Let us consider a sign on a shopping mall storefront. Let us say that it reads, “Joe’s Hardware.” Now consider the sign in the front of the store as an art object. Its pragmatic purpose is to dictate to spectators (mall shoppers) the identity of the store and, hopefully, indicate what is inside. All that is necessary, then, is for the sign, which let us say is in a black-and-white block-letter sans serif font, to hang in a perfect horizontal above the entrance to the store. This would be an art object that is wholly pragmatic. Mall shoppers don’t think too much about the arrangement of the pieces of the sign (except, perhaps, “how dull,” but that’s because most storefronts are no longer wholly pragmatic), but the pragmatic goal of the object is achieved. Shoppers now know what’s inside the store.
Now let us consider the exact same sign, with the same boring font reading “Joe’s Hardware,” in the middle of a museum. Suddenly and almost magically, the sign has become a wholly aesthetic object. It has no pragmatic purpose anymore. Instead, it exists to be perceived. Its very presence in the museum tells us as much. Whether the sign should be more floridly decorated is a matter for critical taste but is not relevant to the sign’s existence as object.
But that’s easy. Let’s go back to the mall, and let’s change up the sign. Let’s say it it still reads, “Joe’s Hardware,” but let’s say it is now a 3-dimensional entity composed of letters and a hammer. Let us say that, by a feat of mechanical engineering, probably by a technician from the Disney store, the sign is animated, so that one of the letters continually slips from its position on the sign and is continually nailed back up by a hammer. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it’s pretty rather than tacky. Now not only do mall shoppers know what is inside the store, but they find themselves standing and looking at the sign long after the pragmatic information it is designed to convey has been processed. One shopper, distracted momentarily from her noisy children, exclaims, “That’s a work of art!” What she means, of course, is not that the sign has ceased to serve a function, but merely that it has moved along the art object spectrum closer to the aesthetic. It is both pragmatic and aesthetic, and wholly neither. The fact that it is pretty only helps its case as an aesthetic object, because the sign does not pragmatically need to be pretty to convey the message that there are tools inside the store.
Of course, the pretty 3-dimensional “Joe’s Hardware” sign probably has the added benefit of bringing more people into the store, and the makers of the sign probably expected this when they spent the money to create it. But this is a secondary effect. The shoppers wooed by the new sign are not coming into the store simply because there are tools inside. They are also entering because they enjoyed perceiving the sign, and they want to see if there is more pleasure to be found within. They might buy a hammer while they’re at it.
So, everything is art, because everything is arranged, but some things are more aesthetic than others, which are more pragmatic. The ontological journey from arrangement to art does not necessitate a consciousness behind the arranging, but of course it always evokes one in the popular imagination. That is why even natural objects may be considered “art.” Though every tree or mountain has a slew of pragmatic functions that necessitate the arrangement of its parts—and scientists have devoted their careers to explaining every single aspect of the natural object in terms of its pragmatic function—we cannot help, at times, simply enjoying the perception of the object, the arrangement of shapes and colors and sizes. And so we say something like “God”—or if we prefer “Nature”—“is an artist!” And we are right, except arguably for the God part.
The crafty reader will have surmised by now that the very term “arrangement” could be rephrased as “form,” and it follows naturally that if art is that which is arranged, therefore art is that which has form. This argument plays itself out in the course of theatrical history. The theatre has outrun many of the qualities that were once seen to define itself—story, narrative, character, the proscenium—but it has yet to outrun form. Even the postdramatic theatre is arranged. Even improvisation, even Happenings, are arranged—they are arranged on the spot, but they have form nonetheless.
To that playwright colleague of mine who once asked, seemingly rhetorically, “isn’t having a good story all that you really need to have a good play?” The answer is no! Story is an available tool for arranging, but it is not the thing itself. It is not art. Art is in the form.
