What Is Art? 什麼是藝術？

🔊The original was lost soon afterward. The examples now in museums are replicas made decades later. In 2004 five hundred British art professionals voted Fountain the most influential work of the twentieth century. Whatever one thinks of it, it did what a good philosophical example does. It was a case that every existing definition of art got wrong, or else got right for an embarrassing reason.

原件不久之後就遺失了。現在博物館裡的那些，是幾十年後製作的複製品。2004 年，五百位英國的藝術界專業人士把〈噴泉〉票選為二十世紀最有影響力的作品。不管你怎麼看它，它做到了一個好的哲學例子該做的事。它是這樣一個案例：每一個既有的藝術定義，都把它判錯了；不然就是判對了，而理由很難堪。

🔊The oldest definition says that art is imitation. Plato states it in order to attack it. There is the idea of a bed, he says, and there is the bed that a carpenter makes by looking to the idea, and then there is the bed in a painting, which copies only how the carpenter’s bed looks from one side. The imitator, he concludes, is “thrice removed from the king and from the truth.” Anyone can do what he does by “turning a mirror round and round.” Aristotle kept the definition and dropped the contempt: people learn by imitating and take pleasure in recognizing a likeness. For two thousand years most European theory began here. The trouble is that music imitates nothing in particular, and neither does a temple, a carpet, or a line of calligraphy.

最古老的定義說：藝術是模仿。柏拉圖把它說出來，是為了攻擊它。他說：有床的理型；有木匠看著那個理型而做出來的床；然後有畫裡的床，它只摹仿了木匠的床從某一側看起來的樣子。他的結論是：模仿者「與王、與真理隔了三層」。他做的事情，任何人只要「拿一面鏡子轉來轉去」就做得到。亞里斯多德保留了這個定義，拿掉了輕蔑：人是藉著模仿來學習的，並且在認出相似之處時感到愉快。兩千年間，歐洲大部分的理論都從這裡出發。麻煩在於：音樂並不特別模仿什麼；一座神廟、一張地毯、一行書法也是。

🔊A second definition looks to the maker. In 1897 Leo Tolstoy, by then more preacher than novelist, wrote that “art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.” A boy who meets a wolf and then tells the story so that his listeners feel his fear has made art. By this test Tolstoy rejected most of Shakespeare and Beethoven as insincere or unintelligible to plain people, and praised peasant songs.

第二個定義看的是創作者。1897 年，那時候與其說是小說家、不如說是傳道者的列夫・托爾斯泰寫道：「藝術是人的一種活動，它在於：一個人有意識地藉著某些外在的符號，把自己體驗過的感受傳遞給別人；而別人被這些感受所感染，也體驗到它們。」一個男孩遇到了一隻狼，然後把這件事講出來，讓聽的人感受到他的恐懼；他就創作了藝術。用這個標準，托爾斯泰把莎士比亞與貝多芬的大部分作品都否定了，說它們不真誠，或者一般人聽不懂；而他稱讚農民的歌。

🔊China arrived at this view first and never held the other. The Book of Documents says that “poetry speaks what the heart is set on,” and the preface to the Book of Songs explains: “In the heart it is intent. Sent forth in words it is poetry.” Chinese critics took it for granted that a poem or a piece of calligraphy shows the person who made it. The weakness of the expression theory lies elsewhere. A cry of pain expresses a feeling and is not a poem, and much great art was made to order by people whose feelings we know nothing about.

中國先得出了這個看法，而且從來沒有主張過另一個。《尚書》說：「詩言志。」〈毛詩序〉解釋：「在心為志，發言為詩。」中國的批評家理所當然地認為，一首詩或一件書法，顯露了創作它的那個人。表現論的弱點在別的地方。一聲痛苦的叫喊表現了一份感受，而它不是一首詩；而許多偉大的藝術，是由我們對其感受一無所知的人，受委託而製作的。

🔊A third definition looks at the work alone. In 1914 the English critic Clive Bell asked what a Persian bowl, a Chinese carpet, a Giotto fresco, and a Cézanne have in common, and answered: “lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions.” He called this significant form. What a picture shows is irrelevant, and Bell dismissed a famous painting of a crowded railway station, full of lifelike detail, as interesting and not art at all.

第三個定義只看作品本身。1914 年，英國批評家克萊夫・貝爾問：一只波斯碗、一張中國地毯、一幅喬托的濕壁畫、一幅塞尚，有什麼共同之處？他回答：「以某種特定方式組合起來的線條與顏色、某些形式與形式之間的關係，激起了我們的審美情感。」他稱之為「有意味的形式」。一幅畫畫了什麼，是無關緊要的；有一幅畫著擁擠的火車站、充滿逼真細節的名畫，貝爾把它打發掉了：很有趣，但根本不是藝術。

🔊Chinese painters had long agreed that likeness is not the point. Around 500 CE Xie He listed six principles of painting and put first “spirit resonance, which means vitality.” Fidelity to the object came third. Su Shi wrote in the eleventh century: “To judge a painting by its likeness is to see as a child sees.” What these writers valued, though, was the life in the brushwork and the character of the painter that it revealed, which is nearer to expression than to Bell’s pure pattern. Bell’s definition has a further problem. When asked what makes a form significant, he could only say that it is the kind that moves us aesthetically, and the definition goes round in a circle.

