuscript by Lord Byron, or The Spirit of St. Louis as it is seen in the Smithsonian Institution. (Indeed, museums fill the very same function as the Smithsonian Institution †wherefore else would the Jeu de Paume wing of the Louvre exhibit\r\nCézanne’s and Van Gogh’s palettes as proudly as they do their paintings?) Actual works of art are little more than historical c uriosities. As far as art is concerned Van Gogh’s paintings aren’t worth any more than his palette is. They are both â€Å"collector’s items.”17 Art â€Å"lives” through influencing other art, not by existing as the physical residue of an artist’s ideas. The reason that different artists from the past are â€Å"brought alive” again is because some verbalism of their work becomes â€Å"usable” by dungeon artists. That there is no â€Å"truth” as to what art is seems quite unrealized. What is the function of art, or the nature of art? If we continue our analogy of the forms art takes as being art’s language one can realize then that a work of art is a kind of proposition presented within the context of art as a comment on art. We can then go further and analyze the types of â€Å"propositions.”\r\nA. J. Ayer’s evaluation of Kant’s quality between analytic and synthetic substanceal is reusa ble to us here: â€Å"A proposition is analytic when its validity depends solely on the definitions of the symbols it contains, and synthetic when its validity is posed by the facts of experience.”18 The analogy I will attempt to make is one between the art condition and the condition of the analytic proposition. In that they don’t appear to be believable as anything else, or be about anything (other than art) the forms of art most clearly finally referable only to art have been forms closest to analytical propositions. Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context †as art †they provide no information some(prenominal) about any matter of fact. A work of art is a prolixity in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that that particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art.\r\nThus, that it is art is true a priori (which is what Judd means when he states that †Å"if someone calls it art, it’s art”). Indeed, it is nearly impossible to discuss art in general terms without public lecture in tautologies †for to attempt to â€Å"grasp” art by any other â€Å" make out” is merely to focus on another verbal expression or quality of the proposition, which is frequently irrelevant to the artwork’s â€Å"art condition.” One begins to realize that art’s â€Å"art condition” is a conceptual state. That the language forms that the artist frames his propositions in are often â€Å"private” codes or languages is an infallible outcome of art’s freedom from morphological constrictions; and it follows from this that one has to be acquainted(predicate) with contemporary art to appreciate it and understand it. Likewise one understands why the â€Å"man in the street” is intolerant to artistic art and always demands art in a traditional â€Å"language.” (And one unde rstands why formalist art sells â€Å"like hot cakes.”)\r\n tho in painting and sculpture did the artists all speak the same language. What is called â€Å"Novelty Art” by the formalists is often the attempt to recover new languages, although a new language doesn’t necessarily mean the framing of new propositions: e.g., most kinetic and electronic art. Another way of stating, in relation to art, what Ayer asserted about the analytic mode in the context of language would be the adjacent: The validity of artistic propositions is not dependent on any empirical, much less any aesthetic, presupposition about the nature of things. For the artist, as an analyst, is not directly concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way (1) in which art is receptive of conceptual growth and (2) how his propositions are capable of logically following that growth.19 In other words, the propositions of art are not f true(a), but linguistic in c haracter †that is, they do not describe the behavior of physical, or even mental objects; they express definitions of art, or the formal consequences of definitions of art.\r\nAccordingly, we can say that art operates on a logic. For we shall see that the characteristic mark of a purely logical inquiry is that it is concerned with the formal consequences of our definitions (of art) and not with questions of empirical fact.20 To repeat, what art has in common with logic and mathematics is that it is a tautology; i.e., the â€Å"art idea” (or â€Å"work”) and art are the same and can be appreciated as art without discharge away the context of art for verification.