Book Review of The Book of The Tel Aviv New Dogma: Paradigm Shift of Art and Aesthetics Theories. Second edition, 2026.

Book Review

The Book of The Tel Aviv New Dogma: Paradigm Shift of Art and Aesthetics Theories. Second edition, 2026. 188 pp. (174 pp. main text).

Books that promise a paradigm shift in their subtitle usually deliver a thesis. This one delivers two, coupled. There is, first, a theory of art: art is the process of interpretation, and the artist is not the maker of the object but its interpreter. There is, second, and derived from it, a theory of aesthetic value: beauty is what a work contributes to what the book calls Public-Language, ugliness what corrupts it, with a further apparatus sorting art into high and low, groundbreaking and important. The two are held together by a single hinge, the claim that gives the book its slogan, that the Viewer is the Artist; but it would misrepresent the book to treat that slogan as its whole content. What it offers is a systematic aesthetics, ontology and axiology together, with an applied wing that runs from atrocity and iconoclasm to authenticity, the swastika, and the museum. The right question for a reviewer is not only whether the slogan is true, but whether the second theory follows from the first, and whether the system as a whole does the work claimed for it.

The opening chapters lay the ontology. Two roles the tradition tends to fuse are prised apart into a strict four-part taxonomy: Creator, Artefact, Viewer-Artist, and Artwork. The Creator produces or declares an artefact and may be anything at all, a craftsperson, an assembly line, nature, or an artificial intelligence. The Artist is the self-aware being who interprets the artefact, and it is in the interpreting, not the making, that art consists. An artefact is anything designed or declared to affect a self-aware being; the artwork is the interpretive layer laid upon it, or, over time, the accumulation of such layers. The refinement on which everything later turns is that art is not interpretation as such, which is ubiquitous, but interpretation directed at language, whether the Private-Language in which a person encodes sensation or the Public-Language a community holds in common. Chapter 2 sets these definitions out with some care; the later chapters apply them; and an Epilogue, added in this second edition and addressed to the expert reader, situates the position against Barthes, Duchamp, Dewey, Danto, Gadamer, Weitz, and Fish. The Epilogue is where the argument is densest, and I would advise reading it first.

The immediate worry about any interpretation-centred definition is that it proves too much. If art is interpretation, and we interpret our data, our griefs, and our afternoons, then the definition admits everything and marks off nothing. The book does not resist the overlap; it theorises it. Art, science, and lived experience are, in its governing figure, tangents on the graph of causality, each individuated by what it is oriented towards, science towards the laws of nature, lived experience towards the navigation of life, art towards the sophistication of language, and free to touch or coincide. The same Talmudic page is halakhic decision for the observant, historical evidence for the scholar, and art for the secular reasoner who delights in the deduction. One may protest that this rests the whole distinction on a single phrase, the difference between being directed at language and merely affecting it in passing, and that science and lived experience are conceded to affect language too. But the chosen figure answers the protest. A tangent is fixed by its direction at the point of contact, and two tangents may meet at a point and remain distinct lines. The theory therefore owes no partition of instances into the artistic and the non-artistic; its model was built precisely so that one object may lie on two tangents at once, and 'directed at language' is not an evasion but the slope of the artistic one. Nor need the book apologise for leaving causality itself undefined, since it defines one tangent of it, not the curve, and no one faults geometry or physics for drawing tangents and speaking causally before the underlying notion is closed. Where a reader still asks how, in the concrete case, the orientation is to be read, the book offers its measure: the intensity not of one's reaction but of one's interpretation, which is why Guernica outranks a more shocking horror film, and why weak art may provoke the stronger feeling. On this head the definition is not merely defended but shown to be operating as designed.

A sharper reader will press that the thesis is true by stipulation. Define the artist as the interpreter and the interpreter is trivially the artist. Here the book does its best and least verbal work, in a case it returns to more than once: the first human being who worked a stone tool with more care than its function required, shaping it around a fossil for the pleasure of the thing. She had no institution, no tradition, no theory of art, no audience, not even a second person. Every rival account, the book argues, must withhold from her the name of artist until something arrives from outside, Dickie's artworld to confer the status, Gadamer's horizon of reception, Barthes's community of readers, Duchamp's spectator to complete the transmission. That verdict is plainly false, and only a view that seats the art in her own interpreting mind, requiring nothing prior, can call her what she evidently was. This is more than relabelling. It returns the intuitively right verdict where the competitors return the wrong one, which is the signature of a definition that earns its keep. A resolute conventionalist may still bite the bullet and hold that art did not exist until a public did; but he then owes an account of how the first public conferred a status no earlier public could have conferred, and the regress is his to arrest, not the book's. On the analyticity charge, the balance falls to the book.

