WORDS OF ART: THE A

Department of Fine Arts, Okanagan University College

WORDS OF ART: THE A_LIST

Compiled by Robert J. Belton

If you would like to see something removed, added or corrected, please feel free to contact bbelton@okanagan.bc.ca.

ABACUS: See column.

ABSENCE: An instance in which uncertainty about meaning prevails over the metaphysics of presence. See deconstruction, différance, presence. The term lurks behind the received opinion of David Salle's paintings of the 1980s.

ABSOLUTE: 1. As a noun in general, anything free of dependence upon factors external to itself. In metaphysical idealism specifically, the totality of what in fact exists. 2. As an adjective in formal terminology, it has connotations related to the former. For example, "absolute scale" (see scale) means the actual size of an object, without reference to the size it appears to be in a given context (cf absolutism, relative, relativism).

ABSOLUTISM: 1. In aesthetics, the opposite of relativism -- i.e., that there are, for example, eternal and immutable standards for the evaluation of works of art. 2. In politics, unrestricted political power. Postmodernism generally rejects all forms of absolutism.

ABSTRACTION: Often used interchangeably with non- objective; more precisely, imagery which departs from representational accuracy (often to an extreme degree) for some affective or other purpose unrelated to verisimilitude. Compare, however, Wassily Kandinsky's conception of abstraction with that of contemporary artists like Peter Halley. Abstraction has been treated to a good deal of revision by critics who practice a type of semiotics: Peter Wollen, for instance, sees the move to abstraction as a gradual separation of signifier and signified, until the signified is suppressed altogether in favour of an art of pure signifiers (Semiotic Counter-Strategies: Readings and Writings [1982]). See also Craig Owens' "The Discourse of Others" in Hal Foster's The Anti-Aesthetic (1983).

ABSURD: Generally, a state of irrationality or meaninglessness. More specifically, absurdity is 1. a flaw in logic (see reductio ad absurdum) or 2. a basic premise of existentialism which asserts that the meaning of the world does not precede the existence of beings capable of formulating a conception of meaning.

ACANTHUS: See column.

ACCEPTABILITY: The idea of acceptable standards, particularly of interpretation, is pretty much a taboo in generally postmodernist times, but if a criticism is tacitly an intelligent argument, then it is measurable by such standards. Of course, artwriters then have to agree on the criteria of acceptability, which they have not yet done. In conventional informal logic, acceptability is usually defined as sufficency, validity, and defensible premises for a given audience, which is ideally assumed to be a "universal" audience of reasonable people. Postmodernism insists that universality is really a Eurocentric and/or androcentric illusion -- or a variant thereof, like fleshless academicism -- so one can easily see why acceptability is such a problem. An interesting recent attempt to define the parameters of the issue in philosophical terms is Annette Barnes' On Interpretation: A Critical Analysis.

ACCOMMODATION: Adaption or adjustment practiced by a individual, an ethnic group, or the like seeking admission or assimilation into a larger group, culture, or social body of whatever sort. For a specific instance with visual ramifications, see speech accommodation.

ACCULTURATION: This can describe both cross-cultural (or intercultural) borrowing and the process by which persons acquire knowledge of the culture in which they live. Feminism and critiques of ethnocentrism make use of the term with slight variations.

ACCUMULATED INTENTION: In The Principles of Semantics, Stephen Ullmann argues that words gather meanings unto themselves over time, producing not merely conventional ambiguity, but also the power of symbolic expression in general. Words and images thus function as accumulators of meaning. The idea could serve as a practical explanation of some of the more ephemeral results of deconstruction.

ACRYLIC: A plastic-based painting medium which, because it is water soluble, dries quickly and cleans up easily. Especially popular in the 1960s and 1970s for effects ranging from translucent watercolour-like washes to opaque hard-edges in bright colours, acrylic seems to have been declining in popularity since the new image movement of the early 1980s restored interest in oil as a medium.

ACTION PAINTING: Harold Rosenberg's 1952 term for those works within the orbit of American abstract expressionism which featured very energetically applied painting, apparently involving movements of the whole body -- or at least of its larger limbs, as opposed to minute movements of the fingers and wrist -- and a certain indifference to traditional niceties of execution, like the avoidance of drips and spatters. Rosenberg had the works of Willem de Kooning in mind, but because of the famous 1951 coverage in Life magazine of Jackson Pollock, in which Hans Namuth's photographs clearly show the artist dripping paint through the air onto a canvas on the floor, the phrase seems attached to this sort of quasi-theatrical activity. (Many artists followed this particular thread to its logical conclusion, a sort of painting as performance. Internationally, Georges Mathieu is a well-known example; in Canada, William Ronald was an early, if only occasional, practitioner.) There are many other variations of action painting, including French tachisme and Canadian automatisme. Although in varying degrees, they have in common Rosenberg's notion that the canvas is "an arena in which to act," rather than a distanced product of reflection and deliberation.

ACTUALITY (OF MEANING): See inexhaustibility by contrast.

ACQUIRED DRIVE: See drive.

ADBUSTERS: See culture jamming.

ADD WOMEN AND STIR: An expression used by some feminists (see feminism) who feel that simply adding women to existing canons of artistic greatness really does nothing to challenge or change the processes of canon-formation, which are inherently hierarchical and sexist.

AD HOMINEM: Traditionally considered a fallacy, ad hominem is a usually pernicious type of argument which attempts to discredit a counter-argument by questioning the opponent, rather than the opponent's position: such-and-such person's views should not be given credence because his/her character is disreputable; s/he is not knowledgeable, trustworthy, or unbiased; his/her credentials are not apparent or are irrelevant; or there is no consensual agreement or resolution on the part of other authorities. A recent example in the popular press is Susan Faludi's dismissal of Camille Paglia's theories: this is not done because of the quality (or lack thereof) of Paglia's thought but because Paglia was filled with spite and a desire for revenge on other feminists who failed to recognize her talent, leading seven publishers to refuse her work (see backlash, feminism, sexual personae). William Blake's occasionally vicious marginalia in his copy of Joshua Reynolds' Discourses -- e.g., "This Man was hired to depress Art" -- are perhaps the most famous art historical examples.

