fully know in advance where it will lead. As Alexander Nehamas observes,
“you can’t know in advance the sort of person [your imaginative involvement
with the work] will make you.”^88 The central role of imaginative response to
perplexities in both the making and the understanding of art is enough to
defeat the thought that art–at least when distinctively successful–can be
merely ordinary.
At the same time, successful experimental-improvisatory works must not
be arbitrary and nonsensical, but must rather address a human problem of
human expressiveness and fluency that is shared to some degree. In each case
the successful work of art is conceived as involving the“working through”of
an emotion toward an effort–either happily successful or tragically failed or
compromised–to achieve a valuable human action or life.Art, propaganda, advertising, and cliche ́
The art critic John Berger distinguishes between the banal artistic image, all
too easily assimilable to and by advertising, and the exceptional artistic
image, in which the“extraordinary particularity”^89 of the presented subject
is focused on. Artworks in general may be said properly to aim at the
achievement of the exceptional. They seek to achieve and embody a full act
of thematic and emotional attention to a subject matter in the working of
materials in a medium and to make this act of full attention available to an
audience, in the face of tendencies to revert to cliché and half-attention.
Finley and Serrano may be plausibly understood at least to have attempted
such an act of attention.
There are degrees of success in this enterprise of attention, and it is fully
reasonable to callartboth partial successes and any efforts within a medium
of art that have this aim in view, even if it is unachieved or less than wholly
achieved. As a result, it is difficult to draw a sharp line between commen-
datory and classificatory uses of the termart, even while some distinction
between these two uses seems pertinent to our experiences of different
works.^90 It is fully reasonable to class as art both practice or student works(^88) Nehamas,Only a Promise of Happiness, p. 129.
(^89) John Berger,Ways of Seeing(Harmondworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 61. Berger develops the
contrast between the banal and the exceptional from pp. 57–64.
(^90) See Chapter 7 above.
244 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art