The latest grand unified theory of art

Dramatis Personae

...is not a synonym for "Introduction," even though they're words that often appear at the beginning of a work, and serve to introduce.

Why care? It's not so much that you care as that you unavoidably interpret the difference. There *is* a difference, therefore you read it. The difference between what I ought to have said and what I did say colors your interpretation of the entire rest of the work; it updates you about what kind of thing you're reading, to be Bayesian about it.

...I recently decided on a new Grand Unified Theory of Art. Let me walk you through it.

First, some definitions.

• "Artistic meaning" is "knowledge, meaning, or information rendered or made naturally accessible to the interpreter."
• "Artistic interpretation" is "reading an artifact, narrative, experience, etc. to interpret meaning in a manner that does not defer to any analytical boundary."
• "Artistic value" is "artistic meaning derived via artistic interpretation considered worthwhile to and by the interpreter."

Therefore,

• "Art" is "artifacts, narratives, experiences, etc. belonging to a class of their kind having artistic value in expectation, or commonly regarded as such."

We'll take these for a spin in a minute.

Misunderstandings

One time I read part of a summary of the Critique of Pure Reason. Of what I read, the thing that stuck the best was the distinction between the phenomenon and the neumenon. Having read only part of a summary, I don't consider myself as having understood Kant, but the misunderstanding of Kant I came away with I put like this: the phenomenon is not the thing-in-itself; it is how things-in-the-world express themselves and can be interpreted. The neumenon is the thing-in-itself; given that all we are capable of experiencing is the expression of things-in-the-world, it is inherently unreachable by experience, and therefore unknowable.

Unknowable, perhaps, but not undue for speculation. By "naturally accessible" I mean something like "made so as to allow the interpreter to approach the neumenon of the object of discussion." There's a difference in kind I experience about good art: good art takes its subject matter and puts it inside of you. You understand what you were told because it's part of you now; or maybe it was already part of you, and now you've been shown how it was always there. The knowledge becomes manipulable to you in the same effortless way you might manipulate your own body.

Whether or not this counts as accessing the neumenon (it almost certainly doesn't), I regard this property of making ideas--"knowledge, meaning, or information"--accessible to me as central to what good art does. If it doesn't make you feel something, if it doesn't make something pop into your head, then is it really art? And conversely, if it makes you feel something, if it makes an idea pop into your head, why not call it art?

Transgressing boundaries

It's well-characterized that if everything is X, then nothing is X. I don't go around calling every physical artifact I interact with, narrative of events I construct, or set of experiences I undergo "art" because the way I hold those mental objects does not necessarily require or even permit me to interpret them in an artistic manner. Like Bennett Foddy says, "things are made to be consumed in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage."

I hold most mental objects in a way that permits a strictly controlled manner of interpretation. The sign on the wall is consumed for its text and pictographs to direct to me to my destination; the receipt is double-checked so I understand how I managed to spend $150 at the grocery store on a Tuesday night, then thrown away; the box fan cools me down when the AC is broken but does not inspire the soul.

Except of course that it does, and of course any of these things can be read as art if we take the time to do so. The sign may have poor kerning and be obviously produced using Microsoft Word WordArt or alternately may be thoughtfully color-coded in a kind and reassuring way. The receipt probably has some garish roll of coupons on the end and I assure you these could be the matter of hours of conversation on the right night. And if you've ever spent a few weeks without AC, you know that a $20 box fan has the spiritual pull of something approaching a lover.

The object doesn't change when we choose to read it artistically; rather, the kinds of information about the object we consider relevant to our interpretation change. I claim that artistic interpretation is the unique form of interpretation where there is no well-founded boundary on our analysis: *any* information about the object can be relevant to our interpretation, and any subset of the information about the object may form a unique limited interpretation.

Section 508 standards for accessibility of the dharma

As it happens, part of the reason the neumenon is inaccessible is that properly speaking it doesn't exist; there is no thing-in-itself because there is no-thing. (I've also read summaries of Buddhism and misunderstood them.) This is convenient because it allows us to recognize that there is no such thing as a fact that isn't about an object, only facts that are more or less relevant in relation to an object.

