Quick Summary: In this Substack, (1) I plug an excellent exhibit, (2) give the start of an introduction-to-philosophy-via-aesthetics that I may serialise over the masters (who knows?) and talk about liking art as someone who is very much not a vintage-skirts and dangly-earrings vibe. Let me know what you think…
Please go to the Icons of British Fashion exhibit at Blenheim Palace.
It’s so cool.
Each room has been adopted by a different designer, who seem to be having a vibe-off, creating spectacular, borderline tastable atmospheres, window dressing on steroids. You move from room to room, surrounded by painted walls and ceilings, and are confronted with clothes that make you gasp, a white and blue ball gown like Iznik tiles, glittering mirrored veils, psychedelic, wobbling jumpsuits.
My favourite gave a sense of The Last Dinner Party, with 10 woman around/ on/ under a table, decked out in mesh, tassels, embroidered peacock feathers, frills, all before a table full of apples and candelabras. It made me think of a set of convicts, already condemned, setting out in their finery, putting on jazz for one last ginormous HURRAH before these roguish, rakish women were locked up and the dresses replaced with orange jumpsuits.
Another room had the Pom Zing Love Shoe. How can you not like an exhibit with the Pom Zing Love Shoe?
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An Aesthetic Introduction to Philosophy
In 2000, Marco Evarisitti placed 10 goldfish in a Moulineux Optiblend. He invited viewers to activate the blender if they wished, leading to the police being called, and drawing criticism from PETA and Friends of Animals. Is this acceptable?
In 1986, Margaret Keane painted Exhibit 224 in 53 minutes, winning a landmark court case for defamation. In so doing, she demonstrated the famous Big Eyed ‘Keane’ paintings were not, as had been commonly thought, painted by her husband - Walter Keane. These paintings had, up until this point, been sold under false pretences. Were they forgeries?
On July 20th, 2021, the National Museums Directors Council released a set of good practice guidelines for cultural institutions, including galleries. This suggested that, as a result of COVID, best practice was to walk round a gallery in one direction. Does this materially alter the nature of our aesthetic experience? That is to say, was the art itself different as a result?
As I write this, a slightly perturbed cockerel looks up at me from the small plate to my left. On the bottom of the plate is the signature Sevie. This is the surname my great grandmother adopted after fleeing the Holocaust, and embarking on a successful career in the UK as a potter. Am I justified in having a different aesthetic opinion as a result of knowing this information? Am I justified in having a different opinion because she is family?
If you are interested in these questions, you are interested in Aesthetics, or the Philosophy of Art. People do not recognise that the questions prompted by Banksy’s self-shredding works, by Black Mirror’s ‘Bandersnatch’ episode, by Beeple's $160 million NFT artwork all form part of an ancient, and really cool philosophical tradition. So why does Aesthetics remain the poorer cousin of its philosophical siblings of Ethics, Epistemology or Metaphysics?
In part, this is a branding problem. “Aesthetics” is fusty. It conjures up images of white-haired men, straining waistcoats, pipes. Artists and philosophers alike bear some responsibility for the sorry reputation of Aesthetics. I went to a panel with Tracey Emin, and all I could think of was the Blackadder episode of Romantic poets, calling for ‘but one cup of that juicing of the naughty bean we call coffee’. Philosophers and artists can each be a little handwavey. Put them together, and you have a recipe for a repetitive strain injury.
This is a real shame. Aesthetics is great for introducing people to philosophy. The examples are cool, deep technical knowledge of previous philosophy is inessential, there’s connections to a range of different topics, and it gives you a chance to look at cool stuff. Plus, art itself is always changing - so there’s always new works casting light on old ideas, providing a stream of novel and new takes.
This book makes the case for aesthetics, illuminating the cutting-edge thinking beneath the archaic name. For the art-lover, I aim to provide a fuller, and more systematic elaboration of thoughts that may have crossed ones mind when looking at art. For the philosopher, I hope to have done this in a way that develops debates within Aesthetics alongside new, and different lines. For the reader, I try to avoid the ‘hand wavey’ philosophy where possible.
