Art and Attribution: Who is an “Artist”?
Enjoying a show last year at The Magic Castle, I was struck by the magician/assistant distinction. The magician would make a dove disappear, and his assistant would suddenly reveal it in her possession. ”Who was doing magic,” I wondered? It looked like a team effort to me.
I was reminded of this distinction while watching an NPR short on artist Liu Bolin. Bolin, we are told, “has a habit of painting himself” so as to disappear into his surroundings. The idea is to illustrate the way in which humans are increasingly “merged” with their environment.
So how does he do it? Well, it turns out that he doesn’t. Instead, “assistants” spend hours painting him. And someone else photographs him. He just stands there. Watch how the process is described in this one minute clip:
So what makes an artist?
One might argue that it was Bolin who had the idea to illustrate the contemporary human condition in this way. That the “art” in this work is really in his inspiration, while the “work” in this art is what is being done by the assistants. Yet clearly there is “art” in their work, too, given that they are to be credited for creating the eerie illusions with paint. Yet it is Bolin who is named as the artist; his assistants aren’t named at all. What is it about the art world — or our world more generally — that makes this asymmetrical attribution go unnoticed so much of the time?
In an abstractly related way, this is precisely why I found Harvard law professor Michael Sandel's book "Justice" so compelling. His take on the nebulous topic of ethics is much less concerned about defining what makes things good/bad or even ethical/unethical, and much more concerned about what society rewards and why.
Causality to me falls in the same category of abstract notions. Throughout history there have been a number of ways we've thought about the causes of things. And we've got a consistent track record of been wrong about it - we're not likely to stop being wrong about it anytime soon. Causality may well turn out to be a butterfly effect-esque representation of chaos theory, only instead of one butterfly flapping its wings there's an infinitely complex network of organisms acting and reacting to one another. But when struck by a bat, that won't stop us from blaming the assailant.
That is to say, there's pure causality, and then there's the causality that matters to humans. We could debate over what the true source of art is, and maybe even someday come to an answer. But it doesn't matter if we're compelled to reward something else.
