A few years ago I published a different version of this essay in Artenol, the short-lived magazine project spearheaded by Alexander Melamid (of Komar-and-Melamid fame). I always prefer my first drafts to the ones that get published after being hacked up and denatured by editors, so I am posting the original here. Though this hardly comes out in the published version, I had meant the essay as a sort of manifesto against several aspects of the currently prevailing understanding of what art is, and thus of what is worthy of aesthetic attention, with my ultimate concern being to lobby for a reunification of two fields that have been artificially (!) and harmfully separated since the 18th century: aesthetics on the one hand, and what used to be called 'natural philosophy' on the other.
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Vladimir Nabokov was not only being contrarian when he came out against the theory of evolution. He really meant it. "Natural selection in the Darwinian sense," he wrote, "could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of ‘the struggle for life’ when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation."[1]
Of course, few would mistake the stubborn Russian-American author for a typical representative of the creationist position, though the difference has to do mostly with emphasis. The creationist wants to say that nothing is nature, but all is art, or, more precisely, the artifice of a certain highly esteemed Artificer. Nabokov by contrast wants to say that art is natural, that our mimetic activity is not an exception to what nature is doing all the time, but rather an instance of it.
I will not help to lend legitimacy to creationism by agreeing with Nabokov here. Or at least I will not affirm his claim as a scientific claim. But as an opening to a general theory of art, he is surely onto something.
The Romantics left us with the dead-end idea that art is the product of an artist's struggle to get something out, something exceptional, something that belongs to him, uniquely, as a member of that rare class of creatures, the artists. What comes out, it has been thought, is something unlike anything else in the known universe: an artwork! There is no thought here that the work might be a species of secretion whose genus is much more widely distributed than to just a small group of human beings, or even more widely than to humanity as a whole: that a work of art might be the exuberance of nature, channeled through a human being.
The natural mimetics Nabokov observes in coleoptera is not the production of paintings and sculptures, but the making of the beetle body itself. Of course we know that insects do not literally make their own bodies, but even the most rigid Darwinists will speak as if the butterfly had been determined to push out that pseudo-eye on its wing in order to scare off predators. What a fine job it has done! we think, congratulating the insect as if it were not so much showing itself, but showing off its work.
A certain well known platitude has it that life is art; or, as certain schools of Hellenistic philosophy had it, that there is an art of living; or, somewhat more restrictively, that some exceptional human lives are lived so well and so impressively as to count in themselves as works of art. I suspect that the first and strongest formulation of these related claims is true, but not for the reasons ordinarily invoked.
We have arrived today at a moment in the history of art --art, that is, in the depauperate sense I have undertaken to question here-- when we praise artists not, or not principally, for their objects, but for their selves: their bodies and the way they carry them in public. Tilda Swinton lay in a box. Marina Abramović sat and stared. Before them, Salvador Dalí and Oscar Wilde were famous for the way they lived their lives, the quirky moustache and the cane and so on. Gérard de Nerval took his pet lobster on walks, etc. But there is something else these artists did as well, and the art of their lives was of interest largely to the extent that it stood in some possible relation to the art of their art. We can no longer assume such a relation in the life-work of today's life-artists.
On the other hand, Wilde and Dalí were really only repackaging the truism that we have inherited from antiquity: that life itself can be art. Is this not the message of books with titles like L'Art de fumer, ou, la pipe et le cigare (1844) or L'Art de bien faire l'amour (2010)? Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler (1653) already promised to teach the 'art of fishing'. But what need is there of such a book? "Because as no man is born an artist, so no man is born an Angler." Walton's hero, the Piscator, convinces his interlocutors that angling is a high art because it is not only a subtle practice, a disciplining of the self, but also because it involves the creation of artifices, and, finally, the deception of the creatures for which these are intended: "O, Sir, doubt not but that Angling is an art; is it not an art to deceive a Trout with an artificial Fly? a Trout!"[2]
Here we see the two interwoven strands of art throughout the past few millennia: art as practice, and art as artifice. The latter of these is often associated in turn with deception, and not only of trouts but of human beings too. But let us stay a moment longer on the first meaning, art as practice.
