What Art Is Like, In Constant Reference to the Alice Books

by Miguel Tamen

What Art Is Like is a comic, serious inquiry into the nature of art. It provides welcome relief from prevailing modes of explaining art that involve definitions, philosophical claims, and critical judgments put forth by third parties. Scrapping all such chatter, Miguel Tamen’s aphoristic lark with aesthetic questions proceeds by taking its technical vocabulary only from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass .

According to Tamen, it would be ridiculous to think of poems or paintings or films or any variety of artistic production as distinct from other things in the world, including people. Talking about art should be contiguous with talking about many other relevant and important matters. Tamen offers a series of analogies and similes to help us imagine these connected experiences. One, taken from the analytical table of contents where the book is writ small, suggests that “understanding a poem is like understanding a cat; neither ever says anything back and you can’t keep a conversation with them. All art is like this, but not only art is like this; nature, the past, numbers are also like this.”

Tamen takes up many central issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, including the connection between art and having fuzzy ideas about art, the mistake of imagining that art-decisions are put forth by art-courts where you are both judge and jury, and the notion that what happens with art also happens to you.

Genres: Art

128 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2012

About the author

MIGUEL TAMEN é professor (e director do Programa em Teoria da Literatura) na Universidade de Lisboa. Deu aulas em várias universidades americanas, nomeadamente, desde 2000 como visitante, na Universidade de Chicago. Foi senior fellow no Stanford Humanities Center e Rockefeller Fellow no National Humanities Center. Escreveu vários livros, o último dos quais What Art Is Like.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

One day I might come back and read this book properly again. It does give me a lot of interesting funny ideas but after a while the ideas get too funny it hurts my brain to understand them.
In other words, the points made in this book about art are very interesting and good ones. By referencing the Alice books it opens a mind to new ways of looking and thinking about art and Carroll's words. But the way it is written made the book itself dense, very hard to read and understand.

[Jamais · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the problems with literature as art is that it take someone to appreciate it the right way. //What Art is Like// is a look at art using the books of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" as its examples. The books provide the muse for an exploration of what art is, and how we can best discuss art. By looking at how Carroll creates a virtual world of logic and then breaking it down into the difference between what is essentially real and what is illusory, making for an interesting jumping off point for artistic discussions.

Although full of brilliant observations about art and the discussions thereof, the almost Victorian prose it is written in makes it almost too dense to read through. It does take Carroll's writings to another level, using them as commentary on some of the art world's pretentiousness, but at a risk of invoking that issue itself. It narrowly skates the line throughout the book, but for those willing to take a chance and work through the language this can be a thought-provoking book. This is an outstanding book for artists, but it may take some slogging through to thoroughly enjoy.

As written by Jamais Jochim for http://sanfranciscobookreview.com/