Thinking with Things

This is a bit off topic for my blog, but I did want to put in a plug for a new book by my mom, Thinking With Things, which was just released from University of Texas Press, available in hardcover and paperback.

In many ways, this is her magnum opus: a theory of art that she has been nurturing for more than 20 years. The book ties together Western and non-Western art by arguing that art is primarily a social creation rather than an aesthetic one. In fact, the whole notion of art is a bit of an obstacle when one looks at anything other than Western art from the last two centuries.

It is not possible to separate art from non-art; there are only things of various sorts, functions, forms, and meanings. Starting with the projectile points of early humans, all human-made things have formal properties and style. [...] That is true of chairs and CDs and garbage cans. Objects heretofore not considered works of art are in no way different--they can all be appreciated and classified by aesthetic criteria. Aesthetic criteria determine dress, the arrangements of homes, cities, highways, transport, and spacecraft. All these things are mixtures of function and forms.

Lest anyone be intimidated by the subject matter, let me add the her style is very straightforward and understandable, even for those of us who don't have PhDs in Art History. And if you're wondering why you, as a software developer should care about any of this, I also encourage you to read my essay on programming and art, which argues that perhaps these two domains are not as far removed from each other as one might think. I also like the way her Theory of Things dovetails with the Object-Oriented Programming model, which also seeks to categorize everything as some type of Object (Thing).

I'm sure I'll post more thoughts as I work my way through the book. But I wanted to congratulate her.