AD IGNORANTIUM: Arguments from ignorance, as it were. After the failure of a responsible attempt to find evidence that a claim is true, conclude the claim is false, or vice versa: there is no evidence of X (or -X). Therefore, -X (or X). For example, there is little solid evidence that Vincent Van Gogh's painting style was the direct result only of his state of mind, so we can conclude that his style was not an expression of madness.

ADMISSIBLE: Capable of being admitted, allowed, conceded, permitted, and the like. In legal contexts, a great deal of attention is paid to what can and cannot be admitted as evidence, but only rarely is such attention given to the question in artwriting. This results in arguments and interpretations which appear to be valid but are constructed on flimsy or irrelevant grounds. See hearsay for an application.

ADVERSARIAL: Occasionally used in place of the adjective "adversary," meaning "having or involving antagonistic parties or interests." It is a key component of the avant- garde and of bohemianism, and some feel it has even become mainstream culture. See for example, licensed rebels.

AEGIS: Term used in Norman Bryson's Tradition and Desire to replace source analysis in traditional art history with a conception of allusion as a trope. Hypothetically, an artist uses an earlier artist's manner as a source to take refuge in and to challenge its authority. His principal example is the work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, but it can easily be applied to others. The concept ultimately derives from Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence. See anxiety of influence.

AESTHETIC DISTANCE: 1. The audience's awareness that art and reality are not the same, entailing some suspension of disbelief. Edward Bullough's famous essay "Psychical Distance" (In the British Journal of Psychology, 1912) is the most extended discussion of the idea. Cf antinomy of distance. The idea should be debated in discussions of images that capitalize on shocking subject matter, ranging from Géricault's Raft of the Medusa to Joel-Peter Witkin's Pathological Reproduction: The Guernica Variations. 2. The term is sometimes used to refer to the distance between a completed art object and the circumstances of its production. Marxists (see Marxism) and non-partisan historians concerned with the social and/or economic circumstances in which artworks were produced would likely be indifferent or opposed to this idea.

AESTHETIC EMOTION: See unique aesthetic emotion.

AESTHETICISM: See art for art's sake. The term is often used to connote a certain decadence or preciousness.

AESTHETICS: Originally, that which pertains to the beautiful, as conceived variously by artists and, especially, philosophers with reference to noble aspects of experience beyond superficial appearance or mere prettiness. The theme preoccupied philosophers in ancient Greece, but the term itself first appeared in the eighteenth-century writings of Alexander Baumgarten. Since the adoption of the term of the term "esthetician" to describe purveyors of cosmetics, "aesthetics" seems to have little relevance, unless one thinks of it more generically as "pertaining to the philosophy of art" -- i.e., its function, nature, ontology, purpose, and so on. Even these have has largely been supplanted by postmodernism's questions of meaning and linguistically based investigations. The term is still sometimes used to indicate a certain imprecise distinction between art and life, or as a rough synonym for "artistic." See art theory.

AFFECT: In an essay in Social Text (Fall 1982), Frederic Jameson characterized the move from modernism to postmodernism as a move from affect to effect, from emotional engagement to slick superficiality. Jeff Koons' works could be so described. Cf simulacrum. Cf speech act theory.

AFFECTIVE: Pertaining to emotional expression. Cf affective fallacy, perlocutionary, speech act theory.

AFFECTIVE FALLACY: Once of great value to all types of expression theory and to Aristotelian catharsis, the notion that a work's value resides in the emotional affect it has on an audience has lost its lustre both for formalism and for postmodernism in general, though for very different reasons. Hence it is called a fallacy. The question should be raised when discussing Romanticism and much early modern art and theory, especially that of Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich, among others.

AFROCENTRIC: Characteristic of any of a number of positions demanding greater representation of African cultural heritage in post-secondary curricula in the humanities (see canon). The range is very wide, from straightforward demonstrations of black pride to claims that classic Greek philosophy was plagiarized from lost black sources and that the ancient Egyptians were actually black Africans. The term is most closely associated with the academic books of Molefi Kete Asante, but the issues should come up in discussions of the works of artists like Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, among others.

AGEISM: On the model of racism and sexism, a discriminatory attitude against people because of their age. Are Ivan Albright's paintings ageist or sympathetic? See the special issue of Art Journal 53.1 (Spring 1994) on art and old age.

AGENDA: A list or outline of things to do, issues to resolve, questions to be decided, and the like. In popular postmodern parlance (see postmodernism), especially when preceded by "hidden," the word connotes premeditated cultural mechanisms of persuasion and/or repression. Cf power.

AGGLUTINATING, INFLECTING, ISOLATING: August von Schlegel's three categories of grammatical relations in comparative linguistics. An agglutinating (or compounding) language is one in which changes in relations are most frequently expressed by an additive process of prefixes and roots. Turkish and German use agglutination much more than English, but an English example in "antidisestablishmentarianism." An inflecting language is one in which changes in relations are most frequently expressed by changes in the forms of the words themselves. In English, for example, the plural noun "birds" calls for the verb formation "fly," whereas the singular noun "bird" inflects the verb into the form "flies." An isolating language (sometimes also called analytic) is one in which the word forms are invariable and changes in relations are signalled by word order and various other parts of speech, as in Vietnamese. The typology suggests interesting parallels with visual art, if art is genuinely understood to be a language. Realism, for example, might be understood as isolating: since the forms of the representation are hypothetically true to nature (but compare perceptualism), they remain constant and meaning is principally produced through different arrangements and accomodations. Expressionist art would likely be inflecting, since its aesthetic impact is largely a matter of deformation in a given context of something which would appear "normal" in another context (compare paralinguistic). The difficulty here is that spoken language usually has denotations and connotations which expressionist art probably does not have (see idiolect). A truly agglutinating visual art is more difficult again to imagine, although one might so consider Northwest Coast Indian totem poles, or certain productions of the more mythically inclined Surrealists and early Abstract Expressionists.

