6. Finally we have rejected arguments that the usual ways in which ethical and aesthetic value interact can become inverted. Oxford: Blackwell. 1981. 1992. The seemingly strange turns art has taken over the recent past is only one of several reasons why some way of reconceptualizing seems urgent. I find this response not completely satisfactory as it stands. 2000 Is It Reasonable to Attempt to Define Art? In Theories of Art Today, ed. Nevertheless, we also argued that one conception did a good job in capturing the extension of experiences considered aesthetic, while preserving some widely accepted constraints on what should count as such an experience. Historical Background Something should be said about the historical roots, not of the concept of art, but of the attempt by philosophers to define art. 2001. In that chapter, we focused most on the issue of whether ethical value can diminish or enhance aesthetic value. Fish, Stanley. We have also given a role to the more standard views in providing an understanding of the phenomena of hearing emotion in music, and correctly doing so. How does one create a look that suggests speed? Part II attempts to give a sense of the range of issues addressed in the philosophy of art. One approach is guided by the thought that art is the most significant or the primary bearer of aesthetic value; it is the one kind of thing that is made chiefly with the intention to create aesthetic value, and, hence, the concept of the aesthetic is the key to understanding the nature and value of art. Is it more like a musical work or a painting? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Most commonly, one attempts to resolve it by providing a definition of art. (In A Slumber, the speakers self-reproach over his failure to appreciate Lucys mortality is an example of intentional content.) However, it not clear that this example constitutes a genuine counterexample to the above proposal. In the present context, the same means qualitatively similar. She insists one must look at a building to know that it is neo-gothic, but its plausible that I can also learn this fact from a guidebook or another reliable third-person source. These colors are really on view, accurately pinned down like a carefully displayed moth. Works can also express attitudes that are not intended. This volume is a fascinating introduction to the core themes and basic methods of aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Two assessments of aesthetic experience as object-directed sensuous pleasure seem reasonable to me. Is this really supposed to suffice in identifying the descriptive content of graceful? As it stands, it does not. Other Emotions So far we have focused on a single emotion: pity. Rather than being an adaptation of the eighteenth-century project, this approach thinks of the philosophy of art and aesthetics, understood as the study of aesthetic value, as distinct, and, at best, overlapping disciplines or subject matters. Fiction and Metaphysics. ed. 1998. This account may not be false, but it is too simple, because on the one hand, it neglects too many differences among aesthetic properties. If so, are there building we should exclude from the art form? But it is puzzling in two respects. 14. To see how this works, first consider a conversational case. However, the people who take this view dont agree among themselves on the positive account of what Peter is doing. Evaluative Judgments of Architecture When we make an overall aesthetic judgment of a building, we are judging it as an environment that is part of a larger environment. Let me begin with two examples that vividly illustrate this point. On one picture, let us call it ethicism, there is the notion that art proper, however indirectly, Maude's excellent translation of Tolstoy's treatise on the emotionalist theory of art was the first unexpurgated version of the work to appear in any language. Emotion characteristic in appearance: A phenomenal propertya look or a soundof something, such as a passage of music, that results from a perceived resemblance with behavior expressive of an emotion. There are some who claim that because of this, these works are fictional even if the primary purpose lies elsewhere (Walton 1990). What needs to be added is that there is a real loss in exchanging one valuable experience for another. Further Reading Currie, Gregory. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. The Pleasures of Aesthetics. 2002b. brute wonder drains from my eyes. . PHR-107 Introduction to the Philosophy of Art is a study of the basic problems, issues, and questions with respect to the understanding, appreciation, interpretation, and evaluation of art and beauty. If one is looking at a picture of a mill, then, on the make-believe view one is imagining ones visual experience that it is the seeing of a mill. 1951. While these are good consequences, a work is not necessarily deserving of praise for producing them. 1995. 