If Art Has No History, What Implications Flow For The Art Museum?

Abstract

I have recently argued in various places that each kind (as the word is defined in the paper) has a history, and only kinds have histories. Because ‘art’ is shown not to be the name of a kind it does not name a kind with a history. This conclusion relies upon a meme-driven account of cultural evolution, providing historical studies in general with a rationale running intellectually parallel to that which sustains objective accounts of biological evolution. I propose that the word ‘art’ should not be used in the conventional way but as a name for the general category of memetic innovation, and the phrase ‘work of art’ as a name for the items of the class of entities inspected by an unprompted eye in search of memetic innovation. These arguments are recapitulated in a form encouraging speculation about their consequences for the art museum and gallery. One effect of a conceptual revision would be to widen the scope of the art museum: on the face of it, without restriction. In order to impose a practical constraint it is suggested that an institutional criterion might be applied to acquisitions and display policies, simultaneously and consistently with a rejection of the Institutional Theory of Art that is currently influential in the art world. It is further argued that the art gallery should be conceived primarily as a domain of entertainment with the underlying function of encouraging creative discovery by the unprompted eye, and not as an art-historically instructive domain. The art museum's collection will inevitably lend itself to study and presentation in various intellectually coherent patterns by cultural historians, but—if the thesis is correct—not by those ‘art historians’ who mistakenly suppose that a bogus ‘history of art’ provides an appropriate structure for the understanding of works of art.

Keywords:

• History
• Culture
• Meme
• Art
• Evolution
• Art museum

Acknowledgements

The Editor and referees of Rethinking History have helped me to clarify several passages of thought in the presentation of this essay.

Notes

I use the term ‘sorts’ as the most general of collective terms accommodating non-particulars such as universals, classes and types, and collections such as heaps, herds and crowds. Kinds must therefore be included—albeit distinctively—among the sorts. The argument does not require a general account of sorting, or of the specific qualifications required of an item of any sort other than a kind.

See D. Brook (2001) and (2002a); also Brook (2002b). A short popular account is available at < http://au.geocities.com/apublicofind/feat_3.html > and a more comprehensive version in Brook (2004).

The expression ‘work of art’ is itself, like all other general names, a cultural kind of utterance with a history. The class of works of art as it is defined in the currently suggested way, however, is not a cultural kind. The underlying point (made earlier in relation to the class of criminal offences) is sporadically recognized in the philosophical practice of distinguishing between the formal and the material modes, but the significance of the distinction is widely ignored.