Artist Ethics and Art’s Audience: Mus Musculus and a Dry-Roasted Peanut
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper sets out to articulate developments in the relationship between artists, artworks and their audiences (or publics), as they meet with increased mediation via social media platforms. Examples of work by artists addressing issues within human-animal studies, is the key area of focus. The paper tracks and probes at ethical concerns and developments in this area over the past few decades. Examples of work by artists such as Julie Andreyev, Mircea Cantor and Paola Pivi are cited alongside a more detailed treatment of the author’s own interactions with a house mouse during lockdown. The paper is strongly intoned with the perspective of an artist and educator who has been working in the field of human-animal studies for the past four decades. It contains welcome humour, a rarity in academic journals, and tracks the shift of ethical responsibility for reputation management from the arts sector more broadly (curators, gallerists and art critics) to the artists themselves. It also overviews and probes at shifts within how critical exchange manifests and ends on a series of questions for artists addressing the above themes.
This is an articulate and thought-provoking insight into a sea change in ethical responsibility and critical potential observed as it intersects with animal studies and animals in art. One of its strengths is its emphasis on practice-led methods. The author writes from in depth experience of working as an artist and observations of the works of others over many years. It could benefit the paper to include a little more detail on the works of the artists cited. It assumes that these works are well known, and they can of course be researched by a reader, however a few lines on the works cited would help to contextualise why the very particular works chosen were important and how incisively they help each nuance of the argument.
This paper doesn’t directly mention the phenomenon of artists involved in practice-led research. This reads as a potential omission in the section on how artists have now become responsible for inscribing their own narratives. The author mentions their own trajectory within a research environment presenting all over the world but doesn’t acknowledge the contribution of creative practice research in mediating ethical concerns relating to animals in art (for better or for worse).
There is a passing reference to Second Wave Feminism, but the article otherwise doesn’t engage with feminist, queer or critical race discourses that do also tussle with ethics and the place and role of criticism currently.
The section on ‘the phenomenon of digitalisation’ could be written closer to the issues being raised in this article rather than as a general overview of digitalisation in its relation to labour and progress. Written as it is, the paragraph beginning on line 222 is indicative of territory this paper does not address on animals, humans, work and labour from which further insights could have be gleaned where technologies impact on animal/human interactions.
The paper ends quite abruptly on questions to ask artists working with this ‘new audience’ as identified within the article. Directly preceding them is a section asserting the need for the critical inclusion of the views of those opposed to the principals an artist might want to promote. It would be beneficial for more context to be given to the questions so that the gap between the two final sections is bridged and it is clear what is being sought by the framing of these questions and how and where they might be answered.
The paper covers important territory on ethics stemming from an experience of social isolation during Covid and the means at our disposal more broadly (with an emphasis on digital recording equipment) to mediate beyond the artist’s own experience and morphology. It identifies, through an incident of stopping short of engaging an audience and through sophisticated knowledge of artists working in this field, issues of where and how animals in their relations with humans, can be openly debated. The references are up to date and relevant.
On line 137 ‘much’ should be ‘such’.
Lines 147, 148. ‘an account of telos’ and ‘could or should aim for’ in the following line amount to the same thing. Suggest making this sentence more succinct.
Line 152 ‘even if she were sure she that while’. Delete ‘she’ as struck through here.
The quality of English Language in this article is good. Sometimes sentences could be made or succinct, but this, and the few aberrations that I picked up in my review, can be ironed out ahead of publication with the editorial team.
Author Response
Point 1
It could benefit the paper to include a little more detail on the works of the artists cited. It assumes that these works are well known, and they can of course be researched by a reader, however a few lines on the works cited would help to contextualise why the very particular works chosen were important and how incisively they help each nuance of the argument.
Response: I now realise that I had added context in some instances, but not in others. So, wherever I’ve mentioned an artwork now, I’ve added some context to explain the choice of those works.
Point 2
This paper doesn’t directly mention the phenomenon of artists involved in practice-led research. This reads as a potential omission in the section on how artists have now become responsible for inscribing their own narratives. The author mentions their own trajectory within a research environment presenting all over the world but doesn’t acknowledge the contribution of creative practice research in mediating ethical concerns relating to animals in art (for better or for worse).
Response: This article doesn’t directly mention or acknowledge practice-led research, because as its title suggests, the second of the article’s two subjects is art’s audience, an audience for art found widely in art organisations, galleries and museums across the world and for the same art then globally disseminated on broadcast and social media, so stretching into hundreds of millions of people. The audience for current research led by art practice only is in this global context very small and narrow and its impact on artist ethics thus minimal, however much university art researchers might wish otherwise.
In fact, as an artist I undertake art practice as (or art practice in) research elsewhere, in which I set out via my artworks and their display to test and extend a range of creative methodologies.
