For consumers, having control over things, artifacts, and life itself is one of the most valued attributes.
It is built around a chronologically ordered sequence of case studies of exemplary things: artifacts designed for purposes of sitting, drinking, lighting, walking, moving about, cooling down, cooking and cleaning, writing and calculating, or media viewing.
The nature of these form-function correlations distinguishes living from non-living things: artifacts have distinctive forms that are consistently associated with their functions, whereas for living entities, biological function information is highly correlated with shared perceptual properties (e.g. eyes-see).
But there is one feature that virtually all of them have in common: a work of art is a human-made thing, an artifact, as distinguished from an object in nature.
States have a penchant for making unusual things official — artifacts, oysters, fife and drum corps — so a new bill to name an official California state amphibian may not come as much of a shock.
This makes the Elizabeth Street exhibition — installed, rather startlingly, in the rear section of a gallery otherwise specializing in, among other things, Coney Island artifacts — one of the few opportunities anywhere to see this extraordinary art.
Yet even in the midst of this Victorian optimism, a few voices of dissent were heard, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson's ominous warning that "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind". For the first time it began to seem as if "things"—the artifacts made by man in his campaign of conquest over nature might get out of control and come to dominate him.
For example, a double-dissociation between living things and artifacts in picture naming and property verification has been used to argue for separate modules for different semantic categories (Warrington and McCarthy, 1987), and a double-dissociation in reading abstract vs. concrete words been used to argue for separate modules for abstract vs concrete nouns (Warrington, 1981).
A second theme is the thesis that there is a fundamental ontological distinction between natural things and artifacts.
Those things are artifacts of goodness.