5. Contextualism is the view that the central issues of aesthetics can only be satisfactorily resolved by appealing to the context in which a work comes into existence: the context of origin or creation. G. Dickie, R. Sclafani, and R. Roblin, 2nd ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. It is simply of no consequence that her success has no basis in the conventionally fixed referents of the words she happens to use. Again this is true. This is not true of related expressions like aesthetic value. We could decide to start referring to the artistic value of nonartworks just as we speak of their aesthetic value. In the debate over interpretation and its objects, people have tended to gravitate around these sets of beliefs. According to Kant, aesthetic experience can be pleasurable and universal (everyone ought to take pleasure in the same objects) and disinterested (we should seek out this pleasure just for itself). However, it would be very confusing to use the name contextualism in this book since contextualism already has been used to identify a general approach to the philosophy of art. . Cleveland and New York: World Publishing. Art need not be made only to be contemplated for its own sake. A defense and modification of the seeing-in view of depiction. Is it also successful as a museum? There is still a difference, since the literal version of this model does not involve pretense. The trouble is that it is admitted by all that Fountain 236 Chapter Eleven sustains little aesthetic experience. Bateson offers a close reading of the poem in which he has something to say about every line, almost every word. When these three factors do interact, the object manifests itself in a certain way to the observer. It is difficult for someone who reads the novel now to accept this. Hearing sadness in something is a (quasi-) perceptual state, which has the same nonexistence property as seeing-in. 1997. We have denied that artworks are intrinsically valuable or valuable for their own sakes. Instead, there are still mainly competing hypotheses, and anyone who appeals to cognitive science is making bets on which of these will turn out to be the winners. 1984. Aesthetic Creation. It is significant but not as significant as one might think. Is there something that we can identify as the meaning of the work, and is discovering it at least one, if not the only, aim of art interpretation? It argues that once we take seriously a certain intention shared by all artists, this rules out the consideration of other intentions as determinative of artwork content. A work can acquire ethical value in virtue Interaction: Ethical, Aesthetic, and Artistic Value 271 of the attitudes it endorses, the manner in which it explores ethical issues, and the consequences for its audience and even beyond its audience. A second source of resistance to ethical-artistic value has a very different character. London: Chatto and Windus. . Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. However, her primary criterion for being intrinsic is epistemic, namely, how we gain knowledge of the property. 3. A work of art is an artifact, which under standard conditions provides its percipient with aesthetic experience (Schlesinger 1979). The structures referred to in this objection, however, are eternal, hence uncreated, patterns, to use Robert Howells (2002b) terminology. Further, the hearing of the former is intimately related to the hearing of the latter. Contains an influential critique of various attempts to define aesthetic concepts. If it involves free fantasizing about anything whatsoever, then what does that have to do with the real? Typically, if not invariably, an art function cannot be appreciated without such an encounter. When the work is a photographic recording of a self-mutilation, it is hard to separate content and productionmeans. Can we resolve the divergent views about the house near the nature reserve? Aesthetic Experience Revisited. British Journal of Aesthetics 42: 14568. We can leave that open.8 Photographs On the view defended here, seeing-in is a crucial feature of depictions, and a crucial property of seeing-in is nonexistence. What, After all, Is Art? However, is this negative attitude aesthetic? One thing that both my examples make plain, though I am hardly the first to point this out, is that buildings are part of and help create an environment. Alan Goldman has provided us with possibly the most differentiated classification of terms most commonly regarded as picking out aesthetic properties. Lets suppose the novel endorses this choice as the most principled, 270 Chapter Twelve and for this reason, the right one to make. It purports to identify the proper object of appreciation of the natural world and the categories or concepts we need to fully appreciate them.5 The model makes two central claims. Paperback. If we combine the immersion approach with order appreciation by saying that nature is to be appreciated through one or the other, we have a fairly wide array of possible appreciations. Irreplaceability would seem to be guaranteed if at least part of the value of an artwork is unique to that work. Defends the best-known version of the historical definition of art. It is just that recognition of such aesthetic properties seems optional, in the sense that other experiences of nature engage our aesthetic appreciation without noting the descriptively thicker aesthetic properties. Some poems tell stories that are obviously fictional. However, Goldmans version of the view demonstrates that these problems are avoidable, and the view can be put forward without appeal to metaphysically dubious entities or an overly narrow view of the object of the aesthetic experience of art. Hence, such a system contains an indefinite number of symbols. 