But not here. In this article, although I may hint at it, I’m not undertaking art practice as-or-in research, nor am I seeking to refer to other researchers using art practice as or in research. Instead, I analyse some ethical points around display of art about animals that involves art censorship (or cancellation) as it arises from historical changes in art’s audience. I suppose these are art-historical points about ethics made by an artist, not an art historian, in an art journal’s special edition about ethics as they touch on art and animals. There is also I suppose in the article a sub-text present about current ethics around censorship (or cancellation) in other academic subjects and political arenas.
Point 3
There is a passing reference to Second Wave Feminism, but the article otherwise doesn’t engage with feminist, queer or critical race discourses that do also tussle with ethics and the place and role of criticism currently.
Response: While critical social justice theory (feminist, queer and critical race discourses) certainly intersects at points with the academic field of human-animal studies, (see Best, Boisseron, Braidotti, Deckha, Dell’Aversano and Twine, inter alia), I have little or nothing to add to those intersections in this article that might lend new insight or discovery (which I see as the purpose of a research article), especially if I were to engage with and rehearse again the familiar arguments of others over a long-standing hierarchy of oppressions, which I would reasonably understand as a kind of tautology - unnecessary. In any case, my subject here has been not the macro and a priori Ur-oppression of other animals by the human one, but only artist ethics and art’s audience as these now relate to a wishful micro-action – the planned, but as yet undisplayed representation of an animal in a given art practice.
For the sake of clarity, I have now elaborated the passing reference to second wave feminism, which I'd cited opaquely there, to make a culture war point about the misogyny to which second wave feminists are currently subjected.
Point 4
The section on ‘the phenomenon of digitalisation’ could be written closer to the issues being raised in this article rather than as a general overview of digitalisation in its relation to labour and progress. Written as it is, the paragraph beginning on line 222 is indicative of territory this paper does not address on animals, humans, work and labour from which further insights could have be gleaned where technologies impact on animal/human interactions.
Response: I have now bookended that paragraph to frame its deliberations more for the argument about audience and contested ethics in art, including those around animals. N.B. Please note that the paragraph in question now begins on line 259, following an insertion I’ve made of a new paragraph, in response to another reviewer.
Point 5
The paper ends quite abruptly on questions to ask artists working with this ‘new audience’ as identified within the article. Directly preceding them is a section asserting the need for the critical inclusion of the views of those opposed to the principals an artist might want to promote. It would be beneficial for more context to be given to the questions so that the gap between the two final sections is bridged and it is clear what is being sought by the framing of these questions and how and where they might be answered.
Response: I have rewritten the end of the article, so that the questions posed arise less abruptly, have more context and more naturally refer to the rest of the article.
Reviewer 2 Report
The article draws attention to how (following the proliferation of digitisation) ethical codes of practice applied to or by artists hitherto making work in the context of human animal studies have brought about certain new self-censorship practices in artists, across all facets of art-practice and art-management and particularly evidenced on social media platforms and in online discussion groups.
In the first part of the text, we are given a glimpse into shared city lives during Covid lockdown, in which a house-mouse captures the attention of the author creating opportunities for conceptual development, artistic experiments and sustained domestic connections. The reader is sympathetically drawn into the narrative which is told in a sincere and personal way culminating in the production of a possible artwork – a video-work to be precise. At this point there is a shift in the story as the reader is given glimpses into the ethical dilemma facing the artist in her/their anticipation of new, digitally constituted audiences. The author/artist puts forward the reasons for the dilemma, first taking into consideration perhaps more established reflective, ethical questioning regarding the animal itself, but then in addition regarding audiences for the artwork which hitherto might not have existed (or collectively had such access to the work). It is clear from the text that the author considers one such potential audience for her artwork to be people within (critical) animal studies or activist groups. The reader is given an insight into the author’s ethical development in relation to visual art (from art student to professional) and the parameters of a more traditional relationship to a public, at that time mainly exercised through exhibitions. In these situations, the role of the curator was of greater importance, whereas currently, according to the author an artist may attract or accumulate multiple audiences totally beyond the power structures of curated gallery exhibitions.
In this way, the article shifts from the personal (the experience that prompts an artwork) into an examination of the consequences of digitisation, censorship, self-censorship and ultimately, audience power including its real and perceived, or anticipated reach. The questions touch also upon power structures and critique within art schools and the consequential effects in all these quarters, of the increased degree of artists’ self-analysis. This latter half of the text is well researched and gives a glimpse into various recent incidents which have been performed in a wide spectrum within the Western artworld and are rooted in ethical consideration given voice through digitisation and online platforms. In the context of controversy surrounding several named postmodern artworks further references are given to art related incidents of digitised censorship*. The overall conclusion is that ethical considerations formerly residing within a relatively small or discrete audiences (in this case of animal studies groups and activists) has through digitisation become extensive and disparate in its form as an open online platform with a world audience. The article, in identifying problems does not offer any solution, but concludes with three questions directly related to the ethics of non-human animals in art and the audience/s of such art.
