DISCUSSION

THE POSSIBILITY OF ART:

REMARKS ON A PROPOSAL BY DICKIE
A

MONGrecentefforts saywhat artis, one of the mostsalubrious to

A8, is George Dickie's "Defining Art."' Like much of Dickie's best work, this essay is brief, direct, and convincing in the way it uncomplicates what philosophers have made murky. This time, however, I think he has tried to make things more simple and ingenuous than they can be. The definition Dickie presents and argues for is this:
A workof art in the descriptive senseis (I) an artifact(2) uponwhichsomesociety or some has the sub-group a society conferred statusof candidatefor of appreciation 254b]. [p.

This definition is introduced early in Dickie's essay, and the rest of the essay is given to elucidating and defending it. Instead of summarizing here all Dickie has to say, I will quote relevant passages in the course of my criticism. At the beginning, however, it may be helpful to note three special features of Dickie's thesis. (i) The somewhat checkered history of attempts to define art is usually seen as a series of specifications of art-making properties. These properties, though subtle and sometimes relational, have been understood to be properties the eye can descry. The definitions which require these properties of artworks are widely thought to have been discredited, if not by earlier examples, by the onslaught of problematic cases and counterexamples supplied by twentieth-century art. Each definition (for example, "Art is imitation, or expression, or significant form, or symbolic feeling") seems either to founder straightway, since many obvious artworks do not display the allegedly necessary property, or to retreat into insignificance, since the property it cites cannot be seen and is presumed to be present only because the objects are artworks. Dickie aims from the outset to specify a property which cannot be found merely by inspecting a putative artwork. He says: What the eye cannotdescryis a complicatednon-exhibited of characteristic
the artifacts in question [p. 254a].

The idea is that the property required by the second condition of the
1 George Dickie, "Defining Art," American Philosophical Quarterly, (i969), 6 253-256. All references to Dickie are to this essay and I will give page numbers

parenthetically in the body of the text, using 'a' and 'b' to refer to the left and right columns of the pages.
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definition is to be, as Dickie calls it, a social property, a non-exhibited status obtained within an institution. (2) Since the eighteenth century there have been a number of definitions of art in terms of something like appreciation. Conceptions of appreciation have varied and so has the strategy of the definition. Usually some minimal requirement is given-for instance, that a thing be an artifact-and then it is held that appreciation of the thing is a necessary or sufficient condition of its being an artwork. The principal refinements have consisted in making the condition more subtlerequiring that a thing be likely to be appreciated, or that it be intended to be appreciated, or that it should be appreciated. Dickie's second condition is subtle enough to transform the character of this kind of definition. All questions of actual appreciation are waived. What is required is that a thing be a candidate for appreciation, and actually being appreciated is neither necessary nor sufficient for that. (3) Dickie agrees with Morris Weitz in distinguishing two senses-or uses, as he sometimes says-of the term 'work of art,' an evaluative sense and a descriptive sense. Thus the initial qualification in the definition. Dickie is interested in the expression 'work of art' only in its descriptive sense, and he has little to say about its evaluative sense. He does invoke the evaluative sense as an explanation of the propriety of remarks like "This driftwood is a work of art" which precludes their being counterexamples to the requirement that works of art be artifacts. Dickie holds that the descriptive and evaluative senses are distinct at least to this extent, that both artifactsand nonartifacts can be works of art in the evaluative sense, while only artifacts can be works of art in the descriptive sense. Furthermore, works of art in the descriptive sense need not be works of art in the evaluative sense. So being a work of art in one sense is neither necessary nor sufficient for being so in the other sense. The third feature of the definition is less novel than the others. I mention it because I will claim, toward the end of my criticism, that Dickie's determination to keep out of the definition everything he takes to be a matter of merit has left his conception of art too spare.

