Art and Meaning

Why is asking how we understand art a stupid question? Because there are many answers and they are all valid. There have been many theories as to how we understand art. There is no ultimate “truth.” It is one of those cliché questions that has been bothering humanity for eternity, in the vein of, why do we exist? What is good? What is evil? What is truth? This cliché question also gives rise to other questions, such as: Is art moral and should art be censored? These are both questions I will address within this paper. My thesis is that art should never be censored for the masses since it has no intrinsic moral value. First I will examine what art is and how we understand it. My thesis for this question is that art is meaning and the individual understands art through the assessment of meaning they derive from an object which they rethink as art.
Art can be examined in multiple perspectives. For instance art can be examined and viewed as a machine. Walter Benjamin said that in the realm of propaganda, “art serves the politics.”(Benjamin, par.35-36) Such as in the case of the promotional Nazi movie, Triumph of the Will. Art served as fuel for the Nazi war machine. Does art stand on its own or are we the ones who make art “art”? Is it simply a matter of framing? Is it like a quotation, where we bracket the existence of a word? We bracket and frame the existence of something, and instead of calling it a “painting,” a “symphony,” a “picture,” a “movie,” we give it the title of “art;” although physically it is still a “painting,” “picture,” etcetera.
Art can be seen as a tool. The phenomenologist philosopher, Martin Heidegger, refers to objects as equipment. He thinks we approach objects as equipment. We look at objects with “circumspection” (see p. 293). We gaze at the “circumference” of the object, meaning we don’t look at the object itself but at how it functions. We do this in order to assert meaning from it. We examine its usability, serviceability, manipulability. That’s our experience of the object, our primary approach to it. When we see something we’ve never seen before we are prone to say “what is this thing?” as in, “what is this thing’s purpose?,” as in, “what is the meaning that could be derived from this object or thing?.”
Art is a relationship. It is an Inescapable relationship that is manifested between the subject and object, the subject being the individual which is experiencing the art and the object being the actual art. Art can be comparable to language in its many forms. The purpose of language is to communicate, and to communicate means to understand, and to understand means to derive meaning from the language, but we can never wholly understand what a person is saying because to do so we would have to be this person and speak their words. Language is hermeneutic. The only person who understands the words is the one who speaks the words. You could never understand my words because they are mine. You could perceive the words, play with them, examine them, but you will never understand them in their purest form. To do so you would have had to have said the words yourself. You could only understand words the way you understand them, which is an understanding nonetheless. It could then be implied that you understand the words in the way you understand them and that is simply where your understanding lies. The meaning you derive from my words is your own meaning invested in the words. But the main point is that you do actually find meaning. You find authenticity. Such is the understanding of language. It is a vague and ambiguous understanding because it is interpreted by every individual uniquely. Yet as vague as it may be, it is still objectively understood on common grounds, that is, there is an objective part to language, otherwise we would not be able to communicate at all.
Language is the linkage of one human to another. It is an objective, yet, utterly subjective, realm of understanding. There is invested meaning behind words we know, when I say the word “tree” you know what it is that I speak of because you are taught to associate the word with an object. In the process, you invest meaning within that gathering of syllables. This is why when I say the word “etz”, which means the exact same thing as “tree” in the English language, just in the Hebrew vernacular, you will only think of what that word could possibly mean. Yet, even with the association we learn to apply to words, including the abstract, such as “love”, “beauty”, and “nothingness”, and those words are an interesting phenomenon because we associate them with physical images although they are the abstract, even with those words, every human has a unique experience with language. There is an objective ground. We know what words mean, but we know what words mean differently from each other. Why is this? Because we are not all the same. Yet, we interact through the basis of our subjectivity, on objective levels.
There is nothing you don’t know. Everything we approach, we approach with our circumspective, primary expectations of finding a use to the object we are approaching. Heidegger calls this “readiness-to-hand.” (see p. 293) We approach objects as if they are “ready-to-hand,” as if they exist for our usage, as if we can use them, as if they have an invested meaning and we just need to find it. So, why is there nothing we don’t know? Because everything we approach we immediately try to answer. We have a priori answers to everything, it doesn’t mean they are correct, but they are answers nonetheless. Existence is a question. Self awareness is accompanied with many presupposition that need validation, that is why questions such as “Who am I?” arise, and why we have a question and answer to every object we counter and perceive.
Art is all the same as language. One should even ask the question “what is not art?” instead of “what is art?” Because inherently there is always going to be a person who perceives everything as art. I am the subject, everything else is the object, the world is an object. This is how we separate things within the world. The subject relates to the object through its “readiness-to-hand,” which is the inherent meaning the subject looks for within the object. The subject is always looking for meaning.
Art is an object. The only remaining question is: what is the meaning the subject finds within art? Art is nothing more than another object, another action done by another person. A painting is nothing but a painting. Someone slops paint on a canvas and it looks like whatever it looks like. Why is that art? It’s art because we say it is art. It is when we rethink the meaning of things when we end up with art. It is when I look at a painting and call it “art” instead of simply a “painting” when new meaning starts arising. The perspective belongs to the subject. Art is what happens when the meaning changes. Heidegger proposes the idea that when there is a break in our perception of objects as “ready-to-hand,” as in when we encounter an object that we do not know what is its purpose, we see it’s “presence-to-hand,” we examine the object itself, not its manipulability.(see p. 297) We create a direct link to the object from our experience of it, theoretically, not through action. We examine it, in multiple ways, until something makes sense to us.
Why are there so many answers to how do we understand art? Because there are many ways to deriving meaning from objects. When R. Mutt (1917) put his beautiful urinal on display who was to say that it’s not art? It is a rethinking of the conception of what art is, some might say. The link that is drawn between the art and the person is how the person understands objects as art. The elements that make up our conception of art are all different aspects of the things we derive meaning from. The aesthetics make the relationship. The theories we have as to how we understand art and what art is, are our objective grounds, just as knowing what a certain word refers to, which is the objective grounds in language, but just as it is found in language, so it is found in art that we can only understand words as we understand them. We can only have personal associations with words, and we can only have one experience of words, which is our own unique, subjective, experience, and we can only come to terms with any of these qualities through the establishment of a relation between the object, whether it may be art or a word, to ourselves, the subjects. And we can only establish a relation if we find meaning. Thus, the understanding of art is about the assessment of meaning the individual derives from an object, which they rethink as art. They have the objective tools of analysis yet, they will only find a subjective link to the object they perceive as art. The formality and aesthetics are our objective grounds of communication over the subject, yet, the authenticity is derivative of the person and, hence, will always be subjective. Because meaning is what creates our relation to art, it would be imperative to suggest that the objective is merely grounded upon the subjective. Art is meaning. With the establishment of this, I can now safely attempt to answer my next cliché question: what is the validity of the censorship of art?

