The Arts: Scope | Quomodo Scimus : IBTOK

areas of knowledge - the arts

Scope of the Arts

What does it mean to know a dance, or a poem, when neither can be checked the way a proof or an experiment can.

A dance school, not a diagnosis

THE PROVOCATION

In the 1930s, a seven-year-old girl was so restless in class that her school wrote to her parents, suggesting she had a learning disorder. Her mother took her to see a specialist. For twenty minutes the specialist talked with her mother about the school's complaints while the girl sat on her hands in a leather armchair, trying not to fidget. Then he told her he needed to speak to her mother alone, and as he left the room, he turned on the radio. Through the window in the door, the two adults watched the girl get to her feet the moment she was alone and move to the music, unselfconscious, absorbed. The specialist turned to her mother and said: "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick. She's a dancer. Take her to a dance school." She did. That girl was Gillian Lynne, who went on to become a soloist with the Royal Ballet and to choreograph Cats and The Phantom of the Opera.

This story is Ken Robinson's, told in his book The Element and in his TED talk "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" (2006). Robinson already opened this course. Core Lesson 1's provocation was his account of the hierarchy schools build into every curriculum, mathematics and language at the top, drama, dance and music near the bottom. Gillian Lynne is what that hierarchy looks like from the inside: a child nearly diagnosed as sick for having exactly the kind of intelligence her school had no place for.

Ken Robinson on Gillian Lynne

The clip runs about two minutes. Robinson tells the story as evidence for a larger claim: schools rank kinds of intelligence, and a child whose intelligence lived in her body rather than on a test paper was nearly pathologised because no one asked the right question. Watch for what the psychologist does not do. He runs no test. He watches a fidgeting seven-year-old move for twenty minutes and reaches a conclusion no test or measurement ever could have given him.

The specialist did not run a test. He watched a child move for twenty minutes and reached a conclusion no measurement could have given him. Whether that recognition counts as knowledge, or a correct guess that only looks like insight in hindsight, is a question this page will come back to. Dance already counts as one of the arts, so nobody had to argue with the specialist about whether Gillian Lynne's talent belonged in this area of knowledge at all. The harder cases are the ones where that isn't settled, starting with the question of what counts as art in the first place.

Big idea 1 - A video game can be art.

The IB's own guide to this course does not pretend the arts are a closed list. It describes them as covering a range of disciplines "such as visual arts, theatre, dance, music, film and literature", a phrase that leaves the list open rather than closing it. Many textbook treatments of this area of knowledge quietly ignore that opening and treat the six named disciplines as the whole territory. Two of the guide's own suggested examples argue against that narrowing. Marco Evaristti's Helena, ten kitchen blenders in an art gallery with live goldfish inside them, and Sruli Recht's Forget Me Knot, a ring made from tanned leather cut from the designer's own body, both sit closer to sculpture, fashion and body art than to any of the six standard disciplines. If the guide's own examples already sit outside its own list, the real question is not which six disciplines count, but what actually decides whether anything counts as art at all.

Most students bring a working definition of art into TOK without realising it, and it is usually a mistake. Ask them what makes something art and they will usually reach for some mix of beauty, technical skill and self-expression, with self-expression (subjectivity contrasted to the objective goals of other AOKs) doing most of the work. All three do genuinely show up in art, but none of them is what makes something art. Duchamp's Fountain, a urinal signed and submitted to an exhibition, has none of the three and is still one of the most discussed artworks of the twentieth century and in every TOK textbook. Sol LeWitt's wall drawings are executed by assistants following his written instructions, so whatever technical skill is on display belongs to whoever is holding the pencil that day, not to LeWitt. Bach wrote most of his church cantatas to a weekly deadline for a specific service, following a brief rather than expressing anything personal, and nobody doubts they are art. A definition built from beauty, skill and self-expression will keep admitting things that are not art and keep excluding things that are. So what is Mr Jones-Nerzic's definition of art?

1. Made or chosen, not merely found. Art must be deliberately made, or deliberately selected and presented, as art. Manufacture alone is insufficient: a hammer is made but remains a tool unless it is artistically reframed. Duchamp's Fountain, chosen rather than made by him, and Sol LeWitt's wall drawings, conceived rather than personally executed, show that artistic intention may reside in selection, conception and authorisation rather than physical manufacture.

