Beginning Aesthetics

beginning aesthetics

by John M. Valentine

an introduction to the philosophy of art

savannah college of art and design

BeginningAesthetics_final.indd 1 12/12/05 11:16:32 PM

prefaceIntroduction

Chapter 1: What is Art?

1.1 The Classical View 1.2 The Perceptual Shift 1.3 Aesthetic Notice and Aesthetic Properties

1.4 Intentional Making1.5 Historical and Institutional

Approaches to Defining Art1.6 Criticisms of the Sentifact Theory

Art IsThought Questions

Notes

Chapter 2: The Task of the Critic: Describing and Interpreting Art

2.1 Description and Interpretation 2.2 Interpretation 2.3 Good vs. Correct Interpretations

2.4 The Role of Artists’ Intentions in Interpretation

2.5 Art and Truth2.6 Criticism as Rational or Non-Rational

Thought QuestionsNotes

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{CONTENTS} iii

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Chapter 3: The Task of the Critic: Evaluating Art

3.1 Subjectivism and Emotivism 3.2 Beardsley’s Theory of Art Evaluation 3.3 The General Criterion Standard

3.4 The Instrumentalist Standard of Artistic Value

3.5 Criticisms of Beardsley’s Theory3.6 Beardsley’s Theory and BeyondThought QuestionsNotes

Chapter 4: Art as the Expression of Feeling

4.1 The Artist and Audience Theories 4.2 What Does it Mean to Say that Artworks Express Feelings? 4.3 How Does Art Express Emotion?

4.4 Collingwood’s Theory of Expression4.5 Art vs. Craft4.6 Plato and AristotleThought Questions

Notes

Chapter 5: Art as Pictorial Representation

5.1 Representational, Abstract, and Non-Objective Art 5.2 Mimesis as Representation

5.3 Max Black’s Theory5.4 Seeing-In5.5 Gombrich and GoodmanThought Questions

Notes

Chapter 6: Beauty

6.1 The Trend Toward Subjectivizing Beauty 6.2 A Brief Survey of Beauty Theories 6.3 Prima Facie and Evidential Beauty

6.4 The Science of BeautyThought Questions

Notes

References Index

{CONTENTS} v

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iv {CONTENTS}


{PREFACE} vii

preface

This book is intended to be a general introduction to the philosophy of art.It is written primarily for laypersons and students who are not philosophy

majors. It covers most of the standard topics of aesthetics in language that

is relatively free of technical jargon. I have not attempted to be exhaustive

in presenting all of the topics and arguments of contemporary aesthetics,

but simply to provide a readable overview of the field. The book also

features an appendix of selected readings which are geared to the topics

of the chapters. This feature combines the approach of the single-author

text with that of the typical readings or anthology text.

I would like to thank the many students at the Savannah College of Art

and Design who have taken aesthetics with me since 1990. Their insights

have been a constant source of inspiration. I would also like to thank

Professor David L. McNaron of Nova Southeastern University who read

and commented on earlier versions of this book. His suggestions have

proved invaluable. Whatever errors that may remain in the text are strictly

my own.

I would like to acknowledge receipt of a Presidential Fellowship from

the Savannah College of Art and Design which enabled me to complete

this book.

Finally, I want to thank my wife Dona for her constant support and

editorial assistance.

vi {CONTENTS}


{INTRODUCTION} ix

Introduction

Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that attempts to establish the general principles of art, beauty, and aesthetic experience. Questions dealing with the nature of art suggest the following issues:

1. Can art be defined? Is there a firm line between art and non-art?

When Marcel Duchamp entered a urinal in an art show in 1917, was he

serious? And what about a bird’s nest or a sunset; could they be works

of art too?

2. What sort of reality or being does a work of art have? Statues and

paintings have a physical reality but works of literature and music seem

to be more intangible.

3. Does it make sense to say that works of art are true or false in some

straightforward way? Is Picasso’s Guernica true? Can anything said by

Hamlet be true since we know he doesn’t really exist?

4. What is the difference, if any, between art and craft? Is the Mona Lisa

art while a lava lamp is merely craft?

5. Can there be objective and reliable interpretations and/or evaluations

of a work of art? For example, what is the correct interpretation of the

movie Fight Club? Is it a good movie?

viii {CONTENTS}


There are other important issues in the philosophy of art, but these are

certainly central ones. The philosophy of beauty and aesthetic experience

deals with these sorts of issues:

1. Can beauty be defined? Is it essentially subjective—in the eye of the

beholder—or more objective in nature?

