Abstract
In contemporary debates concerning the nature of art a recent book by an American philosopher, Alva Noë, has attracted considerable attention. The title of this book reads Strange Tools.
Art and Human Nature (2015). Noë argues that works of art are "strange tools", which stand to usual, ordinary practices, tools and technologies in very peculiar relation.
To say that art engages in producing "strange tools" means to define a work of art as an implement or instrument that has been denuded of its usual function. Art is thus the "enemy of function": it presents our habitual activities (in the sense of basic, sometimes even involuntary modes of organization) as stripped off their commonplace purpose.
Artworks understood as "strange tools" are supposed to show our organized activities in a new light. At the same time, art is like mapmaking, says Noë.
Since our habitual practices organize us, i.e. "they structure the landscape in which we find ourselves", it is just natural that sometimes we lack "a sense of the lay of the land" and we may get lost. Under such circumstances, art could help us to get oriented within the complex, multi-layered landscape of our lives again.
In this chapter I would like to argue that these two aspects of the account are mutually exclusive. Even though the overall pragmatist thrust of the theory is very promising, the idiom of art as mapmaking trivialises the nature of our experience with art severely.
I will focus on the moment of "getting lost" or "not knowing our way around" that is so central to the purpose of art, and try to play two basic interpretations of it against each other: the first views it as experiencing some kind of a technical flaw, the second as an existentially disorientating experience of a numbing routine that is devoid of any meaning for us. I will argue that each of these calls for completely different kind of intervention and we have to treat them separately.