\r\nOn the other hand, let us consider why art cannot be (or has obstruction when it attempts to be) a synthetic proposition. Or, that is to say, when the truth or falsity of its assertion is confirmable on empirical grounds. Ayer states: . . . The criterion by which we determine the validity of an a pr iori or analytical proposition is not sufficient to determine the validity of an empirical or synthetic proposition. For it is characteristic of empirical propositions that their validity is not purely formal. To say that a geometric proposition, or a system of geometrical propositions, is traitorously, is to say that it is self-contradictory. But an empirical proposition, or a system of empirical propositions, may be free from contradiction and still be false. It is said to be false, not because it is formally defective, but because it fails to satisfy some material criterion.21\r\nThe irreality of â€Å"realistic” art is due to its framing as an art proposition in synthetic terms: one is always tempted to â€Å"verify” the proposition empirically. Realism’s synthetic state does not bring one to a circular swing back into a communication with the larger theoretical account of questions about the nature of art (as does the work of Malevich, Mondrian, Pollock , Reinhardt, early Rauschenberg, thrones, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Andre, Judd, Flavin, LeWitt, Morris, and others), but rather, one is flung out of art’s â€Å"orbit” into the â€Å"infinite musculus quadriceps femoris” of the human condition. Pure Expressionism, continuing with Ayer’s terms, could be considered as such: â€Å"A denounce which consisted of demonstrative symbols would not express a genuine proposition. It would be a mere ejaculation, in no way characterizing that to which it was supposed to refer.”\r\nExpressionist works are usually such â€Å"ejaculations” presented in the morphological language of traditional art. If Pollock is key it is because he painted on voicedgoing canvas horizontally to the floor. What isn’t measurable is that he later put those drippings over stretchers and hung them parallel to the wall. (In other words what is important in art is what one brings to it, not one’s adoption of what was previously existing.) What is even less important to art is Pollock’s notions of â€Å"self-expression” because those kinds of subjective meanings are useless to anyone other than those involved with him personally. And their â€Å"specific” quality puts them outside of art’s context. â€Å"I do not make art,” Richard Serra says, â€Å"I am engaged in an activity; if someone wants to call it art, that’s his business, but it’s not up to me to decide that. That’s all count on out later.” Serra, then, is very much certain of the implications of his work.\r\nIf Serra is indeed just â€Å"figuring out what lead does” (gravitationally, molecularly, etc.), why should anyone think of it as art? If he doesn’t take the responsibility of it being art, who can, or should? His work certainly appears to be empirically verifiable: lead can do, and be used for, many physical activities. In itself this does anythin g but lead us into a dialogue about the nature of art. In a sense then he is a primitive. He has no idea about art. How is it then that we know about â€Å"his activity”?\r\nBecause he has told us it is art by his actions after â€Å"his activity” has taken place. That is, by the fact that he is with several galleries, puts the physical residue of his activity in museums (and sells them to art collectors †but as we have pointed out, collectors are irrelevant to the â€Å"condition of art” of a work). That he denies his work is art but plays the artist is more than just a paradox. Serra secretly feels that â€Å"arthood” is arrived at empirically. Thus, as Ayer has verbalise: at that place are no short certain empirical propositions. It is only tautologies that are certain. Empirical questions are one and all hypotheses, which may be confirmed or discredited in actual sense experience. And the propositions in which we record the observations that v erify these hypotheses are themselves hypotheses which are subject to the test of further sense experience. Thus there is no final proposition.22\r\nWhat one finds all throughout the writings of Ad Reinhardt is this very similar thesis of â€Å"artas-art,” and that â€Å"art is always dead, and a ‘living’ art is a deception.”23 Reinhardt had a very clear idea about the nature of art, and his importance is far from recognized. Because forms of art that can be considered synthetic propositions are verifiable by the world, that is to say, to understand these propositions one must leave the tautological-like framework of art and consider â€Å"outside” information. But to consider it as art it is unavoidable to ignore this same outside information, because outside information (experiential qualities, to note) has its own intrinsic worth. And to delve this worth one does not need a state of â€Å"art condition.”