2. What is the connection between beauty and pleasure? What kinds of

qualities cause humans to experience beauty?

3. When we say that something is beautiful, what kind of statement or

judgment are we making? Is it ever appropriate to ask someone to back

up a beauty claim with some kind of proof?

4. Is there an important difference between immediately-intuited beauty

and educated taste? For example, do the experts on Antiques Roadshow

on PBS really know what they are talking about, or are they merely trying

to impose their standards of taste on us?

5. What is the nature of aesthetic experience and what kind of value is

aesthetic value? We may enjoy certain objects or experiences for their

own sake quite independently of the issue of beauty, which often deals

with sheer sensory delight. But then what are these experiences and how

are they different from more practical or utilitarian experiences? And

how is aesthetic value different from other sorts of values?

The philosophy of beauty and aesthetic experience recognizes

aesthetic phenomena outside of art, as in nature and other areas. It

is concerned with art only insofar as art is beautiful or aesthetically

valuable. Aesthetics also covers issues such as art as expression of feeling

and art as pictorial representation. The former explores the connection

between art and emotion. The latter raises questions about what it

means to say that artworks depict reality. As you can see, these topics

are important and complex. They are not normally dealt with in studio

or art appreciation classes. They require the careful application of

philosophical method which involves the identification, analysis, and

evaluation of fundamental concepts and arguments in any intellectual

area. The world of art is certainly a profound and intriguing world.

I hope you will find that philosophy can open a significant window on

this world.

{INTRODUCTION} xix {CONTENTS}


{CHAPTER ONE} WHAT IS ART? 1

Chapter 1: What is Art?

Case Study 1: In 1917, Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal for entry

into an art show in New York City sponsored by the Society of Independent

Artists. He signed the urinal “R. Mutt” and titled it Fountain. It was

to be displayed at a rotated angle. This was undoubtedly the most famous of

Duchamp’s readymades—i.e., ordinary items such as combs and bottle racks

that were to be perceived and/or displayed in unusual ways. Previously, in

1915, Duchamp had unsuccessfully attempted to convert the Woolworth

Building in New York City into a readymade. One of the most difficult questions in aesthetics is whether or not

art can adequately be defined, especially in light of the wide diversity

of efforts in the contemporary artworld. Can we develop a definition

which will pinpoint the concept of art as opposed to non-art? For

example, it seems clear enough that prior to Duchamp’s christening of

his famous urinal as Fountain in 1917, the object in question was merely

a technological item, not art. Then, as if by magical transformation,

Duchamp’s actions somehow converted non-art into art. How did this

happen? Can anything be so converted? Can anything be art?

We will also have to examine the issue of what is meant by a

definition of art. In the traditionally strict sense, a definition gives us

the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a term. In

other words, it tells us all the essential conditions for understanding the

term and how these conditions are jointly adequate for definition. We

will have to see whether such a definition is possible for art, or whether

it is a concept which has no list of necessary conditions which would fit

every case, or even whether it has any definition at all.1WHAT IS ART?

1


1.1 The Classical View

One of the earliest traditions in the history of aesthetics—dating

at least to Plato and Aristotle—assumes that the most basic necessary

condition for art is being an artifact; that is, an item produced or

shaped by human beings. On this view, therefore, no natural objects

or phenomena would qualify as art. They might be said to be beautiful,

picturesque, magnificent, and so on, but they couldn’t correctly be called

art. Whatever else art is (so the argument goes), it is an object made

solely by the human species. To a certain extent, the intuition of the

ancient philosophers here is reasonable. The word art is sortal, picking

out a class of items against a background of non-art. As David Fenner

says, “’art’ cannot be a synonym for ‘everything’ or ‘anything you want

it to be.’” 1 The term cannot be all-inclusive and retain any meaningful

content. This is similar to the Yin/Yang idea that opposites—like art and

non-art—mutually define one another. Apparently, if literally everything

is art, nothing is art.

