The Galleristic Encounter: Communication as the Intrinsic End of Modern Art
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From roughly 1870 through to the present, a dominant strand of visual-artistic culture has developed around the institution of the gallery — a space with the sole distinctive purpose of facilitating engaging with artworks. The central episode within this culture is the galleristic encounter, in which an artist produces a work to be exhibited in a gallery for anyone to see, and a beholder engages with the work in that setting. In a galleristic encounter, we can reconstruct the rationality of an artist and a beholder if we see them as partaking in a game of nonstrict communication. In such a game, first an artist in their studio, then a beholder in a gallery, engage with an artwork with the aim of determining a communicative intention that rationalizes the creation and display of that work. The agents determine a rationalizing communicative intention through close visual scrutiny of the work itself. This is a joint activity, through which an artist and a beholder forge a valuable interpersonal connection that is similar to, but richer than, the connection between two people who jointly perceptually attend to an object ‘shoulder to shoulder’. On this analysis, the galleristic encounter is a form of nonstrict communication because the artist, in virtue of displaying their work in the peculiar context of the gallery, communicates any attitude that rationalizes their action of creating and displaying that work, whether or not they explicitly intended to communicate that attitude. Understanding the galleristic encounter as a game of nonstrict communication clarifies the difference between the artistic culture of the patronage system and a subsequent artistic culture centered around the gallery, and provides a compelling explanation of central moments in the evolution of modern art.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".