2. Embodied in form. Art exists as an object, a moment or language, and its form is not merely a container for a meaning completed elsewhere. A feeling or idea may precede the work, but it acquires its specifically artistic existence through the actual colour, sound, movement or words. Form does not simply transmit the meaning; it helps to make it.

3. Untranslatable. Irreducible to paraphrase. Whatever art does, it does through the particular form it takes. It may be described, interpreted, performed or adapted, but none of these can simply replace the encounter with the work. This is why art can be felt without being fully explained, and why it retains its reputation for mystery. LeWitt provides a productive limit case: if the instructions are the artwork, then conceptual notation is itself the chosen form, while each execution becomes one authorised production of it.

So how can a video game be art? Consider the games Braid, Papers, Please and Shadow of the Colossus. Braid is a puzzle platformer built around the power to rewind time, its levels solvable only once the player understands what rewinding actually changes. Papers, Please puts the player behind a border checkpoint desk in a fictional authoritarian state, stamping or rejecting travellers' documents against rules that keep changing, while a family's rent, food and medicine depend on how fast and how strictly the player works. Shadow of the Colossus asks the player to track down and kill sixteen enormous, often reluctant-seeming creatures one by one to revive a dead girl, the player's own character growing visibly darker with every kill.

Braid structures a player's experience of time as deliberately as a painter structures a viewer's eye across a canvas, withholding its real meaning until the mechanic itself is understood. Papers, Please builds its entire moral weight out of constraint, a handful of rubber-stamp rules that force impossible choices, the same way a sonnet's fourteen lines force a poet's. And a player who finishes Shadow of the Colossus uneasy rather than triumphant is having an audience response as real as anyone standing in front of a painting that has actually unsettled them.

The diagram below groups the arts by how you encounter them rather than by a fixed list of six subjects: as an object, a performance, or language. Read that way, the hybrid forms in the overlaps are not exceptions to be argued about one at a time. Film, opera, the comic book and the video game all sit exactly where this way of grouping the arts predicts a hybrid should sit, which is a better reason to admit them than any single ruling on any one of them.

Big idea 2 - Polanyi's hammer and nail - knowing without saying.

Big Idea 1 asked what belongs within the arts as an area of knowledge. This section asks a more fundamental question: once something has been accepted as art, what does it actually communicate?

In Core Lesson 1 , Michael Polanyi’s claim that “we know more than we can tell” was introduced through the example of using a hammer and nail. A skilled person knows how tightly to grip the hammer, how much force to use and how to adjust the angle, but does not consciously calculate each movement. Their focal attention is on the nail, while awareness of the hammer, hand and bodily sensations remains subsidiary. The hammer almost becomes an extension of the body. This is still genuine knowledge, learned through practice and correction, but it can be demonstrated more completely than it can be stated.

In the arts, this idea applies not only to the skill of making art, but also to what the artwork communicates. A dance, poem or piece of music may convey a feeling, a state of mind or an experience as it is lived from within. Such content cannot easily be translated into a sentence, a number or a logical argument. It is understood through experience rather than explanation. This is precisely what Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge would lead us to expect.

Dance provides the clearest example. What a dancer's body communicates in a lift or a turn is a felt state, not a claim, and no sentence gives you that feeling itself rather than a description of it. This is why the specialist watching a young Gillian Lynne move could recognise something real without being able to state a rule for it: what he saw was a form of intelligence that lived in her body rather than on a test paper, and twenty minutes of watching her move told him something no test could have. Literature appears to be a more difficult case because it is made from words and sentences. Yet literary language does more than state propositions. A reader may repeat every word of a passage that moved them without reproducing what the passage did to them. The words carry an emotional, rhythmic and imaginative force that cannot be reduced to their literal meaning. We examined this in the Language option through the highly controlled poetry of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

Walt Whitman’s free verse offers an especially clear literary example. Whitman wanted to express the unity of mind, body and soul. In Leaves of Grass, he wrote that “the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern and includes and is the soul.” He could state this idea directly, but stating it was not enough. The form of the poem also had to embody it. Whitman therefore rejected the strict metrical verse dominant in his time. Regular metre imposes a predetermined structure upon language, separating form from the experience being expressed. That would have contradicted Whitman’s attempt to present body, mind and meaning as an indivisible whole. His free verse does not merely describe freedom and unity; its expanding lines, rhythms and catalogues enact them. No existing rule could have told Whitman how to create this form. He had to feel his way towards it. The knowledge involved was tacit: a practical and intuitive understanding of how poetic form could embody a lived experience that could not be fully captured as a proposition.

