Dennis Hollingsworth

From my Notes: Art Definition

***
"Abstraction is the hallmark of ideology."
- Philip Pilkington

***

"music [the visual arts included] is a fugazi."
-Mike Benz T=55:00

(Context: regime overthrow spy games in Venezuela and beyond)

***
"People don't have ideas, ideas have people."
-Rupert Sheldrake

***
Lately, I've been thinking about our art world, this current one, as a Real art world hidden or engulfed or engorged by an ever inflating corona of a false art world.

Problems with cynicism and self delusion. Reality check: how much of this thought process is real or subjective?

What is it about art that is real and false?

Is Art the Tao (Dao)?

Is art a Platonic form?

"It is better to not try to be virtuous or pretty or knowledgeable because it is those people who get used or ultimately confused. It is not through virtuousness or trying to be virtuous that true virtuousness is achieved. It is through uselessness that one truly becomes useful." -Zhuangzi

"He uses language to go beyond language, in the end."

***
something in here, pertains to art
"...very specific engineering limitations..."
The mistake: Designing to what we think is possible at the ultimate limit (idealized limits), at the ultimate time.

***
There's an essential conflict about whether the world is corporate or disincorporated (past tense, intentional).

A resentful attitude about technology and innovation says no.

Mankind in modernity is homeless. However, a foundational story in the West is The Odyssey (similar to the Messiah?), a story that aches for home. This means that the Industrial Revolution isn't the cause of our unease and disquiet is built in. The reassuringly integrative story of Classicism is really a story about class.

However much the pre-modern integration and societal harmony was either mythical or concrete or merely functional, this societal framework did exist and it did permeate the world at one time.

History is, at the end of the day, a story. The story of art, of fifty years ago or earlier had been questioned and criticized as being patriarchal or too rigid otherwise. What alternative stories of art had been advanced in this long meantime?

***
Inspiration, inkling, the muse,

***
Snip of one of my comments to Saul Ostrow's "Note to Self: Abstract Art's Form and Function"

The definition of art derives from the root meaning: arə- Proto-Indo-European and Greek ar- "to fit together." Fabrication lies at the heart of the meaning, but within lies a crucial aspect that exceeds mere assembly. Popular usage indicates a scope that is transcendental, indicative of the superlative. The art of war, the art of cooking, the art of reasoning, the art of...

What I take from this is something about the moment when one is operating at and beyond the frontier of all extant known methods of "fabrication" (bracketed to indicate an expansive definition of the term).

This is the territory where one resorts to inspiration, imagination, what was known to be the muse, the world shared with faith, the land (noumena?) into which our rational mind pushes into, balls cupped into the hands*.

The mushiness of the definition of art , lying as it does between a categorical and qualitative indicator.

Art may even belong solely to the West, it is singular, an issue of individuals, autonomous, superlative. In the non-West, it might be inextricably bound within communitarian relationships.

***
People can't define art, so how can anyone define success in art?

***
Art with a capital A, outsider art, established artists, neophyte, white cube galleries, historic spaces, art of the Now...

Gil Sanchez anecdote: "I too am in history"

What hovers in this conversation is the distinction between what is in or out of art. We've been erasing distinctions for decades now. What remains however, is the tacit acceptance that "art with a capital "A" is that which is enmeshed in the gears of capital. Art that is an asset class is unconsciously the legacy description of "successful " art.

***
It's difficult for the general public to distinguish between art and denatured art.

Art has become good enough

Intimidation & perceived elitism

Blindness

Even among those educated in the arts

Even those in the ranks of the "elite"

When the elite themselves have given up

***
T=11:30
Corporeality allows us to have imagination, to grow and expand. Heaven (non-corporeality) is perfect and by definition, static.

Later in the video, other models (Hinduism & Dante) reflect Leibniz's Monadology.
(T=16:00) Pearls and mirrors are analogs of monads.

***
Corporatist state of mind...

"Corporations versus the constitution "

***
CARTER RATCLIFF
AUG 13
[Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, 1656. The Prado, Madrid]

Is Art Good for You?

Of course it is, but why? Last month Artsy addressed that question in an essay entitled "4 Reasons Why Looking at Art Is Good for You." Here they are, in the order they were presented:

Art can help your mental health
Art can improve social skills and resilience
Engaging with art can help your heart
Being around art can lift your mood

The first, second, and fourth reasons overlap, but never mind. Rushing past its minor muddle, the essay goes straight for scientific testimony, which corroborates much that art-lovers have long suspected:

"A growing body of research ... shows that even a single session of viewing visual art can significantly enhance wellbeing, reduce stress, and activate pleasure and reward pathways in the brain," said Dr. Nisha Sajnani, director of arts and health at New York University and co-director of Jameel Arts & Health Lab. "These effects are amplified by moments of reflection, social connection, and personal meaning--reminding us that art doesn't just reflect life--it helps us feel more alive."