4. No one denies that this can lead to some genuine strong feelings that resemble real pity and could even be called pity, but differ in some important ways from the standard case of pity. Compare Hamlet and Macbeth, characters from the two plays by Shakespeare. Now consider the claim that artworks are tokens-of-types. Descriptions are linguistic representations. 4. It suggests that an aesthetic flaw can be responsible for failure to achieve an ethical goal. 1996. We can characterize all these cases as ones where there is a proposition before ones mind and we take an attitude to it that is partly responsible for the emotion we feel. On the other, we have included experiences that bring pleasure primarily because they please one or more of the senses, but place few demands on other mental powers. 4. A highly sophisticated presentation of the resemblance view of depiction. Such an interpretation might enable you to better appreciate the work by helping you to understand aspects of it that were previously unavailable or inaccessible to you. While the behavioral consequences of engagement with art are wrapped in uncertainty, the discussion of attitudes in the previous section demonstrates that other sorts of consequences are inevitable concomitants of those expressions. However, Kant also suggests that the experience of beauty is not cut off from the rest of life because connections exist between cognition and cognitive free play and between beauty and morality. It shouldnt be assumed, however, that putting an item in one group excludes it from belonging to another. Thus, the work is artistically better for achieving its social goal. It is a complex account requiring attention to, or apprehension of, several distinct elements, their interrelations to each other, and lower level perceptual features or a structural base, as Levinson also puts it. . [1] It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or. Regarding Part I, there are two main messages. It might seem like we have already given such an example in our discussion of the Iliad. that one is an appropriately backgrounded listener hearing the music in context. . Art and its Objects, 2nd ed. Moderate moralism was the preferred name for the view that this is only sometimes so. One can respond to this claim in a number of different ways. Being a physical object or a structural type does not distinguish artworks from many other objects, which are also physical things or structural types but are not artworks. Consider a case where I misspeak: I say, There is a fly in your suit, whereas I intended to say that there is a fly in your soup. There are properties that specify the overall aesthetic value of an object, properties like beauty and ugliness. I call these macro-consequences. A lump of iron is a physical object. So applied, Levinsons account says that a poem, or a passage of a poem, expresses an emotion just in case a properly backgrounded reader makes such an apt and unforced inference. However, it should be pointed out that there are many positions not committed to the claim that only experiences are valued for their own sake that still say that all artifacts, including artworks, are only instrumentally valuable. What is attractive about HI, and why would anyone suppose that utterance or work meaning is identified by a hypothetical intention? If what is crucial to aesthetic value is an 6 Chapter One experience, perhaps we should say that it is valued for its own sake, in which case the music itself would seem to have a kind of instrumental value. But if this turns out to be true, it plausibly undermines an unqualified ascription of general aesthetic merit.11 The proposal for the specific-value properties is far more problematic. Defending Musical Perdurantism. British Journal of Aesthetics 46:5969. However, it struggles with two problems. Second, it is very obscure how we are to evaluate competing interpretations on the present view. Although the front exterior does not have the roughly classical trappings of the rear, it does preserve the houses imposing air. Identical scores might be produced in the same musico-historical setting, but if one is made with the intention that it be played to parody the other, it is plausibly a different work. Subjectivism is preferable as an account of aesthetic judgment, as long as we dont know whether there are sufficiently robust groupings of sensibilities, but if there are such groupings, we may prefer a relativism that captures them. Objects and Models When it comes to art, it is obvious what objects are appreciated. New York: Harper and Brothers. Similarly, being aesthetically engaged with an objectan artwork or a natural environmentis being in a state of mind valued (valuable) for itself. First, if seeing-in occurs at all in photographs, we can see-in them kinds of things not represented, just as we can with paintings. Providing an analytic . The view, even rehabilitated along quasi-historical lines, may also fail to account for artworks and art forms from non-western and earlier western cultures that are conceptually but not historically linked in the right way to the eighteenth-century prototypes. In Praise of Immoral Art. Philosophical Topics, 25:15599. The problem here is that we were initially looking, or believed ourselves to be looking, for an account of the latter. In fact, this camps chief