The definition falls short, so to speak, both formally and materially, and it is the second condition which is defective. Despite the careful reference to candidacy for appreciation, and not to appreciation itself, we must be told something about appreciation-enough at least to give content to the notion of candidacy. Materially, what Dickie says about 70

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appreciation is too strong, even though very general; formally, it lacks a dimension without which it is not acute enough to discriminate art from other things. is. Whatappreciation Dickie first says: I The kind of appreciation have in mind is simplythe kind characteristic of our experiences paintings,novels,and the like [p. 255a]. of One may wonder whether there is such a kind of appreciation, and I believe there is not. It seems to me it is already too much to suppose that there is a kind of appreciation characteristic of our experiences of, say, Rembrandt, Cezanne, Pollock, Olitski, "and the like." But Dickie thinks this can be overcome. Indeed, if we mean by "appreciation" somethinglike "in experiencing the of thenthereis no problem qualities a thingonefindsthemworthyor valuable," aboutthe similarity the variousappreciations 255a]. of [p. This suggestion fails to meet the one case Dickie speaks much about, that of Duchamp. Dickie calls Duchamp's "Fountain" a work of art with no hesitation, and I think he believes it a substantial achievement of his definition that it easily accommodatesthingslike the worksof Dada. But does it? I agree that whatever Dada's practitioners thought, their accomplishment was not simply the creation of Un-art. It was, howIn ever, the creation of something different. understanding this I am inclined to follow Michael Fried, who has said this: the situation been complicated further the callinginto question, still has by first by Dada and within the past decadeby Neo-Dadafigures suchas Cage,Johns and Rauschenberg, the alreadysomewhatdubiousconcept of a "workof of art." ... It would, however, be mistaken to think of Dada-the most of precious movements-as opposedto art.Rather,Dadastandsopposedto the notionof value quality art,andin thatsenserepresents reaction or in a againstthe demandsmodernistpainting makes of its practitioners.(It unprecedented is, I think, significantthat Duchampwas a failedmodernist-moreexactly,a failed Cubist-before he turnedhis hand to the amusinginventionsby which he is best known.) But there is a superficialsimilaritybetweenmodernist paintingand Dada in one importantrespect:namely, that just as modernist paintinghas enabledone to see a blankcanvas,a sequenceof randomspatters or a lengthof coloredfabricas a picture,Dada and Neo-Dadahave equipped one to treat virtuallyany objectas a workof art-though it is far fromclear
exactly what this means.2
2 Michael Fried, the catalogue essay for ThreeAmerican Painters, exhibition an of Noland, Olitski, and Stella, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, i965, p. 47.
7'

Whether or not one agrees with Fried, it seems clear that the "appreciation" of Dada was and is novel. If Fried is right, then to speak of Dada in terms of experiencing qualities one finds worthy or valuable is exactly wrong. Even if Fried is wrong, surely the one obvious point about Dada is that it is not the occasion for appreciation of the "kind characteristic of our experiences of paintings, novels, and the like." Of course Dickie has not said that Dada is, or is to be, appreciated in this way, but that it has acquired the status of being a candidate for such appreciation. But Dada in general, and certainly Duchamp's urinal, is virtually accompanied by an announcement that traditional appreciation (if there is such a thing) cannot occur. This suggests two things: (i) that being a candidate for appreciation in any but the emptiest sense of 'appreciation' (where it signifies any kind of apprehension appropriate to anything which is an artwork) is not part of what it is to be an artwork, at least not for some works, and (2) that possibilities concerning what canbe appreciated have some bearing on what can be made a candidate for appreciation. The second point is not considered by Dickie, and this is responsible for what I think of as a formal gap in his definition. Whatcan be a workof art. The second condition Dickie calls a "social property" of art (p. 253b). This idea, that part of what makes a thing a work of art is, so to speak, an institutionalized property, is the genuinely novel feature of Dickie's definition. The idea is present in recent works by Danto and Wollheim,3 but I find it clearest in Dickie's essay and I shall confine myself to his definition. There are two broad areas for questions about how a thing acquires the social property which makes it art: in what circumstances and by whom can this property be bestowed, and what qualifies a thing to receive this bestowal. In the first area I have some more or less standard questions which are not altogether rhetorical for I, at least, do not see how to answer them on the basis of Dickie's remarks. The second area is more important since there I think Dickie does not see any questions to be answered. If part of what makes a thing a work of art issues from an "institution" or "social practice," then we need to be told something of the
3 ArthurDanto, "The Artworld," journal of Philosophy, 6i (I964), 57I-584; Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (New York, i968), esp. sec. 46, and "Minimal Art," ArtsMagazine,39 (i965), 26-32. Dickie cites Danto's paper as a stimulus to his own view.