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‘Once my painting has been accepted and admired as a genuine Vermeer, I will confess publicly to the forgery and thus force the critics either to retract their earlier judgements of praise, or to recognise that I am as great an artist as Vermeer.’ (Van Magreen)
In 1945, Han van Magreen escaped the death penalty in the most spectacular fashion. It had been discovered that van Magreen had traded a Vermeer – The Women Taken in Adultery – to the Nazi Hermann Goering, an act of collaboration with the enemy that was punishable by death. Van Magreen’s defence? The painting was a fake. Moreover, it was not the only one. 8 years prior, the “discovery” of ‘Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus’ had prompted an earthquake in Vermeer scholars. The paramount scholar, described it as ‘the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft . . . every inch a Vermeer.’ In no other picture by the great master of Delft do we find such sentiment, such a profound understanding of the Bible story—a sentiment so nobly human expressed through the medium of highest art." Van Magreen had duped them all.
Forgeries are sexy. The story of Van Magreen cannot help but produce an illicit thrill. I think this is because they play with our ideas of provenance. On the one hand a genuine Rolex is a status symbol, a fake one an embarrassment. On the other - there’s something a little icky about liking a watch because of the brand name. It’s still the same watch. And the same goes for paintings - it’s the same image, whether a Vermeer or a Van Magreen, so why does the value fall off a cliff when we find out it’s from a forger? Thinking about it leaves you with the uneasy sense that caring about a Vermeer because it is a Vermeer (as the forgery shows) comes from the same instinct that makes people spend $650 on a Supreme dog bowl. Are we just in it for the name?
This doubt links to central questions in aesthetics. What is the source of aesthetic value? What is originality? What is the relation between artwork and artist? Moreover, the asking of these questions raises further questions about philosophical methods. How should we try to answer these questions? Can we answer them?
An analysis of forgeries
You’re at a dinner party. On your right is a health insurance provider, attempting to determine your premiums.
“Do you smoke?”
“No”
“Are you under fifty?”
“Yes”
“Do you participate in extreme sports?”
“Yes”
“Do you have any chronic conditions?”
… etc … etc … etc …
After each question, she traces a path down a Hello Magazine style Yes-Or-No flowchart. When the interrogation finishes, she announces, triumphantly, ‘You’re a Category 4023 premium payer’. In despair, you turn to your right. Fortunately there is a philosopher, trying to work out what knowledge is. You hope that this conversation might be a little more interesting.
“Do you need to believe something to know it?”
“Yes”
“Do you need to have said the thing out loud to know it?”
“Not necessarily”
“Does it need to be true for you to know it?”
“Yes”
…etc … etc … etc …
Disaster.
Unfortunately for you, both are engaged in analysis. Formally, an analysis of x is ‘a list of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions’ required to be x. Necessary conditions are those the concept cannot live without. You cannot be a triangle without having three sides, a man without being mortal, and a Category 4023 premium payer without being a non-smoker. In the conversations above, questions where one can give a confident ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ identify necessary conditions. For knowledge, believing something, and that thing being true are necessary conditions. For Category 4023 premium payers, being a non-smoker and under fifty are both necessary conditions.
This is ‘individually necessary’ explained. But what of the second? What does ‘jointly sufficient’ mean? Consider the conversation with the insurance provider. You turn to her, angrily. “You haven’t asked me about whether I love or hate Marmite? If I believe in UFOs? My favourite colour?”. These questions strike us as superfluous. What it is to be a Category 4023 premium payer just is to have all of those boxes checked - to have all the individually necessary conditions. Now no more questions need to be asked. They are ‘sufficient’.
Similarly, the philosopher hopes that, once they have asked the right questions, and identified all the individually necessary conditions, they can get to a point where no more questions need to be asked about knowledge. Ultimately, philosophical analysis is like a very long, very convoluted game of ‘Who’s Who?’. By asking the right questions, by slicing reality down in the right way, we hope to get to the point where no more questions need to be asked.
Providing such an analysis is the Holy Grail for philosophers. It’s why, historically, there has been a significant overlap between science and philosophy. Locke, Mill, Aristotle - all famous taxonomists, as the project of classifying animals into species (‘Orange? Stripey? Mammal? Tiger!)’ and reality into concepts (‘Unchanging? Good-directed? Virtue!’) run along the same lines.