AGNOSIA: See interpretive agnosia.

AHA EXPERIENCE: The literature of psychology describes the instant of insight and release in puzzle or problem solving as the aha (sometimes ah-ah) experience. It would be useful to consider whether the type of satisfaction afforded by a particularly compelling interpretation corresponds to this is any meaningful way, since it would seem to imply that an artwork is principally something to "figure out," rather than something to experience in an open-ended manner.

AHISTORICAL: Generally, that which is not concerned with history or historical development. It is sometimes used as a synonym for anachronism, particularly when the actions, ideas, and/or motives of a given generation are attributed to an earlier one.

AIR BRUSH: A device which sprays paint with compressed air to offer a broad range of applications, from wide patches of paint to thin mists enabling precise details. The principle is the same whether one uses an inexpensive contraption with one's breath or a rather expensive mechanical version of a device invented in the late nineteenth century by Charles Burdick. Air brush painting was particularly popular in 1960s and 1970s advertising and van painting, and its effect of photographic verisimilitude was adopted for use in pop art and photorealism.

ALBUMEN: See photography.

ALEATORIC: Composition based on chance, usually, but sometimes also random accident and/or highly improvisational execution. Hans Arp's so-called Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance is an early example. The composer John Cage is particularly noted for this technique, and traces of it can be found in the work of numerous artists within his circle (e.g., Robert Rauschenberg, Naim June Paik, Jim Dine, etc.).

ALETHEIA: Originally a Greek term meaning "truth" or "the unconcealedness of things." Current writers often use the word with the connotations supplied by Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art, in which an artwork is useful to the extent that it can open up a space in which existentially alienated beings (see alienation) can discover the meaning of their existence, which is not synonymous with "truth" in the conventional sense. See Dasein, existentialism, existential phenomenology, Open.

ALIENATION: Sometimes generally used to suggest depersonalization, disenchantment, estrangement, or powerlessness, alienation is actually a philosophical word with a lengthy history. The most particular conceptions appear in Hegelianism, Marxism and existentialism.Simply put, in Hegel, alienations were various stages in the development of human consciousness: the lowest was immediate perception of sense-data, the next a consciousness of self, the next the abstraction of reason, and finally the world of the spirit, manifest in religion and art. Alienation is perhaps not the happiest translation of his Entaüsserung, which was the dialectical (see dialectic) process by which the mind moved from one of these stages to the next -- a move which entailed the recognition of the illusion of the first stage and a move beyond it, as if the mind became alien to itself, only to return to itself later in a higher stage. In Marx alienation meant the proletariats economic, psychological and other senses of separation from the products of their labour, the forces of production, and his own social formation (see also species-being). In existentialism, generally, alienation is the experience of the world as absurd (see authentic, Dasein).

ALLEGORY: Traditionally, a type of figurative expression, usually a narrative with one or more personifications, and often with some moralizing conclusion. More recently, it has been used in postmodernism to describe the relation of one text to another, particularly where they purport to be about the same thing but actually introduce unbidden levels of signification alien to each other. See, for example, Gregory Ulmer's "The Object of Post-Criticism" in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic.

ALLUSION: Passing reference to an event, object or person presumed to be familiar to the audience, most commonly to increase affective potential without extensive digression. As such, it is a less precise artistic borrowing than appropriation or citation. The wailing mother with the dead child in Picasso's Guernica, for example, may be understood as an ironic (see irony) allusion to the typical Madonna and child. Cf source analysis.

ALTAR: A structure on which sacrifices or other offerings were made to the gods. In Christian tradition, although the altar serves more to allude to the table at which the Last Supper took place, the celebration of the mystery of the Eucharist -- i.e., that bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ -- is still a sacrificial affair of sorts. Altars are a central part of many forms of religious life and are accordingly given special visual treatment with such things as altarpieces.

ALTARITY: Title of a 1987 book by a/theologian Mark C. Taylor (see a/theology) describing religious existence in terms deriving from deconstruction. The term plays on alterity but is not synonymous with it. See also disfiguring.

ALTARPIECE: Any of a varety of decorated panels, screens or shrines rising behind an altar to signify its importance and authority, to tell an associated legend, and so on. The most common type of altarpiece is a painting spread over several panels hung together like folding screens. A simple type consists of a central panel with two flanking half-sized doors to close over it (e.g., Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights). A three-part painting of this sort is called a triptych. Paintings with more complicated arrangements, as in Van Eyck's celebrated Ghent Altarpiece, are called polyptychs. Altarpieces often have a decorated panel at the bottom called a predella. Some Baroque altarpieces are gloriously overblown flights of fancy, with painting, sculpture, and architectural accompaniments skillfuly interwoven for theatrical effect. Altarpieces are sometime called reredos or retables.

ALTERITY: Not to be confused with altarity, alterity is the condition of being radically different or unlike some other being, state or thing. See other.

ALTERNATING FIGURES: Ambiguous diagrams (see ambiguity) serving in the psychology of perception to illustrate the way the mind habitually tries to achieve a coherent Gestalt. An example is the famous impossible trident, the bottom half of which seems like a square "u," and the top half like three prongs. Op art occasionally makes use of the phenomenon. One might speculate whether there is a non-visual, cerebral equivalent which could be useful in discussions of ambiguity or plurivocality. See closure.