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details of the institution. There is merit enough in articulating the claim that art-ness is partly an institutional property-if that is true, and I do not mean to badger Dickie about the details. As he says, in worldare by and largeexplicitlydefined lines of authority the politico-legal like (or andincorporated law, whilelinesof authority something authority) into at on carries its business the in the artworld nowherecodified.The artworld are
level of customary practice [p. 255a].

What Dickie says about this customary practice, however, leaves things more confusing than they might have been if he had simply referred to such a practice and left it at that. Dickie sees a difference between a plumbing equipment salesman displaying his wares and Duchamp exhibiting his urinal, which he elucidates in this way: betweenmy uttering"I declare is The difference analogousto the difference and the head of the electionboard this man to be a candidatefor alderman" uttering the same sentence while acting in his official capacity [p. 255a]. But there is an ambiguity here: whose enfranchisement are we concerned with, some museum director's or Duchamp's ?That Dickie means the former, or at least that he does not mean Duchamp, is suggested by thisThe point is that Duchamp'sact took place within a certain institutional settingand that makesall the difference.Our salesmanof plumbingsupplies could do what Duchampdid [p. 255b]and by his remark concerning a different case, "It all depends on the institutional setting" (p. 256a). If Dickie is read this way, then his analogy is strikingly inept, for it is precisely not the case that our Dickie could do what the head of the election board did (make someone an aldermanic candidate). What the analogy suggests is that to make something art, one first must be an artmaker. I suspect that the analogy appeals to Dickie because it sets making-a-candidate-for-election beside making-acandidate-for-appreciation. But it is clear that one needs status to bestow status in the political case. What about the case of art? What about the interchangeability of Duchamp and the plumbing supplier? What if a urinal merchant or a junk collector had attempted to carry out Duchamp's act, say with the very object Duchamp used, and had been turned away by the organizers of the show? Is that all there is to it: the urinal did not become art because it did not receive the requisite social property, though it received it later when Duchamp 73

brought it around; and the only way in which Duchamp's being Duchamp figures is contingently (since the organizers knew him, they accepted his urinal) ? Well, then what if Duchamp had been rejected as well? If he had then just sulked, that might be an end to it. But what if he displayed the rejected urinal in his own flat, set it out on a ropedoff rug in the living room? Does that turn the trick? Then could the merchant do the same? These are bewildering questions, and they become more annoying if we switch Duchamp and the salesman in the other direction. Suppose it is Duchamp who comes to your home, where perhaps you are in need of plumbing fixtures, and sets before you a number of objects, including the urinal. Now what? Dickie's account of appreciation does not help. Dickie notes (p. 255a) that the ordinary salesman is presenting his wares for appreciation, but insists that he is not conferring on them the status of candidate for appreciation. But he couldbe doing both things, couldn't he? Couldn't Duchamp? Suppose that Picasso came to your house hawking his paintings, and didn't care what you did with them. Or better, since you may believe that Picasso's paintings were already art before he got to your house, suppose that he came and was commissioned by you to do a sketch directly on the wall in order to disguise some cracksin the plaster.That would be art,wouldn't it ? And if it is when Picasso does it, why not when the neighborhood painter and plasterer do it? And if Duchamp's urinal is artjust as readily for having been brought to your house as for having gotten into the show, why not the salesman's? Before his discussion of Duchamp and the salesman, Dickie offers an adroit remark to help in accepting the notion of a "conferral of status" when it is clear that for much art this cannot be said to occur overtly (some artists never exhibit). What I want to suggestis that, just as two personscan acquirethe statusof common-law withina legal system,an artifactcan acquirethe status marriage of a candidatefor appreciation withinthe systemwhichDantohas called "the
artworld" [p. 254b].

Then how is it that Picasso's merest scribble and, perhaps, Duchamp's urinal have a status not possessed by just anyone's mere scribble or spare urinal? Perhaps it is like this: one of the ways the "artworld" breeds Art is by way of enfranchising Artmakers. Anyone who did "Nude Descending a Staircase" and the rest would be an Artmaker (however good), but only an Artmaker could make that urinal Art (if it is art). It is because he did "Nude" that Duchamp is an artist; it is 74