It might be useful, though, to modify the old view a bit. It is possible

that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. If so, these alleged

life forms may create something like what we call art. There also exists

the well-known phenomenon of non-human animal art; that is, pieces—

often paintings—done by elephants, chimpanzees, gorillas, etc. It may be

wrong to think that only humans can produce art. Instead of insisting on

the word artifact, therefore, it might be better to substitute the new word

sentifact, coming from the root words sentient and artifact. The term

refers to any item made by a being aware of itself and its environment.

The broader term sentifact enables us to expand the boundaries of art

to include the above-mentioned examples. It also preserves the sortal

function of the word art to the extent that items which are made by

sentient life forms could be candidates for the status of art, but not such

things as flowers, trees, grass, and so on. Natural phenomena could, of

course, be manipulated somehow by humans (for example, Bonsai trees)

or other life forms in such a way that the result may be art, but this is a

special category which will be explored later in this chapter.

Two issues immediately suggest themselves:

1) The first is that of intelligence: must sentient beings be of

sufficient intelligence in order to create and/or know that they have

created art?

2) The second is that of intentionality: must sentient beings intend to

create art? In blunt terms, for example, are ants capable of creating art?

As to intelligence-based or intentionality-based standards, we may

do well to leave the matter open until we have a better understanding

of what constitutes intelligence in the non-human animal world, and

also until we have more reliable methods in communications theory.

The belief that humans are the superior species is often a subtle form

of prejudice in these areas. Secondly, the full theory of art developed in

this chapter is formalist in nature, so that it does not heavily rely on such

factors as artist intentions or the intelligence of artists. [Formalism is

the theory which focuses only on such things as line, shape, color, tone,

texture, aroma, and taste in artworks.] The only requirement imposed

by being a sentifact is that the item in question have madeness as one of

its properties and that it is not, therefore, an already existing natural

phenomenon.

Lastly, as we will see, the sentifact theory involves a “perceptual

shift.” That is, it involves ways of shifting our attention back and forth

between noticing the aesthetic properties of objects versus noticing

only the use-functions of the objects (more on this later). The theory

presumes that any sentient being with the appropriate intelligence and

intentionality could choose to perceive any sentifact as art regardless of

the intelligence and/or intentionality of the maker of the sentifact. So,

in blunt terms again, I would say that although ants may not be capable

of creating art knowingly and intentionally, they are certainly capable

of creating sentifacts (hills) which could be experienced as art by other


2 WHAT IS ART?


sentient beings. The use of the term sentifact simply acknowledges

some unanswered questions in regard to a cross-species approach to the

concept of art.

If it is true, however, that being a sentifact is a necessary condition

for defining art, it doesn’t follow that it is a sufficient condition. If it

did, the concept of art would be too amorphous, since any sentifact

would automatically be art. This seems a bit much. Most of the time

we just don’t regard urinals or screwdrivers, say, as art. They are

technological items which have clearly defined, utilitarian purposes. So

what else besides being a sentifact is necessary for defining art?

1.2 The Perceptual Shift

Some philosophers have argued that a second necessary condition

for defining art is the presence of an explicit intention to experience an

item as art. Or more precisely: the presence of an explicit intention to

experience an item as a candidate for aesthetic notice (this way we don’t

have the word art built into our definition of art). Although the phrase

“candidate for aesthetic notice” will be developed in more detail later,

for the moment it denotes taking notice of line, shape, color, tone,

texture, aroma, or taste for their own sake in any sentifact. This involves

a kind of low-end taking notice of these properties rather than a higher-

end experiencing of sentifacts in terms of qualities such as mystery,

tension, energy, coherence, balance, serenity, and so on. Strictly

speaking, aesthetic notice is neutral with regard to the quality or lack of

quality of the sentifact’s formal features—as we will see, this allows for the

possibility of good art vs. bad art.

In exploring the notion of a perceptual shift from sentifact to

sentifact-as-art, consider the well-known duck/rabbit figure:

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that

in viewing this image we were bound to experience the “dawning

of an aspect”2 – that is, we would see either the duck or the rabbit.

He interpreted this as a type of seeing which operates by way of a

foreground/background contrast as well as by what psychologists have

called perceptual sets. Perceptual sets involve dispositions to perceive

patterns in one way rather than another. Thus, if we are acquainted with

the concept of a duck (we’ve seen ducks before, we know how to use the

word duck correctly, etc.), it is likely we will see the image as a duck if we

are already accessing at some level the concept of a duck. The same is true

for the rabbit pattern. Of course, the accessing may be quite immediate

and the experience is often one of “Aha! There’s the rabbit (or duck).”

