Information and Aesthetics in Contemporary Art

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.

Huberman's Critique of the Informed Mind

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."

To understand Huberman's claim, it is necessary to examine his statement within its full context. Huberman writes:

To stand for the importance of things we don't understand is to stand for an active and reactive pursuit of knowledge. To favor the curious mind over the informed one is to make room for experimentation and risk-taking. To stop the path of information is to reject the passive consumer and to require, instead, an active engagement of a motivated and implicated audience of participants. In the end, art that stops information is art that creates space for a viewer to experience it.

What this context makes clear is that Huberman is assessing information in light of how a work of art is received. Resistance to facile interpretation—acknowledging the work of art as one of those "things we don't understand"—places the viewer in a relationship to the work in which the viewer pursues knowledge. However, this also fundamentally redefines the role of the critic. By "favor[ing] the curious mind over the informed one," Huberman implies that previously the dynamic worked in the opposite direction. He likens the "informed mind" to an older model of art criticism founded on connoisseurship, in which the "information" possessed by the mind contextualizes and anatomizes a work so thoroughly that any chance for a personal or spontaneous reaction is lost.

Interpretation versus Audience Engagement

The "informed mind" Huberman urges us away from is the sort of art criticism practiced by an earlier generation—the connoisseurship exemplified by scholars like Gombrich or journals like the Burlington Magazine. Consider, for example, what sort of viewer would be required to accurately judge a newly discovered fifth-century BCE Athenian red-figure vase. An "informed mind" would be positively required to establish authenticity, reconstruct the artifact physically if necessary, and elucidate the meaning of its imagery. But does this automatically reduce the viewer to the level of a "passive consumer"? To a certain extent it must, for the simple reason that an Athenian red-figure vase was, in its original historical context, considered more like a consumer good than a work of art. The erasure of personal reaction is permitted here because ultimately the work does not possess the aesthetic stature of a Michelangelo sculpture. An ancient Greek vase painting can hardly be expected to yield endless fodder for interpretation, and thus is hardly likely to encourage the "active participation" of its viewers.

Yet the larger question concerns interpretation of the work of art itself. Privileging the act of "interpretation" as the most appropriate way to approach art is essentially another way of saying that art exists purely as a vehicle for coded information. This framework relies on the interpreter to complete the aesthetic experience by decoding that "message"—either by divining it through intuition or analysis, or by applying rules specified in an external cipher-book to interpret it in the most standardized way possible. The problem rests in assuming a one-for-one correspondence between details or aspects of a specific work and the artist's intended "meaning," and in finding the "purpose" of art to lie in that act of interpretation rather than in the relation between viewer and work, as Huberman suggests.

Huberman is hardly novel in wanting to privilege the relationship between art and audience over the interpretation of art by the viewer. Half a century ago, Susan Sontag was already complaining in "Against Interpretation" that in place of a hermeneutics of art we need an erotics of art. Yet this differs markedly from the "experimentation and risk-taking" Huberman advocates. A Sontagian erotics of art would simply be a more rarefied act of connoisseurship, hardly evading the notion that value judgments in aesthetics represent merely the expression of personal tastes. For Sontag, however, this would pose no problem—like a number of other aesthetes ranging from Oscar Wilde to Harold Bloom, the distinction between critical and creative activity is elided, and there is suddenly no difference between what a work of criticism does and what a work of art does.

What Huberman proposes is, in its way, more radical. He wishes to include the critic (or, as he carefully chooses his term, "audience") as a necessary part of the artistic act. With certain works of art this seems absolutely vital in terms of the most basic conception. Without an audience, a performance artist is simply engaging in solitary action. With an audience, the work becomes performance art. The audience does more than merely legitimate the work by sitting through it; the performative nature itself guarantees its status as art—as an aesthetic experience that is not reducible to a mere artifact. This may be contrasted with contemporary visual art produced for the market, where artists like Warhol, Jeff Koons, or Damien Hirst produce work that invites the passivity of the consumer, creating what is essentially the contemporary equivalent of Athenian red-figure pottery.

Eco's Information Theory and Aesthetic Meaning

It is useful at this point to introduce the insights offered by Umberto Eco in his essay "The Open Work in the Visual Arts," starting with Eco's "radical distinction between 'meaning' and 'information'" (Eco 93). Eco's specialist use of terminology from cybernetics and information theory sidesteps the vertiginous skepticism of Ashbery's "Was it information?" because the category of "information" has been redefined. One cannot address seeming irrelevancy in Ashbery's fashion because, as Eco defines it, "the more improbable, ambiguous, unpredictable and disordered the structure, the greater the information" (93). In other words, the less a work relies on formal structure—which must streamline and encompass a message that does not disrupt overall formality—the more "information" it contains in Eco's sense. At the same time, such work offers more opportunity for "favor[ing] the curious over the informed mind" as Huberman would prefer.

Furthermore, music provides an instructive example. As Pater claimed in the mid-nineteenth century, all art aspires to the condition of music, a form without fixed content. Music is not only an art requiring performance; it necessarily organizes itself primarily in the fourth dimension and in the third only through its players. Yet music also fits Eco's requirement that the "information" contained in a work is "not the kind of information that enriches one's knowledge of the concepts to which it refers, but rather a kind of aesthetic information that rests on formal values" (Eco 94). The more complex and unpredictable the musical structure, the greater its information content, yet this very complexity may paradoxically enhance rather than diminish the listener's active, curious engagement.