2. Do We Need the Word "Art"?

I say get rid of the word "art."  What would we lose?

Just the riches of the human imagination.

No, not lose the thing itself; lose the word for it.  

Like nobody at the dinner table being able to call the painting on the wall "art"?

Yes.  And nobody able to call that dumb stuff I saw on the subway platform yesterday art.  Performance art.

What's the harm?

The harm is to my idea of what's right and proper.  It's not right that a thing's value be determined by what it's called.  One minute this thing, this fellow in his underwear wrestling a steering wheel, is dumb stuff, low value, and the next minute it's art stuff, high value.  Same stuff, same person making the call. 

But viewable in different frames.  Maybe what I was trying to do when I gave you a different word was  get you to change your frame.

Frame-change doesn't change what I'm objecting to.  It still adds a value that the thing in itself doesn't have.  That's what I want to get rid of, that added value, that unearned increment.  To raise the value of a painting or performance you ought to change it, not just change the frame or the label.

Ah yes, change the thing itself.  And what, in this case, is the thing itself?

A fellow doing stuff in a train station.

And people in a train station don't do stuff worth watching?

Yes, they do sometimes, but each time I would judge their worth against all the other stuff I see in a train station.  No outside bonuses.

I see.  You're for a very, very big market.  Your artist won't just be competing against other artists; he'll be competing against everything that can come to people's attention.

Isn't that the way it would be if you started from scratch?  Say there had never been a painting.  Nothing but wallpaper. You got the first one and put it on your wall.  It's competing with the wallpaper.

Which is competing with the view out the window. And the television in the next room.

And the conversation at the table.  That's life.  And everybody who produces something has to buy his way into it — as the makers of the commercial on that television well know.  I see no reason why painters should get a special price.

OK, so they're up against the wallpaper, fair and square, competing for favorable attention.  Not direct attention, of course, but the kind you expect of wallpaper, that it will provide a pleasing background.

Yes, direct attention will be on the conversation and the food.

And if your painting turns out to be less pleasing than solid wallpaper that's the end of painting.  That's all right with you?

Sure.  It's properly ended.  If the painting is an improvement, hey, you've got a market there.  And I think it's almost certain to be an improvement.  A painting is going to have more ways to connect itself with people's lives than wallpaper is going to have.  Painters work more to attract and reward direct attention than wallpaper manufacturers do.  Connecting with life is a way to do that.  It's what brings forth comments.  Dinner guests seldom stop to comment on the wallpaper.

Very well.  The painting wins and you get your market.  The painters paint and time passes and pretty soon you have what we have, people collecting paintings, and going to museums.  Same thing happens with sculpture.  People start to talk about what they see. Won't they lose a lot of pleasure in that talk if you take away the word "art"?

Ah yes, you remind me that they will.  Historians need the word and they give us pleasure, the pleasure of orderly knowledge.  But the pleasure they, like all talkers, give will always be a derivative pleasure. There'd be none of it if that painting hadn't beaten out that wallpaper.  That's the primary, dividend-paying pleasure.

So the word "art" boosts a derivative.  People can use it to leverage their investment. 

Yes. That's why I want to get rid of it.  Too many people are doing that.  All this leveraging makes me nervous.