Evandra writes on the purpose of art: "Something is art when it treats you differently every time you encounter it, and even compels you to revisit it," I like this theory, not least for its ascription of action to the object—its "treatment" of me the looker.

I'll now quote Ev. quoting Mark Kingswell paraphrasing Arthur Danto: "Art is now anything that is accepted as an object 'of rapt attention' in a conventionally structured institutional setting." There's something true in this, but Ev. is right that the theory is limited to "the art world" or even "the metropolitan/academic art world." Interesting questions arise there at the boundary of the history of art with cognitive science: what kinds of things get subjected to that rapt attention, and why? The answers, I think, have much more to do with contemporary culture and Where We're Goin than the traditionalists or the hipsters often realize. It is enough to declaim the practices of quoting or pastiche as merely the practices of a culture turned in on itself—though they are that.

Next Heidegger is paraphrased (and here quoted, with double indirection): "The artwork presents no particular truth—it does not "mean" something or other. Rather, it offers the deeper truth of Being, a moment of reflection on the fact that there is something rather than nothing." The difference in between indicating or signifying on the one hand, vs. "being" on the other hand, is a very important difference for makers. It is difficult to avoid signifying (have you ever tried it?) and so our making tends to take up signs and make indications; this is interesting, it is useful, it is one extreme of what we call "communication." Yet another possibility for making objects is to have a direct impact—to act on the world, as it were. To present a new thing which carves out its own presence and presses an unforeseen impact on the world.

Which is why it surprises me that artists and technologists so rarely accept one another as kindred beings. How fresh the impact of the advent of the railroad, or the portable solid-state music player? How much less impact can a thing have than a millionth painted flower, another portrait of nature "as the artist sees it," or another meandering "avant-garde dance piece"? Or, to flip the sense of it, how much more impact can a thing have than Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, or how much less than yet another automated calculator of financial derivatives?