Art and Objects - Graham Harman

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commodity-form. Art is autonomous for the same reason as everything else: however significant the relations between one field or object and another, most things do not affect each other in the least. Any attempt to explain art in terms of capital or popular culture shoulders a heavy burden of proof in explaining why these outside factors ought to outweigh what belongs to the artwork in its own right. It is not enough merely to assert that “all these relations [are] internal to the critical structure of the artwork” (ANA 46). Such claims face the doom of what Arthur Danto calls a “metaphysical sandpit” (TC 102), as will be seen in Chapter 6.

      This book was nearly complete for many months before I was able to add the final chapters; something in the argument felt wrong, for reasons hard to identify, and the publisher suffered patiently through the resulting delay. I was finally able to finish due to a lucky accident that requires a bit of personal history. In the late 1980s I was an undergraduate at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, a classical liberal arts institution that hosts a stimulating Friday night lecture series. On one of those nights during my junior or senior year, a fiftyish Michael Fried made the short trip from Baltimore to give us a sparkling preview of what would soon become his 1990 book Courbet’s Realism. Though I remember being blown away by Fried as a speaker, I had no sense at the time of his reputation or significance, and could not have foreseen that his work as an art critic and historian would become important to me as a philosopher many years later. Having long regretted my youthful lack of preparation to fathom the depths of his lecture on Courbet, I made sure to nominate Fried for the visiting speaker series at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles after joining the faculty there in 2016. Less than two years later, the SCI-Arc administration delivered on my wish: Fried arrived on campus in early February 2018 for two lectures and a tireless Saturday masterclass, topped off with a marvelous Sunday talk on Caravaggio at the Getty Museum. It was a rare treat to see this living master at work for the better part of a week. More concretely, from hearing Fried speak and from asking a number of strategic questions, I was finally able to see my way through to finishing this book. He will not agree with most or even much of it, but I hope he will appreciate how his important body of work has sparked yet another parallel line of thought in philosophy. As witnessed by the recent appearance of Mathew Abbott’s edited collection Michael Fried and Philosophy, I am not the first to owe philosophical thoughts to Fried, and am undoubtedly not the last.

      1 1. Stephen Melville, “Becoming Medium,” p. 104; Richard Moran, “Formalism and the Appearance of Nature,” p. 117.

      This is the first book to address in detail the relation between art and Object-Oriented Ontology (hereafter OOO), in the wake of a number of earlier publications on the topic.1 For the purposes of this book, “art” means visual art, though the principles developed here could be exported – mutatis mutandis – to any artistic genre. What ought to make OOO’s relation to art of especial interest to the reader is that this new philosophy treats art not as a peripheral subfield, but as the very heart of our discipline, as in the well-known OOO call for “aesthetics as first philosophy.”2 But what does it mean for aesthetics to serve as the basis for all philosophy, and why would anyone accept such an apparently deviant thesis? To develop these questions is the purpose of this book.

      That brings us to the second and broader misunderstanding to which the title of this book might lead. Positive talk of “objects” in an arts context is often assumed to mean praise for mid-sized durable entities (sculptures, statues, glassworks, easel paintings) at the expense of what seem to be more free-form art media (performances, happenings, transient installations, conceptual works). In a OOO setting, however, “object” has a far broader meaning than solid material things. For the object-oriented thinker, anything – including events and performances – can count as an object as long as it meets two simple criteria: (a) irreducibility downward to its components, and (b) irreducibility upward to its effects. These two types of reduction are known in OOO as “undermining” and “overmining,” while their combination – which happens more often than not – is called “duomining.”3 OOO holds that nearly all human thought involves some form of duomining, and tries to counteract it by paying attention to the object in its own right, apart from its internal components and outward effects. This is admittedly a difficult task, since undermining and overmining are the two basic forms of knowledge we have. When someone asks us what something is, we can answer either by telling them what the thing is made of (undermining), what it does (overmining), or both at once (duomining). Given that these are the only kinds of knowledge that exist, they are precious tools of human survival, and we must be careful not to denounce these three forms of “mining” or pretend we can do without them. Yet my hope is that the reader will come to recognize the parallel existence of forms of cognition without knowledge that somehow bring objects into focus, despite not reducing them in either of the two mining directions.

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