Many use the term 'artless' to mean something like 'unbeautiful', yet it is in fact a compliment, referring generally to a girl, an ingenue, who has not yet learned to be artificial, has not yet sprouted defensive spots on her wings to fend off predators. The girl is thought to be pure nature, pure in nature, and this is thought to be good. But one way or other we all must sprout our art, we all must grow up. This can be done well or poorly. Books that instruct you in The Art of This or That likely always make promises on which they cannot fully deliver. One 18th-century treatise by a certain Melchisédec Thévenot promised, with dense text and forty copper-plate cuts, to teach The Art of Swimming, as if images of "the different Postures necessary to be used in that Art" could ever convey what is truly required for successful natation.[3]
One needn't necessarily learn to swim, but one must do something. As Walton said, proto-existentially, no one is born an artist, or an angler, or anything at all. So one must lose one's artlessness, become artificial; one has no choice.
Now is becoming artificial the same as becoming artistic? The words are cognate, obviously, but they split somewhere back in history and now seem to mark out very different territories. Works of art are supposed to have a quality of aboutness to them: to stand for something else, either through direct representation, or by some more subtle conceptual link. Artificial things, like food coloring or bicycles, are not naturally occurring, but they don't stand for anything other than themselves (fishing lures evidently do stand for something else; this is the key to their success as artifice, but only, as Walton would say, for 'a Trout!').
What about the sort of artifices that come with the loss of artlessness? Do these stand for something else? What is a highway patrolman doing exactly when he swaggers up to the side of your car? What, to evoke Sartre's classic example, is a waiter doing when he throws himself into his work? They and everyone else seem to be imitating something, not in the way a statue imitates a man or a fishing lure imitates a small darting fish, and perhaps not something clearly identified in the minds of the swaggerers or waiters, but only some vague ideal of the sort of person these characters imagine they ought to be.
Human life is not only art, then, in that it involves loss of artlessness. Human life is representational art in the strict sense. In gestures and comportment, we are living, moving, shifting statues, standing for something that we, strictly speaking, are not. What is Tilda Swinton in the box standing for? I don't know exactly, but it is surely something more than, something outside of, the bare biological entity we call by her name.
That human beings (and, if we agree with Nabokov, all beings) have always been engaged in this sort of mimetic exuberance somewhat obviates the question of the origins of art, of when and how we became art-making beings. Pliny the Elder speculates that it all began in love and loss, when the daughter of Butades of Corinth, "being deeply in love with a young man about to depart on a long journey, traced the profile of his face, as thrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp."[4] Plato for his part thought representational art isn’t worth a whole lot. The world of things is an imitation of the world of ideas. To produce an imitation of a thing in the world is thus to imitate an imitation. The world itself is bad enough; why make knock-offs of it?
This is all rather sad: art is that faint trace that is left over when the thing we love absconds. It is like the fossil is to the once living animal. This inauspicious start to the history of aesthetic theory also makes the Nabokovian alternative --art not as dead fossil, but as blooming flower, mimesis not as replacement of something vanished, but instead as exuberance-- seem particularly urgent.
We have distinguished already between art as the making of works, and art as the making of selves: the sprouting of pseudo-eyes on butterfly wings, or the construction of our own bodies through habit, gesture, and perhaps even more permanent forms of modification such as tattooing and foot-binding. Immanuel Kant found nature to be exuberant in the shells of crustaceans and in the feathers of parrots. He called these 'free natural beauties'.