claim is that we can refer to what does not exist, Representation: Fiction 171 including to fictional people and places. You have always admired it. Let us begin with the first version, which says that the meaning of a work is the intention an ideal audience would attribute to the actual artist based on the total admissible evidence and, where needed, considerations of aesthetic merit. The former is rarely, the latter is never true.) If one approaches the poem with Wordsworths pantheism chiefly in mind, one can readily read the poem in Batesons terms, making the interpretation unforced and plausible, and in doing so, provide a way of appreciating the poem as a whole. If we can pin down the sense of form as it applies across various art media, can we then go on to assert that something is an artwork just in case it has significant form? Is a scenic view such an object? Artists typically craft, or at least select, the individual item that is the artwork, being guided in either case by intentions toward that item. However, if all artworks belong to a type of object, it hardly follows that no nonartworks belong to that type. 19511952. Hypothetical Intentionalism The alternative is known as hypothetical intentionalism (HI). We have also noticed that some conceptions work better with regard to art (selfless absorption), while others work better for nonart objects like nature and everyday artifacts (object-directed sensuous pleasure). Wollheim, Richard. Oxford: Blackwell. Artworks often have the capacity to provide certain benefits when properly appreciated (experienced). Artworks are sad in some sense, but an intrinsic part of the problem is to better understand what this sense consists of. Yet Henry does set off on such a journey because his goal in life is to become a landscape painter, and he knows that to pursue this he must leave the village and find a teacher in a center known for such art. Kant, Immanuel. To evaluate an object, we have to do something further. Now suppose we are following the story of a character in such a game, and we imagine hearing or witnessing that things work out very badly and the character suffers terribly. In part because both cast their thoughts about art in terms of the art world, and in part because Danto was not explicit about his proposed definition, for some time it was thought that they were advancing similar definitions of art. But if the experience is focused on the object of the experiencethe food and its various qualities of texture and tastes in relation to one anotherthen it is an aesthetic experience, which is also a source of sensuous, indeed, for the nonce, sensual pleasure. Accordingly, intentions are realized if one manages to communicate them. We will see later in the chapter that several promising approaches to answering this question do not meet this more stringent requirement. He claims that this is what distinguishes aesthetic absorption from nonaesthetic attention. Goldmans version attempts to meet this objection by appealing to a special object of attention (absorption): a virtual world distinct from the real one. All day the mountain flared in Blue September Air . Even the village he returns to is not the one he left though it sits on the very same spot in the Swiss countryside. Elements of this conception survived even after the idea that the essence of art is representation was abandoned. Second, whatever medium the above types of writing belong to, there is little in the way of institutional arrangements for placing those (relatively rare) items that are made with artistic intentions or achieve artistic aims (to a significant degree) in settings that make them readily available for artistic appreciation. However, if it makes the presentation of its moral issues compelling, and convinces us that it sensitively explores them, we will take seriously the attitude it expresses and find the exploration worthwhile. It also seems to tell us something about the knowledge needed. This replaceability argument is one that is frequently appealed to by essentialists. The main question we ask in this chapter concerns the bearing of such ethical aspects of a work on its value as a work of art. What could justify such a claim that the experience (judgment) of beauty carries with it a universal normative judgment? , ed. Only these latter properties would indicate genuine ethical or cognitive value, and the experience of the work alone does not reveal whether the work has these properties. (So the claim that Fountain sustains little aesthetic experience is not inaccurate.) Two Distinctions in Goodness. In Creating the Kingdom of Ends. This work might also be thought to have an aesthetic flaw underwritten by a flawed moral (religious) attitude. Ethical-artistic value: The ethical value of a work that contributes to its artistic value. Some utterances give vent to our feelings or express rather than describe an attitude. