单选题
Is performance art really art at all? We must determine what art is or how it is defined before answering this question.
The oldest theory of art in the West is to be found in Plato, in Book X of "The Republic." There, Socrates defines art as imitation. He then declares that it is very easy to get perfect imitations—by means of mirrors. His intent is to show that art belongs to the domain of reflections, shadows, illusions, dreams. He proceeds to map the universe in terms of three degrees of reality. The highest reality is found in the domain of what he calls "ideas," the forms of things. Ideas are grasped by the mind. The next degree of reality is possessed by ordinary objects, the kind carpenters make. The artist only knows how ordinary objects look, as rendered in painting or drawings. The carpenter"s knowledge is higher than the artist"s: his beds, for example, hold the sleeping body. The highest knowledge is possessed by those who grasp the idea of the bed, understanding how it supports the body. The lowest knowledge, if it is knowledge at all, is the artist"s ability to draw pictures of beds. They only show appearances.
This famous design of the universe and its degrees of reality was clearly constructed to put art in its place—the domain of illusions, shadows, dreams. The artist is cognitively useless. It explains why philosophers tend to have little use for art. Several of Plato"s dialogues stress the inferiority of art. The political message of "The Republic" is that philosophers, at home in the realm of ideas, should be kings. Artists don"t even belong in the Republic!
Meanwhile, the mimetic theory, as it is called, had a certain power. Aristotle, in his "Poetics," characterizes plays and epics as imitations of actions, such as the death of Hektor. But a performance is not the imitation of an action, but the action itself. It is art and reality in one.
In the 1960s, a group of philosophers argued that art was indefinable, so many things are classified as art that the most one could hope for is what Wittgenstein called a "family resemblance." Yet not having a definition does not stand in the way of our picking out the art works from a pile of assorted things. A definition will make us none the wiser. Unfortunately, the philosophers who subscribed to this view were out of touch with the avant garde. Between 1913 and 1917, Duchamp presented a number of readymades, most famously his "Fountain," a toilet bowl. In 1964, Andy Warhol exhibited wooden facsimiles of shipping cartons. A work of art and a mere shipping carton can look exactly alike. What explains the difference? What is the difference between sitting down with someone in a performance and merely sitting down with someone? The work of art has meaning; it is about something. And it embodies that meaning.
单选题
Who knows what a bed really is according to Socrates?
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】[解析] 作者在第二段提到苏格拉底的观点，在苏格拉底看来，艺术只不过是对现实的模仿，是现实的影子，但并不是现实本身。因此，艺术家对于世界的描述仅仅停留在表面。最高级别的知识是心智对理念的把握，只有把握住了物质的理念，才称得上是把握住了事物的本质。第三段中提到，只有哲学家才擅长于把握理念(at home in the realm of ideas，此处，at home意为“精通，擅长于”)。因此，只有哲学家才真正知道事物的本来特征——或者拥有有关“床”的理念。
单选题
The artist is cognitively useless because ______.
【答案解析】[解析] 作者在最后一段试图给出艺术的定义。他反驳了某些哲学家关于艺术的不可定义性的观点，他认为艺术品和非艺术品(如a work of art and a mere shipping carton)、艺术行为和非艺术行为(如sitting down with someone in a performance and merely sitting down with someone)的区别，就在于艺术所表达或体现的意义。选项B中所谓的different可以理解为与非艺术品或非艺术行为的区别，definable则涉及艺术的可定义性问题，在作者看来，艺术显然是可以被定义的——艺术可以通过它表达的意义加以界定。