because he is Duchamp that "Fountain" is not just a misplaced urinal.4 This idea suggests that art and its institutions are inbred and selfjustifying in ways that are hard to untangle, and I think that is plausible though I will not argue for it. It seems clear that Dickie does not agree with this. He says, after all, that the salesman could do what Duchamp did, and there is no suggestion that to do this the salesman must first acquire a power Duchamp already has. And, as noted, on this count the creation of an aldermanic candidate is a poor analogue (even Mayor Daley cannot make a man a candidate for alderman: he must make the election board make the man a candidate). The creation of a political candidate, like the act of christening, which Dickie refers to and which I will discuss later, seems an apt analogue of artmaking only so long as only one aspect is considered. In both artmaking and candidate-making there exist constraints in terms of the objects. The head of the election board cannot make just anyone a candidate. Typically there will be a minimum age, a residence requirement, a stipulation that there be no criminal record, a requirement that there be nominating petitions signed by some number of registered voters, and so on. Perhaps Dickie supposes his account of artmaking supplies an analogue for all this in the first condition, that the object be an artifact. But something is missing. There is nothing to match the connection between the qualifications imposed on a would-be alderman and the point in making someone a candidate for alderman. The qualifications, which the election board is bound to impose, derive from considerations of what aldermen do or are supposed to do. There is no doubt a blending together of considerations of what aldermen do and what they do well, but that need not be gone into. What connection of any kind is there between being an artifact and being appreciated? Why is it that only artifacts can be made candidates for appreciation, and, more important, why suppose that every artifact can be made such a candidate? This problem, and the failure of analogy in Dickie's failure to say anything about constraints in terms of the artmaker (about who can make something art as only a deputized official can make someone a political candidate), lead me to abandon Dickie's own analogy. If we are to get to the subtleties implicit in Dickie's suggestion, we need a
4This suggestion, I suspect, would be much more agreeable to Danto

than to Dickie. I say this only on the basis of some remembered of remarks Danto'smadeduringdiscussions the Universityof Illinoisat ChicagoCircle at Aesthetics Institute, May, I971. Despite Dickie's accurate recognitionin Danto of a view broadlysimilarto his own in the matterof sayingwhat art is, thereare acutedifferences. 75

different analogue for the act of making something art, one in which a distinction appears, not between having a power and not having it (as the head of the election board has a power not possessed by others), but between exercising a power we all have and not exercising it (like Duchamp's act which Dickie thinks anyone could have carried out). I believe that Dickie thinks we are all, or nearly all, in the artworld and that in the artworld everyone is empowered to make art. A suitable analogue may illuminate what limits the exercise of this power.

I take the act of conferring the status of candidate for appreciation to be (or to be like) what Austin called an illocution, or what he earlier might have called a performative.5 The analogue chosen by Dickie, declaring someone a candidate in the uttering of certain words, is an illocution. To improve on it, we need a different illocution. I will use the act of promising, though it too is an imprecise analogue in some respects. There are a number of obscurities in our understanding of the mechanics of promising, but that is a help here, for it exposes the complexities that arisewhen we move from formalized rituals and ceremonial acts like christening and political licensing to less canonical ones like promising and, as Dickie thinks, making things art. Before getting back to the definition of art, I need to use promising to illustrate a point about illocutions which is not reflected in Dickie's conception of what is required to make art. The act of promising accomplished in the saying of "I promise. . . in appropriate circumstances is an illocution. Characteristically, this illocution precipitates various effects and consequences Austin calls perlocutions. Among possible perlocutions are, for instance, the recipient's feeling gratified in some way, his attributing to the speaker an intention to do what is promised, his acting in ways commensurate with or dependent on the speaker's doing what is promised. Though it oversimplifies things, I ask you to think of all these consequences or effects as one perlocution, a kind of generic responseI will call "accepting" a promise. Promising is an illocution; having a promise accepted is a perlocution. In the case of promising and securing acceptance, the illocution and the perlocution are associated, I think, on two levels: as a
6 The outlines of Austin's conceptions of illocutions and perlocutions are, I hope, familiar enough not to need rehearsing here, and it is only a general account that I am concerned with. For Austin's detailed account see his William James Lectures, published as How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass., I962), esp. pp. 98 ff.