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . How Can We Fear and Pity Fictions? British Journal of Aesthetics, 21, 291304. In addition, this model distorts what actually happens, typically, when nature is an object of aesthetic appreciation. They go to the psychologists lab, experience nothing scintillating, but over a period of several weeks notice the exponential growth of their powers of pattern recognition and perceptual discrimination. For example, its plausible that Tolstoy wants us to see his fictional world in relation to nineteenth-century Russia. Trivedi, Saam. Things happen to the characters, the narrator knows that they do somehow, and he or she tells us. Or are we to realize he is asking the wrong question at this moment, a fact that reveals an alienation on his part from the flesh and blood Gretta? It is now widely accepted that we have to appeal to certain constitutive intentions to understand or correctly identify certain items (see Levinson 1996, 18889). Vermazen, Bruce. Anne Sheppard discusses what it is that all works of art have in common - what gives them their value as art - and asks, wisely, whether there can ever be one correct interpretation of a work of art. In Schopenhauer, aesthetic experience is a state of mind completely severed from the rest of life, and that is its chief source of value. It is held just as firmly within the contextualist paradigm. 2002. A more plausible view, as we shall now see, is that they belong to a variety of kinds, but it remains true that the identity of an artwork depends on certain historical and structural properties. New York: St. Martins Press. London: Longmans Green & Co. Beardsley, Monroe. The columns support a portico, under which is a swimming pool surrounded by a garden. One may not only imaginatively experience a visual world represented in painting, but through that, come to see the actual world presented visually in new ways. 139 about the ontology of art and about metaphysical issues generally. Another objection claims that there are many cases where music has a perceptible emotional quality, but its clear that it is not intended, because the quality performs no important functional role in the music. 1997. This is why I can pity someone in my imagination even when I dont imagine sharing a world with the person pitied. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howell perspicuously writes, When, through the coming into existence of a community practice, a pattern takes on the property of functioning to carry such semantic, formal, and expressive qualities . We look for coherence in these connections, but not coherence based on some further purpose they might serve, such as delivering a message of some sort, but coherence simply as a structure of sound. It isnt farfetched to say by expressing an emotion we come to know that this particular state is identical to the emotion I am feeling. For one of the motivations of the account on offer is to be able to distinguish cases of sad (or melancholy and somber) sounding music, which is adequately captured by the phenomenal appearance account, and cases of musical expressiveness where something more is required. Art and the problem of modernity 2. This is not to deny that sometimes our appreciation of nature involves aesthetic properties. One exception is Gaut (1998), who includes ethical and cognitive values of art within the idea of aesthetic value. However, Mozarts mature music, such as his clarinet concerto, is an exemplar of the classical style. Darren Hudson Hick's Introduction to Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art offers a fresh, engaging take on both central and historically neglected topics in aesthetics.Hick presents complex debates in an accessible way and brings thinkers from different traditions and historical moments seamlessly into conversation. Here is one recent proposal. In doing this it either shows us the subject itself or a substitute for the subject, but not a representation of the subject. (Elements of philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. 3. There is one final argument that we should consider that is set up by positing two experiences. There could be three reasons. Three Views about Response-Dependency Recall that a property is response-dependent if its instantiation in an object, by definition, consists in the object having a steady disposition to bring about a certain reaction in human beings. Jerrold Levinson has proposed that it is a historical relation that holds among the intentions of artists and prior artworks that is definitive of art (1979, 1989, 1993). Unlike morally praiseworthy behavior, which always has some positive moral value, the expression of a morally praiseworthy attitude may neither be particularly admirable in itself nor do any good, and so have no moral value whatsoever. To a considerable extent, this definition follows the pattern of traditional simple functionalist definitions of art. Without further argument, the formulation in terms of means and ends looks to be adequate and easier to understand. See the section below titled Is Nature an Artwork? 3. On the other hand, suppose work meaning cannot be identified independently of identifying the properly realized intentions. . . The consequences of a work on its audience and beyond can be good or bad (or both good and bad) and works can be ethically evaluated for having such consequences or for having the potential (the capacity) to produce them. Both sustain contemplation that could be aesthetically gratifying. The Art Circle. The chief value of the work lies elsewhere, in the cognitive value of the reconceptualization it proposes and symbolizes. He fails in love and he also gives up the idea that he has enough talent to become a painter.
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