How does art have these desirable effects? Well, the emotions prompted by art have been linked with lower levels of cytokines, proteins that control inflammation. Art supports our immune systems. But note this: researchers have shown that "nature and spirituality" can affect us in similar ways. Art prompts the release of dopamine. "the 'feel-good' neurotransmitter," and that's nice, though art has no monopoly over this physiological process. We also get dopamine hits from scrolling through our phones, which inspires an unhappy thought: spending half an hour with meaningless Facebook posts is equal, neurologically speaking, to half an hour face to face with Las Meninas. This equivalence would not, I suppose, be highlighted by even the most obsessively data-driven scientist--certainly not by Professor Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at University College London, who discovered that "the way our brain reacts to beautiful artworks is very similar to how it responds when we are in love." Professor Zeki has not, as far as I know, investigated the conflict that arises when the one you love does not love the art that you do.

Being in love, loving art, feeling a rush of spirituality, wandering through nature, wasting time on a cell phone--these are a few of the activities and states of being that can turn the tide of neurotransmitters in a positive direction. Not all are good and some are very bad. Have neurobiologists investigated the possibility that psychopaths get a dopamine high from attacking people? Book Sixteen of The Iliad features Achilles enraged and extoling the anger that "rises up in the soul of a man like smoke, and the taste thereof is sweeter than drops of honey." (Samuel Butler's translation.) I am not saying that Achilles was a psychopath. Still, in providing a classic example of pleasure felt for dubious reasons, his wrath points to an obvious truth: brain chemistry is amoral. And it lacks taste. The silliest cartoon can stimulate as much dopamine as the greatest painting.

Why bring taste into it? Am I a snob? Maybe, but what I take for my good taste is not militant. I like certain cartoons and dumb jokes and idiotic pop songs and all manner of things that thrive on a plateau far below the one where I find the art I admire. What, then, is the problem? There isn't one unless we impose on culture the ideal of equality that should guide our political life. Everyone should be equal before the law. Everyone should be free to vote and to say whatever. Thus, anyone has the right to recommend that I take professional wrestling as seriously as I take art. Yet I am under no obligation to agree, even if a scientific study finds that art and professional wrestling produce comparably positive neurological effects in their respective devotees. My right to my own opinion is obvious. Just as obviously, brain chemistry is a physical not a cultural phenomenon.

It is good to feel good, and it is reassuring to hear that art can help us improve our moods. Yet science provides no way to scope out the larger picture. Art contributes not only to individual well-being but also to the play of meaning and value that sustains our communal lives--and without which there is no individuality. It is said that we are social animals. We are, as well, animals who become who we are in a give and take with our culture as well as our society, and I believe that the more complex and demanding the artworks with which we engage the better we will be. I have no lab results to back up this belief. Nor do I feel the need for them. Call me a snob, but it seems to me indubitable that it is better for you and the culture if you get involved with the grand subtleties of Las Meninas and avoid the brutish melodrama of professional wrestling, the crude mythology of movies spun off from Marvel comics, and the addictive emptiness of video games. In Las Meninas you find inexhaustible possibilities for making sense of yourself, others, and the world we inhabit. In the cheesy stuff you find lines of least resistance that lead directly to an abraded and diminished sensibility.

An afterword. What about attractive but merely decorative paintings, competent but overly genteel poems, highly wrought but unambitious novels--all the stuff that is respectably professional and not, after all, so bad? In The Scarlet Pimpernel, a 1934 movie with Leslie Howard, the foppish hero says, "There is nothing quite so bad as something that is not so bad." Clement Greenberg, not a writer I usually invoke with approval, said in an essay on kitsch that upper middlebrow culture is more damaging than low culture. Yet Ludwig Wittgenstein, feeling frustrated by the impossibility of making himself entirely clear to his students, would wallow in Hollywood movies. Jacques Derrida is rumored to have indulged in the worst that French television had to offer. So there may be a place for mediocrity, the best and even the worst of it. More on this later.

***
Art vs Art World

Termed "vs" versus because each are distinct, because the latter is t a singularity but instead a multiplicity, because there is commercial aspect that is all too willing to eclipse all others, especially the one whose heart is centered within vision and the imagination.

