Aesthetics, Applications, Artistry and Anarchy: Essays in Prehistoric and Contemporary Art

� Pre-Columbian rock art is still not considered by many as a form of aesthetic expression, and many still do not consider rock art as art. These ideas seem to be sustained by popular notions about the nature of aesthetics and art that have had a particularly unfortunate impact on the study of non-Western and prehistoric art. There seems to be a general acceptance of the Kantian idea that aesthetic expression is about the beautiful, and this has come to define the aesthetic for most people today. In the long shadow of this modernity—a distinctly Kantian Modernity, with a marketplace that reinforces these expectations of art and aesthetic expression—pre-Columbian rock art can indeed seem out of place, even unwanted. But if we consider the critical heritage of Alexander Baumgarten, who coined the term aesthetics and was writing a generation before Kant, we find an aesthetic theory that better reflects art’s historical condition. When it is seen in terms of Baumgarten’s ‘science of sensitive cognition’ we gain a much richer formal and aesthetic understanding of pre-Columbian rock art. Keywords� art, aesthetics, pre-Columbian rock art, Alexander Baumgarten, Brazil, Caribbean Aesthetics, Applications, Artistry and Anarchy 10 work—like pre-Columbian rock art—is not supposed to be viewed aesthetically, perhaps because it was made before these societies had entered the ‘Era of Art’ (à la Belting 1994). Such oppositions to rock art as art are well known (Morales 2005a). Many people who do not see rock art as art and do not consider it a significant form of aesthetic expression reflect long-standing attitudes toward prehistoric and non-Western works. They characterize such work as non-art or pre-art because they view it as foreign to any work or concept related to art in our modern world. They argue art is not a ‘universal category of human existence’ (White 1992: 538), that, according to some prehistorians, it is rare in the long history of humanity; and that art is only a recent phenomenon of the Western First World. This critical trend contends that the aesthetic response is a transcendental exploration (Tomásková 1997), and thus art exists apart from the everyday (utilitarian) concerns of life and living. Art is a cultural phenomenon ‘that is assumed to function in what we recognize and even carve off separately as the aesthetic sphere’ (Soffer and Conkey 1997: 2; emphasis added). Art is limited to the objet d’art designed for the disinterested contemplation of the beautiful, and thus cannot account for the production and reception of rock art. Rather than allowing these popular opinions about art and its lack in the pre-Columbian Americas to limit the range of works we study as art, we instead seek to expose the multicultural and eternal nature of art by demonstrating the strengths of more inclusive notions of art and the aesthetic response. This more reasonably reflects the historical condition of art as most people have known it for most of time and makes the resulting analyses of old and new art far more rewarding. While this perspective takes the long view of history, it is critically grounded in the contemporary artworld by necessity. Much of what art means to us today is generated and warped by the contemporary artworld marketplace, and much of this contemporary artworld marketplace would seem a complete anathema to the world of preColumbian rock art production and reception. The first thing we need to do is to reconcile conflicting notions about the nature of aesthetic responses. Kantian Beauty and Art’s Uselessness Most students of aesthetics typically trace its Western beginnings back to the ancient world and the Platonic tradition. Plotinus, for example, contrasted things known through rational processes (intellectual, noetic) and things known through the senses (sensate, aesthetic) in his discussion of the soul and the body in the Fourth Ennead (Aschenbrenner and Holther 1954). We also see a sophisticated aesthetic discourse at work centuries earlier, in third millennium B.C. Mesopotamian art, as Irene J. Winter (2002) has convincingly demonstrated. For the Sumerians and Akkadians qualities such as grace, luminosity and awesome power were important aesthetic considerations in their evaluation of their art. These are qualities, we might note, that reflect social and political attitudes that exist outside the work but are expressed through the work. It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that we saw our modern notion of aesthetics codified. In 1790 Immanuel Kant bent the arc of Western aesthetic theory toward the beautiful and toward judgments of disinterested taste. Because, for Kant, aesthetic judgement is based on the beautiful, and because the capacity for beauty only exists in the non-useful, non-functional, we are left with an aesthetic theory whose object we carve off separately from the world of useful objects (à la Soffer and Conkey 1997). This follows the admonition attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that ‘utility cannot be beauty’ (Risatti 2007: 217). An object might be a work of art because it engenders an aesthetic response, but such a response relegates the object to the realm of the non-useful (just ‘something pretty to hang on a wall,’ following Lekson’s critique). This is the Kantian twist that reinforces the perception of art as somehow removed from everyday life, elevated to the level of disinterestedness, or concerned with some contemplative search for the beautiful (as in Tomásková 1997). That was not a fair characterization of art in eighteenth century Europe, nor a fair characterization of art today, nor is it a fair characterization of art for most people for most of time. We deserve a reminder of what art actually is, and how we came to lose sight of that. When we say that an object is a work of art if it engenders an aesthetic response, we mean art with a lowercase a—’for Art with a capital A has come to be something of a bogey and a fetish’ as E. H. Gombrich (1950: 5) wrote in the mid-20th century. This art includes not just the fine art of the museums, galleries, and auction houses, it also includes fine and utilitarian craft, and all manner of fine and commercial design and architecture. This catholic approach deserves emphasis, because many critics of rock art as art only think of fine art when issues of art and culture arise. Not all art is fine art. Calling some arts fine arts only came to us from the late eighteenth century (Risatti 2007: 71). The result has been that pottery, textiles, furniture, jewelry, tattoos, and commercial and decorative graphic design could not compete with the fine or high arts of painting, sculpture and monumental architecture for the critical attention of Enlightenment aestheticians, and were thus relegated to the category minor or low arts. Consequently, those low arts could not compete for the excessive commissions of extremely wealthy patrons, whose conspicuously generous support of their Reinaldo Morales Jr. and Howard Risatti