An attempt to make sense of our fractured lives

But Is It Art? by Cynthia Freeland (Oxford University Press, £11.99)

By Sue Hubbard
Wednesday, 14 March 2001

So now it seems that, among their other duties, the officers of the Metropolitan Police have become art critics. When they paid a visit to the Saatchi Gallery to denounce the work of the photographer Tierney Gearon, who had taken nude photographs of her children, it would have been interesting to hear what arguments the police used, and with which critical theory they substantiated their case.

So now it seems that, among their other duties, the officers of the Metropolitan Police have become art critics. When they paid a visit to the Saatchi Gallery to denounce the work of the photographer Tierney Gearon, who had taken nude photographs of her children, it would have been interesting to hear what arguments the police used, and with which critical theory they substantiated their case.

Contemporary art, more than any other creative form, seems to invoke the ire of the middlebrow. There appears to be a brooding anxiety that those clever-dick artists are pulling the wool over their eyes. Dripped paint, elephant dung, unmade beds - a child could do that!

In But Is It Art?, Cynthia Freeland, professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, has written a book of simplicity and clarity that may well come to rival John Berger's Ways of Seeing as a reader's digest of the rubric of theories that make up contemporary art criticism. What becomes manifest is that, so often, the wrong question is asked. The pertinent query would be: "But is it good art?"

In concise language, mercifully free of art-speak, Freeland challenges the sacred cow of obfuscation so prevalent in art writing: "A theory should help things make sense rather than create obscurity through jargon and weighty words." She cavorts with aplomb through theories about blood, ritual, beauty and sexual politics. She moves with consummate skill, ducking and weaving through readings of Greek tragedy, Chartres cathedral, African sculpture and Native American dance to the relevance of Walter Benjamin's theories on reproduction to digital media and MTV.

Freeland reminds us that, for most tribal people, art and artefact are not distinguishable; that the notion of the individualistic artist is a modern, Western construct. Medieval European Christians did not make "art" as we understand it, but saw themselves as skilled craftsmen who tried to imitate God's divine beauty. She starts in myth and ritual to show how art gave cohesion to older societies, pointing out that modern artists cannot take this consensus of shared beliefs for granted, and that meaning is therefore mutable. This, she suggests, can lead to a sense of shock and abandonment, so that art may be perceived as something alien. Symbols used in religious art, such as blood, become shocking when employed by artists such as Andres Serrano in his infamous Piss Christ (1987).

Kant is named as the predecessor to the scientific psychologists who judge concepts of beauty by studying viewers' eye movements. His influential definition of beauty is explained as "purposiveness without a purpose". This sense of an art work's "rightness", manifest largely through form rather than meaning, developed into the modernist theories of "significant form" expounded by Roger Fry.

Wagner, Kant's notion of the Sublime, and Andy Warhol are all discussed. Freeland illustrates that it is now impossible to separate art theories from practice, so interdependent have they become. The "primitive", the "exotic" and the feminine are all rapidly explored. While Freeland is careful not to give one philosophical stance privilege over another, one senses that her own view probably accords with the critic John Dewey, who claimed that art "expresses the life of a community".

This is a valuable book for anyone perplexed by the arcane theorising of contemporary art. It is, in the end, optimistic, displaying the respectable degree of scepticism illustrated in a quote from the environmental artist Robert Irwin - that art "has come to mean so many things that it doesn't mean anything any more". None the less, Freeland endorses his view that art is perhaps best described as "a continuous expansion of our awareness of the world around us".

Art can enhance an awareness of ourselves, as well as challenge and expand our perceptual relationship to our surroundings. For this reason - dead sheep or no - we will continue to create it, and look at it, in an attempt to make sense of our fractured modern lives.