ALTERSSTIL: German term referring to the style of an artist in old age, especially when it has characteristics distinguishing it from earlier parts of the artist's career. Notable examples include late Michelangelo and Titian. See Hugo Munsterberg's The Crown of Life (1983).

ALTHUSSERIAN: Pertaining to the ideas of philosopher Louis Althusser. See autocritical, coupure épistémologique, ideology, interpellation, masquerade, overdetermination, problematic, structuralist Marxism, theory of practice.

ALWAYS-ALREADY-READ: Frederic Jameson argues that no text exists in a vacuum, for when it is read by a member of an identifiable social group, its meaning is mediated (see mediation) by his or her ideology. The material is thus always already read, in a sense. See political unconscious. For visual art, there is no need to transform theterm to" always-already-seen," because the component "seen" implies a value-free physiological phenomenon which postmodernism generally dismisses. See perceptualism.

AMBIGUITY: Something which admits of interpretation in two or more possible senses. In logical and critical texts, ambiguity is usually something to be avoided (however, see dissemination), but many creative works capitalize on it quite effectively. There are, for instance, ambiguities of drawing in Matisse's Le Luxe II and ambiguities of content in Dorothea Tanning's Birthday. See also double entendre, pun.

AMBIVALENCE: Often colloquially known as "mixed feelings;" mildly conflicting emotions or contradictory attitudes.

AMBULATORY: An aisle surrounding the altar at the apse end of a church, or a covered passage around an open court, as in a cloister.

AMORPHOUS: Formless -- i.e., devoid of readily recognizable regularity in form, as in a standard shape like a rectangle or a triangle.

AMPHORA: A large storage jar with a fairly tall neck and two handles stretching from a wide mouth to a broader oval body. In Greek antiquity, such jars were for both practical and trophy purposes. Without their painted depictions of the Greek myths, we would have very little knowledge of ancient Greek pictorial practice.

ANACHRONISM: Chronological misplacement, usually running backwards in time, as in asserting that Freud used a CD player, or some such thing. Cf ahistorical. For a possible instance, see camouflage.

ANALEPSIS: The recovery into consciousness of unconscious, repressed or forgotten material. Clear examples are in Max Ernst's descriptions of the discovery of frottage and Salvador Dali's paranoiac-critical method.

ANALOGY: A comparison in which two things have sufficient numbers of similar characteristics to conclude that they will probably share others. It is commonly used when a familiar thing is used to explain something less familiar and as such is a basic component of symbolism. See argument from analogy.

ANALYTIC: See synthetic a priori. (For a less frequent sense, see agglutinating, inflecting, isolating.)

ANALYTICO-REFERENTIAL: See discursive activity.

ANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY: Jungian term for a wholistic type of depth psychology which takes into account not only the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious as motivators of behaviour, but also the conscious aspirations and goals of the subject. A hypothetical criticism so inspired would differ fundamentally from Freudian-based psychoanalytical criticism.

ANAMORPHOSIS: Mannered or distorted imagery that can be optically corrected by examining it from an unconventional point of view or through some optical device. Although the term usually indicates a simple visual example of the phenomenon, as in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, Donald Preziosi uses it in Rethinking Art History as a metaphor of the way historical narrative (see metanarrative) deforms the object of investigation. Jacques Lacan has also used the concept to describe how his conception of a picture functions (see gaze and glance).

ANCHORAGE AND RELAY: Roland Barthes' characterization of the functions of captions in advertising, the former serving to anchor (i.e., delimit) the meanings of the example, for example, via identification, and the latter serving to proliferate meaning via a process of referral to other, absent significances.

ANCHORING GAZE: In You Just Don't Understand, Deborah Tannen coined this term to indicate the principal line of sight of people in conversation. She found that female speakers tended to face one another and look directly into each others' faces, whereas male speakers tended to sit at angles to each other and find visual home bases elsewhere in the room. The idea gives further support to her distinction between rapport-talk and report-talk. The idea might be exploited to disrupt the simple polarity of Bryson's gaze and glance.

ANDROCENTRIC: A specifically male anthropocentrism. A typical, though simple example is the use of the word "man" to refer to both genders. Imagine how it might be used to discuss the canon of art history.

ANIMA: Originally the soul or life force, but now universally construed as the Jungian archetype of the female components within a male personality. Presumably, a male projects his own female side -- whether it be creatively inspiring (the muse) or protective and nurturing (the mother), etc. -- onto those around him. Jung designated the reverse, the male components within a female personality, as animus, but he did not explore the concept to as great a depth. The notions have been much abused in popular writings, opening them to charges of essentialism.

ANIMUS: See anima.

ANOSAGNOSIA: A neurological term coined by Babinski, a contemporary of Freud (see hysteria), designating certain patients' inability to know they are suffering from a cognitive deficit, particularly agnosia (see interpretive agnosia). Such patients thus have a double deficit, for they have even lost an awareness of their loss.

ANTAGONIST: In narrative analysis, the adversary or opponent of the protagonist. The antagonist in Artemesia Gentileschi's Judith and Holofernes, for example, is the latter.

ANTHROPOCENTRISM: The mind-set that sees human beings as central (i.e., essential and most significant) in the universe. A more precise term that says the same specifically of male centrality is androcentric.

ANTHROPOMORPHISM: The representation of non- human beings, whether real or fictitious, in human form (e.g., the gods); the ascription of human attributes, characteristics, and/or preoccupations to non-human beings (e.g., the speaking animals in Aesop's fables).