More specifically, "relevant" here means "able to be used to make meaning accessible to the interpreter." Omega could presumably tell me how the nearest tardigrade relates to my decision to write a bunch of blog posts instead of enjoying my October, but if they started trying my eyes would glaze over and I would go back to typing. Point, counterpoint: the method of our analysis is unbounded, but our ability to execute that analysis is not. This means that finding artistic meaning via artistic interpretation, being of unclear utility, is almost as good for engagement as logical decision theory.

Art as we speak about it commonly isn't just "things we can interpret artistically," because you can interpret any mental object artistically. Art is the sort of thing we expect to be worth interpreting artistically to begin with, given that it's frequently hard to do and the kinds of affordances that make meaning naturally accessible to human beings are relatively specific.

We're also very provincial about the kinds of information we consider worth making naturally accessible. The "human condition" or whatever has had far more ink spilled over it than the moons of Jupiter, despite the moons of Jupiter being extremely cool, and I've seen Cowboy Bebop so I can tell you that the moons of Jupiter have in turn had far more ink spilled over them than whatever my current hyperfixation is--let's go with toki pona-based programming languages.

But none of this has anything to do with what art is, fundamentally! The way you're probably going to feel the next time you get dumped is a thing-in-the-world that art can tell you about, and it can also tell you that everybody else has felt it too, and being humans we like to know those sorts of things; it could just as well tell us about, I don't know, why they seem to keep adding new kinds of quarks. Just like everything else, the interpreter is the one who decides whether the meaning they've interpreted is of value to them.

The Adventures of Slopboy and Lavagem

This framing allows us to better understand many common criticisms of art, and criticisms of crticisms of art, and criticisms of claims of things being art, and so on. Let's do a lightning round.

• Marvel movies either are or aren't art depending on if you're the kind of person to read them closely or not. Neurons firing when explosion happens is fun, but doesn't amount to artistic interpretation because the only fact about the work you consider when interpreting it is whether there was explosion to make neurons firing. On the other hand, we can certainly learn a lot about culture by looking at what continues to get put in Marvel movies.
• AI slop unfortunately is art, but it's very bad art, because mechanistic interpretability is still learning object permanence and how to manipulate the focal depth of its eyes, and so nobody has any idea how some slop Claude wrote relates to anything. Therefore very little is made accessible to the interpreter no matter how hard they try, which is why people get mad when they find out something they thought was good art at first blush turns out to have been AI. I'm the Coyote crashing into your deftly rendered image of a tunnel through the mountain. I will be sueing for damages.
• Still on AI, this also lets us understand why sometimes things that involve AI can also be good art: if a human being exerted substantial control over the creation of a final artifact, that makes it much more amenable to our interpretive process. Likewise uses of AI that help us understand it better in intuitive ways (the AI village or other AI fishtanks come to mind) strike me as substantially artful, despite being equally substantially composed of object-level slop.
• Whether or not a work "has" artistic value is entirely dependent on the interpreter that happens to be interpreting it, and relies both on their skill at interpretation and the schema they use to interpret it. If I think Lawrence of Arabia is a fantastic film that points at something fundamental about the human condition because it has four hours of beautiful desert landscapes and closeups of Peter O'Toole, bully for me. Your squeeze may understandably not so juice.

Anyway, my point is that the difference between "Dramatis Personae" and "Introduction" is the difference between gluing a puzzle together and hanging it on your wall and putting a urinal on display at The Louvre. (Apparently they may not have rated a copy of Fountain, actually.) That is to say that there's no difference at all, of course, except for the fact that they're different things.

Everything in the world is exactly the same.

—Kanye West

[Different] things are [different].

—Hirasawa Yui, misquote

The kanji of the day is 冬

• Its Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course keyword is WINTER.
• Its readings are ふゆ and トウ.

He's so clean. How could you not love him? I can practically feel the chill coming over me just looking at him. 10/10, no notes.