The Linguistic Turn... via an on-going Book Review - "Rethinking Art" (2008) by Steve Shipps - Part 5a

The dawn of the post-modern era started in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the realisation that art was "just an idea" was first considered. The domination of modernism over the past 60 to 70 years began to be replaced with an alternative view of an expressive form.
There was a kind of disorientation.
Traditional craftsmanship began to emerge again with photorealistic paintings and those categories of art considered as outsider art were beginning to gain ground amongst the high art elite establishment, but also, Street Art or Graffiti was also gaining a place.
Another area of art which was also gaining ground was the idea of appropriation, and this can be seen in the likes of paintings such as the Mona Lisa being copied and then adorned with graffiti-esque style moustaches and beards and so on.
It was as though there was a kind of anarchy and chaos being developed against traditional art on the one side, but also the establishment and the elite on the other.
Steve Shipps points out that post-modernism can be explained through three separate overarching elements of it. He describes this as an ethos.

• The first of these is that all art is, particularly in post-modern terms, "it's all language" and linguistic. Virtually the whole of human experience is, of course, linguistic. 
• The second point that Shipps makes is that any discussion about post-modern culture equally is linguistic and so, therefore, it becomes a commentary on what is actually happening within a culture, whilst at the same time being a culture in itself and related to everything around it linguistically. 
• And then finally, the third point that Shipps makes is that any human product, whatever it may be, can be considered as "art". 

In other words, anything goes and anything that embodies an idea can be considered as "art". A critical point, though, that Shipps also makes is that it "can be" art, so whilst it's an obvious statement to make, in post-modernism object, any human created product, can be or could be art, but not everything is.... It's a question of validity, as mentioned already with the citing of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, - the ready-made urinal.

So with this background and the move to post-modernism, and the view that the world as a whole is considered in linguistic terms through signs and symbols, coupled with the fact that art now is just an idea, Ships asks the question what actually is that idea?.

Shipps in my opinion, correctly argues that many suggest that art is dead, but clearly it is not. It still goes on and people practice it as they always have, throughout our human existence. What he drives at, though, is that the unit word "art" is, arguably, somewhat meaningless, because to describe 'what is art' and 'what is not art' is highly subjective, I would argue, contemplative too.

It is here that Steve Shipps uses a linguistic device in chapter 5, by setting aside the discussion of what the word "Art" is, through his book so far, and turning to an alternative, "right-field" subject in order to compare the understanding of what "Art" means in modern terms.

Here's my interpretation based on Shipp's book...

A language is a communication system. Within it (a language), it uses a system of rules known as grammar together with punctuation, where the words, (i.e. the signs), are used in a specific order that is mutually understood by all those who use the same language, which is known as syntax. Shipps suggests that we should consider all words as signs because they are signifiers. The words have significance. Arguably these signs could be anything at all, but when arranged in a particular order (grammar and syntax) and punctuated with other certain signs to facilitate comprehension, anybody (or thing such as this computer that I'm dictating to), which also has mutually recorded the pre-understood corresponding sound waves, can understand, to some extent, the language being spoken (or read).

However, anybody outside that circle of the 'mutually connected, same language group', who does not know the signs nor significance, of that particular language, would not understand any dialogue or narrative taking place. This mutually defined agreement or convention resides within a community. If you use the signs or words in the wrong order, without the right grammar or syntax, or without the right punctuation marks, or pauses and inflexions of speech, it becomes very difficult to communicate.

It is also worth pointing out that Shipps makes the distinction that these words and signs are adapted slowly, through precedents and also by what he calls "accumulated precedent". (Cited from the book reference "After Babel; Aspects of Language and Translation" by George Steiner. Oxford University press 1998 (page 40)).