ANTI-AESTHETIC: The title of an influential postmodernist (see postmodernism) anthology edited by Hal Foster (1983), in which he expressly argues that "anti-aesthetic" does not mean a reassertion of modernism's principle of aesthetic negation, or anti-art, but rather a critique of the very notion of the aesthetic (see aesthetics), especially in its modern manifestations with supposedly pseudotranshistorical and determinate meanings (see determinacy).

ANTI-ART: Imprecise but once fashionable term to describe works which sought to denounce or dismantle traditional conceptions of art, whether through untraditional techniques, materials, and display formats (e.g., automatism, combine painting, installation) or through unusual iconography and the like.

ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN: The essential characteristic of any challenge to presumed authority.

ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM: Any position, whether originating with an unreflective street tough or a philosophical pragmatist, which eschews, fears, or mistrusts reason. Some hyper- intellectual artwriting is, paradoxically, overtly anti- intellectual. (See, for example, écriture féminine.) The relation between it and once fashionable Romantic bohemianism should be explored.

ANTINOMIANISM: Originally, the doctrine that moral laws do not apply to Christ. By extension, the notion that certain persons with privileged status do not have to obey their own dictates, as in "Do as I say, not as I do." Many artists, especially those of the middle class who feign distaste for bourgeois values, have exhibited such characteristics. In "Suspicious Art, Unsuspecting Texts" (In H. Smagula, ed., Re- Visions), David Carrier uses the idea without identifying it as such to point out the paradox of artwriters whose "incredulity towards metanarrative" (see postmodernism) is framed within yet another metanarrative.

ANTINOMY: A paradox or contradiction between two conclusions, both of which were apparently arrived at by proper reasoning. For specific applications, see antinomy of distance, spontaneity.

ANTINOMY OF DISTANCE: Edward Bullough's conception of aesthetic distance includes a paradox of sorts: an artist's work will be most powerful when it is most personal, but s/he can only formulate an effective artistic expression by assuming a certain detachment from it. Similarly, a viewer's experience of a work of art will be augmented if s/he has experienced something similar, but if a certain aesthetic distance is not maintained, the art is superseded by the viewer's own emotional state. Bullough formulated the principle in this way: "What is...most desirable is the utmost decrease of [aesthetic] distance without its disappearance."

ANTIPHRASIS: A specific type of irony in which a sign is used to signal its opposite.

ANTIQUARIANISM: Originally, the study of the material culture of ancient societies, particularly those whose current descendants exhibit markedly different customs, as in Egypt. In certain circles, the term now has a connotation of commercialism and commodity exchange for profit, rather than for the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge.

ANTITHESIS: 1. A single figure with markedly contrasting ideas. 2. The second component of the Hegelian dialectic (see Hegelianism).

ANTONOMASIA: A figure in which a general idea is represented by a proper name, as when artists' names signify their entire oeuvre or an unspecified single work. This is everywhere in art criticism, art history, etc.

ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE: The title of a book by literary theorist Harold Bloom, who asserted that the ambiguous relationship writers have with those who influence them is akin to the psychological relationship of sons to fathers described in Freud's Totem and Taboo. It concerns alternating veneration and vilification -- the mixed feelings of adoration and fear of the artistic forefather, whose authority represents an implicit castration threat, but whose position as father is nonetheless worthy of some veneration. Its application to art history appears in Norman Bryson's Tradition and Desire. See aegis. An instance of the popularization of the term appears in Stephen Eisenman's Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History, wherein the author casually and without explanation describes Drouais' relationship with his master David as anxiety of influence.

AORIST: Literally "without horizons," the term designates a classical Greek tense presenting an occurrence without limitation as to duration. It could be used as a rough synonym of indeterminacy. Norman Bryson uses the term in Vision and Painting as a rough antonym of deixis.

APHASIA: Impairment of the ability to use and/or understand words. The term is still fairly rare in contemporary theory, but it has crept in via Roman Jakobson and others (see concatenation relation) and, from there, into a few writings on contemporary art inasmuch as both artists and aphasics find other ways to communicate (see communication). For a related idea, see artist envy. Cf agnosia, paralinguistic.

APHORISM: A concise statement of a principle or something held by the speaker to be true or deeply felt. While there is a strong philosophical tradition involved -- as in, e.g., Nietzsche's well-controlled aphorisms -- many artists' writings are simply strings of unordered aphorisms, as in the cases of Brancusi and Picabia.

APOPHASIS: The rhetorical figure in which one states something while seeming to deny it. The phrases "not to mention such and such" and "to make a long story short" are apophases. To maintain, for example, that a depiction of cruelty towards animals is a protest, rather than an indulgence, requires some notion of apophasis. Compare indulgence or indictment.

APOPHATIC: A theological term meaning knowledge of God obtained by negation (see negative theology). Much modernism has been apophatic inasmuch as the autonomy of art has been asserted chiefly by excluding what art is not. Since what "art is not" is really what "art is thought not to be," there is a similar dimension of faith involved.

APORIA: Formerly, a type of irony in which certainty, say, about a person's character, masquerades as deferential uncertainty. Now the term is more likely to mean the point at which a text is most explicitly indeterminate (see indeterminacy) or self-contradictory, as in deconstruction.

APOSTROPHE: A figure in which something or someone is addressed in their absence. For example, pictorial appeals to the saints usually include some sign of the saints within the picture's space, but instances in which no saints or signs appear might be legitimately considered apostrophes.

APOTROPAIC: Having the power to avert evil or bad fortune, as in a good luck charm or talisman. Magico-religious art and ex-votos could be said to have an apotropaic dimension.

APPEAL TO PRECEDENT: X should be allowed (or not) because some analogous Y has been allowed (or not). This structure of informal logic is very widely used in writing about art, especially in attributions and interpretations, but it is rarely explicitly identified or critiqued on the basis of its logicality. See analogy, argument from analogy.