\r\nFrom this it is easy to realiz e that art’s viability is not connected to the presentation of visual (or other) kinds of experience. That that may have been one of art’s extraneous functions in the preceding centuries is not unlikely. After all, man in even the nineteenth century lived in a reasonably standardized visual environment. That is, it was ordinarily predictable as to what he would be coming into contact with day after day. His visual environment in the part of the world in which he lived was fairly consistent. In our time we have an experientially drastically richer environment. One can fly all over the earth in a matter of hours and days, not months. We have the cinema, and color television, as well as the man-made spectacle of the lights of Las Vegas or the skyscrapers of naked York City.\r\nThe whole world is there to be seen, and the whole world can watch man crack on the moon from their living rooms. sure enough art or objects of painting and sculpture cannot be expected to com pete experientially with this? The notion of â€Å"use” is relevant to art and its â€Å"language.” lately the box or cube form has been used a great deal within the context of art. (Take for instance its use by Judd, Morris, LeWitt, Bladen, Smith, Bell, and McCracken †not even mentioning the quantity of boxes and cubes that came after.) The difference between all the unhomogeneous uses of the box or cube form is directly related to the differences in the intentions of the artists. Further, as is particularly seen in Judd’s work, the use of the box or cube form illustrates very well our earlier claim that an object is only art when pose in the context of art.\r\nA few examples will point this out. One could say that if one of Judd’s box forms was seen fill up with debris, seen placed in an industrial setting, or even merely seen sitting on a street corner, it would not be identified with art. It follows then that understanding and consideration o f it as an artwork is necessary a priori to viewing it in order to â€Å"see” it as a work of art. progress information about the concept of art and about an artist’s concepts is necessary to the appreciation and understanding of contemporary art. any(prenominal) and all of the physical attributes (qualities) of contemporary works, if considered one after another and/or specifically, are irrelevant to the art concept. The art concept (as Judd said, though he didn’t mean it this way) must be considered in its whole. To consider a concept’s split is invariably to consider aspects that are irrelevant to its art condition †or like reading pliberal arts of a definition.\r\nIt comes as no surprise that the art with the least fixed morphology is the example from which we decipher the nature of the general term â€Å"art.” For where there is a context existing separately of its morphology and consisting of its function one is more likely to find r esults less conforming and predictable. It is in modern art’s possession of a â€Å"language” with the shortest history that the plausibility of the renunciation of that â€Å"language” becomes most possible. It is understandable then that the art that came out of Western painting and sculpture is the most energetic, questioning (of its nature), and the least assuming of all the general â€Å"art” concerns. In the final analysis, however, all of the arts have but (in Wittgenstein’s terms) a â€Å"family” resemblance. Yet the different qualities relatable to an â€Å"art condition” possessed by song, the novel, the cinema, the theatre, and various forms of music, etc., is that aspect of them most reliable to the function of art as asserted here.\r\nIs not the pooh-pooh of poetry relatable to the implied metaphysics from poetry’s use of â€Å"common” language as an art language?24 In New York the last decadent stages o f poetry can be seen in the move by â€Å"Concrete” poets recently toward the use of actual objects and theatre.25 Can it be that they feel the unreality of their art form? We see now that the axioms of a geometry are simply definitions, and that the theorems of a geometry are simply the logical consequences of these definitions. A geometry is not in itself about physical space; in itself it cannot be said to be â€Å"about” anything. But we can use a geometry to reason about physical space.