Not every artist would accept that art primarily communicates feeling. Bertolt Brecht developed a theory of theatre intended to resist passive emotional identification. Actors address the audience directly, songs interrupt the action, and theatrical devices expose the performance as a construction. The purpose is not to eliminate feeling, but to prevent audiences from losing themselves in it and to make critical judgement possible. The conceptual artist Sol LeWitt went further, arguing that the idea or system behind a work, rather than the emotional response produced by it, was the essential artwork. Because Sol LeWitt defined the "art" as the written blueprint rather than the physical paint on the wall, his work is designed to be posthumously executable. The Sol LeWitt Estate holds the copyrights and continues to authorize teams of studio assistants and local volunteers to render his historic instructions in new spaces. In fact, some instruction sets that LeWitt wrote during his lifetime were never physically realized while he was alive. These pieces receive their very first physical fabrication years after his death, yet they are still officially certified as original Sol LeWitt artworks. See for example Sol LeWitt: Open Structure at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Conceived in 1969, the instructions were never physically realized anywhere in the world until they were fabricated posthumously (below).

Even here, however, something of Polanyi’s point survives. Brecht still required an audience to experience estrangement in the theatre; a philosophical statement explaining alienation would not produce the same knowledge. LeWitt’s concepts likewise had to be encountered through instructions, diagrams, language or their execution as drawings. Even art that makes reason, ideas or structures its subject communicates through a particular form of experience that cannot simply be replaced by a proposition. What is communicated changes from case to case: often a feeling, but sometimes an argument, a system or a structure. What remains is the possibility that, in art, something must still be experienced before it can be fully known.

Big idea 3 - Visceral and vicarious - art produces real feeling through 'unreal' events.

Watching Jaws in a cinema, your pulse can spike, your palms can sweat and you can flinch in your seat, even though everyone in the audience knows the shark on screen is a mechanical prop that famously kept breaking down during filming. Two words describe what is happening in a moment like that, visceral and vicarious. Visceral means felt in the body, immediate, physical, arriving before conscious thought has time to explain it: a racing pulse, a tightening chest, a lump in the throat, a shiver. Vicarious means experienced at one remove, through someone or something else, rather than lived directly: you feel it because of what is happening to another person, real or invented, not because of what is happening to you. Most things in life give you one or the other. A car alarm outside your window is visceral but not vicarious, it is happening to you directly. Reading a weather report about a storm in another country is vicarious but not visceral, nothing in your body responds. Art routinely produces both at once: a real bodily reaction to an event that is not actually happening to you, and in many cases never happened to anyone at all. Nothing in the room is dangerous, yet your pulse quickens as if it were.

Aristotle noticed this problem in tragedy over two thousand years ago. Watching a character suffer on stage produces real pity and real fear in the audience, even though everyone present knows the suffering is invented. In the Poetics, he built this effect into his definition of tragedy itself, arguing that it "accomplishes through pity and fear the cleansing of experiences of this sort", catharsis, in his original Greek. Whether or not his account of catharsis is right, his starting observation still holds: the fear is the actual thing, not pretend fear, aimed at a cause that never happened.

Dance makes this easiest to see, because it needs no invented plot to produce a vicarious response. Watching a body do something difficult and beautiful produces a visceral reaction in an audience, and it does so vicariously: the audience is not dancing, but something in the room responds as though they were. A spectator's own muscles may tense at a fall, their breathing may change through a held position, or they may feel the anticipation of a landing their own body will never make. The feeling is the real thing, not a lesser copy of it, produced by a method that has nothing to do with the event actually happening to you.

The scope of the Arts compared

If a painting cannot be checked the way a proof can, what is left holding it to any standard at all?