APPETITIVE DRIVE: Any of the instinctual urges thought to require some sort of satisfaction of a need, as in hunger, sexuality, sleep, etc. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche and many others (André Masson, male Surrealists in general) have thought that sexual appetite was the real drive behind works of art -- even the high idealism of Raphael. More recently, Stephen Pepper used the idea in The Work of Art to argue in favour of determinacy: see consummatory field.

APOLLONIAN: Friedrich Nietzsche's designation for the calm, conscious, orderly, and rational side of human nature. Cf Dionysian.

A POSTERIORI: See synthetic a priori.

APPROPRIATION: More aggressive than allusion or citation, appropriation is the excision of material from one context and its reuse in another context, usually with intent to expose some unrecognized irony in the original or to undermine notions of authorial responsibility. The range of possibilites extends from simple reuse, as in collage, to Sherri Levine's rephotographed photos by Edward Weston (see aura).

A PRIORI: See synthetic a priori.

APSE: Under construction.

ARBITER ELEGANTIARUM: A putative final authority or judge in matters of taste. Clement Greenberg might be so described, using other terms. Cf connoisseurship.

ARCHAEOLOGY: The scientific study of the material remains of past cultures. Michel Foucault used the term figuratively (see figurative) to describe the history of the mechanisms which appear to constitute knowledge. See episteme.

ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM: Usually Jungian, but any criticism which seeks to discover the role of archetypes in generating meaning. Cf matriarchal aesthetic.

ARCHETYPE: An essentialist (see essentialism) term imported from Jungian analysis, it means basic, unchanging images of a primordially mythic character that reside in the collective unconscious. The presumption is that these images are universal, transcultural, and transhistorical. Jung himself said the idea was not his invention and could be found in previous writings by Adolf Bastian and Friedrich Nietzsche (Jung, Psychology and Religion [1938]).

ARCHITECTURE: Under construction, if you will pardon the pun. For the moment, note that the word itself is made up of two components originally meaning "of a leading or distinguished sort" and "pertaining to construction," so that "archi-tecture" meant buildings of artistic, political, religious or social significance, as opposed to run-of-the-mill structures of little or no importance. This explains to a great extent why many classically trained architects of the nineteenth century were so strongly opposed to structures like the Eiffel Tower: designed by an engineer, it was thought by some as mere "building" -- somehow sub-architectural. Lately, however, we have used the word with fewer restrictions, although we sometimes still feel it necessary to use phrases like "vernacular architecture" to identify ordinary, average, everyday structures like domestic housing or commercial facilities. See column, order, vault, wall.

ARENA: Many writers are now concerned with how speakers and listeners work with each other to ascertain the meanings of the things they say (and, by extension, the things they produce). Herbert Clark argues in an anthology entitled Arenas of Language Use that only analysis of the common ground between speakers can determine their meanings. Each area of common ground is an arena, which is thus a near synonym of what other writers call the social formation.

ARGUMENT: In informal logic, a propositional form in which premises (reasons) are given in support of a claim (conclusion). While most art is not propositional, and therefore cannot be construed as argument in itself, much (if not all) art criticism is implicitly or explicitly a matter of substantiating claims about a work. As such, it admits of the kind of critical analysis applicable to logic. A simple argument consists of one conclusion supported by one or more premises. An extended argument consists of a main conclusion supported by premises, some of which are, in turn, conclusions of subsidiary arguments.

ARGUMENT FROM ANALOGY: If X is true, Y is likely to be true if it similar in sufficient, relevant aspects, and if it is not relevantly dissimilar. See sufficiency, relevance.

ARISTOTELIAN: Pertaining to the thought of Aristotle and his followers. See catharsis, mimesis, techne.

ART: Any simple definition would be profoundly pretentious and tendentious, but we can say that all the definitions offered over the centuries include some notion of human agency, whether through manual skills (as in the art of sailing or painting or photography), intellectual manipulation (as in the art of politics), or public or personal expression (as in the art of conversation). As such, the word is etymologically related to artificial -- i.e., produced by human beings. Since this embraces many types of production that are not conventionally deemed to be art, perhaps a better term would be culture. This would explain why certain preindustrial cultures produce objects which Eurocentric interests characterize as art, even though the producing culture has no linguistic term to differentiate these objects from utilitarian artifacts. For an interesting list of the various definitions that have preoccupied writers over the years, see definitions of art. Cf craft, high art, low art.

ART APPRECIATION: The introduction of basic principles of visual literacy -- especially the fundamentals of formal analysis without reference to iconography or historical context -- to general audiences for the purpose of enhancing their enjoyment of works of art in non- academic contexts. In some postmodernisms, the term has a slightly pejorative tone indicating unreflective indulgence.

ART CONSERVATION: Principally, the technical study of the best ways to preserve and protect artworks from physical deterioration. However, some programmes in art conservation also address related issues, such as the ethics of conservation, art restoration, museology, and so on. The most famous -- and hotly debated -- conservation issue in recent times is the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

ART CRITICISM: See artwriting, critic, criticism. Cf art history, art theory, historical methodologies.

ART FOR ART'S SAKE: Any of a number of positions related to the possibility of art being autonomous (see autonomy) or autotelic. The term is usually used of artists and artwriters of the second half of the nineteenth century: in France the prime movers were Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier; in England, J. A. M. Whistler and Oscar Wilde; in the United States, Edgar Allan Poe. In the twentieth century, the notion has been sharply critiqued by Walter Benjamin, among others. See, for example, aura.

