What is Art?
Heidegger Contra Sociology
What is art? On one side is a materialist or sociological view. Art is a commodity, a form of exchange. Look: this book won an award; this painting sold for millions; this play just got reviewed in the New Yorker. There’s a higher order version of this view. Art hangs in a museum and is defined by the people that go visit it and discuss it. Art symbolizes something which people recognize; it is the ship on which rides the cargo of ideology.
Heidegger and German Romantics take a more purist view. For Heidegger, art “reveals the truth of being.”
Now, maybe we can walk that statement back a bit; we can say how that’s just a fancy way of describing what Bourdieu calls “cultural capital.” But I’m not convinced. I take Heidegger to be saying that art shouldn’t be defined by anything other than its essential purpose. In this, he’s Aristotelian. There is a “final cause” to art that is unique to it.
What is that purpose? One way to put it is that art enables us to experience our world in a non-utilitarian way. Its utility is in making us aware that truth is deeper than correctness and that there is more to existence than what we find useful, valid, or reasonable. Art allows us to experience for a brief moment Being as an end in itself, without need for justification, life without goal, thought without procedure.
Another way to put it is that art’s purpose is to reveal a struggle between “earth” and “world” (Heidegger’s terms). While the world is that which is familiar to us, earth is that which precedes us: language, tradition, the body, and also the literal earth on which we stand. Earth is the matter which the artwork needs: the canvas, the paint. But art is also significatory: it tells us something about our world. If it were only significatory it would be information. If it were totally material without any information it would be nature, or else, chaos. Rather, art is the revealing of meaning and its withdrawal.
Some of us like more “show”; others like more “tell.” But regardless of our own personal aesthetic sensibility, the task of art is neither to show nor tell, but to show and tell the tension between showing and telling.
Do Bored Apes NFTs do this? That, for another time. For now, we should simply note that on Heideggerian terms, the social validation of art has little (but not nothing) to do with the essence of art. All of that belongs only to art’s world, to the “art world.” To be art, art must maintain its connection to “earth.”
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