musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.


Dialetheia -now there’s a word I haven’t heard before. It means a statement that is both true and false at the same time: a true statement whose negation is also true. I like things like that. It’s of the sort that used to intrigue us many a night in the university dorms of my youth -like the Epimenides paradox. Epimenides was a philosopher from Knossos in ancient Crete, and his paradox was the sentence that all Cretans were liars. For some reason nobody called it a dialetheia though -perhaps because it was never clear whether the word was singular or plural, let alone how to pronounce it without sounding pompously erudite and being asked to spell it…

In the particular case that introduced me to the new word, the consideration in question was ‘What is Art?’[i] I mean, perhaps it is a simple question: Art is something resulting from the expression of human imagination, or creative skill; given the various media which may be involved, not a great definition perhaps, and yet diffuse enough to suggest that Art can include many things. And, much like beauty, and as something I discussed in a previous essay, it may not be judged as such universally. [ii]

So… can the same object be Art, and non-Art? If it is a painting, or a sculpture -or anything, for that matter- surely the producer can be asked about why and perhaps how it was produced; if they -the artist- insists it is Art, and does not deserve a ‘why’ question, then it is Art. Period. While it may not be good Art (whatever that is), and may not convince anybody else that it is particularly compelling or creative, we should probably take the artist at their word… and then maybe not go to whichever gallery is bold enough to display it.

But should the fact that it doesn’t enjoy popularity, or even approval, make it non-Art? Who’s to judge? Opinions differ, public tastes change: today’s garbage may be tomorrow’s delight. I mean, who would have thought that Andy Warhol’s paintings of Campbell Soup cans would be considered Art…?

For that matter, who would have thought that Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ was Art, and not merely a urinal? He did not create it, or design it; it was visibly indistinguishable from other urinals that came off the same production line. It seems more like a random object chosen with poor taste… he merely signed a urinal. But having done so, his urinal became no longer primarily a useful object – rather, it became a meaningful object. And it could therefore be seen in a new context: if it is Art, then it is art with a higher conceptual than aesthetic value; it is declaring something, rather than unveiling something new and unique… It is about something more than just the thing itself.

As one commentary on the piece put it: ‘It is because the urinal is not art that it has its particular artistic message; and it is only because it is art that it has a message at all. Of course, it can carry other messages as well, for example, that contemporary ideas of art are misguided, that craft is not essential to art, that beauty in art is optional. But it can carry such messages only because, in the artworld of its time, it was not art.’ So it is, and is not, Art.

But wait a minute. I am by no means alone in wondering how an unimpressive, off-the-shelf, and otherwise anonymous urinal suddenly qualifies as Art. The art critic Roberta Smith, similarly puzzled, opined that: ‘[Duchamp] reduced the creative act to a stunningly rudimentary level: to the single, intellectual, largely random decision to name this or that object or activity “art”.’

Maybe the whole thing requires me to surrender the idea of Art as, well, in some normative sense beautiful, and in good taste; depictive… Maybe I have to change Magisteria and dwell more on what sort of thoughts it inspires… Actually on second consideration, that doesn’t really help -it’s still an empty urinal for goodness sakes; if Duchamp had even possessed the creative politesse to thread a rose, or something in one of the drainage holes, I’d rest more easily.

Still, maybe that is just ‘Old School’; I suspect that most of us still regard Art as having ‘more value than simple craft: some intimation, through beauty, of spiritual or philosophical truths.’ As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once wrote of those times, ‘the artist worked with or against matter to afford some moral, metaphysical or at least aesthetic vision, which was ‘higher’ than ordinary commerce and labour’.

‘Duchamp’s Fountain was the antithesis of this. There was no obvious craft – and certainly no fine artistry. The urinal was designed and manufactured to some standard, but one of utility, not aesthetics.’ In other words, as has been suspected by many others, ‘the message of Fountain was one of mockery: of modern ideals of art. It mocked, not by parodying fine art, but by being its stark opposite: uncrafted by the author, ugly, utilitarian, vulgar, ubiquitous…’

And yet, it has accomplished something, I suppose: that we are able to evaluate his urinal for other reasons than its utility, or its aesthetics. And what is that message -one that without its categorization as Art would not even be suspected? Well… that it is not Art, of course! ‘This message is one of so-called ‘anti-art’. What gives the work its power is that it is not art; but that, at the same time, it is art.’

Okay, the dialetheism works like this. ‘The object’s category is ‘art’. And as art, it has a message. In this case, its message is about its own category: it says to the viewer – truly – ‘this is not art’. The dialetheia arises because the message requires the very category it rejects, art; and because this rejection is its message within this category. The rejection of its status as an artwork is the very thing that makes it an artwork, which it rejects…’

I wonder if Duchamp, rather than Epimenides, would be the subject of late night discussions in the college dormitories of today. I’d love to give it a try anyway; It’d be fun to try out the word ‘dialetheia’, now that I know how to spell it…

[i]https://aeon.co/essays/how-can-duchamp-s-fountain-be-both-art-and-not-art?

[ii]https://musingsonwomenshealth.com/2018/12/26/beauty-is-but-a-vain-and-doubtful-good/

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