ART HISTORY: Misleading presentations of a unified, homogeneous art history have eroded the reputation of the field as a serious intellectual endeavour. In much of Norman Bryson's writing, for instance, it is equated exclusively with perceptualism, while Nicolas Hadjinicolau (Art History and Class Struggle) assumes it is hagiography unconcerned with social context. Reductive characterizations like these should be baffling to postmodernists (see postmodernism) and students of traditional historiography alike. While it is true that certain approaches achieved predominance in institutional contexts in the 1960s -- especially connoisseurship and formalism -- simplifying characterizations do not recognize the rich variety of interpretive approaches that have succeeded one another over the history of art history. The real culprit is not the field itself but textbooks -- written for general service courses at the university level, but strongly influenced by the commercial success of coffee table books. Since textbooks reduce everything complicated to a simple taxonomy, often with a teleological bent, the onus is on innovative instructors to generate enough intellectual curiosity that students won't forget to see the trees for the forest. (No responsible student of psychology or biology would assume that their field is perfectly characterized by a first year textbook designed for specialists and dabblers alike.) See art criticism, art theory, criticism, hagiography, historical methodologies, perceptualism, taxonomy, teleology.

ART MEDAL: See medal.

ARTIST: A maker of art. See also author.

ARTIST ENVY: Donald Kuspit's term (in Artforum [November 1987]) for the envy psychoanalysts -- and by implication, practitioners of psychoanalytical criticism -- have for artists, whom they feel can establish a pre-verbal closeness (empathy, identification. etc.) with the audience. This closeness is of the sort that psychoanalysts work so hard to achieve with their patients.

(L')ART POUR L'ART: See art for art's sake.

ART RESTORATION: The rectification of damage to artworks. Cf art conservation.

ART THEORY: The general study of aesthetics and art, with a particular view to elucidating the nature (see ontology) and purpose (see function) of works of art. Art theory has been written by practising artists, critics, historians, and professional philosophers. It is impossible to see a work of art without theory: even the most unreflective, untrained viewer -- protesting, e.g., that even a child could draw such and such -- is encountering visual phenomena through a tacit theory (in this case, one which foregrounds illusionism and traditional conceptions of talent as technically based). Although art theory sometimes deals with history and ideology, historical methodologies and postmodernism in general are more directly concerned with and responsive to them.

ARTICULATIVE RESPONSE: See illustrement.

ARTISTIC BIOGRAPHY: The interpretive mode which seeks to produce an accurate account of an artist's life and/or foregrounds data about an artist's life in the discussion and evaluation of the artwork. Vasari's Lives is a prime example, and the model continues to this day. As in the case of Vincent Van Gogh, sometimes biographical accounts become so distorted in popular consciousness that readers fail to recognize the merits of disinterested scholarship. Cf biographical fallacy.

ARTS JOURNALISM: The production of descriptive reviews of arts activities (including dance, drama, music, theatre, visual arts, etc.) for publication in the mass media. Because it is usually directed towards a general audience, much arts journalism has not been very critically acute. Except in some larger centres, popular writing about the arts has even fallen under the rubric of entertainment or lifestyle journalism, and in such cases it is often written by columnists without particular qualifications.

ARTWORK: A work of art. Sometimes, like oeuvre, it can also signify an entire body of works.

ARTWORLD: Not simply an art world (sic) -- i.e., an institutional framework in which art is commodified, discussed, insured, researched, etc. -- "artworld" is Arthur Danto's term The Journal of Philosophy [1964]) for the knowledge of theory and art history that is necessary to understand how a single artifact can be non-art in one situation and art in another. More bluntly, theory is not a parasite of art but is constitutive of it. Cf "is" of artistic identification.

ARTWRITER: A practitioner of artwriting.

ARTWRITING: David Carrier's book Artwriting is a thought-provoking analysis of practices in both art criticism and art history, based in part on Arthur Danto's theory of interpretation (see also artworld). It traces the interrelations of three conceptual points: "the need to properly identify an artwork [i.e., to distinguish it as an artwork, rather than a non-artwork]; the possibility of conflicting interpretations; and the use of rhetoric in intepretation." Accordingly, the term "artwriting" is more or less a conception of art criticism and art history as essentially rhetorical, rather than scientific -- i.e., the primary characteristic of both is persuasive instrumental value, not truth value.

ASIDE: A term used mostly in theatre and film criticism to describe the dramatic convention in which an actor directly addresses the audience without the other actors' knowledge. It could easily be applied to paintings like Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe.

ATAVISM: Reversion to an earlier type or to the characteristics of a remote ancestor, as in some varieties of primitivism. Joan Miro's pictograph-like images and Henry Moore's allusions to Precolumbian artifacts might be so described. The word was frequently used by Salvador Dali to indicate something closer in meaning to analepsis.

A/THEOLOGY: A unique brand of postmodern (see postmodernism) theology in which the Bible, God, the self and the Word of traditional theology are mutually interpretable in terms deriving from deconstruction. The term, first proposed in Mark C. Taylor's 1984 book Erring, would have no currency in art discourse were it not for the same author's Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (1992), in which the disfiguring of artists and architects like Michael Heizer, Anselm Kiefer, Robert Venturi and James Stirling is discussed.

ATTRIBUTE: An object familiarly associated with an office, person, or personification, as in the sceptre of a king, the tablets of Moses, or the scales of Justice. See metonymy.

ATTRIBUTION: The act of giving credit for an unsigned work to an artist on the basis of similarity of style, iconography, or some other material evidence.

AUDIENCE: Originally, a group of listeners; now, any reader(s), spectator(s), or viewer(s). The traditional distinction between active artists and passive audience is being revised substantially, with much more of the responsibility for meaning going to the latter. See authorial responsibility, reader-response.

