With conceptual art having exploded all limitations on what art is—it’s not necessarily an object, esthetically powerful, or even meaningful or “privileged”—how do art-lovers make critical judgments? Trusting to institutional valorizations (as Danto seems to do) simply pushes the decision-making off one’s own desk onto someone else’s. When did intellectual/artistic lefties become dittoheads?

if art becomes an arena of experimentation eschewing any sort of meaning, statement, or content outside its own concerns (remember wicked old navel-gazing formalism?), which have been enlarged in the past few decades, granted, why should anyone outside the artworld bubble care?

thanks for that great response. it’s so thoughtful.
AW

Thanks for the thoughtful report and discussion. I agree with what you and Anu say about the notion of observation as a link between the two domains. I just wanted to suggest a different way than the art/science binary to discuss different observational practices and how they relate to language. I’ll try to be brief.

One practice seems coupled with objectifying language. That is to say, the goal of observation is the form of description, interpretation, theory or judgement about the observed. It could take the form of many kinds of language: say in the language of math or filmmaking or the law or art criticism. The observation is in the service of creating these formulations in a language independent of the object, and possibly the observer.

A different practice, or aspect of general observation would be coupled with a response, i.e. the gesture of response, directed “back towards” or “inspired by” or “in resistance to” the observed on something like its own terms, or on a composite of one’s own and the observed’s terms. This kind of observation is in the service of creating a dialog in a way that may never get formulated in (meta-) language, but is fed directly back as play. This is the way an artist works with materials, or a comic works with an audience, or a predator, prey.

Sometimes both aspects get mixed together, but the thought is that one way creates facts and theory, the other creates discourse and interaction. Art or science could work in either mode, of course!

Thanks for the conversation!