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relation between promising and acceptance in general, and as a constraint on promising in particular instances. In general, the perlocution is something like the rationale, or part of the rationale, for the illocution. It constitutes a general reason, a reason iiberhaupt,for performing the illocution-it gives the act a point. As Kant noted, if there is no acceptance of promises, then the act of promising becomes not merely a vain effort, but it ceases to be that kind of act-it ceases to be promising. This is not to say that there must be acceptance in every case, that there is no such thing as an unaccepted promise. The perlocution is detachable from the illocution in particular cases. But something does follow with regard to individual cases. In any particular case it must be possible, or at least appear to those concerned to be possible, that the perlocution transpire. It is, so to speak, in the nature of the illocution to effect the perlocution, and if it is obvious to those involved that this effect cannot occur, then the illocution is in some way and to some degree abortive. That is why I cannot promise you something we both know, and know one another knows that I cannot deliver. There may be some point in my giving my word knowing you know that I cannot keep it, but it cannot be a point usual in cases of giving one's word, and so I am not simply "giving my word-period."6 Sometimes I cannot do an illocution because the illocutionary act is not open to do. I cannot christen a ship I have already christened nor marry you if you are already my wife. The illocution has been preempted. The pre-empting need not have been done by me: I cannot hire you if my partner has already signed you on, or arrest you if the sheriff has just booked you. But sometimes the illocution is no longer open because the associated perlocution has already been effected, whether or not by means of an illocution. For instance, I cannot argue the point with you if you are already persuaded, or warn you of a danger to which you are already alerted, or point out something you already see. Whether I can do these things is, perhaps, problematic if
6I leavesome principal questions concerning the relations betweenillocutions and perlocutions untreated here, trusting that I have said enough to clarify the point I will make about Dickie's definition. These questions-for instance, why we ought not simply to separate promises from non-promises, warnings from non-warnings, etc. without reference to perlocutions, whether every illocution is associated with some perlocution in the way promising is associated with securing acceptance, whether Austin was sufficiently acute in distinguishing illocutions from perlocutions by declaring only the former to be "conventional" -are taken up in my "Illocutions and Perlocutions,"forthcomingin Foundations of Language.

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I am ignorant of what has already happened, but it seems clear that I cannot do them if I know that you are already persuaded,alert, or aware. I take it as a kind of rule of thumb that the availability of at least some illocutions requires the openness of their associated perlocutions. The perlocution must be neither known to be already effected nor known to be clearly out of the question.

Let me import these points about perlocutions into Dickie's definition. I construe the act of conferringthe status of a candidate for appreciation to be like an illocution, and I take the actual appreciation of a thing with this status to be like an associated perlocution. Being appreciated is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for something's being a candidate for appreciation, just as having what I say (about what I will do) accepted is neither necessary nor sufficient for its being a promise. But if what I say is a promise, then it must seem possible that it be accepted. And (supposing Dickie's definition correct), if I am to succeed in conferringthe status of art on an object, it must seem possible that it be appreciated. My utterance is not a promise just because I say so, just because it has the form 'I promise ....' (I cannot promise that I was on time yesterday,or that it will rain tomorrow.)And neither, I think, is x a work of art just because I say so. There are substantive constraints on what I can promise (however difficult it may be to formulate them), and there must be constraints on what I can make art. But what are they? Dickie names one-x must be an artifact.7 But this is not enough. What of an artifact which clearly cannot be appreciated (in Dickie's sense)? I say that there are such things-for instance, ordinary thumbtacks, cheap white envelopes, the plastic forks given at some drive-in restaurants-and that if Dickie's definition were correct then these things could not be artworks because they could not receive the requisite status. Duchamp's urinal is like that. Things like that cannot acquire the status required by Dickie's second condition because it would be pointless or bizarre to give it to them. Dickie's concrete mistake has been to suppose that Duchamp's "Fountain" has anything whatever to do with what Dickie calls appreciation. If such eccentric works are art, then if that requires that they
7

I have completely recast Dickie's formulation, so that it calls for an illocu-

appropriate on tion to be done and imposesone constraint the circumstances modelin I to that kindof illocution. shouldpointout thatDickiehas a different and mind. He takeshimselfto be giving a definitionby genus(artifactuality) for differentia (candidacy appreciation). 78