AURA: Walter Benjamin's famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" defines "aura" as the unique existence of a work of art -- its originality and authenticity. Reproduction withers the aura, detaching the object from the domain of tradition and "liquidating the traditional value of the cultural heritage." Photography, which renders absurd the notion of the "authentic" print, replaces the ritual roots of authentic traditional art with a basis in politics. Discussions of contemporary appropriation, especially that of Sherri Levine, Richard Prince, Sarah Charlesworth and others, often make explicit reference to the idea. See also negative theology.

AUTEUR THEORY: The still fashionable theory that a single filmmaker, almost always the director, is fully and finally responsible for the creative processes that make the finished product. Essentially Romantic at heart, auteur theory often capitulates to modernism's, rather than to postmodernism's, definition of the artist as a singular genius. The contributions of a host of putatively lesser talents -- writers, supervising photographers, editors, sound personnel, etc. -- are supposedly superceded by those of the auteur. Films by Hitchcock, Kubrick, Truffaut, Vigo and a host of others are generally so treated. Analogies to artists with large workshops and/or numerous assistants (e.g., Rubens, Bernini, David, Warhol, etc.) are inevitable. Some important artists of the 1980s are forcing the issue by becoming film directors themselves (e.g., David Salle, Robert Longo, and Julian Schnabel).

AUTHENTIC MARXISM: See vulgar (sense 3).

AUTHENTICITY: Generally, the condition of that which is reliable, trustworthy, real, original, unique. In this sense, see the more specific term aura and cf simulacrum. In existentialism,art sometimes plays a primary role in establishing a sense of unique identity in the face of an absurd, basically meaningless world. The resultant freedom to choose -- to fashion a meaning for oneself, instead of simply reacting passively to external circumstances -- is considered authentic. Cf Dasein, existentialism, inauthentic.

AUTHOR: "Artist" can refer generically to practitioners of any number of art forms. Similarly, in some contexts "author" no longer means strictly an editor or writer, but any creator. The doctrine called the death of the author, however, has become one of the more powerful contributions to the growing body of reader-response theories. For this reason, translations of certain thinkers, notably Julia Kristeva, use "writer." See also auteur theory, authorial ignorance, authorial irrelevance, authorial responsibility, authority.

AUTHORIAL IGNORANCE: The notion, at least as old as Plato, that authors do not fully understand what their own works are about. Cf authorial irrelevance.

AUTHORIAL IRRELEVANCE: The rejection of an author's biography, social context, and/or stated intentions in the interpretation of a work. Postmodernism generally takes the idea as a given. In contrast, E. D. Hirsch argues against the concept in Validity in Interpretation. Cf artistic biography, authorial responsibility, intentional fallacy.

AUTHORIAL RESPONSIBILITY: Like the auteur theory in film studies, the notion that artists have conscious, determinate (see determinacy) intentions and thus are solely and fully responsible for their work's success or failure, regardless of the audience. The notion is largely out of fashion in postmodernism. See appropriation, intentional fallacy. Cf reader-response.

AUTHORITY: The power to act, command or judge; expertise; mastery; or one who wields such power. As might be expected in a period of postmodernism and multidisciplinary pursuits, the notion is challenged as an instance of political power, rather than true knowledge. An interesting example is Jan Gallop's "Psychoanalytic Criticism: Some Intimate Questions," in Art in America (November 1984).

AUTISTIC CERTAINTY: A narrow example of the type of circular logic called begging the question, in which an individual maintains an illogical certainty about some matter by saying "It is because I believe in it," or "It cannot be so because I believe it cannot be so." Unverified or unverifiable statements like "I don't think it, I know it" are even narrower instances of the same phenomenon. Obviously, this raises a number of issues concerning such matters as faith or belief in the paranormal.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ART: Art produced specifically to exploit, illustrate, or record events in the life of the artist, and/or art produced to give expression to personal thoughts or to vent feelings peculiar to the artist responsible. Autobiographical art is usually indifferent to public themes, but there are recent instances (particularly among feminist artists) in which the personal becomes political, as it were. Mary Kelly's Post Partum Document is a recent important example.

AUTOCRITICAL: In general, self-critical. A specific application is in the autocritical essays of Althusser, in which he revised his earlier opinion that philosophy was about science to a conviction that philosophy was the theoretical expression of politics (see Althusserian).

AUTONOMY: A state of self-government or freedom from restraint; by extension, the supposedly pure, independent realm which art occupies after the removal of all those things which are not "essential" characteristics of art, like iconography and social context. The latter implications are said to derive from Immanuel Kant, who argued that pure art was not limited by function, knowledge, morality, or necessity. The idea is clearly a cornerstone of absolutism, abstraction, apophatic, essentialism, formalism, modernism, non-objectivity, etc. Not surprisingly, postmodernism disputes the idea virtually everywhere. Cf autotelic, homological statements.

AUTOPTIC: A thing itself used as evidence.

AUTOTELIC: Art which has no goal outside of itself, unlike didactic or moralizing work. Audiences incapable of tolerating the portrayal of moral excesses or criminal activities in a work of art have refused to acknowledge the possibility of its autotelic status. Autotelic differs from autonomy in that the latter ideally refers to nothing but itself, whereas the former depicts, say, emotionally trying circumstances, without pretending to be an account of an actual series of events and without having an ulterior motive.

AUTRE: French for other.

AUTRUI: French for other people or others in general. The term is occasionally used for alterity. See other.

AVAILABILITY BIAS: Go here

AVANT-GARDE: Originally a French military expression meaning "advance guard," and one which still carries distinct connotations of a group of courageous adventurers who take the lead, but now in cultural matters. It once had the very real sense of being ahead of -- or at least outside of -- the mainstream (i.e., the bourgeoisie, who were alienated [see alienation] by it), but it is now replaced with the debased illusion of "advanced" creative endeavour. And, of course, its productions -- once genuinely outside the mainstream market -- are now supported by public institutions with only the occasional flutter of public discontent. See also bohemianism.

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