The "defined by what something does" notion is actually pure raw Platonism. For instance the 'good' knife is the knife that does the job the best, ie. cutting. We thus measure its goodness by how sharp it is. We can adorn the handle with a design, but the art is the design and not the knife. The knife cannot be art, because then it wouldn't be a knife. A craftsman hones the blade, but the craftsman is no artist even though we say the craftsman goes a trade skillfully. We need only substitute a few words to make this apply to headphones: musical reproduction, transparency, etc.
The problem with trying to use this definition to delineate art is that it attempts to reduce everything to neat categories. It also fails to take into consideration dimensions of art that are experiential on the part of the audience, focusing on what's inside the display case rather than why it came to be there in the first place and who is looking at it. It fails to take into account art's plasticity, its ability to encompass a plethora of objects without necessarily disrupting what that object originally was in the first place.
Take a pot from some "primitive" culture. We see these in art museums all the time, yet they were created for a very specific purpose by people we wouldn't necessarily consider artists. They have designs on them, which we consider artistic craftsmanship, yet at the same time we consider the entire pot an art object. This is because of the pot's context: it's a prototype for objects we encounter today, and we encounter it with a sort of mystical reverence. It solicits an emotional response in us, and in its standing in to represent the very idea of a pot it has significance beyond being a mere pot. Yet even when considered an objet d' art, it still remains a pot. There is no danger of the pot ceasing to be because, for a moment, we look at it from other perspectives. Art is about
how one sees something and
experiences it just as much as it's about the 'what.'
As someone at the user end of a particular experience, I can see my pair of headphones as an art object, to view them as an end in and of themselves rather than a means to an end. I can break down the individual elements of my experience while maintaining their relation to the whole, appreciate the specific arrangement of points of sensory datum in the context of it being 'a pair of headphones.' I can appreciate how these facets affect my notion of 'a pair of headphones' and what that understanding even entails. For instance, are they not on some level a symbol of isolation? They reflect our lives and changing values, embody the libidinal urges of our consumerist tendencies and our fashion sense. How I choose to see this is independent of what the intent was when they were manufactured. The reactionary response to this will dismiss it, usually out of fear that some floodgates are opened where anything and everything can be labeled art, usually coinciding with some rant about people abusing grants and labeling a dead bird nailed to a plank 'art' just to get money. Of course, someone could just as easily get money from nailing dead birds to planks and calling it taxidermy, but then you don't get to call yourself an artist.
Another point I found somewhat interesting that I failed to explore further before was this notion of the audio chain's wholism. Does the medium not play just as big a role in the message? The music itself is the art, but it's recorded onto a specific medium which actively changes what we hear. The degradation becomes part of the experience. Similarly do headphones not color what we hear, even the most transparent (there is no completely transparent headphone)? We run into problems when we start bandying about phrases like "what the artist intended." We really don't know this despite our false sense of confidence. In other words, the "art" can be viewed as the entire experience of
listening, listening to a specific type of media with a specific type of playback device. I'll return again to the notion of art installations.
Nam June Paik's
Random Access. The observer uses a handheld reader (the sound head detached from the tape recorder) to "play" the tracts of tape, passing it along and creating a composition by "cutting" into various parts of the recording and controlling the speed of one's tracing.
I think Final Audio has adopted this approach in their own devices, this idea that listening is a wholistic activity. Their devices are meant to simulate specific contexts such as listening on vintage horn speakers. The good headphone is defined thus by the experience of
user enjoyment rather than strict fidelity.
