An experience, and six answers

A violinist in the subway

At 7:51 on the morning of Friday, 12 January 2007, a man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a baseball cap stood against a wall in L’Enfant Plaza, a Washington, D.C., Metro station, opened a violin case at his feet, and began to play. He was Joshua Bell, one of the best-known classical violinists in the world. His violin was the “Gibson ex Huberman,” made by Antonio Stradivari in 1713 and reported to be worth about $3.5 million. For 43 minutes he played six pieces, opening with the Chaconne from Bach’s Partita no. 2 in D minor. The Washington Post had arranged it, and filmed it with a hidden camera, as “an experiment in context, perception and priorities.” Gene Weingarten wrote it up in the Post’s magazine on 8 April 2007, and the piece won him a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2008.

The numbers are stark. In those 43 minutes 1,097 people passed. Twenty-seven put money in the case, most of them on the run, for a total of $32.17, not counting a $20 bill from one woman who recognized him. Seven people stopped for at least a minute. Three days earlier Bell had filled Boston’s Symphony Hall, where merely good seats went for $100. The same man, the same instrument, the same music: one setting was an event, and the other was a corridor.

Critics of the stunt have a point. It was rush hour, people were on their way to work, there was no sign, no stage, and no reason to stop, and a solo violin in a tiled passage is a hard case. Weingarten himself called it an experiment in context, not a test of taste. That is exactly what makes it the right start for this lesson. The last of the lectures’ six keywords says that what makes something art is neither the thing alone nor the label on it, but what happens when someone meets it: experience.

What Dewey meant by “an experience”

The philosopher most tied to this idea is John Dewey (1859–1952), born in Burlington, Vermont, and for many years a professor at Columbia. In the winter and spring of 1931 he gave a series of ten lectures at Harvard, and in 1934 they became Art as Experience. The book is dedicated to Albert C. Barnes, the Pennsylvania collector whose foundation now holds the largest of Cézanne’s five Card Players, and Dewey called his debt to Barnes his greatest. It opens with a complaint: a wall, he wrote, had been built around works of art that cut them off from the life they came out of. The Parthenon is a great work, he says, but it counts as art only as it becomes an experience for a person. The arts that have the most life for most people, he adds, are the ones people do not take to be arts at all: the movie, jazz, the comic strip. (He wrote this in 1934.)

Then comes the central idea. We do not have experiences all the time, Dewey says; we have a stream of drifting and interruption. But now and then we have an experience: a piece of work is finished in a way that satisfies, a game is played through, a conversation runs its course, or, his own example, there is “that meal in a Paris restaurant” of which one says it was an experience. An experience has a unity, a single quality that runs through it, and a beginning, a development, and an end that is “a consummation and not a cessation.” Dewey even imagines a stone rolling down a hill that could look forward with desire to where it will come to rest: then its rolling would be an experience, and an esthetic one. He wrote that the enemies of the esthetic are neither the practical nor the intellectual, but “the humdrum; slackness of loose ends; submission to convention.”

The lecture compresses this into three words, complete, continuous, and unified, and adds a point of its own: a novel read over thirty days can still be one experience, if each return picks up where you left off. That is a fair application, though not one of Dewey’s own examples. And it draws the lecture’s conclusion. In this reading, art is not a thing but an occasion, a condition under which an experience of this kind becomes possible. Monroe Beardsley, writing in 1982, defined an artwork in just such terms, as an arrangement of conditions meant to make an experience with a marked aesthetic character possible. By the end of the lecture, art “creates conditions.”

A room made of light

The lecture’s best example is a living artist. James Turrell was born in Los Angeles in 1943 and studied perceptual psychology at Pomona College. In 1966 he moved into the Mendota Hotel in Santa Monica, covered the windows, and let in only measured amounts of street light: his first light projections. Since then he has built rooms in which the thing you look at is light itself. In his “Space Division” constructions, as described in general terms in museum writing, what looks like a flat rectangle of colored light on a wall turns out to be an opening into a lit room, and the lecture reports the shock of walking up to a painting and finding a hole. In his “Ganzfeld” pieces (the German word means “complete field”), a visitor enters a space filled with uniform light with no visible corners, and loses the sense of depth. His “Skyspaces,” rooms with an opening in the ceiling that looks straight at the sky, numbered more than eighty by 2013. In 1977 he bought a dormant volcanic cinder cone, Roden Crater, in the Painted Desert of northern Arizona about fifty miles northeast of Flagstaff, and has been shaping tunnels and chambers in it ever since; as far as this course could confirm, it is still under construction and closed to the public. In his own words, he wants to “set up a situation to which I take you and let you see.”

Notice what this does to the question. There is nothing in a Turrell room to imitate, and no form to hang on a wall. It is a situation, and the lecture draws a bold conclusion: all art is in some sense performance, “behavior art,” because even Raphael or Myron made a condition under which something could happen between a person and a thing. That goes further than most critics would. Some art exists only while it is happening: Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings” date from 1959, when his 18 Happenings in 6 Parts ran from 4 to 10 October at the Reuben Gallery in New York. A bronze or a painting lasts as an object and is experienced later, again and again. The philosopher Nelson Goodman marked the difference with two words: a work is autographic if the distinction between an original and a forgery matters, as it does for a painting, and allographic if it does not, as with a piece of music that can be performed from a score. The lecture’s point survives the distinction in a modest form: whether it lasts as a thing or happens as an event, a work becomes art in an encounter.

Does context make the experience?