A related objection is less technical and more territorial, and the book takes some trouble to disarm it: that in crowning the Viewer the Dogma robs the painter of his title. The answer is that it does no such thing. Rembrandt was an artist, on this account, not because he produced canvases but because he interpreted through them; the maker who interprets is a Creator-Viewer-Artist, and loses nothing by the redescription. What changes is only the breadth of the field. Once any self-aware interpreter qualifies, the candidates are simply more numerous, and distinction is not dissolved but relocated, from the bare fact of making to the measure the evaluative theory already supplies, importance, the capacity to enrich Public-Language. The jobbing illustrator and Rembrandt are alike artists; they are not alike important, and the theory says clearly why. This is also where the ontology and the axiology meet, the widening of the one answered by the ranking of the other, so that breadth at the door costs nothing in discrimination within.

It is worth pressing what that door admits, for the gate is self-awareness, and the competition it opens is a competition among human interpreters. The machine that now produces so many artefacts enters only as a Creator; the Artist's seat is reserved to the self-aware, and, one may add, the continuously self-aware, a threshold no artificial system yet crosses. Far from surrendering art to the machine, as the anxious painter half fears, the Dogma is the one account on which the human keeps the artist's chair precisely as the machine takes over the making, and keeps it there until an AI is not self-aware in some passing flicker but continuously so.

The gravest worry is that making every viewer an artist must end in relativism, each reading as good as another. This is the objection most clearly foreseen, and the answer to it, the keystone of the evaluative theory, is the most carefully built thing in the book. Three registers of truth are distinguished and kept apart, and demonstrated rather than asserted, in the first case study of Chapter 10, a Greek krater in Boston. There is factual truth, what the painter in fact depicted, which the book, dissenting from the museum, reads as a bear with a shattered shield rather than a sea-monster. There is Private-Language truth, the interpreter's own reading, which one is free to hold. And there is Public-Language truth, the museum's and the scholars' identification, which binds the shared meaning whether or not one privately dissents, until the paradigm shifts. The book's own formulation is the one to hold onto: Public-Language is not necessarily correct, but it is the best tool we have for approaching factual truth. That sentence disarms the tempting reply, that if Public-Language can be false then factual truth is the real arbiter and Public-Language a mere echo. Public-Language was never the arbiter of fact. It is the binding arbiter of shared meaning, modelled on legal truth, which can convict against the facts and still bind as law, and which a later court may correct without its having been a mere tally of opinion. That it can be wrong is just what shows it to be a normative register rather than a descriptive one. Aesthetic judgement tracks this binding register while the register stays open to revision, and the two are never confused.

Two analogies the book presses are worth naming here, since both bear on factual truth and not on meaning alone. Kuhn supplies the mechanism of correction: Public-Language revises toward the facts by paradigm shift, the museum's 'Hesione' liable one day to give way to the bear, so that the binding register is never sealed against factual truth but remains, over time, answerable to it. Gödel supplies the limit: there may be factual truths that no state of Public-Language can establish from within, true yet unprovable, which is exactly why factual truth must be kept as a register of its own, standing beyond whatever the shared language can at any moment demonstrate.

What survives is smaller, and it is expository rather than substantive. That Public-Language binds is not in question: shared meaning bound speakers long before any dictionary recorded it, and 'yes' and 'no' have held their force for as long as language has existed, the how and why of which is a matter for science and not a gap in the aesthetics. The krater's 'Hesione' binds in just that way, fixed by the community that holds the object's meaning, its museums and its scholars, who are simply its relevant public. The only risk is that a reader who takes the dictionary and the courtroom as two competing sources of authority, rather than as two pictures of one descriptive fact, may suppose a choice is owed where none is.

That leaves the hardest case, the identification of beauty with the good and ugliness with evil, which looks like the very fault the book convincingly lays at Adorno's door, a theory that blesses only the art agreeing with its author's politics. The reply repays slow reading, because what appears at first to be the same fault proves, on inspection, to be the theory's distinctive strength; and it needs stating plainly, since the compression of the argument can mislead, that the book itself abhors the case through which the point is made. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by religious zealotry is, in the book's own Western-Enlightenment judgement, an act of ugliness, and it says so without equivocation; the example is chosen for its explanatory difficulty, not out of the least sympathy for the deed. What is claimed for the framework is descriptive reach: it can enter a value-system it rejects and account, from within, for the aesthetics that system produces. Supply it with the axioms of the zealous iconoclast and it will explain, without special pleading, why to that zealot the shattering of the Buddhas registers as beautiful, because within the iconoclast's own Public-Language the act advances the values of his creed. That the theory can reconstruct this verdict is a measure of its power, not a sign of the author's assent, which is withheld throughout. When the book calls the same destruction ugly, it is not stating a fact and not making an unconditional claim; it is stating a Western-Enlightenment Public-Language truth, indexed to that register exactly as 'sea-monster' was indexed to the museum's, and 'ugly' here has the logical form of 'Hesione', binding within its register and open to revision. The zealot's 'beautiful' is the parallel verdict in that other register, one the theory can describe precisely because it is not obliged to share it. The theory occupies the position that accounts for both and, as description, privileges neither, while the book, speaking as a situated Enlightenment interpreter, is committed to the one verdict and firmly opposed to the other. This is exactly where Adorno's mirror fails to reflect. Adorno cannot generate, from within, the beauty of the art he condemns; his apparatus ratifies only what already agrees with him, and that is the circularity. This theory keeps a slot for taste, the axiom-set, and can fill it with anyone's, including that of the adversary the author would resist. That capacity is what earns it the word descriptive that Adorno cannot claim. The same logic governs the book's policy treatment of monument art from totalitarian regimes: it opposes physical destruction as historical erasure, arguing that such markers should remain in the public square under heavy re-contextualisation to preserve their historical 'marks' within Public-Language.