中國的畫家早就同意：形似不是重點。大約公元 500 年，謝赫列出了繪畫的六法，把「氣韻生動」放在第一。忠於物象的「應物象形」排在第三。蘇軾在十一世紀寫道：「論畫以形似，見與兒童鄰。」不過，這些作者所看重的，是筆墨裡的生命，以及它所顯露的畫家的品格；這更接近表現，而不是貝爾那種純粹的圖案。貝爾的定義還有一個問題。有人問：是什麼使一個形式「有意味」？他只能說：就是那種在審美上打動我們的形式；於是這個定義繞了一個圈。

🔊None of the three could explain Fountain. It imitates nothing, expresses no feeling that anyone can name, and has the same form as every other urinal from the same factory. In 1964 the philosopher Arthur Danto saw Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, plywood copies of supermarket cartons, and concluded that what makes something art cannot be anything the eye can see. It is “an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.” George Dickie turned this into a definition: a work of art is an artifact that someone acting on behalf of the artworld has offered as a candidate for appreciation. On this account Fountain is art for the plain reason that it was put forward and taken up as art.

這三個定義，沒有一個解釋得了〈噴泉〉。它不模仿任何東西；它不表現任何一種說得出名字的感受；它的形式，跟同一家工廠出產的每一個小便斗一模一樣。1964 年，哲學家亞瑟・丹托看到了安迪・沃荷的〈布瑞洛箱〉——超級市場紙箱的夾板複製品——並得出結論：使某樣東西成為藝術的，不可能是眼睛看得見的任何東西。它是「一種藝術理論的氛圍，一種對藝術史的知識：一個藝術界」。喬治・迪基把這變成了一個定義：藝術作品是一件人造物，由某個代表藝術界行事的人提出來，作為供人欣賞的候選者。照這個說法，〈噴泉〉是藝術，理由很平常：它被當作藝術提出來，也被當作藝術接受了。

🔊The institutional theory fits every case, and critics say that this is its fault. It tells us that something is art when the right people call it so, and is silent about why they should. Morris Weitz had argued in 1956 that the search was a mistake from the start. Art, like a game, has no single feature shared by all its instances. They are linked by overlapping resemblances, and each new movement extends the family. On this view the question “What is art?” has no final answer, and the changes in the answer from one age to the next are a record of what each age cared about.

制度論符合每一個案例；而批評者說，這正是它的毛病。它告訴我們：當對的人把某樣東西稱為藝術的時候，它就是藝術；至於他們為什麼該這樣稱呼，它不說。莫里斯・韋茲在 1956 年就主張過：這場尋找從一開始就是個錯誤。藝術就像遊戲一樣，並沒有一個所有實例都共有的特徵。它們是由彼此交疊的相似之處連在一起的；而每一個新的流派，都把這個家族擴大了一點。照這個看法，「什麼是藝術？」這個問題沒有最終的答案；而答案在一個又一個時代之間的變化，記錄了每個時代在乎的是什麼。

🔊John Dewey thought all four definitions looked in the wrong place. They ask what kind of object a work of art is. In Art as Experience (1934) he argued that art is something that happens between a person and the world, and that the museum piece is only its most concentrated form. A mechanic absorbed in a job well done and a cook who cares about the meal have experiences of the same kind as the painter’s. A society that locks art in special buildings, he thought, has usually let it drain out of ordinary work.

約翰・杜威認為，這四個定義都看錯了地方。它們問的是：藝術作品是哪一種「物品」？在《藝術即經驗》（1934）裡，他主張藝術是發生在一個人與世界之間的事，而博物館裡的作品只是它最濃縮的形式。一位全神貫注把工作做好的技工、一位在乎那頓飯的廚師，他們的經驗與畫家的經驗是同一類的。他認為，一個把藝術鎖在特別的建築物裡的社會，通常已經讓藝術從日常的工作裡流失了。

🔊The question has a new form today. A computer program can now produce an image that imitates well, has striking form, and wins a prize at an art fair, while no one involved has had any feeling to express. Whether it is art depends on which of these theories is right, and the answer will affect who is paid and who is credited.

這個問題今天有了新的形式。現在，一個電腦程式就能產生一幅圖像：模仿得很好，形式醒目，還在藝術展覽上得了獎；而牽涉其中的人，沒有一個有任何感受要表現。它是不是藝術，取決於這些理論當中哪一個是對的；而答案會影響誰拿到報酬、誰得到名分。