\r\nThat is to say, once we have given the axioms a physical interpretation, we can come on to apply the theorems to the objects which satisfy the axioms. Whether a geometry can be applied to the actual physical world or not, is an empirical question which falls outside the scope of geometry itself. There is no sense, therefore, in asking which of the various geometries known to us are false and which are true. Insofar as they are all free from contradiction, they are all true. The proposition which states that a certain application of a geometry is possible is not itself a proposition of that geometry. All that the geometry itself tells us is that if anything can be brought under the definitions, it will also satisfy the theorems. It is therefore a purely logical system, and its propositions are purely analytic propositions. â€A. J. Ayer26\r\nHere then I envision rests the viability of art. In an age when traditional philosophy is unreal because of its assumptions, art’s ability to exist will depend not only on its not playing a service †as entertainment, visual (or other) experience, or decoration †which is something easily replaced by kitsch culture, and technology, but, rather, it will remain viable by not assuming a philosophical stance; for in art’s unique character is the capacity to remain aloof\r\nfrom philosophical judgments. It is in this context that art shares similarities with logic, mathematics, and, as well, scien ce. But whereas the other endeavors are useful, art is not. Art indeed exists for its own sake. In this period of man, after philosophy and religion, art may by chance be one endeavor that fulfills what another age might have called â€Å"man’s spiritual needs.” Or, another way of putting it might be that art deals analogously with the state of things â€Å"beyond physics” where philosophy had to make assertions. And art’s strength is that even the preceding sentence is an assertion, and cannot be verified by art. Art’s only claim is for art. Art is the definition of art.\r\nNOTES * Reprinted from Studio International (October, 1969). 1 Morton White, The Age of Analysis (New York: Mentor Books), p. 14. 2 Ibid., p. 15. 3 I mean by this Existentialism and Phenomenology. Even Merleau-Ponty, with his middle-of-the-road position between empiricism and rationalism, cannot express his philosophy without the use of words (thus using concepts); and followi ng this, how can one discuss experience without sharp distinctions between ourselves and the world? 4 Sir James Jeans, Physics and Philosophy (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of clams Press), p. 17. 5 Ibid., p. 190. 6 Ibid., p. 190. 7 The line of work such philosophy has taken upon itself is the only â€Å"function” it could perform without making philosophic assertions. 8 This is dealt with in the following section. 9 I would like to make it clear, however, that I intend to speak for no one else. I arrived at these conclusions alone, and indeed, it is from this thinking that my art since 1966 (if not before) evolved.\r\nOnly recently did I realize after meeting terry cloth Atkinson that he and Michael Baldwin share similar, though certainly not identical, opinions to mine. 10 Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language. 11 The conceptual level of the work of Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Morris Louis, Ron Davis, Anthony Caro, John Hoyland, Dan Christensen, et al., is so dismally low, that any that is there is supplied by the critics promoting it. This is seen later. 12 Michael Fried’s reasons for using Greenberg’s rationale reflect his background (and most of the other formalist critics) as a â€Å"scholar,” but more of it is due to his desire, I suspect, to bring his scholarly studies into the modern world. One can easily feel with his desire to connect, say, Tiepolo with Jules Olitski. One should never forget, however, that a historian loves history more than anything, even art.\r\n13 Lucy Lippard uses this quotation in a footnote to Ad Reinhardt’s backward memorial, January, 1967, p. 28. 14 Lucy Lippard, â€Å"Constellation by vulgar Daylight: The Whitney Annual,” Hudson Review, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Spring, 1968). 15 Arthur R. Rose, â€Å"Four Interviews,” Arts Magazine (February, 1969). 16 As Terry Atkinson pointed out in his introduction to Art-Language (Vol. 1, No. 1), the Cubists never questioned if art had morphological characteristics, but which ones in painting were acceptable. 17 When someone â€Å"buys” a Flavin he isn’t purchase a light show, for if he was he could just go to a hardware store and get the goods for considerably less. He isn’t â€Å"buying” anything. He is subsidizing Flavin’s activity as an artist. 18 A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover Publications), p. 78. 19 Ibid., p. 57.\r\n20 Ibid., p. 57. 21 Ibid., p.90. 22 Ibid., p. 94. 23 Ad Reinhardt’s retrospective catalogue (Jewish Museum, January, 1967) written by Lucy Lippard, p. 12. 24 It is poetry’s use of common language to attempt to say the unsayable that is problematic, not any inherent problem in the use of language within the context of art. 25 Ironically, many of them call themselves â€Å"Conceptual Poets.” a lot of this work is very similar to Walter de maria’s work and this is not coincidental; de Ma ria’s work functions as a kind of â€Å"object” poetry, and his intentions are very poetic: he unfeignedly wants his work to change men’s lives. 26 Op. cit., p. 82.\r\n'