I. Questioning Basic Premises
The intense interest shown in the topic of art and cognition clearly
implies that the relationship between them is a distinctive one, meriting
study in its own right. Further, it implies that artitself possesses a dis-
tinctive identity, differing from other objects of perception and cognition
in significant ways. Little of value is likely to come of all this intellec-
tual ferment, therefore, without a clear understanding of what exactly is
meant by “art” in relation to cognition.
As indicated by the epigraph I chose—excerpted from the
Introduction to one of JCS’s special issues on art and the brain—
researchers in this area have tended to accept as art, and include in their
deliberations, virtually all the modernist and postmodernist innovations
of the past hundred years, regardless of whether they have anything
essential in common with established art forms. Avant-garde works
cited by Goguen in his Introduction, for example, include Robert
Smithson’s “earthworks” and Christo’s “wrapped buildings,” as well as
Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades” (in particular, the urinal he dubbed
Fountain),^5 Andy Warhol’s images of Campbell’s soup cans, and John
Cage’s use of chance operations in his experimental “music.” Yet one
would be hard pressed to understand how such works fit the view that
art is “a particularly poignant manifestation of human consciousness”—
to quote from the call for papers by JCSfor its issue on “Art, Brain, and
Consciousness.” By the same token, it is not at all obvious how, or even
if, they aim to produce “rich cognitive effects.”^6 Yet disconnects of this
kind are commonplace in contemporary discourse on art and cognition.
Scholars have too long failed to ask themselves whether the term art—
customarily applied to such works as the tragedies and comedies of
ancient Greece, Michelangelo’s David, Rembrandt’s portraits, Handel’s
Messiah, or the landscapes of Constable—can coherently encompass all
the inventions of the “avant-garde,” however bizarre or unintelligible
they may be.
Interest in the relationship between art and cognition is scarcely a
new phenomenon. Western thinkers since antiquity have grappled with
it, albeit without the insights of modern science. In the modern era, such
interest inspired the eighteenth-century philosopher Alexander
Baumgarten to found a new branch of philosophy devoted to the study
of “sensuous cognition.” Coining the term aesthetik(from the Greek
term meaning “perceptible to the senses”) to designate this new field, he
broadly defined it as “the science of perception”; but it was with the
nature of perceptual knowledge conveyed through the artsthat he was
Mimesis versus the Avant-Garde: Art and Cognition 39