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have something in common with traditional art, it is not a candidacy for what they were designed to forestall and disdain. This material error is a symptom of a more formal, conceptual gap-namely, supposing that making something a candidate for appreciation can be altogether unilateral, so that anything whatever could become a candidate upon someone's say-so. In fact, the untoward consequence of Dickie's suggestion is that it will rule out the very items Dickie is eager to accommodate. But then what about "Fountain"? Is Duchamp's "Fountain" a work of art, and Dickie's definition wrong because it misses this work, or is Dickie right and so "Fountain" not art? Neither of these choices is a healthy one. I am not clear about whether "Fountain" is a work of art, just like that. I am not as confident as either Dickie or Fried about this. If Fried is right, in the aftermath of Dada we are able to count nearly anything a work of art-but, he says, this leaves it unclear what it means to count something as a work of art. What is wrong with Dickie's definition, I think, is that as Dickie takes it, it is clear and it clearly applies to "Fountain." No definition should fit "Fountain" so comfortably. Why not takes some explaining. To say that an illocution must be "pointless" if its associated perlocution is not open is not quite right. There can be a point in saying "I promise to love you forever" or "I promise never to feel anger again." Indeed, saying these things can be splendid ways, perhaps the only ways, of saying and doing some things. But that does not make these sayings promises (I think they cannot be promises because these things cannot be promised). Similarly, there can be a point, I suppose, in invoking a formula for bestowing the status of candidate for appreciation on a thing which cannot be an object of appreciation. But that will not give these things that status. In both kinds of cases, as with "pointless" illocutions in general, the effect is to draw attention from the thing said (or the putative object of appreciation) to the act of saying it (or the act of exhibiting it). If Austin is right, we cannot entirely separate the saying and the said without distortion, but we can identify, so to speak, the locus of significance and import: if the situation is normal and altogether unproblematic, the thing uttered (or the object of appreciation) engages us; if the situation is in certain ways remarkable, then however canonical the thing uttered seems, we will pass behind it to its genesis. What significance we can find in "Fountain" we find not in the urinal but in Duchamp's gesture. It is not that "Fountain" is simply a candidate for appreciation which cannot be appreciated (nor is "I promise to love you forever" simply a promise which cannot be accept79

ed); its transparent resistance to appreciation is the sign that it is not simply a candidate for appreciation (as the fact that love cannot be promised is the sign that this utterance is not simply a promise). It is not only the questionable conception of appreciation which undermines Dickie's definition. Let us ignore that for a while. At the end of his essay Dickie says:
Now what I have been saying may sound like saying, "a work of art is an object of which someone has said, 'I christen this object a work of art."' And I think it is rather like that. So one canmake a work of art out of a sow's ear, but

of coursethat doesnot meanthat it is a silkpurse[p. 256b]. What I have been arguing is that it cannot be this simple: even if in the end it is successful christening which makes an object art, not every effort at christening is successful.There are bound to be conditions to be met both by the namer and the thing to be named, and if they are completely unsatisfied, then saying "I christen . . ." will not be to christen. If making a thing art is like an ordinary illocution, then there are prior constraints.8 Austin's characteristic way of describing
8 In Danto's "The Artworld" (op. cit.) I find a suggestion of a way to treat artmaking as an extraordinary illocution, one whose constraints are always emendable. In the last section of the essay, Danto ventures some remarks which, in rough summary, are to this effect: there is a set of pairs of artwork-relevant predicates. Each pair consists of two "opposite" predicates "expressionist"/"nonexpressio(e.g., "representational"/"nonrepresentational," nist"). Opposites, unlike contradictories as usually construed, do not sensibly apply to all objects; but with regard to any artwork they behave as contradictories. (It is not true that anything is either representational or nonrepresentational; it is true that any artwork is either representational or nonrepresentational.) A necessary condition for an object to be an artwork is that at least one pair of artwork-relevant predicates be sensibly applicable to it. Danto remarks that an artistic breakthrough may consist in adding a pair of artworkrelevant predicates. Then we might try to think of artmaking in this way: the constraints on what can be christened art are given by the condition that some artworkrelevant predicate pair be sensibly applicable to the object. But it is possible to make art of an unqualified object not by altering the object but by adding to the set of predicate pairs a pair already sensibly applicable to the object. In order to work out the details of this suggestion, one will have to say something about how a predicate pair can be made a member of the set. The project is complicated by Danto's ingenious observation that once an object is an artwork all artwork-relevant predicate pairs apply. This means that after the fact, the new pair will be as definitive as the older ones of earlier artworks, and the older pairs will sensibly apply to the new work. I should make clear that Danto's remarksare made in an altogether different context, and their adaptability to a discussion of the illocutionary act of making

