Christopher Earley (University of Liverpool), "Co-Producing Art’s Cognitive Value"

Forthcoming, British Journal of Aesthetics

By Chris Earley

You can learn a lot about the world from the painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. His works don’t indulge in the swirling pastel fantasy of his rococo contemporaries. Chardin’s world is full of people absorbed in everyday tasks. A woman stirs a cup of tea, a child builds a house of cards, a young man blows a bubble. He casts the spotlight not on cascades of improbably lush flowers, but on ensembles of mundane cookware and a few pieces of choice fruit. It’s no surprise that when Chardin’s biographers want to capture his achievements “their texts are peppered with phrases such as ‘truth and nature’, ‘nature and naïveté’, ‘the study of nature’ and ‘an exact study of nature’.” (Rosenberg, 2000: 35)

So, what exactly is it that we learn from Chardin? If we follow his biographers, then it would seem we learn the truths he captured in his paintings. He saw that this is how the world is and used paint and canvas to convey it to us. By looking at his artworks, we learn from Chardin what a person actually looks like, what objects actually populate our world, and what it is like to actually see them.

A century later another great artist was struck by the truth of Chardin’s paintings. In an early essay Marcel Proust wondered how to help a person who has grown bored of their domestic surroundings. To bring them back to life what they need (and, of course, remember that this is Proust who is giving the advice) is a trip to the Louvre. But this person quickly needs to be ushered past the scenes of romantic drama so tempting in their distance from the everyday. They must instead be shown into the side room that contains Chardin’s still lives. Faced with these works, Proust believes some epistemic magic occurs:

If, when looking at Chardin, you can say to yourself, ‘This is intimate, this is comfortable, this is as living as a kitchen,’ then, when you are walking around a kitchen, you will say to yourself, ‘This is special, this is great, this is as beautiful as a Chardin.’ ... Still-life will … change into life in action. (Proust, 1994: 102-3)

What is striking is that, for Proust, the epistemic magic does not happen by learning the truths contained in Chardin’s works. Rather, it happens once we go out into the world beyond the gallery. We grasp the insights of Chardin’s art not by just seeing what a particular apple or pot looks like in the painting, but by seeing anew the aesthetic details of our own kitchens.

We can now detect two ways of thinking about how we learn from art. Sometimes we praise artworks because we think they contain knowledge or understanding. If we want to learn something, our task as audiences is just to work out what insights the artist has realised and is trying to hand over to us via their artwork. I call this ‘insight in art.’

However, I don’t think this is what Proust is describing. He is proposing that the cognitive value of Chardin’s work is realised not just by exploring what is in the painting, but by also exploring the world beyond it. Chardin’s still lives prompt us to gain aesthetic insights into our own domestic surroundings. To do this, we can’t just stare deeper into the painting. We have to do some further investigating for ourselves. I call this ‘insight through art.’

You might think there isn’t much difference between these two ways of learning from art. When engaged in insight through art, we may just come to better grasp the knowledge that is contained in Chardin’s work. We have to go look in our own kitchens to see that, yes, the teapot does indeed warmly glow in just the way Chardin depicted. We double-checked, and he was right.

I don’t think this is always the right way to describe insight through art. Put bluntly, if we’re meant to be learning about kitchens beyond the canvas, then chances are they look little like a Chardin painting. We see different distributions of objects under different lighting conditions. It’s hard to find a Chardin painting that depicts the novelty mug, air fryer, or slightly stained Tupperware that might populate a contemporary kitchen. As insightful as Chardin was, the artist lacked knowledge of how exactly other people would see other kitchens. To move from Chardin’s paintings to insights into kitchens far removed from those of the paintings, I contend that audiences have to do some extra epistemic work for themselves. They have to take aspects of what the artwork offers them and then translate, extend, or otherwise creatively reappropriate them in order to know and understand the world beyond the artwork.

I think that this is a really common way to grasp an artwork’s cognitive value. What is particularly interesting is that even if we investigate different things there is still a sense that, when we do arrive at insight, the artist deserves some credit for that insight. We feel we are seeing the world better thanks to Chardin. Just like Proust, we even encourage others to go through the same process of exploration in order to grasp just what makes the artist so great.

My article ‘Co-Producing Art’s Cognitive Value’ (forthcoming in The British Journal of Aesthetics) tries to shed some light on the workings of insight through art. But I also consider a problem it creates. Many philosophers of art hold that appreciating art centrally involves working out what the artist has achieved by making an artwork. On such a view, you might worry that insight through art gets things the wrong way around. If audiences do their own original epistemic work in order to arrive at insights, and if the resulting insights can’t be said to just be conveyed to them by the artwork, then it looks like we are trying to explain an artwork’s cognitive value by focussing on the audience’s cognitive achievements rather than the artist’s. As the aesthetician John Gibson puts it, “I point in the wrong direction if I gesture toward myself instead of artworks when specifying the site of cognitive insight and discovery.” (Gibson, 2008: 575) Insight through art quickly comes to look like a pretty bad way to seriously appreciate what artists achieve.

If this is correct, there must be something wrong with all those people – myself included – who feel that they really grasp an artwork’s greatness once they explore how it illuminates the world beyond the gallery, page, cinema, or theatre. Of course, I happen to think there isn’t anything wrong them (us). And I think I have a solution to these worries about insight through art. My proposal that is that problems only arise if we assume that cognitive achievements are the preserve of individuals. But recent work in social epistemology – particularly the study of group inquiry in the natural sciences – tells us otherwise. Cognitive achievements can be collaboratively produced, with many parties working together to make the difference to the group’s success in their shared project of inquiry. When we work in this way, credit for our cognitive achievements is usually shared. Think about the fact that scientific discoveries that are brought about by teams are transmitted in articles with many listed co-authors, marking that the credit for the insights must be distributed amongst these parties. I think that what critics of insight through art miss is that insights can also be co-produced in the arts. When we say that Chardin has helped us to learn about the aesthetic richness of our everyday world, we are not just admiring our own cognitive achievements. We are reporting on the role Chardin has played in our collaborative project of inquiry. We have depended on him to notice certain things and draw our attention to them. He has done this in a way that we might not be able to. With this help, we can then make our own moves, noticing new things and learning about the aesthetic texture of wholly new arrangements of objects. Though we couldn’t explain the insights we have arrived at by just pointing to what Chardin has done, we also couldn’t explain our achievements without crediting the artist for prompting them.

Of course, there are many complications to iron out with this proposal. But you can look at the full article to enjoy my attempt at grappling with questions like ‘are artworks also dependent on audiences?’, ‘can we form co-productions with artists we will never actually meet?’ and ‘how far are collaborations in the arts actually like those in the sciences (and football)?’

The upshot is that if it’s plausible that artists and audiences can sometimes be regarded as collaborators, then we shouldn’t always think of audiences as pupils who are just trying to grasp the lessons artists are teaching us. An artwork can also invite audiences to become collaborators in a shared project of inquiry, increasing their sense of epistemic creativity and autonomy by encouraging them to inquire into the world in ways they might not have previously thought possible. By exploring how audiences can collaborate with artworks to achieve insights, we can better understand the nature of the artist’s own epistemic and artistic achievements. To fully appreciate art’s cognitive value, we need to spend more time asking how it helps us change our lives into action.

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Soap Bubbles, c. 1733-34

References:

- Gibson, John. (2007). Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

- Proust, Marcel. (1994). ‘Chardin: The Essence of Things’, trans. Mina Curtiss, in Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, ed. John Sturrock (London: Penguin).

- Rosenberg, Pierre. (2000). ‘Chardin: The Unknowing Subversive’ in Chardin (London: Royal Academy of Arts).