2.2 Developing the Cultural Denition
2.2.1 Fixing objections which led to the later formulation of IT
Two issues led Dickie to change his view (see pages 19f.), but they can both be solved more successfully by introducing the notion of cultural competence. The objection raised by Beardsley regarded the supposed informal nature of the artworld being in contrast with the very formal-sounding elements of the denition `conferring the status' and `acting on behalf of' were singled out as particularly problematic. What follows is naturally the observation that no such formal practices exist. Dickie avoided this problem by abandoning those notions, and adopting a less legally-sounding phrase: `creating an artefact of a kind to be presented'. I believe that this solution is too robust the change made seems to be much more than just nominal (explanation to follow), whereas really all that is required is simply stating: you need to understand those phrases in an informal way. Similarly, it could be said that one can act on behalf of the bikers in conferring the status of cult objects on Harley Davidsons without assuming that bikers need to form a formal organisation. While it might be the case that the phrase sounds a little out of place, it is not the rst time that philosophers come across an issue which cannot be described in any prima facie appropriate way, and utilise only relatively appropriate phrases noting that they should be understood slightly dierently than in common language. There is no reason why Dickie should not be allowed to do this as well.
The notion of `conferral' itself has been looked at suspiciously what exactly counts as conferring a status? But surely this issue is not as problematic as it is portrayed. There are a number of other practices in which statuses are conferred in formal or informal ways, and which are unproblematic: knighting, marriages, fashion, creating cult objects, etc. In all cases, formal or informal, the status conferral proceeds by engaging in certain conventional and often culture-specic practices, such as uttering specic words by a priest, a couple conducting seven circuits of the Holy Fire, or simply moving in together in case of marriage; the Queen wearing something, or Vogue writing about something in case of fashion, etc.
The artworld has its own conventions, and some of those conventions determine which practices count as status conferrals. Of course, it would take an empirical study to provide a complete list (see section 2.2.5 for details), but some likely candidates seem quite obvious presenting to an artworld public is denitely one of, if not the most common one, but giving a title or opus number, or an art magazine writing about some folk-artefacts might be another.5 All it takes now is that the person who confers the status is culturally competent, i.e. has the appropriate knowledge of her culture's conventions, and thus is able to employ them correctly.
Danto's objection considered the requirement for specically aesthetic appreciation while Dickie explicitly denies the need for it, he has to implicitly assume it to explain how we know which aspects of the work to focus on and appreciate (Danto 1974). The later IT completely bypasses the problem by not mentioning appreciation at all and instead focusing on presenting of a work by the artist.
Again, I think that Dickie throws the baby out with the bathwater. While he may sidestep the problem, I am not convinced that removing the notion of appreciation alto- gether is appropriate, and moreover, I believe that shifting the explanatory burden from those who appreciate or present for appreciation to just the artist is wrong. Similarly, in the answer to Beardsley's objection, substituting `status conferral' and `acting on behalf of' with `creating an artifact' strengthens the role of the artist.6 While the artist can be (and usually is) included in the group of those who present for appreciation or confer the status, or act on behalf of the artworld, he does not need to e.g. Byzantine icons were clearly presented by their authors to an audience, but not an artworld audience, and more often than not they were presented anonymously (the audience was led to believe that icons were painted `by the hand of God'); those who later presented them to the artworld
5In fact, it seems that in most of the following discussion the phrase `conferring the status' could be
substituted with `presenting to an artworld public' although I believe that something would be lost in this way (as there are other conventional ways of conferral than presentation).
audiences were no artists themselves, or at least did not need to be. Unnished works are common cases of conferring the status by someone else than the artist Schubert never completed his 8th Symphony and did not present it to the public, instead it was presented only 37 years after his death by Anselm Hüttenbrenner and even though unnished, it was appropriated by the artworld public as a complete artwork.7 Following those examples, I think that both of Dickie's solutions simply limit the power of the institutional theory without oering much in return.
In answer to Danto's objection, I propose to bite the bullet and admit that yes, in appreciation one does indeed need to know which aspects of the work to appreciate, but I argue that this does not require one to assume aestheticism. Instead, it requires cultural competence. Firstly, it is not clear at all why one should only appreciate aesthetic prop- erties or aspects of paintings its artistic properties seem just as worthy of appreciation, and it so happens that sometimes people do appreciate properties which are neither artistic nor aesthetic (for example the fact that a painting was recovered after being stolen last year, or perhaps even the dreaded property of `being expensive'). As I will argue below, these are not to be discarded too lightly. Secondly, it seems that the issue can be resolved really easily: it is a matter of cultural competence of all the members of the artworld to simply know which aspects of the work are to be appreciated and which are not. It is not because the front of the painting is more aesthetically pleasing than its back that we know to appreciate the front, but because in our culture paintings are created in such a way that fronts of canvasses are their only relevant elements, and anyone with appropriate cultural competence knows that this is the case.
It might seem that already here my denition enters a tight circle for is cultural competence not to be dened as competence in the matters of art? There are two reasons why this is not the case. Firstly, similarly as in Levinson's denition, a given object can
7See (Lamarque 2010: 37f.) for a detailed discussion of unnished works, and see (S. Davies 1991:
be judged as an artwork on the basis of cultural competence concerning other, past or already known artworks, i.e. the reference of `artwork' in the explanandum and explanans are dierent (a discussion will follow in section 4.1). Secondly the cultural competence does not only refer to art in this context. One is usually required to have rather vast extra-artistic knowledge to properly understand any artwork one needs to know a lot about Christianity and counter-reformation to understand why Caravaggio's naturalistic paintings are spiritual, and one needs to know the dierence in density of terracotta and marble to appreciate the skill of an artist who sculpts in the latter. Let me now skip over the details of this issue until sections 2.2.5 and 2.2.6, where they will be discussed at length. In any case, I believe that at this stage introducing cultural competence is not a par- ticularly signicant change to the institutional denition, as Dickie in his later denition did in fact refer to something quite similar when talking about creating works `with un- derstanding' (see p. 20).
The denition should be thus reformulated as follows: IT1: x is an art work
def
= x is (1) an artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which
has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some culturally competent person or persons acting on behalf of the artworld.