Many artists these days unfortunately tend to think that the art world is a kind of lock for a key must be fashioned... and people like this (which abound in government, industry and institutions) think of themselves as a key to be shaped, mind, imagination and works.

This is unfortunate because as this kind of artist begins to file away at the teeth of their character

***
Without intellectual and creative integrity, art world is just a pyramid scheme.

Late in the history of art, intellectual integrity was strained by the misuse of caprice

***
Cognitive Light Cone:
[Michael Levin]

"Every agent can be demarcated, be define defined by the size of the goal they pursue."

Goals are a signal of intelligence.
Agent: Boundary between self and world.
Nested agency.
Agents operate in their own self interest.

Single cells: metabolic goals

Cells comprising muscle and bone (salamanders, for example): goals in anatomical space

Life is the embodiment of intelligence. William James: Intelligence is the ability to reach the same goal by different means.

What is called Platonic Space is the space of minds. "Selflets" populate Platonic space.

You don't have access to your past. You have access to your memory engrams, which the future you will have to interpret, treating your own memories as messages from your past self. Therefore those memories will have to be interpreted. You are not committed to the fidelity of that information, you are committed to the salience of that information. A process view of the self. Continuous storytelling. Our current actions are messages to our future self.

The persistent self is breaking down.

Q: Larger light cone = better? A: depends on the organism. Enlarging the light cone enlarges meaning.

CSAS: Center for the Study of Apparent Selves.

Fundamental unit in the world: perspective.

Laplacian Demons are unsustainable. You can't afford to track everything. As your past self compresses many diverse experiences into a compact representation, a memory trace of what happened... [pithiness] the thing about compression is that data that's compressed most efficiently starts to look random. Lots of metadata loss. Unless you know the algorithm required [an unconscious process*] to decompress [the engram], the data itself looks like noise, because you've pulled out the correlations. You have to be creative to interpret your own engrams [memories]. There are no non-destructive recall of memories.

* These unconscious processes [referred to "hardware"] doesn't define you, it enables or constrains what you want to do. We are a collective intelligence or groups of cells. The unconscious dimension is unconscious for a good reason. (Reference to film Ex Machina, an unfortunate interpretation, the materialism of humans being the mere resultant of the cogs and gears aka proteins, lipids and ions.). Humans are resultant beings. No discovery of the fundamental reality of your being should pull you away from the emergence of who you are. Materialism underestimates matter.. We are majestic agentic beings. Really minimal things have surprising cognitive qualities. [Leibniz]

Bio-electricity as cognitive glue, allowing scalability.

(T = 50:00) Intelligence: a specific type of problem solving. "Beginner's mind". A new definition of intelligence. Basis for experimentation: what is the problem space, what are the goals and what are the capabilities it has to reach those goals? A measurement of competency.

Paper: "Reframing Cognition". Basel cognition: stories of scaling, a question of where did our cognitive abilities come from? Not panpsychism. Potential energy and least action principles are the tiniest hopes and dreams that there are, the most basel version of cognition. Experimentation involves a selection of tools to address the problem.

(T=+1:00:00) What does a good theory of consciousness give you? Consciousness is the kind of thing that cannot be studied in the third person, you can only study it by being part of the experiment. A weak version of this is art. Stronger form: a rich brain interface, you have to fuse with the subject of the experiment. Other subsystems of the body have a non zero amount of consciousness. We are a collection of interacting consciousnesses.

Bioelectricity, xenobots, anthrobots...

***

Input vs output side of consciousnesses

The action side, the ability to do things

Agent: "What do I do next?"

Driven by the need to choose the next action.

New definition of consciousnesses: Kevin _____ "I move, therefore I am."

Panpsychism with an empirical component (intentional?)

***
Art in terms of Human Action:

"Economics is the study of human action with regard for improving life when scarcity is involved."
-Dave Smith

T=7:30
(Libertarian comic Dave Smith, while discussing the impact of 2025 tariffs in Austrian Economic terms.)

Human Action

Praxeology
Not to be confused with Practice theory, which is also called praxeology.
In philosophy, praxeology or praxiology(/ˌpræksiˈɒlədʒi/; from Ancient Greek πρᾶξις(praxis) 'deed, action' and -λογία (-logia) 'study of') is the theory of human action, based on the notion that humans engage in purposeful behavior, contrary to reflexive behavior and other unintentional behavior.