One honest cost remains, and it is expository rather than doctrinal: because the applied chapters deliver their verdicts in the book's own register, a reader who does not reconstruct the indexing will hear 'the destruction of the Buddhas is ugly' as unconditional, when the theory means something more careful. And there is a question the framework raises rather than evades, whether anything could make one register's aesthetic better than another's as aesthetics, to which the answer given is that nothing does, and that the only anchor outside the registers is ethical, the value of the interpreting life, from which follows its single exclusion, the inhuman. That is a dogmatic floor, explicitly normative and committed to Enlightenment values, and the book says as much. One may decline to stand on it; one cannot convict it of standing nowhere.

I have concentrated on the system, but much of the book's reward lies to one side of it, in the readings. The distinction between reference and representation in the chapter on art after atrocity, the thought that art builds the layer of language by which an event can later be spoken of, rather than reproducing its pain, answers Steiner's drift towards silence without succumbing to it, and does so humanely. The Aesthetics Chain of Custody, which extends a work's interpretive history to the critics and institutions that have layered meaning upon it and asks whether they thereby acquire a claim upon its value, is a genuinely fertile proposal, whatever one finally makes of the jurisprudence. And the reading of the concealed blind Samson in Rembrandt, with the folding of time and space carried across to the Claudius Civilis, is close looking of a high order. These pages call least upon the theory and are among the best.

The book is not without its irritations. The repetition is deliberate, and defended as a guard against the flattening of a novel thesis by hurried reading, but it wearies; the engagement with the literature is quarantined at the back, so that the main body reads as more assertoric than it is; and the applied chapters carry a good deal of contested political matter that some readers will find sits awkwardly against the book's professed neutrality among tastes, though, as I have argued, the register-indexing largely earns it the right to that matter. None of this touches the core. Where the book is most closely pressed, on the definition of art and on the structure of truth its aesthetics rests upon, it answers not by evasion but by argument, and repeatedly by an argument one had not anticipated: the tangent geometry, the first artist, the three registers of the krater, the descriptive engine that generates the aesthetics of its own opponents. What stands against it at the last is modest, and expository rather than doctrinal: a habit of stating carefully indexed verdicts as though they were plain, and analogies to the dictionary and the courtroom that, read too quickly, can make the binding force of Public-Language look like an open question, when the book's claim is that shared meaning simply binds, as it bound speakers before any dictionary existed, its mechanism a matter for science rather than a gap in the theory.

This is a serious and original work of systematic aesthetics, written, unusually, for the pragmatic professional it names as its reader, the engineer, the lawyer, the physician, and largely succeeding on those terms, while giving the specialist a good deal to contend with. It couples an ontology of art to a theory of value and carries both into hard cases without losing its nerve. Whether or not one ends by agreeing that the Viewer is the Artist, the book's most striking dividend comes the moment the ingrained habit of seating the artist in the maker is set aside and the seat given to the interpreter. Not only is art then coherently and unifyingly defined; the horizon of innovation, which the seeming exhaustion of form has long appeared to be closing, is thrown open once more, for if art is interpretation then novelty is no longer bounded by what can still be done to the object, but ranges across the interpretation of the world, a field that has no edge. And even the most conservative reader, one who declines so much as to entertain the premise that the Viewer, rather than the Creator, is the Artist, is left with an achievement he cannot easily wave away: the book establishes that the change of paradigm is not an indulgence but a necessity. That necessity is in the first place philosophical, for the old identification of the artist with the maker has never yielded a definition at once coherent and unifying; but it presses with new and sharper urgency in the wake of AI, since once the Creator may be a machine, only the removal of the artist to the interpreter keeps the very notion of the artist coherent, and keeps it human. One may refuse the answer; but that question, who the artist is, one must grant to be important, and, in the age of the intelligent machine, urgent.