Information and Aesthetics in Contemporary Art
This essay examines the relationship between information and aesthetic experience in contemporary art by analyzing John Ashbery's "Soonest Mended," Anthony Huberman's concept of information-resistant art, and Umberto Eco's distinction between meaning and information. The paper argues that while Huberman advocates for art that "stops information" to create active viewer participation, Eco's information-theoretic framework suggests that ambiguity and formal complexity actually increase information content. The essay ultimately contends that rather than banishing information entirely, the most productive understanding of contemporary art involves a dynamic relationality between work and viewer that accommodates both interpretive depth and spontaneous aesthetic experience.
- Introduction: Information and the Postmodern Artist: Ashbery, information, and aesthetic questioning
- Huberman's Critique of the Informed Mind: Active engagement over connoisseurship
- Interpretation versus Audience Engagement: Decoding versus relational viewing practices
- Eco's Information Theory and Aesthetic Meaning: Ambiguity, complexity, and formal information content
- Reconciling Information, Formalism, and Viewer Experience: Beyond information resistance toward viewer relationality
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What makes this paper effective
- Opens with a vivid literary example (Ashbery's "Soonest Mended") that concretely establishes the tension between information and meaning before moving to theoretical abstraction.
- Carefully contextualizes each theoretical framework (Huberman, Eco) within its full argumentative scope rather than isolated quotations, showing how definitions shift across contexts.
- Uses hypothetical examples (the Greek red-figure vase, Karen Finley's performance) to test theoretical claims against real aesthetic scenarios, avoiding pure abstraction.
- Identifies genuine conceptual paradoxes (e.g., how ambiguity in Eco's framework increases "information" while Huberman seeks to limit it) rather than resolving them prematurely.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The essay employs sustained conceptual analysis through textual exegesis—moving carefully through primary sources (Ashbery, Huberman, Eco) to expose how their definitions of key terms ("information," "meaning," "interpretation") operate within different theoretical systems. Rather than using sources as evidence for a predetermined argument, the writer allows apparent tensions between sources to drive inquiry, ultimately recognizing that different frameworks (cybernetic information theory versus aesthetic reception theory) may describe overlapping phenomena without contradiction.
Structure breakdown
The argument follows a pattern of progressive refinement: it begins with a literary moment of skepticism about information, then examines Huberman's proposed solution (privileging curious engagement), tests that solution against historical and contemporary examples, introduces Eco's redefinition of information through formal complexity, and concludes by dissolving the apparent paradox through a recognition that both frameworks address viewer relationality rather than absolute resistance to meaning. The paper resists simple thesis-support structure in favor of iterative exploration.
Introduction: Information and the Postmodern Artist
The American poet and art critic John Ashbery, in what is perhaps his most famous poem "Soonest Mended," sketches what he has described as an "everybody's autobiography," in which his characteristically postmodern approach to narrative style (leaping from comic strip to novel to abstraction) seems to question the value of the very concept of "information":
And then there always came a time when / Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile / Came plowing down the course, just to make sure everything was O.K., / Only by that time we were in another chapter and confused / About how to receive this latest piece of information. / Was it information? Weren't we rather acting this out / For someone else's benefit, thoughts in a mind / With room enough and to spare for our little problems (so they began to seem), / Our daily quandary about food and the rent and bills to be paid? (Selected Poems 87)
This well-known passage demonstrates how the queasy questioning of "information" is immediately followed by a vision that can be described as both paranoid and performative. The vicissitudes of the contemporary artist, Ashbery seems to suggest, are directly related to the sense of audience, and it is the audience that prompts the mental leap from questioning the status of "this latest piece of information" to a nightmarish vision in which the artist's existence is reduced to "thoughts in a mind" belonging to someone else. Ashbery's deliberately abstracted and aestheticized poem—whose very title enacts an argument for reticence by reticently refusing to quote in full the proverb it references ("least said, soonest mended")—offers a starting point for approaching the question of the intersection of information with aesthetics.
This essay considers the question through the lens of Anthony Huberman's concept of "information" as expressed in "Naïve Set Theory." Huberman writes, "In the end, art that stops information is art that creates space for a viewer to experience it." Through this lens, the paper assesses the view of art and information expressed by Umberto Eco in his essay "The Open Work in Visual Arts."
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