Thinking about wholes and parts in this way is a key component of good old-fashioned art appreciation theory. A work of art is a…
Thinking about wholes and parts in this way is a key component of good old-fashioned art appreciation theory. A work of art is a whole, and this whole contains many parts — the materials out of which it’s made being just one of them. We could include the interpretative horizons of the art’s consumers, for example, and the contexts in which the art materials were assembled — a highly explosive concept, as we saw earlier. In this way it’s obvious that there are so many more parts than there is whole. In an age of ecological awareness there is no one scale to rule them all. This means that art and art appreciation won’t stay still, in the way that a lot of art theory (for instance in Kant) wants. And in the absence of a single authoritative (anthropocentric) standard of taste with which to judge art, how we regard it is also about how wholes are always less than the sums of their parts. A work of art is also a transparent bag full of eyes. There is something inherently weird, even disgusting, about beauty itself, and this weirdness gets mixed back in when we consider things in an ecological way. this is because beauty just happens, without our ego cooking it up. The experience of beauty itself is an entity that isn’t ‘me’. This means that the experience has an intrinsic weirdness to it. This is why other people’s taste might come across as bizarre or kitschy. Morton, Timothy. Being Ecological. London: Pelican Books, 2018.