But still, as we perceive one of the patterns, the other stays in the

background. As Wittgenstein suggested, it is very unlikely that someone

could perceive both duck and rabbit simultaneously. One may switch

back and forth in a split second, but that is a different matter.

The sort of perceptual shift involved in the duck/rabbit image may

have broader applicability. Consider how we might be able to perceive

sentifacts as art (or as “candidates for aesthetic notice”). Duchamp’s

readymades are possible guides here. How is it that a simple urinal, for

example, could be considered as an artwork?

Duchamp’s agenda in submitting Fountain as a work of art in 1917

was destabilizing and subversive. Among a range of responses to Fountain,

however, it is certainly possible to ignore the utilitarian or use-function

of the urinal and focus instead on the purely aesthetic properties of the


4 WHAT IS ART?


item (line, shape, color, texture, etc.). Of course, as the Bauhaus school

of design taught, form follows function. But form is not identical with

function, just as the duck is not identical with the rabbit. An interesting

aspect of Duchamp’s readymades is that we may choose to place utilitarian

factors in the background and focus purely on the foreground of

intrinsic aesthetic properties. We can shift back and forth quite readily in

the case of the urinal, just as we can freely shift in the duck/rabbit image.

One problem, however, with this interpretation of readymades

is that Duchamp’s intention for them seems to have involved the total

rejection of the European aesthetics of taste—especially the emphasis on

beauty or ugliness—in favor of the new thought that anyone at anytime

could simply choose to experience any artifact as art. Consider The Blind

Man commentary of 1917:

Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not

has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of

life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the

new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.3

Also: “No beauty, no ugliness, nothing particularly aesthetic

about it…”4 Aesthetic form (as Duchamp understood it) was apparently

irrelevant to the concept of the readymade. We can clearly see this from

some of Duchamp’s later comments about critical reactions to Fountain.

Duchamp’s patron, Walter Arensberg, “imagined the artist’s intent in

submitting the urinal was to draw attention to ‘a lovely form,’ and to

the formal parallels between this piece of industrial plumbing and the

sculpture of Constantin Brancusi!”5 But Duchamp’s reaction to this

statement was, “I threw the urinal in their faces as a challenge, and now

they admire it for its aesthetic beauty.”6 As Arthur Danto points out, “its

beauty, if beauty there is, is neither here nor there. He was submitting it

as a work of art, not something calculated to induce what he dismisses as

‘retinal flutters.’”7

From a formalist point of view, however, Duchamp’s theory of

the readymade is extremely problematical. The wording of The Blind Man

commentary is tantamount to the theory that art is anything anyone

chooses it to be and an artist is anyone who makes such a choice. Such a

theory is philosophically uninformative and trivial. Choosing in an ad

hoc way to experience sentifacts as art—with no other criterion than mere

arbitrary choice—is hardly a solid basis for defining art. It should also be

pointed out that Duchamp did not merely choose to perceive a urinal as

a work of art. He did more than that: he titled the urinal, he signed it,

he turned it upside down, and he re-contextualized it by entering it in

an art show. Additionally, there is a certain inconsistency in Duchamp’s

claim that there is “nothing particularly aesthetic” about readymades. In

an interview given in 1915, he declared that:

The capitals of the Old World have labored for hundreds of years

to find that which constitutes good taste and one may say that they

have found the zenith thereof. But why do people not understand

what a bore this is?...If only America would realize that the art of

Europe is finished—dead—and that America is the country of the

art of the future…Look at the skyscrapers! Has Europe anything

to show more beautiful than these? New York itself is a work of

art, a complete work of art…8

Similarly, in the same edition of The Blind Man in 1917, Louise Norton had

this to say about Fountain:

…the jurors of The Society of Independent Artists fairly rushed

to remove the bit of sculpture called the Fountain sent in by Richard

Mutt, because the object was irrevocably associated in their atavistic


6 WHAT IS ART?


minds with a certain natural function of a secretive sort. Yet to any

“innocent” eye how pleasant is its chaste simplicity of line and color!