Mathematics answers to proof. A claim can be checked against a demonstration that either holds or fails, and Gödel's incompleteness theorem only sharpens that standard further, by showing its outer limit from the inside rather than escaping it. Nothing in the arts works this way. The three-point working definition in Big Idea 1 narrows what counts as art without ever producing a test a given work either passes or fails, and Big Idea 3 offers no proof that a piece of music is moving, only the observation that the feeling it produces is real.

History interprets evidence about events that actually happened, weighing sources against each other to reconstruct something that occurred once and cannot be rerun. The arts reverse this relationship. Braid, Shadow of the Colossus and the tragedies Aristotle had in mind all produce real feeling from events that never happened at all, which is a strange kind of evidence: not evidence that anything occurred, only that something was made to work.

The natural and human sciences both aim, however imperfectly, at claims another investigator could in principle check: an experiment repeated, a study replicated. What Polanyi's tacit knowledge names in Big Idea 2, the content of a dance or a poem that was never a proposition to begin with, has no equivalent procedure for a second observer to run. Two people who disagree about whether a passage of Whitman succeeds have no experiment left to settle it. Treating a painting as though it failed a test it was never sitting misreads what kind of knowledge it offers.

Next: Perspective in the Arts

Think further: questions and resources

Aristotle argued that tragedy works through pity and fear to produce a kind of cleansing in the audience. If a feeling produced by events you know are invented still counts as a real experience, what does that tell you about the relationship between knowledge and the body?
Michael Polanyi argued that skilled knowledge, from riding a bicycle to reading a poem, outruns our capacity to state it in words. If a dancer or a poet cannot fully explain their own craft, can they still be said to know what they are doing in the way a scientist knows a result?
Marx treated free, self-directed, shaping activity, not survival, not instinct, as the trait that marks humans off from every other species. If making art is one of the clearest cases of that activity, does calling something "just art" undersell what it is doing?
The IB's own guide describes the arts with the phrase "such as", leaving the list of disciplines open rather than closed. If a video game or a piece of software design raises the same questions about structure and audience that a painting does, what would be lost by admitting it into this area of knowledge, and what might be lost by refusing to?
Gillian Lynne's dancing was recognised by a psychologist with no test for it beyond watching her move. Sruli Recht's ring and Marco Evaristti's blenders full of goldfish were recognised as art by galleries with no test beyond a decision to exhibit them. Is expert recognition doing real epistemic work in cases like these, or is it just an institution's way of settling a question that has no other kind of answer?
Go back to the specialist's line to Gillian Lynne's mother: "She's a dancer." He was not measuring anything. If recognising a talent, or a work of art, for what it is counts as a form of knowing, what does that tell you about the limits of every other kind of knowing this course has covered so far?

Films
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.

🎬 WATCH — Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)

Banksy

Exit Through the Gift Shop follows Thierry Guetta, an amateur filmmaker who spends years documenting street artists including Banksy, until Banksy turns the camera on him. Guetta reinvents himself as Mr. Brainwash and stages a sellout exhibition almost overnight, and the film never resolves whether he is a genuine artist or an elaborate prank on the art market. That unresolved question is Big Idea 1's own: whether something counts as art depends on intention and presentation, not technical skill, and the film refuses to settle which of Guetta's decisions were real. My students can watch the complete film here.

🎬 WATCH — Billy Elliot (2000)

Stephen Daldry

Billy Elliot follows an eleven-year-old boy in a County Durham mining town during the 1984 UK miners' strike, who trades boxing lessons for ballet classes and hides his growing talent from a father who sees dance as no way for a boy to spend his time. His teacher recognises what he can do long before any exam or audition confirms it, in scenes that echo the Gillian Lynne story this page opens with. The film asks what it costs a community to make room for a kind of intelligence its own economy has no use for. My students can see the film here.

🎬 WATCH — Jaws (1975)

Steven Spielberg

Jaws is the clearest possible case for Big Idea 3's claim that an invented event can produce a real bodily reaction. The shark on screen is a mechanical prop that famously malfunctioned throughout filming, and everyone in the audience knows a fictional town is not really under attack. Neither fact stops a pulse from spiking at the right moment. The film is widely credited with a real behavioural effect of its own: swimmers avoided the ocean in the summers after its release, frightened by something everyone knew had been manufactured. My students can see the film here.