Art is often asked to justify itself. Is it expressive? Political? Transformative? Useful? These questions assume that art’s value lies in what it says or represents.
Relationally, this misses the point.
Art matters when it reconfigures intelligibility — when it alters what can be perceived, felt, or coordinated — without requiring agreement or belief.
Art Does Not Transmit Meaning
To treat art as message is to misunderstand its function. Art does not transmit content from artist to audience. It reshapes the conditions under which meaning can arise.
This is why art can feel powerful even when it is confusing, opaque, or uncomfortable. Its effect does not depend on comprehension, but on reorientation.
Art as Experimental Cut
Every artwork performs a cut:
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it selects materials, forms, rhythms
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it excludes familiar pathways
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it foregrounds some relations while suspending others
These cuts are not representations of reality. They are experiments in coordination.
Some fail. Some irritate. Some disappear. A few subtly reorganise the field.
Why Art Resists Instrumentalisation
When art is asked to serve a purpose — persuasion, education, propaganda — its reconfigurative power diminishes. Instrumental demands:
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fix interpretation
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stabilise response
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foreclose revisability
Art that “delivers a message” may succeed rhetorically, but it rarely reshapes intelligibility.
This is why genuinely transformative art often appears useless, indulgent, or irresponsible at first.
Ambiguity as Feature, Not Bug
Ambiguity is not a failure of clarity. It is a refusal of premature stabilisation.
Art that sustains ambiguity:
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keeps multiple distinctions in play
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resists closure
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invites recoordination rather than compliance
Such work is difficult to manage institutionally precisely because it preserves revisability.
The Ethics of Artistic Intervention
Art is not ethically neutral. By reshaping intelligibility, it redistributes:
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attention
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legitimacy
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affect
This creates responsibility — not for “messages sent,” but for fields altered.
Relational responsibility in art involves:
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attentiveness to uptake
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sensitivity to unintended exclusions
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willingness to let the work fail or change
Ethics here is not moral signalling, but care for possibility.
Art and Cultural Subversion
In contexts of rigid coordination — authoritarian, neoliberal, or otherwise — art’s most subversive act is often modest:
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slowing perception
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disrupting expectation
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making the familiar strange
These gestures do not announce resistance. They make other alignments thinkable.
Closing
Art does not save us. It does something more precise and more fragile: it keeps the field of intelligibility from fully closing.
In cultures where coordination hardens, where normativity tightens, and where fear compresses possibility, this work matters.
Not because art speaks truth, but because it reopens the space in which truth could become intelligible again.
This concludes the series “Culture: The Aesthetics of Coordination.”
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