Art and Objecthood (Week Eight, I think)

I am not quite sure if this is the post from last week or for this week, but here we go. The question.

The answer I want to propose is this: the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing more than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is now the negation of art. Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work."

If this is Fried's answer, what is his question? Why does he object to what he calls "objecthood," "theatricality," and "literalist" work?

To quote the article the question asked is "What is it about objecthood as projected and hypothesized by the literalist that makes it , if only from the perspective of recent modernist painting, antithetical to art?"

Before moving forward let's look at what exactly the question even means. The writer mentions that to him objecthood is "non-art." Painting, not from a literalist perspective, is too restrictive because it is limited to one plane, therefore with three-dimensionality it becomes something more likely to please the literalist, but ultimately it too fails.

Still I confess this whole article causes nothing much more than confusion. However considering what I just said allow me to explain it in a manner that I think is close to what the article is trying to say.

Because literalist work is so caught up in the way it is presented and received, it is less art and more theatre. Although not necessarily theatre which is art, but the showyness, the literalist ability to evoke something in viewers that is like the way theatre is perceived. So when you go to a gallery and see art, literalist art I mean, you are actually going to experience something, instead of actually, you know, seeing art.

So if this is the answer and the question. There still remains another question. What does he say is his problem with this system? Well I think, even though he spends what I feel are entirely too many pages to say this, basically if literalist art exists to be showy and not to be art, then it is needlessly at war with other art and isn't art.

Okay so, because I am having a bit of trouble explaining it, allow to me to pull an example from own life and in some ways make a point in favor of this writers. When I got the chance to go to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain I recall being very excited to see great works of modernist art. The ones I recall most were these very large circular pieces of metal. They were all in a spiral shapes and they were all amazing. You couldn't help but be drawn to them in a truly theatrical way. However, in spite of the power of the emotions that overwhelmed me, I mostly felt an overly serious sense of "neat." But the whole experience for me, was somewhat, artless. Not detached in any way, but theatrical.

Thus art, according to this author, is the opposite of "objecthood." Objecthood then, is "non-art." So strangely a correct, overly simplified summary of this article could be. The opposite of art is "non-art." This is somewhat amusing to me. And like always, even though I think the writer has very valid points, I can't help but be weary of anyone who goes out of there way to define art as a particular thing.

Art is, as the old adage goes "in the eye of the beholder." Hmm...does that statement, as I have often wondered, sound hypocritical?