I hadn't heard that one, actually. I find it hard to believe that the validity of any statement turns on its audience. Who would get to vote, how would the votes be weighed or counted, and what if the statement challenges the composition of the audience? How would the audience decide, short of engaging in statements open to argument? Statements exist only in a language, which presupposes some such mix of public, shared, and debatable terms, propositions, and understandings.
However, if the particular statement is "X is a work of art," where you fill in X, then some such criterion of truth is less obviously self-refuting. In fact, it sounds like quite a familiar argument, the "institutional theory of art" notably proposed by George Dickie of U. Illinois-Chicago. However, it, too, gets one into deep water, for much the same reasons. It may be no more than a symptom of how hard it is to come up with a definition for art that involves criteria of any kind, including this one. In my own allegedly funny glossary of terms in art, I define art as what artists do and artists as people who make art.
As you guys all probably know, Dickie picked up where, he thinks, Arthur C. Danto left off, although Danto did not agree with where that led! (I'm going to quote from myself on the man and what I have called hypothetical works of art.) Art, Danto concludes, cannot depend for its being on visual qualities, much less the skill in representation prized in Kant's time. No formal distinction, he argues, can distinguish art from "ordinary things." It even exceeds the say-so of the art world. What art can do is create meanings.
Now that runs into trouble, too. It forces Danto to see indiscernible objects, art and non-art, everywhere, and that is literally too much of the same thing. When he does not, it bothers him. Did Warhol start off with loosely painted Pop anthems? Danto calls the gesture "mere superstitiousness and aesthetic conformity." To me, that gorgeous phrase captures instead Warhol's lifelong love-hate relationship with fine art and mass culture. It thrills me, and it refuses to leave things as "ordinary" as advertising quite so meaningless.
He also remains uncomfortable stepping outside art—and into society or history. The openings give art a context, but not in the sense of much recent criticism. At one point he tracks a chain of causes, from artist to cultural movements, but after that, "I don't know." Criticism turns itself into a reverse ready-made of its own, drawing back from life.
A related approach dear to Danto or Dickie is to imagine a hypothetical work and wonder if it is art. That can lose sight of something: the art market traffics in nonexistent works all the time, and one can see them with one's own eyes. Writers insert fragmentary novels into fictions. Broadway audiences for Art view a white canvas through the entire play. It destroys a friendship while pushing the boundaries of art, or so one believes as long as the play goes on.
Other hypothetical museums remain invisible, but the works still matter. Historians piece together careers by contemplating works that have vanished or changed irrevocably. Any visitor to Milan, in fact, can join the game. Imagine The Last Supper as it once stood.
The problem is that, pursued as definitional in terms of audiences, one has to know all too well what those hypothetical squares look like, which means they are no longer hypothetical. To make his case, Danto or Dickie must assume indiscernible objects. However, that assumes visible differences cannot explain art. To counterattack, one must insist on the differences. However, that assumes differences exist and matter.
If Danto's hypotheses sound suspicious, a formalist counterattack as perhaps Mark has in mind only makes matters worse. It distrusts hypotheses too much. In reality, art's guessing games will not go away. One continues to recall artists' lives and reconstruct their intentions, and one cannot explain intent as shorthand for the finer visual evidence. When I compare Artemisia Gentileschi to Caravaggio, I have made a useful interpretation. I cannot convert it to a finite set of statements about her paintings' physical traits.
One side grounds the interpretation of a work of art in a given, the artist's stated concept. The other grounds interpretation in the sensual nature of the art object, again placed temporally and logically prior to questioning. Both sides, then, use and deride hypothetical works of art, because they cannot pierce what Wilfrid Sellars, a philosopher, has called "the myth of the given": they ask for a place to enter the world—a place that may not exist. There has to be a way outside those traps. Do not just ask what hypothetical works of art mean. Look.
In short, a philosopher cannot—and need not—abandon a thesis, but encounters with art have a nice way of transforming hypotheses into life. Imaginary art can never become real, but all art throws life into the workings of the imagination. Critics and philosophers share the priceless job of looking for it there.
Anyhow, you can read more on my site, with luck in longer versions that cohere better!
An excellent post, John, taking off in one of the directions I think necessary for consideration. The Danto/Dickey institutional theory is the tacit, triumphant theory in the artworld now, a generally ingenious philosophy, yet one going in a direction Danto did not intend, as you mention. And one that has, in it's simplified, trendy form, had a negative impact on art today, being used as the justification for most mannerist, academic Neo-Con art. See my own discussion of the philosopher David Carrier's struggles with it here. I'd like to add that your article on hypothetical works of art should be a must read in art circles, in my opinion. Danto's thought-experiment form of envisioning visually identical objects (one art, the other not) is ingenious, but also bears criticism. It is a thought-experiment, not a bona fide experience. The wonderful thing with philosophy is that it has to be SUBSUMED and transformed, not just Oedipally abandoned, as we were taught to do in Modernist art instruction. Even Danto himself is working on this now. I say, keep an eye on Carrier and Jerrold Levinson, and a few others, I think they are hot on the trail of a solution to the problem that the Institutional Theory is somehow right, but not ENOUGH and too subject to "chic" misuse.
In my discussions of the New Academy and Neo-Sophistry in art, I was more intent on using history to criticize unexamined socio-political "oversights" and problems in today's art scene, rather than on discussing the ontology of art, which I have done elsewhere. I was focusing on self-justifying issues of hegemony, which seems to have generally displaced any real argumentation. You are right that this is one result of the New Academy, and it was illuminating to me how you linked it to the sophistic belief in audience coercion --- believe it or not, I had not put those two together. Great insight, John!