Unfortunately, reality is rarely obliging enough to make itself susceptible to this kind of analysis. Think of mules. Infertile hybrids between horses and donkeys, they render the neat framework of Kingdom-Phylum-Class-Order-Family-Genus-Species unstable. They seem to be a species (intuitively), but the necessary condition scientists give to be a species, successful reproduction, is not fulfilled. We either have to give up the intuition - and reject the idea that mules are a species - or we have to change our conditions.
In the case of the mules, we are not so wedded to the idea that mules must be a species that we are willing to give up the simplicity of successful sexual reproduction as a necessary condition for being a species. We bite the bullet. The philosopher Nelson Goodman calls this a reflective equilibrium. We’re trying to find the best balance between the rules that we want to hold onto to explain the situation, and the intuitions that build them up. Formally, “A rule is amended if it yields an inference we are unwilling to accept; an inference is rejected if it violates a rule we are unwilling to amend”. We’re engaged in trade-offs between inferences and rules.
Let us return to forgeries. There are two ways we can define forgery. We can define them by properties the forgery has. Does it look different? Or we can define a forgery by where it comes from, how it came to be. Goodman took the first route, arguing there are tiny aesthetic differences, microscopic, that produce a different feeling. Goodman is clearly right about some forgeries. My cack-handed attempt at copying van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ in Year 7 attests to that. Yet for an analysis this needs to be an individually necessary condition. That is to say, for every forgery, these tiny microscopic differences must exist.
This suggests that there can never be a perfect forgery. That it is conceptually impossible. But, at the Van Gogh exhibit, a machine had constructed a millimetre by millimetre reconstruction of Van Gogh’s sunflowers. It doesn’t seem too far fetched to imagine something even better. Plus, think of NFT’s. It’s pretty easy to make an exact copy when the artwork is pixels on a screen. Moreover, Goodman’s argument defines out of existence the ‘Perfect Forgery’. Surely if I successfully duplicate every aspect of a painting, I have made the forgery, a superb forgery. But on Goodman’s definition, I have not made a forgery at all - a necessary condition (the tiny aesthetic differences) isn’t there. This seems really dumb. So I think we reject Goodman’s rules.
Instead, I think there’s quite a cool type of analysis that we can do around forgeries. The stories of forgery cases seem to coalesce around a common core of characters. We have Mr Forger, the producer of art. Mr Forger’s early artistic promise fails to translate into recognition from the critics. Bitter and disillusioned, the artist vows revenge on the Artworld that has rejected him. Through enlisting a ‘Dodgy Dealer’, Mr Forger successfully dupes ‘Unwitting Buyer’ into purchasing a painting purported to be by the ‘Illustrious Artist’, a work which is vaunted by the ‘Pompous Critic’. Beltracchi, Ernst, van Magreen – all bear a resemblance to the core, central story here. Our ideal forgery, our archetype will involve all of these characters.
Yet remember the traditional definition of an analysis. An analysis is ‘a list of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions.’ Are these characters necessary? It is clear we can kill off the ‘Pompous Critic’. I can sell a fake Warhol at a market, and the painting can disappear into the buyer’s home, never to see the light of day. The painting clearly remains a forgery. Oddly, it is also easy enough to bump off ‘Mr Forger’. Artists forge their own work - like Rueben - passing off their own paintings as ones they did earlier in their career, or artists may resell something they find in their studio, possibly by a student. These still seem to be forgeries.
For the Dodgy Dealer, I think we can imagine the below:
The Van Gogh Ceiling Case: The ceiling of a vault in the National Gallery was garishly painted in 1887. As I, and others, walk on it, flakes fall down onto a 19th century piece of parchment. They form an exact replica of Poppy Flowers. The stuffiness of the vault leads to a chemical reaction, and affix themselves to the parchment. (Removal of Mr Forger). A curator comes down, and finds the painting. The most reasonable assumption is that there has been a misclassification elsewhere in the gallery. The curator breathlessly announces it to the world. (Removal of Dodgy Dealer). Many years later, archived CCTV footage reveals what actually took place. The papers announce that Poppy Flowers was forged. Does that language appear natural? Does it seem right to describe this as a forgery?