In Smith's definition, with regards of the artworld, the aspects of improving life, aka flourishing, and scarcity stand out. An artists central objective is to improve life, even when, or perhaps especially when employing ironic means to do so. Scarcity is central when quality inevitably ranks and sorts the various abundance of accumulated art produced or conjured in the world at any given time.

***
Lee Krasner 1978 Interview
(Earlier), she describes the transition from the academic to the cubism as taught by Hoffman was as difficult as the transition from that to the abstraction (all over) of Pollock. It took her three years painting, as she described it, "frozen grey masses" to get to the other side of cubism, which was always object or subject based.

Later, she relates the first encounter of Hoffman and Pollock, where Hoffman chides Pollock for not dealing with nature (as subject), when Pollock famously retorted "I am nature."

T=15:00
"...if we think of the Renaissance concept of space where you are the artist up here and whatever it is ...your using perspective as your means and you are making your whatever you're doing with it. Now if we go from that concept into cubism, the thing is still there in the same sense [that] nature is there. I am here the artist, I observe and the only thing is frontal now and that much has taken place. Now, in Pollock once more, there is another transition. I can't define it for you. Sorry, it's not my job."

Cubism & academicism: artist > nature (as subject)

AbEx abstraction: artist > artist (the self, subjective experience, therefore the psychological preoccupation with Freud & Jung)

Pop: artist > consumer culture

Minimalism: artist > (specific) object (analytic, reductive)

Conceptualism: artist > algorithm (mental will)

Post 20th century art: artist > the physical reality of a work of art / the world at large (cumulative experience)

***
algorithm
/ăl′gə-rĭᴛʜ″əm/

noun
A finite set of unambiguous instructions that, given some set of initial conditions, can be performed in a prescribed sequence to achieve a certain goal and that has a recognizable set of end conditions.

A precise rule (or set of rules) specifying how to solve some problem; a set of procedures guaranteed to find the solution to a problem. 

A precise step-by-step plan for a computational procedure that possibly begins with an input value and yields an output value in a finite number of steps.

***
Ockham's Razor
Elegance
Beauty?
Piercing through the muddle.

***
I awoke to the thought of how art is different altogether from an art market or an art industry ... or maybe even from an art world. These words coalesced and lingered in my mind, kept me awake as I turned them over and over.

"...hypothesize the hypostatic..."

***
Sun Tzu Art of War
There are three great avenues of opportunities in life: Events, Trends, and conditions.

Hypostasis

***
Skin in the game > retouch the material touchstone.

***
Avant-Garde
If once the most advanced was the margin, now the margin is considered the most advanced. (This dates to the 1950's. What of this 70 years later?)

***
Constraints built into reality.
vs
Imagination unconstrained.

Once we began to model reality, eventually some of us tried to make reality fit our models. To refine this assertion: people now tend to use models, virtual constructs propositioning reality, in order to shape the behavior of a target population towards a desired end. Theoretical constructs used as bait.

***

Is art simply, self expression (per Spengler)?

Is this still bound to individualism?

Isn't the definition of art in the West inevitably bound to individualism?

Spengler's Prime Symbols

Classical conception:

Concern for the tangible and immediately present: the human body

No horizon

Red & yellow : flesh

Classical gods had limits

Finitude

Ahistorical

Desire for limitations & boundaries

Western culture (Faustian)

Limitless will to power

Reach to the infinite

Ethereal

Blues & greens, the color of death

Brown is a mileu

Calculus: Functions instead of concrete numbers

Cities vs the nation-state

Arabian: enclosed dome

Egyptian: narrow path

Chinese: the wandering path

***
Making it strange
Liminal boundary between disruptive innovation and adaptation/acculturation.

Why linger?

***
Frontiers of fabrication

Necessity is the mother of invention

Here's my definition in two aspects:

Art is imagination, concretized.

The definition of art derives from the root meaning: arə- Proto-Indo-European and Greek ar- "to fit together." Fabrication lies at the heart of the meaning, but within lies a crucial aspect that exceeds mere assembly.

Popular usage indicates a scope that is transcendental, indicative of the superlative. The art of war, the art of cooking, the art of reasoning, the art of... What I take from this is something about the moment when one is operating at and beyond the frontier of all extant known methods of "fabrication" (bracketed to indicate an expansive definition of the term).

This is the territory where one resorts to inspiration, imagination, what was known to be the muse, the world shared with faith, the land (noumena?) into which our rational mind pushes.

Posted by Dennis at February 14, 2026 9:19 PM