voi Cesproductions and interpretations will be manifold and diverse, and to the extent that
both forms of outcome are themselves novel, the stimulation of novelty will be intense
and uncontained, and its dispersion rapid. understood in this way, new knowledge is
a potential for a certain type of action, or as Johnson advises, ‘knowing is a process
of intelligent inquiry into and transformation of experience’ (Chapter 8). Conceived
in this way, neither certainty of interpretation nor the binding of new understanding
to that of the past is a necessary precondition for the collective endorsement of new
knowledge. in the case of art, these features of new knowledge, which in many other
fields are preconditions for the commitment to further investigation, might merely
serve to diminish the productive potential of both modes of innovation, since each is
an unstable moment in the unmaking and remaking of aesthetics regimes. novel works
of art and criticism are not to be understood as, ‘true propositions or statements about
how things are and how they work, which can be verified by past, present or future
experience’ (Chapter 8), that have to be acquired before we can arrive at collective
comprehension of a change in understanding of art. Rather they are better understood
as unstable, active contributions to the coalescence of collective interest and
understanding that make it possible to speak of artistic renewals, such as impressionism
and Cubism, and of artists who changed art.
When the artist remains silent in the presence of the work, the transformational
component is experienced by its audiences initially as individual surprise and then as
collective surprise, which leads to discourse between those who would reject and those
who would accept the work as a work of art. Whilst rejection reinforces the current
understanding of art, acceptance requires cognitive adjustment such that surprise
can become recognition. This cognitive adjustment amounts to a description of the
transformational contribution of the work, historically provided through the criticism
and history of art. art cannot surprise the individual unless that individual possesses
art- related cognitive schemas and semantic networks. Collectively surprising art relies
on objective-shared traditions, rules, values and expectations. in Constable’s day the
rules of engagement were clear, public and governed by the Royal academy, where he
himself studied. such was the common appreciation of this authority that Constable
must have thought that it would be obvious to all how his art enhanced its merits. in
the end, it was not obvious and he needed to speak of past art in order to clarify the
originality of his contribution. Therefore, the artist must be satisfied that his or her
work is taken on face value or find ways of influencing its reception. modernism, the
avant- garde and postmodernism, if not dismantling all tradition, all expectation, have
brought us to a point where collective agreement about art is problematic. We may
actually be at a moment when art becomes an arena incapable of cognitive surprise,
since the frameworks for reception and interpretation have been eroded. in such an
arena, the work of art may not be able to stand on its own without the presence of
an ‘other’ that gives it visibility, to borrow Rancière’s articulation of the term. This,
perhaps, explains why contemporary artists are increasingly choosing to talk and write,
as well as show. in fact, the whole debate around art and research may come to be
seen as reflecting this historical turn; the moment when the artist found it necessary to
articulate the reflective and projective character of his or her practice.