Intentionalist Modification: The Van Gogh Case 2: 18th Century parchment and some paint are left out. Each person walking past contributes an additional blob of paint. Some are more conscious of Poppy Flowers than others, and over time, the painting increasingly comes to resemble Poppy Flowers. However, the final blob that tips us over the threshold to indistinguishability has no knowledge of Poppy Flowers, but proceeds on artistic instinct, about what ‘looks right’. She walks off. A curator sees it, and, observing the gap of the painting framed above it, breathlessly announces to the world that Poppies has been discovered behind a frame (making the inference to best explanation). The papers announce that it was forged - does that language appear natural? Does it seem right to describe this as a forgery? What about if the last painter knew they were trying to imitate Poppy Flowers? Is it a forgery then?
The Artificial Inflation Case: I am part of a band of art dealers. My friend informs me that he is going to list a fake Le Pigeon Aux Petit Pois, and needs me to bid for it at auction, to provide a longer causal history. I buy it for $50 million. I intend to get round to selling it, but some of my other heists come off, making me a billionaire, and I decide it is not worth the risk of further scrutiny to sell it again. So the painting is never sold under false pretences (Removal of Unwitting Buyer). Is this a forgery? It doesn’t quite seem the case.
The Muppet Case: Josh Taylor draws a pretty mediocre artwork. Fortunately, I know Jeff Bezos. I expound at length on the wonderful ‘JT’, and Bezos buys it for $100 million. It does not seem that there has been a forgery yet, nor that there has been misrepresentation. But note the ‘hyping up’ of ‘JT’ is analogous to the actual behaviour of quite a lot of genuine art dealers. How do our intuitions change when there is another artist on the scene called ‘JT’. I don’t correct Green, but I also don’t lie to him - I rely on him having somewhere in the recesses of his mind a famous ‘JT’, and mistakenly making a connection. I have not misrepresented. But now it seems a little more like a forgery. Yet ‘JT’ could not even exist - I could have put an article about a few weeks ago saying he does (Removal of Illustrious Artist). Now it seems more like misrepresentation. Does it make it seem more like a forgery?
[To be continued. Maybe. This hopefully ends up being a new kind of analysis - stay tuned xoxox]
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I like art. (You would hope so, given I’m about to spend a year studying the Philosophy of Art.)
But I feel slightly nervous about this, primarily because I don’t wear scarves. Or dangly earrings. I can’t throw together a Mongolian faux fur coat, vintage 1950’s dungarees and a mesh vest from my grandmothers brief cabaret career and have it all work together. I read (most of) Hamlet and I didn’t get it. I enjoy classical music but I’ve never quite been able to understand why or what I like, and stick with Chopin because it’s what I know. I like art and I like crappy reality TV, I like face masks and overpriced coffee, I like walking and I care about staying fit, I spend half my life in three striped Adidas tracksuit bottoms and sports kit, I ‘attack’ more than I ‘waft’, and I worry that all this mean I am not an Art Sort of Person.
I don’t know why I like things, or what it is I like. I’m not au fait, all the time, with why such-and-such a thing is a horrendous colonial indictment and a paragon of heteronormative climate hypocrisy. I once mistook a Basquiat for a Rick and Morty still. Sometimes I want to see things simply because they are beautiful, without worrying if they are good.
But I like art because it makes me think. I like art because I choose where I look, and what it is I like and why, because I like taking delight in something that was made to cause delight. I like art because often art is witty or silly or wryly tongue in cheek, or because art makes a point in a way that makes you get it, get it at a level below looking, like the difference between the facts of grief and the reality. I like art because I like the feeling of satiation after spending time looking at beautiful things, I like art because, like reading, it is an exercise in empathy, but it is an exercise in empathy at one remove - why does this person choose to do things like that? And what does this do? And how?
I like being in a space of Noticeable and Noted things, where there is a reason to look at everything because it has all been deemed worth looking at, and then being able to take this frame of Noticing and Noteing out into the world, and look for the Noticeable - the stacking of car garages and industrial buildings like a Hockney, the old man silhouetted behind moving train carriages, how the lines in a poster cut against the window.
Funnily enough I couldn't agree more with your views on Blenheim! I love reading your perspectives Lauren.
Baumgarten - aesthetics - 'the science of the beautiful'