All art is a request for and record of attention

Evidence

In the lore of the Birds, every work of art can be thought of as a kind of “request” for attention—indeed, that simple idea might sum up a whole philosophy of art, which suddenly seems like it might best be understood as a special way of working and reworking the problem of attention. The artist is a person who attends, in a particular way, with particular charisma or diligence, with particular tools and temporalities. The work of art is the result or the effect or the evidence of this attending. It is the careful line-drawing that reveals how deeply someone stayed with the contours of a model or the landscape carved by a river. It is the perfect note that makes manifest decades of committed practice. But it is also that urinal, placed puckishly atop a pedestal in 1917 and renamed “Fountain”—which was a way of saying that some trickster had turned his attention to pedestals (not to mention urinals!) in a new way, and invited onlookers to do the same. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 382

Categorization

• DEFINE: Posits the chapter’s core redefinition of art as an attentional gesture rather than an object.
• XREF: Resonates with the book’s central ‘human fracking’ thesis: art as the inverse, the anti-extraction form of attention. — connects to: Attending to a work can itself constitute an artistic act — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 437