Week Two: Paradigms and Purposes

Frankly, I found the second chapter of Freeland's book hard to follow because of its meandering discussions that were never concretely tied together. That being said, I was interested to read about Andy Warhol and his Brillo Boxes. I have little background knowledge on the pop art movement but find myself drawn to it because of the complex issues involved in describing such pieces as 'art.' I do not necessarily agree that works like Brillo Boxes become art when/if they are "accepted by museum and gallery directors and purchased by art collectors" (Freeman 55). This seems to suggest that art is only valuable to our society because of its monetary potential, not because it represents a deeper meaning.

In one of my other classes we were discussing Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, which is essentially a urinal turned on its side and glued down. I was struck by the similarities between The Fountain and Brillo Boxes, even though the former was made in 1917 and the latter in 1964. Obviously Warhol was not the first to claim ordinary objects could be viewed as art. I think both of these pieces hearken back to what Freeland described in chapter 1 as ‘disinterestedness’ or ‘purposiveness without a purpose’ in that the boxes or the urinal would be ordinary objects if they were used as such. However, since they are not being used and are being displayed in a (somehow) meaningful manner, they transcend the distance between artifact and art.

Freeman's discussion of the philosopher Arthur Danto's reaction to Warhol's Brillo Boxes does raise some interesting points about how art today differs greatly from art in Ancient Greece or even the more recent Romantic era; in neither of these times would Warhol or Duchamp have been able to pass their works off as art. Yet this connects to last week's discussion about our art tastes having evolutionary roots: we have evolved, and therefore art has had to evolve as well. In order for art to stimulate our minds and inspire us, artists needed to find new things to depict in art--no one would be interested in art if we were still sculpting statues the same way they did 2500 years ago. Therefore, I think the art community should be more accepting of such bizarre pieces.

Week One: Evolutionary Art

After reading Richard Conniff's article "The Natural History of Art" I found myself considering art in a way I never had before. It's true that the things in this world I find most beautiful are natural landscape settings. However, I prefer mountainous scenes, preferably mountains I've climbed, to calm, secure, habitable settings that Conniff describes as evolutionarily safe and therefore desirable for humans to view as art.

I started thinking that if I were to accept this theory about the history of art, I would like to believe that we have evolved since our ancestors lived in the African savannah and preferred open lands and water sources in view from their habitats. Maybe this is me supporting Conniff's assertion that his claim is "an affront to our idea of what it means to be human" (96), but I would imagine that if our technology, social and language skills, and lifestyles have evolved over a few thousand years, maybe our art tastes have evolved too. If humans truly only appreciated art because our DNA is coded to determine what we find beautiful, then movements like cubism should have died off quickly, because those paintings definitely do not depict a habitable African landscape.

I found the section about natural fears in humans very interesting, that we fear snakes or spiders much more than guns or electrical wires simply because of our evolutionary instincts, even though we know that the latter two are more dangerous in our everyday lives. But I'm still not convinced that this is evidence for the art-encoded-in-DNA argument.

One of the main issues I had with this article, beyond my own skepticism, was the way Conniff tried to argue that the reason humans love art or situations we see that scare us, such as Shark Week on Discovery channel, horror movies, or even other people’s car wrecks, is because of our evolutionary desire to prepare against danger. If we watch Shark Week, we know what we should do in the highly unlikely event of a shark attack: kick it in the face (I think…). However, I cannot see an evolutionary equivalent to this: did humans go seek out dangerous situations on the African savannah in order to prepare themselves, after spending all that time and effort finding a safe, beautiful place with water and a view? I highly doubt that humans would have gone to watch lions feed or stampedes occur just so they would be prepared, just in case. I feel like this portion of Conniff’s argument was contradictory to his earlier argumentative points, which at least made sense to me, and thus negated all of the positive strides he had made in convincing me that we find art beautiful because of our evolutionary instincts.