Please make use of one or more the following thought experiments in constructing this week’s discussion board:

1. Betsy the Chimpanzee in the Baltimore Zoo is given some paints and some paper; with them she creates various products, some of which might be called paintings. Even if Betsy’s works are not masterpieces, they are undeniably interesting and appealing in their own way. Selected pieces of Betsy’s “oeuvre” are displayed for a month at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Suppose that the next month the same pieces are exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute, and that at both exhibitions, Betsy’s works are greatly admired by the viewing public.

Is Betsy’s work art? Is it art only under certain conditions of display (e.g., at the art museum, but not at the natural history museum)? If it is (at least sometimes) art, whose art is it?

2. Suppose a well-known artist happens to be vacationing in the small community where you are curator of the local museum. One day you see him walking along the beach, and you tell him that your museum — although it is almost without funds to purchase new works — would be greatly honored to be given a work by him. He pauses, smiles in an indecipherable way, and bends over to pick up a piece of driftwood that is lying on the beach. “Here,” he says with a glint in his eye, “take this. Call it ‘Driftwood’.”

As curator, do you exhibit the driftwood or not? (Your gallery would be greatly enhanced by acquiring a genuine work by this famous artist).

3. Consider the following possibility, based on an exhibit at the Tate Gallery in 1976. A person already known, perhaps even famous, as a “minimalist” sculptor buys 120 bricks and, on the floor of the well-known art museum, arranges them in a rectangular pile, 2 bricks high, 6 across, and 10 lengthwise. He labels it “Pile of Bricks”. In another part of the building, a bricklayer’s assistant at a renovation site takes 120 bricks of the very same kind and arranges them in the very same way, wholly unaware of what has happened in the museum — he is just a tidy bricklayer’s assistant. Can the first pile of bricks be a work of art, while the second pile is not, even though the two piles are seemingly identical in all observable respects? Why or why not?

4. The following is one of William Carlos Williams’s best-known and most often anthologized poems:

This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

What, if any, difference should it make if someone discovered that Williams had not written this as a poem, that he had never intended it for publication, and that, in fact, it was just a note he had left on the door of a friend’s refrigerator after eating all of the plums?

To get full credit for this post, you must:

• address the prompt(s) fully (write a paragraph or two). Cite the text where appropriate;
• respond meaningfully to one classmate’s posting (say something substantial – add to the discussion!) (your response should be a well-thought-out paragraph or two). Cite the text where appropriate; and
• use standard English and grammar in all postings.

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