“Art as a Cultural System,” by Clifford Geertz. A Short Response
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. Should we not talk about art and worry only about production? Should we talk about our work a posteriori? Complete it first and then analyze? Or should we just speak technically about what we’re producing and let the specialized vocabulary guide our concepts for production? “Much of what we call ‘taste’ lies in the conformity between discriminations demanded by a painting and skills of discrimination possessed by the beholder.” So our aesthetic experience as artists cannot be isolated; we cannot confine our production and experience to ourselves or our studios, it must be a constant conversation with the public and the paintings— one will inform the other and in turn inform us. This seems to be a very dynamic triad for an aesthetic interaction but it is a state of being that seems to elude us no matter how much we try to hold on to it. The dream of a perfectly closed loop between artist and viewer is shattered by interpretation and miscommunication causing the debate around aesthetics and beauty to feel like an exercise in futility.
“A theory of art is thus at the same time a theory of culture, not an autonomous enterprise.” With this in mind, sociology seems like an interesting perspective to approach art theory from, especially in combination with: history, psychology, and philosophy. This multidisciplinary approach may offer us a more complete view of the art as a social activity that requires a more complex set of interactions than the artist creating in isolation. The moment we try to study creation by isolating it from its context, it slips away from us. Just as Gombrich recommends, Geertz reinforces the necessity to approach the study of aesthetics from a semiotic perspective. We must not think about art in terms of market but in terms of context and history, of craft and concept. We can only understand beauty through a semiotic approach that relies on the methodology of hermeneutics if we wish to delve deeply into the “why” and “how” of arts with the understanding that a vital piece will always be missing until we can resolve the issues of consciousness and perception.