What Do Artists Know?

Kant’s Assumption What the Artist Knows and the PhD for Visual Artists

If we believe Plato, the artist knows and represents nothing but lies. Not only that, but such lies make men cry—make them act, that is, like women. Aristotle replies, in effect, “The artist knows less than the philosopher, that I grant you. But it’s also true that the artist knows more than the historian, because [his] mimetic representations are universal, whereas the historian’s facts are particular .” Always the pragmatist, Aristotle takes Plato’s binary of the ideal/real and sets up knowledge as a working hierarchy: philosophy = high; art = middle; history = low. Hence begins one of the main dialectical histories of Western epistemology—with the science of philosophy always already in first position and art and history endlessly fighting it out for second place. But it is Plato’s original point about mimesis as the artist’s representation of lies that sets up the key aesthetic dialectic between truth and art—not to mention the ever-enduring relationship between aesthetics and misogyny. (Aristotle in the Poetics equates women and slaves, as if to assure Plato that whatever their differences on art, they’re a match when it comes to patriarchy.) In much of aesthetics, then, part of the game is to mollify Plato’s unbending law of the pure forms, to somehow reconcile the artist’s representation of art—of mimesis—with ideal truth. Toward that end, Aristotle’s tragedy purifies the soul and thus supplies the playgoer an instance of Plato’s Idea. Aristotle’s catharsis hardly lasts forever, though (otherwise, to see one tragedy would be to purify the soul for a lifetime), and comes nowhere near equivalency with eternal truth. Nor is that Aristotle’s intention. He merely wants to prove art’s moral efficacy in relation to the state. Of course, Aristotle’s case never quite sticks, at least not to everyone’s liking, and numerous other attempts to extend or assuage Plato’s moral objections to the artist swell the aesthetic record, including Plotinus , Aquinas, Spenser, Shaftesbury, Winckelmann. Even after Baumgarten’s formalization of aesthetics, when the focus turns more narrowly to the art viewer’s taste, there continues, certainly in Lessing and Diderot, a persistent if sometimes latent worry about what the artist knows. Morality, the good, ethics, representation , mimesis: whenever in aesthetics terms such as these come to the fore, behind them will likely hover book 10 of the Republic. In the first Modernist answer to the Platonic indictment, Kant, as we know, separates form from content, and in form he locates Plato’s universal truth, that is, beauty, freedom, the moral good. Content, in its ideological particularity and cultural specificity, he all but dismisses as beside art’s point. As far as Kant is concerned, the fact that the beautiful palace was conceived and built under the rule of aristocracy has nothing to do with the question of beauty and truth; what KANT’S ASSUMPTION WHAT THE ARTIST KNOWS AND THE PHD FOR VISUAL ARTISTS George Smith 00i-228_Elkins_4p.indb 152 9/14/12 1:17 PM assessments 153 counts is the design, the form. And the artist capable of such design, the artist who conceives universal truth through the invention and the creation of original form, is the artist who disregards or breaks existing formal laws and makes new ones for (him)self. This artist, whom Shelley designates “the unacknowledged legislator of the world” (and whom a century later Pound rallies around the Modernist battle cry, “Make it new!”), is, according to Kant, none other than the genius. And Kant assumes that of necessity this genius knows philosophy. Nevertheless, in perfect keeping with Aristotle’s dialectic, Kant is quick to add that while the true artist is a genius, it is the scientist, the philosopher, who is endowed with the highest and most powerful of human mind. I traipse this well-trod ground partly to remind ourselves that we are still debating the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle on the question of what the artist knows. From Kant we can fast-forward to Wilde’s charming lament on “The Decay of Lying,” which turns Plato upside down and leaves the artist in possession of knowledge as the Platonic good. From Wilde there is a short stride to Fry, Bell, and Croce, each appealing for the artist as Keatsian knower of beauty and truth, at least implicitly. And from Croce there is but a step to Greenberg, who in the pure form of Jackson Pollock finds a more...