The lecture offers a simple example. A shirt in a farmers’ market is a shirt. The same shirt in a boutique, with music and perfume in the air, is a different object, and you pay for the difference. What you buy, it says, is your experience. This is the idea behind the 1998 Harvard Business Review article by B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore, “Welcome to the Experience Economy.” Their illustration was a birthday cake: when mothers baked at home, the ingredients cost mere dimes; with a boxed mix from Betty Crocker, a dollar or two; from a bakery, $10 or $15; but parents who hand over the whole party to a business pay $100 or more, and the cake comes thrown in.

Does context really change what we feel? In a 2008 study in PNAS, Hilke Plassmann, John O’Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel had twenty people taste red wine in a brain scanner. They were told they were sampling five different Cabernet Sauvignons. There were three wines: the same $5 wine was labeled $5 once and $45 another time, and the same $90 wine was labeled $90 once and $10 another time. People reported more pleasure from the wine when the label gave the higher price, and a region of the brain involved in pleasure, the medial orbitofrontal cortex, was more active. The effect has been seen again by the same group, but the study was small and was about labels. A larger study of more than six thousand blind tastings, by Robin Goldstein and colleagues, found that non-experts did not prefer expensive wines in the dark. So believing a thing is dear changes what you report, but that does not prove that price makes wine better. The question of how much a person’s experience is made by the setting, and how much by the thing, is the subject of Course 10’s lesson on luck, time, and price.

Marcel Duchamp complicates the lecture’s claim in a way he spelled out himself. The lecture says that Fountain succeeded because it shocked people’s senses in a temple of art. But in a talk at the Museum of Modern Art on 19 October 1961, Duchamp said the choice of his “readymades” was never dictated by taste: it rested on a reaction of “visual indifference,” with “a total absence of good or bad taste,” and in fact a “complete anesthesia.” And in 1917 almost nobody saw the object, since it was kept out of sight. Its first public life was as a photograph. Dickie and Danto read it as an idea or a status, not a sensation. The lecture’s reading and Duchamp’s own stand in tension, and the course leaves it there.

Six answers on one table

Now the six keywords can be set side by side. Imitation asks what a work resembles. Freedom asks whether it is made for itself and not for use. Form asks what shapes, colors, and relations it has. Authorization asks who has said it is art. Exemplification asks whether it has properties that it also points to. Experience asks what it does to the person who meets it. Try them on seven cases. The verdicts here are this course’s reading, and philosophers argue about each one.

One case deserves a longer look, because it tests two of the accounts at once. Han van Meegeren, a Dutch painter, painted in the 1930s a Supper at Emmaus in the style of Vermeer. In 1937 the critic Abraham Bredius declared it a Vermeer, and a society of art lovers bought it for 520,000 guilders for the Boijmans museum in Rotterdam, which showed it in 1938. After the war, in 1945, Van Meegeren was arrested for selling a Vermeer to a Nazi leader, and confessed that he had painted it. To prove it he painted another in custody. On 12 November 1947 he was found guilty of forgery and sentenced to a year in prison, and he died on 30 December 1947, before serving it. The same canvas had moved experts and visitors before the confession, and was shunned after. Authorization changed overnight. Experience changed, too, and that is the telling part: what people felt depended on what they believed about where the picture came from.

Where do the six sit among philosophers’ own maps of the field? Stephen Davies, in Definitions of Art (1991), divides definitions into functional ones, which say what art does, and procedural ones, which say how art is made or approved. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s survey adds more. In those terms the lectures’ imitation is the representation theory, form is formalism, authorization is the institutional theory (with Jerrold Levinson’s historical definition as a cousin), and experience is the aesthetic, functional definition. The other two are different in kind. Freedom, with Kant and Schiller, is a theme of aesthetics, not a standard definition of art. Exemplification belongs to Goodman’s theory of symbols, and Goodman himself proposed no definition. Missing from the six are expression (Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? of 1898, Benedetto Croce, R. G. Collingwood), the historical definition, and two skeptical or flexible views: Morris Weitz’s 1956 claim that art is an open concept that cannot be defined, and Berys Gaut’s 2000 “cluster” account, with ten criteria, such as positive aesthetic qualities, expressing emotion, being original, and being the product of an intention to make art, none of which is necessary alone.

The step that carries the lectures from their fifth keyword to their last is Goodman’s. In 1977, in an essay called “When Is Art?”, he proposed that the question “What is art?” be replaced by “When is art?” Something can be art at one time and not another, he argued. The lectures take over the question, and name Goodman for exemplification, though they do not give him the essay. This course thinks the lecture’s last move is the right one: no single answer covers every case, but each of the six lights something a good answer must contain, and asking when keeps all of them in view.

Making conditions

The lecture ends with a short ladder. Art is creation; creation is creating conditions; creating conditions is design; design is turning decay into the marvelous (化腐朽为神奇, huà fǔxiǔ wéi shénqí). A scholarly echo of the third rung comes from the economist and design theorist Herbert Simon, who wrote in The Sciences of the Artificial (1969) that “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”

The Chinese saying has a famous source, with a twist. In the Zhuangzi, chapter 22, the passage reads, in Herbert Giles’s 1889 translation: “What we love is animation. What we hate is corruption. But corruption in its turn becomes animation, and animation once more becomes corruption.” In the Chinese, 神奇 (marvelous) and 臭腐 (stench and rot) change into each other in both directions, because all is one breath (气). The four-character idiom is a later compression, with 腐朽 in place of 臭腐, and it has become advice: take what is spoiled and make it wonderful. That is the lecture’s use, and a good one. Zhuangzi’s own point is wider and less comforting.