Someone said, “Like a lovely Buddha;” someone said, “Like the legs

of the ladies by Cezanne;” but have they not, those ladies, in their

long, round nudity always recalled to your mind the calm curves of

decadent plumbers’ porcelains?9

According to Arthur Danto, “one aspect of the highly

overdetermined gesture of submitting the urinal was to de-Europeanize

American art—to get Americans to appreciate their own artistic

achievement. But that meant that Americans had to be made to see an

article of plumbing as a work of art, but not necessarily beautiful in

the way works of art had standardly been seen.”10 On this alternative

reading of readymades—and given Duchamp’s penchant for American

plumbing—it is possible to argue that what he wanted to accomplish with

Fountain is the broadening and mundanizing of beauty (or the aesthetic)

in a way that transcended the aristocratic and snobbish traditions of

Europe. If this reading is plausible, it is possible to conclude that the

issue of Fountain’s beauty (or aesthetics) is a relevant and important issue in

terms of the question of the perception of basic formal elements such as

line, shape, and color.

Even if we take Duchamp at his word that aesthetic form has absolutely

no role to play in the theory of the readymade, it must be stressed that

the “new thought” of ordinary objects as art would have to be grounded

in basic formal features such as line, shape, and color—perceived as

such—once the “useful significance” of said objects had disappeared.

Without formal elements, the new thought would be entirely abstract and

unrelated to the physicality of sentifacts. The reduction to absurdity of

this idea would be the complete elimination of sentifacts altogether. All

one would need to do is simply think the thought that everything is art,

and the pure choice would make it so. But the “everything” in question

here is extremely problematical because the new thought is about

sentifacts and what are they if not collections of formal properties that

come to the fore once useful significance disappears? Correspondingly,

it does not seem so easy to dismiss the concerns of formalism, especially

again in terms of Duchamp’s own ambivalence about them.

When one experiences a sentifact as art, therefore, one seems to

be adopting a certain kind of perceptual set that one does not adopt in

regard to non-art. In the 18th century, many philosophers discussed

a state of mind called disinterestedness which bears a similarity to this

perceptual set. To them, disinterestedness is a condition in which an

object’s formal aesthetic properties can be noticed for their own sake.

Thus, disinterestedness does not mean apathy or uninterestedness. It

is, rather, a state of consciousness in which an object is shifted from

its normal utilitarian contexts to an aesthetic context. The German

philosopher Immanuel Kant even went so far as to claim that in a state of

disinterestedness one would have “no interest in the real existence” of the

aesthetic object.11 An example will illustrate his point. Imagine that you

have wandered into an orange grove. If you simply take note of the lines,

shapes, colors, textures, aromas, and tastes of the fruit without wanting

to eat any oranges, you are in a state of disinterestedness. If, however,

you “have an interest in the real existence” of the fruit (i.e., you want

to eat some of it), then you are not in a state of disinterestedness and

will not notice the formal aesthetic properties of the fruit as such. Kant

also thought that disinterestedness has other implications for aesthetic

judgments which we will analyze in a later chapter. Tentatively, there

does seem to be a certain kind of perceptual shift which one can intend

to take toward a sentifact in order to experience it as a candidate for

aesthetic notice.

The notion of disinterestedness is not without difficulties,

however. In a variety of sources, the American philosopher George

Dickie has criticized various theories of disinterestedness.12 His main

argument is that the examples of a peculiar frame of mind or a special

type of perception (“disinterested perception”) that can be found in

the philosophical literature are not convincing. It seems impossible to

distinguish between two completely different types of perception in these


8 WHAT IS ART?


examples. The line between aesthetically disinterested perception and

perception that is interested in ulterior or selfish factors is not precise.

Thus, it may be best to drop this approach altogether and simply concede

Dickie’s point that focused attention—of the normal sort—may sometimes

have utilitarian function as its object, while at other times it may have

aesthetic form as its object. This is the minimal perceptual shift which is

being used from Wittgenstein’s analysis of the duck/rabbit image.

In the next section, we will develop more fully the concepts of

aesthetic notice and aesthetic properties. It is essential that care be taken

here so that our definitions are not circular. For instance, we must not

say that art is any sentifact which is aesthetically noticed, and then go

on to say that aesthetic notice is a certain type of experience which is

identified by having art as its object! (Philosophers call this “begging the

question.”) What is aesthetic notice? And what are aesthetic properties?

