The rhetorical concept of invention relies upon the common relationships between ideas that lead to possible areas of discussion for a certain subject. These “topoi,” as Aristotle calls them, are the generators of argument. Types of topoi include definition, division, comparison, relationship, circumstance, and testimony. The most widely used topic is testimony. And while testimony is both effective and popular, the other topoi are equally as important in building an argument of great depth.
Recently, I created a brief documentary film called “Walking Man I: The Business of Art.” The film is an exploration of art institutions through the lens of one particular work of art, Alberto Giacometti’s bronze sculpture “Walking Man I.” The work recently sold for $92.5 million at a Sotheby’s-London auction, breaking the previous world record price. The art institutions and roles discussed in the film include “the auction house,” “the gallery,” and “the artist” and their individual but overlapping subcultures in the overarching structure of the “art world.”
The art world is a small, often elitist, facet of economic culture romanticized by public myth and exclusivity. In this world, who gives art value and what does the dichotomy between the business of art and the art of business look like in an increasingly commercialized market? With the help of two topoi, circumstance and relationship, I attempt to show my audience the answer.
The topic of circumstance deals with past facts versus future facts or the idea of possible versus the impossible. I employ circumstance throughout my documentary, perhaps most clearly in the section about the auction house. Giacometti’s sculpture set a new record for the highest sale of a work at auction, so to give viewers a sense of context I go through some of the past records for highest sale, the types of works they were (painting, sculpture, etc.), and which artists produced them. Giving the audience these “past facts” enables them to bridge the information gap and understand the historical progression of art pricing and correctly place the new fact in that lineage. Without knowing what other works sold for and who created those works, it is hard to see the significance of the sale number, and more importantly, the perceived significance of the artist. In other words, circumstance is the background knowledge that is necessary for the effective presentation of relationship.
Relationship is the topic that deals with cause and effect, compliment and contradiction and the connections in between. The underlying subject in my documentary is essentially the relationship between prices and piece i.e. what causes a piece to be valued at or sold for over nine million dollars. Each institution and the individual players contribute to the end price of an artwork. Art cannot be quantitatively appraised; prices are not set by how many hours an artist put into the piece or how much money they spent on materials. Pricing comes down to people, not the object itself. When I say people, I don’t mean the common man walking on the street. Instead that refers to the people, often the leading players, of the art world. These people decide whether a work has deeper meaning and an artist societal significance. It is these people who chose to invest art with a measure of economic value. This relationship brings the entire documentary with its individual segments and themes together into one cohesive argument about the nature of the business of art.
Topoi are so effective in any argument because they transform it from an inanimate assertion to an interactive dialogue engaging all disciplines, and in that way an argument fulfills its true purpose and might actually do some persuading.
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