It is kind of early in the morning and am thinking the old Art = ? – is it a question of relevance? – how do I ask it?
Say every time you came to visit me i’d ask if you fancied a brew, to which you’d answer: tea please. In turn, i’d hog the kitchen for 5 mins and come back with a dark brew of stuff anyone you know knew would call coffee – is it an issue? is it an important issue? can it be solvable by saying that next time you’d ask for coffee, to get what anyone else might call tea?
Perhaps though, these questions are wrong in a way that the only stuff they actually relate to is that when it comes to art, the What is a false issue? (ie it is superficial if you call X stuff art or not, because we can agree that you are happy for me to call Z “art”, while i am cool with your X = Art.)
The question is different while art is What-less. Or that the What – the what is this that you call art – is inconsequential. The What art is a cracked ant, or a light switch – we can live with that. However, if indeed what Art is = a boring question. You call It coffee, I call it Tea – so long as we can establish that, we can communicate and move on – then perhaps the exciting consequences of this kind of situation are that How is Art becomes a rather more constitutive question. If not as a fact, then as a serious theoretical one?