1.3 Aesthetic Notice and Aesthetic Properties

The key etymological root for the term aesthetics is the ancient

Greek word aisthetikos, which refers to taking pleasure in some aspect

or aspects of sense perception. We will employ this emphasis on a

sensory phenomenology (or attempt to describe the structures of our

experience as we live them) but with an important modification. Rather

than stressing the pleasure that one takes in sense perception, we will

stress the mere taking note of particular aspects of sense perception

for their own sake, while ignoring other aspects or functions of the

sentifact in question. Thus, for example, in the case of a new car, it

seems straightforward enough that we could ignore the use-function of

the vehicle and instead take an intrinsic interest in its various sensory

qualities. That is, our eyes could follow certain lines, shapes, and colors

just as lines, shapes, and colors. Similarly, in the case of music, our ears

could follow certain tones just as tones. Such an interest, no doubt,

could be achieved with no ulterior motive beyond simply dwelling on

these qualities as such. Of course, when we dwell on them, we may

find that we like or dislike what we experience. Therefore, to build the

notion of pleasure into aesthetic experience—as in the case of the strict

definition of aisthetikos—would be a mistake. It would render bad art or

other kinds of disagreeable aesthetic experiences impossible. What we are

attempting to uncover is a kind of “phenomenologically foundational”

focus that we can take on the sensory qualities of sentifacts.

There are, of course, many ideas as to what constitutes aesthetic

properties. A huge variety of terms have been employed with great

intricacy in this area.13 For instance, in his article “Categories of

Art,” Kendall Walton discusses the issue of what it means to identify

an artwork’s aesthetic properties. As examples of aesthetic properties,

he cites “tension, mystery, energy, coherence, balance, serenity,

sentimentality, and pallidness.”14 He argues that these properties are


10 WHAT IS ART?


emergent attributes of works of art which are based on non-aesthetic

properties such as colors and shapes, modulation of notes, and pitches

and rhythms. In order correctly to perceive such aesthetic properties,

he says, one must have a prior knowledge of and training in a variety of

artistic categories. Some of these categories are commonly explored in

formalism, but others are clearly contextual and historical. Familiarity

with such categories enables us to perceive some features of artworks

as standard (e.g., the exposition-development-recapitulation form of

classical sonatas), others as variable (e.g. the arrangement of colors in

paintings), and still others as contra-standard (e.g. traditional sculptures

which move on their own).15 His analyses are rich and detailed. He does

not, however, deal with the singular and foundational acts of perception

which are necessary conditions for the basic recognition of sentifacts

as art.

Perhaps what is missing in Walton’s account is an attempt to describe

what it means to experience lines, shapes, colors, tones, forms, etc., as

themselves intrinsically aesthetic, especially again in light of the Greek

root aisthetikos.16 When one is drawn to line, shape, color, etc., as such,

one is perceiving aesthetically. The nature of the drawnness is often non-

reflective, immediate, and holistic. Of course, this sort of experience is

frequently presupposed for us in the artworld in terms of a sentifact’s

having already been contextualized: we see it in an art museum, hear it at

a symphony, and so on. But there are unusual cases—such as readymades

in their early years—where the artworld is at a loss in regard to certain

sentifacts, and audiences must fend for themselves.

Interestingly, Walton himself gives an example of this latter type:

If we are confronted by a work about whose origins we know

absolutely nothing (for example, one lifted from the dust at an

as yet unexcavated archeological site on Mars), we would simply

not be in a position to judge it aesthetically. We could not possibly

tell by staring at it, no matter how intently or intelligently, whether

it is coherent, or serene, or dynamic, for by staring we cannot tell

whether it is to be seen as sculpture…or some other exotic or

mundane kind of work of art.17

It is no doubt true that we would be at a loss as to how to apply

sophisticated aesthetic terms to such an object (for example, “coherent”

or “serene”) precisely because we wouldn’t know which categories of

art pertain to it. However, we could still be drawn to or intrigued by its

colors, shapes, and forms as such. In that case, we would be relating to

the object as generically aesthetic. It seems likely that we could do this

notwithstanding our lack of specific art categories, as Walton suggests

when he acknowledges that we could attribute aesthetic properties to this

strange object the way we do to natural objects, “which of course does not

involve consideration of historical facts about artists or their societies.” 18

But this would mean that, if we can be intrinsically interested in the

lines and colors of a sunset, for example, we can be equally interested

in the purely formal properties of a sentifact. Tones, shapes, lines,

colors, forms, etc., can have their hold on us even if we have no further

ideas as to how to classify them. Correspondingly, it is perhaps useful

to distinguish between what might be called “higher-end” aesthetic

properties (such as beauty, mystery, and serenity) and “lower-end” ones

(such as line, shape, color, form, etc., experienced simply as such). The

latter are clearly necessary conditions for the former, but I see no reason

to assume that they cannot be perceived on their own independently of

any further knowledge of artistic categories or styles. The basic holding of

our attention is singular and foundational in regard to the phenomenon

of aesthetic properties emerging in our consciousness.