When censorship, as an action, is committed, it inherently implies that the origin of the action is derived from the opinion that censoring is right i.e. moral in one way or another to whomever is committing the act. In order to censor a piece of work, it must mean that the action of censoring that work is moral and not censoring that work is immoral. The reason for making the censorship of something moral means that whatever the thing that is being censored, must be censored because it obtains an immoral essence and not censoring it is not fulfilling one’s moral duty. So, the maxim (personal moral principle), which is enacted upon art is: If art serves an immoral purpose it must than be censored and hidden from view because of its immoral/harmful nature or content.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant invented an ethical system he named the “categorical imperative.”(see p. 306) The categorical imperative, as stated in Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason, means that you can never act upon a maxim unless you “will” everyone else to follow that maxim as well.(see p. 306) If the maxim is irrational then it should not be acted upon. For example, take the action of cheating in school in order to get a degree. If you cheat in order to gain a degree you are adopting the maxim that it is right for one to cheat whenever they want to get a degree. Using the categorical imperative you must take your maxim and apply it universally so that now it is everyone’s maxim that it is ok to cheat in order to get a degree. This is an irrational maxim and hence it should not be followed. Now, using Kant’s categorical imperative in concern with the censorship of art I stated that the maxim that is followed is: If art serves an immoral purpose it must than be censored and hidden from view because of its immoral/harmful nature. This maxim seems rational, if applied universally, yet, it contains a presupposition that art can have a moral character. I don’t think this presupposition is valid. Without the validity of this supposition, the maxim is false and should not be followed.
The only thing which can be moral is a thing which can have the capacity to reason and act. Humans are the only things, which have this direct capacity. Animals do not have a moral understanding, they are slaves to their nature and desire. Only man can have the ability to defy temptation. Inanimate objects are unable to reason and hence cannot be moral beings. A rock cannot be a moral being even if it is used by one person to stone another. The rock is independent of it’s abuser’s moralistic intentions. Art also, is independent, and as an object it cannot be moral or immoral since it lacks the ability to reason and act, and its meaningful existence depends on its relation to the individual. It is possible for one to derive moral or immoral worth from art. Art has the possibility of affecting the character of a person, but even in this case, it is the individual which chooses to what extent they want to be affected by the art. We should also still consider art’s hermeneutic nature. Similarly to language, is it correct to censor a work which can derive different meaning to people because the meaning you derive from it is not positive? It is best to ignore the work if you do not agree. It is illogical to censor art for the masses if the masses have the ability to reason and act for themselves. In this case, the maxim, which I discussed earlier about the censorship of art, cannot hold true. Art cannot posses a moral nature, therefore the censorship of it to rational creatures is a maxim which should not be followed. Furthermore, censoring art is implying that the immorality interpreted in the work by the person who is advocating the censoring holds true to all other beings which view this work as well. This is also illogical and thus further proves that the maxim holds no truth and should not be followed. The maxim should only be followed in the case that art contains an intrinsic moral value, which it cannot, or in the case where a non-rational being under the supervision of another can be prone to a bad influence by a work of art. Such as in the case of a child. The child’s guardian must choose what may or may not be appropriate for the child’s viewing, because the child lacks comprehension and cannot make rational choices regarding these manners. In all other cases art should never be censored.



Bibliography:
Heidegger, Martin. “Being and Time” trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
The Phenomenology Reader . Ed: Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004. 288 - 307

Kant, Immanuel. “The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals” trans. T. K. Abbot
The Moral Life: An Intorduction Reader In Ethics and Literature. Ed: Louis P. Pojman, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 297 - 316

Benjamin, Walter. “The work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
http://bid.berkeley.edu/bidclass/readings/benjamin.html