Significantly, he also saw the tattoos of South Sea Islanders in much the same way. These could be for him at best ‘pleasing’ (even if to actually take pleasure in them is to fail to appreciate the native New Zealanders as men, and thus as ends in themselves rather than occasions for delectation). There is no awareness in Kant of the biographical and even cosmographical function of Polynesian tattooing. For him, the Maoris tattoo themselves for the same reason seashells come forth in the ocean through the regular repetition of geometric patterns. Both are instances of free natural beauty, or something like this: pleasing and pointless excrescences of nature, yielded up blindly and without genius. These tattoos, like the feathers of birds of paradise, are beautiful, but they are for nothing, whereas art is always for something, even if we cannot always say what this is.
Kant was the last major philosopher to treat what we call 'biology' together with aesthetics, and most readers today tend to see these dimensions of his 1790 Critique of the Faculty of Judgment as effectively two separate treatises loosely tacked together. Kant worked hard to separate out the beaux arts as producing a very special category of objects, again, unlike anything else in the known universe.
Prior to Kant, the primary home of beauty had been not in these special objects, but in nature. Thus Plutarch relates a typically Nabokovian flourish from Chrysippus, who says that "it is only to be expected that nature should love beauty, and delight in variety. ... the best evidence of this is the peacock's tail, for it shows that in this case the animal was created for the sake of its tail ...with the peahen as a concomitant."[5]
Nabokov sounds strange to us, writing in the post-Kantian era, since it is the legacy of the German philosopher to have restricted true aesthetic beauty to a small range of artificial human-made objects. Free natural beauties are not aesthetic objects in any rigorous sense, since in Kant's view we have no real basis for believing that nature loves or delights in anything. Aesthetics and biology appear loosely tacked together in Kant, because he is writing about them together at just that historical moment when they are about to come apart.
Now, today, going to the museum and putting on one's serious-art-face is something very, very different from going to the national park and putting on one's nature-loving-face. Both are thought to be serious business, both are thought to be good for you, both are enough to make you proud of yourself. But they are supposed to be very different kinds of activity, with different kinds of object.
Kant denied not just that we could discern love or delight in nature's work, but concrete ends of any sort. In this he agrees with modern evolutionary theory, while Nabokov appears entirely out of step with his era in disagreeing with it. But Nabokov's claim, again, is not only, or perhaps not at all, a scientific claim. It is a claim about the unity of art and nature in beauty.
Until the 18th century, the aesthetic regard was principally focused upon moss-covered rocks, tangled branches, leaves.[6] Aesthetics, understood in Alexander Baumgarten’s original sense as the science of perception,[7] could not ignore the fact that living nature imposes itself on our senses in a particularly vivid, in a literally im-pressive way. Yet by the 19th century aesthetics had largely shrunk the scope of its interest to a small sub-class of human-made objects, for reasons that had mostly to do with economics, with the increase of circulation of art objects as capitalist goods par excellence.
But that system has largely collapsed, and now we are lurching around, trying to see what all we might be able to regard aesthetically besides the masterworks of painting and sculpture. We have tried out the aesthetic gaze on mass-produced objects, on object-less performance pieces, on celebrities lying in glass cases. Meanwhile nature continues to cast forth its diverse forms, and patiently awaits its rightful return --once these floundering museums with their cynical repackagings of the life-as-art platitude will have finally collapsed -- to the center of our aesthetic attention.
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[1] Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory! 125.
[2] Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man's Recreation. Being a Discourse of Fish and Fishing not unworthy of the perusal of most Anglers, London, Richard Marriott, 1653.
[3] Melchisédec Thévenot, The Art of Swimming, Illustrated by Forty Proper Copper-Plate Cuts, which represent the different Postures necessary to be used in that Art. With Advice for Bathing, Done out of the French, 3rd Edition, London, 1789.
[4] Pliny the Elder, Natural History XXXV, 15.
[5] Plutarch, Stoic. rep. 1044d.
[6] See for example Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. L. E. Klein, Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1710].
[7] Alexander Baumgarten, Aesthetica, Ioannis Christian Kleyb: Frankfurt an der Oder, 1750.
