Instead of talking of ‘using something as an object of art’ I can also say ‘thinking about something as an object of art.’ The two things would come to the same thing. Both indicate that the object is brought into our lives in a particular way, or occupies such a logical place in it—an art-object place. Something being an art object, in other words, is a matter of grammar, a matter of logical function. And there is no limit on what can thus function. This is then what I mean by ‘use.’
So that’s my first claim. All it amounts to is what we may call ‘the grammaticalization of art’: the taking of the grammar of art to indicate, elucidate, for us what art is—its essence.
The second claim I want to make is more substantial and controversial. I want to characterize a particular logical place that art takes in life: a particular grammar that the art object has, a particular use that is a use of something as an art-object.
The place in life of an art-object in which I’m interested is a reflective one. Take what you now see as an example. Stop reading for a moment and just look at what you see. – It is a strange command: “look at what you see.” But we can obey it. (It takes practice. Painters are better at it.) It would involve a kind of aspect-seeing. And you can do it at any moment: take yourself out of your routine with things, observe them sub specie aeterni, suspend them from their worldly existence. I would also like to note that some such distancing involves perceptual experience, and some involves a sort of experience that is more intellectual than perceptual. Anyway, since this command takes us to a place beyond our routine normative life with things, since it allows us to see things from “sideways on,” in doing so it also forces on us a type of reflection on them.
Related thought, in which it is also implicit what I take Wittgenstein to mean by saying that ethics and aesthetics are one (Tractatus 6.421), and by saying that there can be no moral propositions (Tractatus 6.42):
We don’t live life as if observed (e.g. as characters in God’s novel). The idea of living life like that is related to the idea of seeing only aspects—never letting anything become a routine, never really living with things, never letting them be in our world. (See William Day’s “Aspect-Seeing and the Nature of Experience,” unpublished.) The difference is that in thinking of ourselves as observed, we are not the agents of seeing, but the patients. We are seen; and by the seeing we are suspended from life.