The Story Behind This Thesis

That I would complete my five years at university with the writing of this thesis was determined as early as the third semester of the Bachelor’s programme. Being genuinely annoyed with the fact that I was studying art (and Aesthetics & Culture, which is the name of both the Bachelor’s and the Master’s programmes I followed) without the existence of a widely accepted, coherent definition of art, I set out to establish one myself.

My first attempt, which is also referenced in the introduction of the thesis, turned out to suffer from a circular logic that I wasn’t entirely aware of at the time. In short, it pre-supposed an understanding of art in the mind of the person creating art, and as such it was a requirement that the given artifact was created with the intention of being art.

Having circular logic be the exact thing I was arguing against in Dickie’s institutional theory, I had to get beyond this and consider how a linear definition might manifest itself. Over the course of the following six semesters, plenty of thinking was done on this topic, and by February 2009, I was ready to start writing. The initial disposition of what the thesis would contain doesn’t hold up with the finished result at all, as it reveals an intention to include a historical walk-through of the definition of art as well as a major chapter on conventions of art – labeled artness.

These were discarded, and the breakthrough came with the writing of a 4½-page document that is largely identical with the first part of what became The Evolution of Art, the second sub-chapter of Chapter 1: The Origin of Art. The inspiration drawn from Darwin (and Dawkins) was not supposed to be covered up in any way whatsoever; on the contrary, in fact. It was exactly the ability to see art as a naturally occurring phenomenon existing across cultural and institutional conventions that would form the foundation of the thesis.

With these 4½ pages, I packed my suitcase with books and clothes and flew to San Francisco on February 16th, with a ticket back on April 20th. With a room ready for me in the house of very good friends I had visited five times previously, I sat down with my books at various cafés and restaurants around the Richmond district, while also drawing inspiration from visits to readily available museums such as The DeYoung Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Asian Art Museum.

My method, which I developed along the way, was more effective than I could have hoped for:

• Read the given book and take notes every time a relevant passage pops up
• Transcribe each and every passage into one document per book with specific references and add short or extensive thoughts on the given topic
• When everything has been read, create one document per topic that is going to be discussed in the thesis (in this case, the documents were named after the chapters and sub-chapters)
• Go through all the transcribed passages and insert them into the relevant documents in a meaningful order
• For every topic, simply pull up the relevant topic and start writing – everything that might be quoted is already neatly arranged in the document, and it is not necessary to ever open any of the books again

Following this quite simple method, I was done with the first four steps by March 10th. The last step – the actual writing – was done by March 27th. After that I happily and relieved went on a two-week cross-country trip during which the first read-through of the whole thing took place. Following that, the conclusion was extended with some additional points, another read-through was done, and finally I could hand in the final result on my 27th birthday, April 28th, 2009.

On June 22nd, an e-mail arrived from my supervisor, Jacob Lund, who told me that he and the external examiner, Peter Nielsen (culture editor at Information), had decided on grading it 12 (A), and that he hoped I was satisfied with that. Obviously!

Alphabetic gratitude to:

Jørn Erslev Andersen, Patrick Buijten, Robert Carswell, Ellen-Margrethe Dahl, Troy Chance Graves, Sidsel Birk Hjuler, Lars Löbner Jeppesen, Lesley Boyce Kiss, Jacob Lund, Anne Grethe Pabst, Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen & Jan Løhmann Stephensen.