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a kind of act or thing was to catalogue the dimensions in which it can be irregular. Thus a promise might be untoward, gauche, imprudent, impractical, ineffective, or unaccepted. As we move through various departures from the normal, pedestrian cases, passing through all the gross irregularities Austin called "infelicities," we come eventually to cases which are no longer promises. The boundary between non-promises and more or less failed promises is hard to locate, but (i) it exists, and (2) it is not identical with the boundary between utterances of the form "I promise . . ." and those without it, for this form is neither necessary nor sufficient. If artmaking is like an illocution, then a similar catalogue is in order, an account of the ways in which artmaking can be irregular. I do not blame Dickie for not yet supplying such a catalogue. I do complain that he has not noted the importance of such a catalogue, for if artmaking is simply a matter of informal illocutions, then the catalogue may be the only substantial definition we can get or need. There must be a boundary, however hard to chart, between making art, and trying but failing to make art. Dickie cannot account for this, because the difference is not simply the difference between objects which have been called art (or candidates for appreciation) and those which have not. Duchamp's "Fountain" is a difficult case. It is difficult in the adjustment it demands of us, but neither of the two adjustments likely to be suggested is in order. One is to give up defining art, pointing to "Fountain" as an illustration of the inevitable failure of any definition. The other is to formulate a definition which covers "Fountain" as neatly as "Nude." Perhaps the most helpful part of Dickie's view is the implicit suggestion of a way to avoid this choice. Instead of either of these responses, I think we must give up the compulsion to decide about "Fountain," to rule it in or out; and I think we can do this by taking seriously the suggestion that whether "Fountain" is art depends upon whether and how a certain kind of act was performed. Succeeding in getting "Fountain" under, or out from under, the term "art" is a delusive achievement: for the sake of a kind of ontological tidiness, most of what is interesting and instructive about "Fountain" is ignored. What we need to discuss are the ways in which "Fountain" is
art is my own tentative suggestion. In any case, the suggestion is of no use to Dickie, who seems to conceive the act as an ordinary illocution. Indeed, whereas Danto's idea might at last give content to Morris Weitz's somewhat dogmatic claim that the conditions for a thing to be art are indefinitely corrigible ("The and Role of Theory in Aesthetics," Journalof Aesthetics Art Criticism,I5 [1956], 27-35), Dickie's essay is offered as an explicit refutation of Weitz. 8I
6

very much like normal art and the ways in which it is altogether unlike normal art, and then how this bears on the character of Duchamp's act of putting it forward and having it called art. When that discussion is done, nothing may be left to do. So it is with promising. Some cases are clearly promises, some clearly are not. Some are unclear. The unclear cases illuminate the clear ones as they bring out parts of the conception according to which the clear cases are clear. "I promise to wring your neck." Not a promise: I cannot promise what you do not want, knowing you do not want it. "I promise to keep all cigarettes out of your reach." This is not clear. Can I promise you something we agree you need even if we both know you do not want it? The hard thing to do is to hold on to the conviction that we know what art and promises are while refusing to suppose that we always can decide or need to decide. Dickie and others have criticized earlier theories for having lost the good art/bad art distinction, often, as with Collingwood, willfully absorbing it into the very distinction between art and non-art. Ironically, Dickie has effectively reversed this: he has provided for room on the bad art side of the good art/bad art distinction for much of what is normally taken to be non-art. He says: is that Pleaseremember when I say "Fountain" a workof art, I am not saying that I it is a goodone. And in makingthislast remark am not insinuating it is a
bad one either [p. 255b].

This is the view Dickie proposes to take of any object whatever. From this view the real difficulty, the philosophical anguish, will arise after the question of art has been settled, and that question is never more than a nominal problem encountered occasionally because "lines of authority (or something like authority) in the artworld are nowhere codified" (p. 255a) and so it may be hard to discover whether the thing has been christened. This view obscures too much. The works of the painters Fried discusses (Stella, Noland, Olitski) are clearly works of art, and the serious questions about them concern what kinds of paintings they are, and whether and why they are good. But there are very few such questions about "Fountain," most Dada works, and many contemporary works. The questions about them concern exactly whether and why they are art, and how they became anything like art. To make these questions easy is both to mistake the nature of these objects and to refuse to take seriously the question of the possibility of the creation of art.
TED COHEN

of The University Chicago

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