purported artists were going was no longer art, he replied that Duchamp
had settled that question for all time, by establishing the principle “If an
artist does it, it’s art.”
What about the many serious artists who have chosen not to go
where these “sound artists” and other avant-gardists are going, and are
completely ignored by the museum? Lowry’s answer was: “Our society
values innovation, and artists who don’t engage in it are inevitably left
behind.” Not considered by him (or by today’s art establishment in gen-
eral), of course, was the fundamental question of what properly qualifies
someone to be considered an “artist.”
Perhaps more disturbing, meaningful criteria have even been aban-
doned at an institution as formerly conservative as the Morgan Library
and Museum. A recent exhibition entitled Embracing Modernism: Ten
Years of Drawings Acquisitionsincluded, among other dubious items, a
“folded paper drawing” by Sol Lewitt and a Gavin Turk “drawing” cre-
ated by placing a sheet of paper on his van’s exhaust pipe. When I asked
the curator, Isabelle Dervaux, how she defines “drawing,” she replied:
“anything on paper”—quickly adding, rather testily: “I hate splitting
hairs over what a drawing is.”
Such instances attest to the contemporary artworld’s dominant prem-
ise that virtually anything can qualify as art. That entrenched view has,
in turn, given ever freer rein to avant-gardists. What hope is there for
uprooting it?
The best hope, in my view, lies in what neuroscience is teaching us
about the brain’s system of “mirror neurons.” This powerful neural net-
work—first discovered in the 1990s in macaque monkeys, and increas-
ingly extrapolated to humans—helps to explain why mimetic art (that is,
artistic imagery) can affect us so deeply and meaningfully. Mirror neu-
rons are activated, first and foremost, by observing instances of emo-
tional expression and physical action in others—clearly accounting for
the “monkey see, monkey do” phenomenon. Of particular relevance for
the arts, however, the mirror neuron system in humans is also activated
by seeing images—in particular, images of things we are already famil-
iar with from our own experience. In other words, we in fact respond to
imagery as we would respond to the things represented, if we saw them
in reality. That helps to explain why mimetic art is directly intelligible
and emotionally meaningful, endowed with a psychological power never
to be attained by the arbitrary inventions of the avant-garde.^2250 Michelle Marder Kamhi