Art and symbol

My friend Christy, who lives in the Galapagos and has time to think!!!!, has tweaked me enough, finally awakening me from my stupor so that I try to articulate some coherent thoughts (if they are not coherent, she will jump on any failure in logic like a ton of proverbial bricks). A number of problems, I would argue, have prevented us from understanding visual art, including beads (all of the arts, but I do not have enough energy right now to take on all the arts).

The first problem, as Count Leo Tolstoy claimed -- and he wrote quite insightfully about visual art -- is a failure to define the term. At one time, definition was a first step of the scientific method. No longer. I cannot remember the last time I read anything in the scientific literature -- from biology to social science that provided a theoretical definition. Sad, but true.

A second problem is all the BS -- academic hyperbole -- that obscures the phenomenon and makes understanding difficult if not impossible. One element of the BS/AH is the focus on symbol -- with a failure to define what a symbol is. The argument then becomes when humans first began to symbolize -- at what point (exact day and time) did our minds become capable of symbolizing?

An additional problem is the aesthetic emotion. How can we identify in the prehistory record whether or not the cave person got a thrill looking at the red ochre. I am not even sure we know what the emotion is. Yes, Christy, I am ready for your descriptions of aesthetic thrill. I wonder how it differs from other thrills in life -- how or if? The large human brain has been around a long time -- how do we know when those presumed emotions kicked in?

This brings me to an additional problem, which is testability. We need to stick to hypotheses we can test. It is not possible to know either when the mind began to symbolize or whether or not an item is symbolic. It is a waste of time to talk about such things, at least when we assume we are increasing knowledge and not just listening to the flow of words from our own mouth.

Another problem is that we need to recognize (and would if we defined terms) that symbols are learned -- to the extent they are cultural, symbols involve an association of a spoken explanation (that stands for X) with an object. Culture, remember, is shared--it is not individualistic behavior. We cannot know whether something was symbolic -- had a learned association -- when looking at the prehistoric record.

One thing we can appreciate in both the ethnographic and prehistoric records is replication/copying. In my book I wrote that a minimal difference -- or major one, Christy -- is that so called animal art -- draping vines around one's neck (No, Christy, I did not call this visual art, other art philosophers do) is not noticed and it is not replicated. Surely replication is important and surely it suggests a social element to the object, as we learn from others, generally by watching them as they do something. It also could be argued that replication implies intergenerational ties. To the extent that humans lived in small groups of kin, they learned from kin. The process of learning the techniques of art provided the opportunity for building social relationship and learning (and teaching) the history of one's people. This is why I argue that the process of learning to make art is possibly more important socially -- and we are a social spec ies -- than the art object.