Tomatoes, or How Not to Define Art [SLYT 11min 46 seconds]

January 3, 2017 9:51 AM

Ceci n'est pas une tomato. A Tomato is Botanically a Fruit, but is it also Linguistically a Vegetable? This is a video about how we (as humans) define and use tomatoes, except it's really a video about how we define, use and interact with Art.

You are not required to like tomatoes, or indeed have a strong opinion on their inherent fruit/vegetable-ness to enjoy the video.

How you pronounce the word tomato is your own business and has no real bearing on this discussion.

posted by Faintdreams (30 comments total)

In my home, there is a rule that when people trot out the old, "Well, actually tomatoes are a fruit..." you can throw tomatoes at them with impunity.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:03 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I've also heard that, because it's a fruit with edible seeds, that makes it a berry.
posted by wormwood23 at 10:10 AM on January 3, 2017

Is there anyone in the history of ever who thought that a painting of a pipe was a pipe?
posted by thelonius at 10:13 AM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

wormwood23: I've also heard that, because it's a fruit with edible seeds, that makes it a berry.

There's a poster in my daughter's school saying the same thing about pumpkins. Giant orange berries.
posted by clawsoon at 10:17 AM on January 3, 2017

How you pronounce the word tomato is your own business and has no real bearing on this discussion.

Then let's call the whole thing off.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:24 AM on January 3, 2017 [12 favorites]

I mean, there are actual, real definitions out there. If anyone cares.

"A berry is a fleshy fruit without a stone produced from a single flower containing one ovary."
posted by humboldt32 at 10:28 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

Remind me never to eat berry sorbet made by a botanist
posted by iotic at 10:56 AM on January 3, 2017 [6 favorites]

I don't like tomatoes, but I love tomato-based sauces. So to me it's merely a Sauce-In-Waiting.
posted by jonmc at 10:57 AM on January 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

The point of debating opinion is not necessarily to find some absolute truth.
posted by Zalzidrax at 11:07 AM on January 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

There exists videotape of a young Sphinx in kindergarten when the teachers stood up tall and told us to be trees and the camera pans to me all scrunched up on the floor and I say "I'm a tomato." I stand by that statement forty years later.
posted by Sphinx at 11:11 AM on January 3, 2017 [8 favorites]

I don't get it. Is ketchup art or not?
posted by Kabanos at 11:23 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

Abbot: Costello, did you ever draw a nice, fat salary?
Costello: No. But I once sketched a skinny tomato!
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:24 AM on January 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

I always figured that something has to be useless to be art. I think it was maybe Alice Walker who got me thinking along these lines: Quilt on a bed, not art. Quilt on a wall, art. You turn something into art by taking its job away from it.

Sundried tomato on a pizza, not art. Sundried tomato in a stylish bottle on the top shelf that will never be opened, art.
posted by clawsoon at 11:27 AM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I thought this was an interesting video but felt like it skirts around the deeper issue here, which is that meaning and truth are ultimately socially derived. Even among scientists who champion a strictly empirical approach to knowledge, there can be broad consensus on supposed facts which turn out to not represent reality at all. In fact I believe most scientists would shy away from claiming to explain the universe versus strictly describing what they observe and coming up with theories to attempt to model it.

When you get into more abstract concepts like "tomato" once again the meaning is based on the social context, whether it's with chefs or botanists. On one level there's the word itself. A word representing multiple ideas is nothing new, but having a group agree to one common definition may be hard. You may as well come up with new or alternative words to describe the different ideas. The reductionist conclusion from this is that intelligent debate is impossible because all parties have to agree what every word they use means.

But then there's the idea itself, which presumably is represented across different languages and cultures. How do we know this is the same thing? There exists an object in reality that we call a tomato, but in order to perceive it we must filter the observation through our senses and our minds. To come up with a simple example, if you're a person who rarely avoids eating sweets, the experience of eating a ripe tomato may be that it is intensely sweet and juicy. But if you eat sweets all the time, the experience may be more in its tartness. The idea of a tomato can only be derived from experience, but all experience is subject to interpretation.

Which leads me to art. Art, as a label we apply to things, is almost meaningless. We all have our own personal understanding of what art is, and that understanding may even be subject to change, and you might even have some sort of broad consensus among your circle of friends, your class, your country, or all humanity. But can anyone definitively say what art is, when its definition has radically changed in the span of a few centuries? I don't think so. At best we're just blindly grasping at straws, and the sooner people realize it the fewer tired arguments about what is and isn't art we can have. Saying something isn't art is akin to that annoying cousin who tells you a tomato is actually a fruit. At best it's a failure to understand the pliable meaning of words. At worst it's trolling.
posted by rq at 11:42 AM on January 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