In this concluding paragraph a reference to the article’s introduction and an acknowledgement of the role of a single mouse as the inspiration and catalyst for the thinking behind the article would have been useful and appropriate.
*Would have preferred to see artworks referenced in the article detailed in the reference.
Author Response
Response to reviewer report 2
Point 1. In this concluding paragraph a reference to the article’s introduction and an acknowledgement of the role of a single mouse as the inspiration and catalyst for the thinking behind the article would have been useful and appropriate.
Response: I shall amend the concluding paragraph so that it refers to the article’s introduction and acknowledges the single mouse.
Point 2 *Would have preferred to see artworks referenced in the article detailed in the reference.
Response: I shall now amend the article by giving any artwork referenced in the article greater detail in that reference.
Reviewer 3 Report
As the paper seems to argue from an animal studies perspective, I found it strange that you called the mouse "it" several times. Even if you do not know the sex of the mouse, it would be more coherent to write he, she, or they (or explain the use of "it").
I find your case study, the discussion of the recent "ethical turn" in art criticism and the changing "art world" convincing and relevant. Maybe you could add a short paragraph about how criticizing the manipulation/maltreatment of (nonhuman) animals is different from "canceling" or criticizing other controversial artworks involving for example obscenity, transphobia, racism, blasphemy, etc. (because of the anthropocentrism and speciesism of the debate).
Author Response
As the paper seems to argue from an animal studies perspective, I found it strange that you called the mouse "it" several times. Even if you do not know the sex of the mouse, it would be more coherent to write he, she, or they (or explain the use of "it").
I shall include an explanatory note, as follows.
Pronoun issues. While this article may certainly be read from the animal studies perspective, I think the role of academic writer is to communicate with a wider audience than the human-animal studies field. For the sake of parsimony or even elegance, I don't wish to appear repetitious in my prose. To avoid the opaque, I try not to begin sentences with the English pronoun "it", but I may well use that pronoun within a sentence for, say, a mouse, if I don't know the sex of the creature, and if I've used the given English name for the animal twice in the closely preceding prose, as well as already used the words "animal" and "creature" as stand-in nouns in the sentence… These are, in the circumstances, strict but reasonable conditions before any resort to the use of the word “it” for the animal. On a related matter, I also fight shy of an orthodox refusal to use "it" for any animal individual, because I think the neutral ambiguity of that pronoun neatly matches the neutral ambiguity that follows on any human's knowledge of another animal's individual identity, which in the regular inter-species way is necessarily more limited than knowing a fellow human’s. I also disagree with any argument against referring to an animal as a thing (which could mistakenly be understood as objectification), first because I have a thing for things (I'm a sculptor, so the way that thing theory interrogates and queries subject-object relations in given spaces at given times is pertinent here) and secondly, because it strikes me that the name-noun for any animal in any language is a questionable but understandably major reification itself, one which naturally arises (and so begs prior attention) before any query of the humble pronoun “it" as a substitute. If one first had to deconstruct every reified name-noun for any animal before using it, an article might soon become less intelligible. There is, however, an artwork I’m making, whose display will address this very issue in a visual and aesthetic context perhaps more appropriate to the purpose than an academic paper. Of which more later.
Maybe you could add a short paragraph about how criticizing the manipulation/maltreatment of (nonhuman) animals is different from "canceling" or criticizing other controversial artworks involving for example obscenity, transphobia, racism, blasphemy, etc. (because of the anthropocentrism and speciesism of the debate).
I think this depends on the value assigned to debate. There’s a big difference between criticism (which can open up debate) and cancellation (which always shuts debate down). And I think there’s then also a qualified difference between human manipulation of other animals and their maltreatment by us. The actions of vets, conservationists, animal activists and wild feeders still ‘manipulate’ other animals, regardless of their understood positivity, while maltreatment is absolutely never to the advantage of the animal concerned.
I agree that criticism of the inter-species issue of manipulation/maltreatment of (nonhuman) animals is different from the necessarily intra-human criticisms of blasphemy and obscenity, etc. I also agree that criticism of the maltreatment of animals is different from such intra-human criticisms, because it is regularly met by anthropocentrism and speciesism in any debate with either an elite or the new non-elite audience. However, I don’t see how such criticisms of blasphemy, obscenity, etc, can be described as anthropocentrist or speciesist themselves, unless it were to do with our regular prioritisation of those criticisms over the equally or more urgent criticism of animal maltreatment.
So I plan to add a short paragraph in which I shall outline the threat of cancellation as the new art-historical power of art’s audience, and how this new political agency of a non-elite audience is very different from the elite critics’ and gallerists’ former power, referring for precedent to the 19th century opera cliques and their successors. I shall also point out that the motives for cancellation by the new non-elite art audience afforded by social media are of course diverse and will range from un-nuanced activist prohibitions to bog-standard human exceptionalism, anthropocentrism and speciesism.
