Hot Take on Art

Visible/IR comparison of possible Rembrandt painting, retrieved from:
https://hyperaxion.com/culture/fake-painting-genuine-rembrandt/

  Somewhat following on the previous post, I had a set of comparisons with thermometers come to mind, and in the interests of personal history am scribbling them down rapidly and publicly.

One of the problems that it doesn't take long to run into is the issue of whether art is objective or subjective.  Say it's purely objective and it's easy to point out that who is viewing it, what they know, their state of mind, and so forth matters a great deal.  Say it's purely subjective and you'll be awarded an English Literature degree encounter the problem that certain works maintain their quality through time and with many people, and that it seems absurd to claim that there is absolutely nothing inherent in the object itself which contributes. 

Due to recent cultural history and comparisons with science, the latter view has mostly prevailed, but I think the problem is simply that the question is a bad one.  And to explain why, I need to talk about thermometers.

A thermometer is a device which is designed to measure the temperature of an object.  It seems as straightforward of a function as possible, where the final result is a single number and there is absolutely no debate as to whether the cultural biases of the thermometer affected its judgement.  But look closer, and this view of a thermometer unravels.  First, some types of thermometers:

1. Traditional mercury/alcohol thermometers that rely directly on the expansion of a fluid to fill a bulb and ascending stalk, and so indicate the temperature based on how high they go.
2. An older Galileo thermometer which also uses the expansion of liquids, but does so by having several bulbs full of different fluids that expand at different rates.  Their relative location in a column indicates the temperature.
3. The type of thermometer that was traditionally found in thermostats in houses, where a bimetal bar, made of two metals with differing rates of expansion, would bend relative to each other and so move a needle to indicate the temperature.
4. Modern electronic thermometers that are based on how the changing temperature affects the resistance to current flow.  This is converted by an internal microchip into a numerical readout.
5. Infrared thermometers focus the infrared radiation emitted by warmed objects onto a receiver which changes its voltage output as a result.  Like the electronic thermometer, this is then turned into a display for us to read.

Well, this is fine and all, but what has this to do with art?  I bring this up because looking closely it makes something obvious: none of these thermometers indicate temperature directly.  They are all proxies, the reaction of one thing to another to another which we infer informs us of the nature of the world.  How much the kitchen counter moves is a thermometer, if one just knows how to read and interpret it.  How much I am sweating now could be a thermometer... if it weren't so complicated a process to unravel.  The point is that we need to be careful to recognize that the device that is measuring is an integral part of measurement itself, and that the individual quirks of each are what we are observing.

So how do we actually read thermometers?  First, we have to calibrate them.  To take a traditional thermometer, if the marks for the temperature are put in the wrong place then it will give us a wrong number.  Of course, that doesn't mean that the thermometer didn't work; the liquid expanded as it always did, we just didn't know what that reaction meant.  We had no way of turning it into an assessment.

We also have to use them properly.  For instance, IR thermometers won't measure air temperature; they rely on radiation being given off, and the gases in the atmosphere are not at such a density or energy level as to affect it.  Not all thermometers work for all tasks, and the failure of one thermometer to measure something isn't a commentary on temperature but on the very nature of the apparatus.  As noted above, we need to be clear on what a thermometer is actually doing if we are not to misapply it.

I hope there is some inkling as people read this that I am trying to give an indication of the issue in art.  We want to express something such as quality or beauty, consistency or elegance, etc. in a work but the only tool we have to assess this is human minds (somewhat, there are some interesting attempts to analyze art through algorithms, but TASFAD).  As these minds are highly variable it should come as no surprise that given differing settings there are different readings, and that in particular an education which helps better calibrate them improves their ability to "read" art.  That often what we are left with is not an analysis, but merely being able to pay careful attention to our own profound reactions and feelings and then, if possible, try to turn it into something more.  But those "readings," like the bending of a bimetal bar or a change in conductance, came before any final analysis of what they meant.  In other words, the terms subjective and objective are simply misused for something as simple as a thermometer, let alone for a topic as complicated as art, where in both cases the measurer is not separate from the measured.

"Yes, but in the end there is a real temperature to be measured out there while there isn't any such thing as real quality."

Now we venture into the last point, and this is why I think the fragmentation of science, philosophy, and art has been to the detriment of all, for it requires something of all of them to make this coherent.  I'm going to say that there is no such thing as temperature either... but it is a highly useful fiction.  There are two ways of approaching this.

First is to point out that the very definition of temperature is an abstraction.  It is, ostensibly, the motion of molecules, or a measure of their heat.  But it is the average motion of many molecules, not the motion of any individual particle.  So it is already a statistical construct, an abstraction that we have created.  And it is only a sampling.  If you ask what the temperature of an object is, then you have defined a boundary of your observation, considering it unimportant that different parts may have different temperatures should you have averaged them individually.  This regresses to the problem that thermometers are always, inevitably, doing an imperfect sampling of the object in question.  We know this - a thermometer tells you the temperature of the air around it, not the temperature of the whole room's air, your whole town's air, or the whole atmosphere.  

However, this is not really my primary argument here, for it regresses always to, "Yes, but there is something you are measuring out there."  But I would take this a second step, and I am going to borrow a comparison from Philip Ball's Beyond Weird: measuring the location of an object.

Imagine that you are in a dark room and there is an object suspended in front of you.  At your disposal are many small balls which you can throw, and which you know where they end up after being thrown (for the sake of thought-experiment here).  Well, as you threw the balls repeatedly you would come to notice that some come right back at you, some are deflected at certain angles, and of course some continue on unimpeded.  Using many many ball throws it would be possible to reconstruct the object in the dark, both its size (based on how many balls pass by) and its shape (knowing the angles at which balls bounce, it could be inferred the attitude of the surface they struck).

In all this, though, you have not ever "measured" any of these qualities.  You have measured the reactions of the balls to it and worked backward from there.  The idea of it having location and shape and all these features is a deduction based on certain rules; not bad rules, mind you, but nonetheless rules.  It is the issue that Locke ran up against when, after formulating the world as substance and properties, he realized that we could never know anything of substance itself.  Just of properties and their interactions.  What is substance "out there"?  What is location if not the interaction of things with others in a predictable pattern?

To return once again to art, then, my ultimate answer to the objection above is that real doesn't exist in the way we naively assume as humans.  Of course, thermometers aren't arbitrary, and as noted are highly useful.  They are measuring something of the universe and we care a great deal about it.  Location too.  But the very nature of measurement is that it is bound up with what is doing the measuring, and therefore it makes no sense to ask of anything what it's "really" like "out there."  And therefore it is no surprise that art, being vastly more complicated than temperature, as interpreted by human brains/minds, which are vastly more complicated than thermometers, is a topic in which this issue makes itself so clearly known by the variability of responses and measurements.