The definition of 'art' is kind of low hanging fruit. People do still say that things are not art, but if you question them, they're usually seeing 'art' as a value judgment, and will usually admit that the thing in question is art, and that what they mean is that it's bad art for suckers and phonies.
posted by ernielundquist at 11:46 AM on January 3, 2017

This is great. I'm going to send this to every blow-hard who's ever insisted something was "not art" because they personally didn't like it or, more frequently, didn't understand the context and so were made to feel uncomfortable. It seems most people consider art in a very Capitalist way, as in, does this make me feel good, would I purchase it to put on my wall at home, would most people understand it/enjoy it? It's high time folks stop naming themselves the arbitrators of What Is And Is Not Art (which can be a very dangerous instinct historically).
posted by Mooseli at 11:47 AM on January 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

The definition of 'art' is kind of low hanging fruit.

I say high growing vegetable!
posted by Kabanos at 11:48 AM on January 3, 2017 [12 favorites]

Ugh. Putting aside quibbles about the tomato analogy, the discussion of Ebert's proclamation on video games and their (non)art status was awful. There have been a lot of responses to Ebert -- the best being by Grant Tavinor and Aaron Smuts -- but nobody thinks that they get their art status by being readymades.

Look, if I screw a copy of "The Last of Us" to the gallery wall, it might become an artwork (because of my saying so in the right institutional context), but not because of its specifically video-game-like qualities. The whole point of the readymade gesture is that it applies to arbitrary everyday things. It's fundamentally anaesthetic. That's the opposite of how people argue for video games (or some of them) having the status of artworks. They appeal to narrative and visual complexity, immersiveness, expressiveness, etc. An absolutely maddening claim out of someone who spends whole minutes getting snarky about Ebert not having cracked an art theory textbook.
posted by informavore at 11:49 AM on January 3, 2017

rq: But can anyone definitively say what art is, when its definition has radically changed in the span of a few centuries? I don't think so. At best we're just blindly grasping at straws, and the sooner people realize it the fewer tired arguments about what is and isn't art we can have. Saying something isn't art is akin to that annoying cousin who tells you a tomato is actually a fruit. At best it's a failure to understand the pliable meaning of words.

The meanings are pliable, but there are still meanings, and - as the video touches on - the shared parts of those meanings are typically hammered out in debates about what ____ is. You might have your own meaning for a term, but if you want to have a conversation about it you have to call on shared meanings.

For contentious terms, like art, what's contentious is usually which social group you're identifying with when you call on their shared meanings. You're not just pulling out random meanings and grasping at straws; you're pulling out tribal identifiers. You're signalling who you'd prefer to share your meaning with.
posted by clawsoon at 11:59 AM on January 3, 2017

Some art tribes: Piss Christ vs. Kinkade. Duchamp vs. Michelangelo. Concept vs. Craft.
posted by clawsoon at 12:04 PM on January 3, 2017

Piss Christ vs. Kinkade.

Kinkade had a pretty good piss game himself
posted by thelonius at 12:09 PM on January 3, 2017

Tomatoes as musical art: Guy Clark, "Homegrown Tomatoes" (Live ACL 1990). Only two things that money can't buy--and that's true love and homegrown tomatoes.
posted by MonkeyToes at 1:01 PM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

I have used the tomato fruit/vegetable divide before as a similar analogy. I did not emphasize the cultural element so much, but just the part where if you spend too much time arguing over a definition, it's useful to ask the question, "How would you actually use this definition?"
posted by RobotHero at 1:23 PM on January 3, 2017

but nobody thinks that they get their art status by being readymades.

I have my own issues with the video (glib presentation of often divisive and difficult ideas without acknowledging the extent of the claims being made), but I don't think that it was arguing that they do. You might choose to infer that, but I can't see why one would. It really wouldn't make any sense as a claim. "Nothing can't be art, in the right context" could be taken to refer to the particular activities of the game in the context of the game itself, and I'm pretty sure that it should be. Because why assume, unnecessarily, a reading so uncharitable as to be practically meaningless?
posted by howfar at 1:55 PM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Counterpoint.
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:03 PM on January 3, 2017

Counter-Counterpoint
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:03 PM on January 3, 2017

Fight me
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:04 PM on January 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

clawsoon: I always figured that something has to be useless to be art. I think it was maybe Alice Walker who got me thinking along these lines: Quilt on a bed, not art. Quilt on a wall, art. You turn something into art by taking its job away from it.

Stoneware mug on the dinner table: not art. Stoneware mug, 500 years afterward: art. If you wait long enough some archeologist will be interested in it.
posted by sukeban at 2:55 PM on January 3, 2017

You are confusing art with artifact. Archeologists are interested in artifacts, but not all artifacts are necessarily art, in fact.
posted by RobotHero at 8:52 PM on January 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

Point taken.
posted by sukeban at 3:57 AM on January 4, 2017