Following additional suggestions made by Monroe Beardsley,19

we might also think of aesthetic notice as a domain which involves the

following features: (1) A situation where “attention is firmly fixed upon

heterogenous but interrelated components of a phenomenally objective

field” (Beardsley, p. 527). That is, attention is highly focused on the

object and the object controls the experience. (2) The experience is


12 WHAT IS ART?


one of significant intensity: “Aesthetic objects give us a concentration

of experience…They summon up our energies for an unusually narrow

field of concern” (pp.527-528). He goes on to suggest that aesthetic

experiences are peculiarly able to shut out distractions. (3) The

experience is highly coherent: “One thing leads to another; continuity of

development, without gaps or dead spaces, a sense of overall providential

pattern of guidance, an orderly cumulation of energy toward a climax, are

present to an unusual degree” (pp. 527-528). According to Beardsley,

when such an experience is broken off, it retains its hold on us and we can

resume it holistically at will. (4) The experience is particularly complete

in itself: “The impulses and expectations aroused by elements within the

experience are felt to be counterbalanced or resolved by other elements

within the experience, so that some degree of equilibrium or finality is

achieved…” (pp. 527-528) In other words, aesthetic experience stands

out in one’s memory as a singular event. Although Beardsley doesn’t

specifically discuss a phenomenologically foundational focus on formal

qualities per se, his comments are clearly compatible with it. It seems

likely that an aesthetic object could only emerge in our experience if

we had suspended--to some extent at any rate--our normal patterns of

dealing with our environment; e.g., patterns of manipulation, buying

and selling, focusing on utilitarian functions, and so on. Thus, aesthetic

notice will have, no doubt, a different feel to it to the extent that it is

detached from normal routines and interested in the sensory qualities of

sentifacts only for their own sake.

In concluding this section,we should remember that when we speak

of a perceptual shift from use-function to aesthetic form, we are not

presupposing any special kind of attitude or state of mind. The minimal

shift being stressed simply means that consciousness is moved from

focusing on function to form, nothing more or less than this. If such a

shift is commonly and naturally possible, then the next question we need

to address is how we can get from the perception of a sentifact’s aesthetic

properties to the perception of it as art. In answering this question, we

will be developing a third necessary condition for defining art; namely,

intentional making.

1.4 Intentional Making

In order to develop the argument that intentional making is a third

necessary condition for art, we need to distinguish between two types

of sentifacts: Sentifact 1 is any item produced by human hands with the

intention that its aesthetic properties are to be noticed for their own

sake. This would surely include the overwhelming majority of cases of

artistic creation where some kind of raw material is fashioned into an

aesthetic object. This does not mean, of course, that the makers of these

aesthetic objects could not have other intentions in regard to the nature

and purpose of the objects (e.g., their meaning), but the foundational

intention--the one that establishes the very artness of the object--seems

to be that of creating an object with aesthetically perceivable properties.

Sentifact 2, on the other hand, is the readymade, that is, any item

produced by human hands where there was no original intention that it

be a candidate for aesthetic notice, but subsequently the sentifact has been

intentionally re-perceived and manipulated somehow into an aesthetic

object by focusing on its lower-end aesthetic properties. Readymades

are certainly not the standard fare of artistic creation, but Duchamp has

demonstrated that their possibility must be taken into consideration.

The object that is the readymade as such–a urinal, comb, bottle rack,

snow shovel, etc.,–is clearly a type of raw material that is being used by

someone other than its original maker for non-utilitarian purposes. Of

course, it is not the case that readymades lack intentionality. Someone

must intentionally perform the perceptual shift on the sentifact and

alter it somehow. When this happens, we can get an odd result; namely,

a situation where the person who does the shift first is the artist of

the sentifact, notwithstanding the fact that he or she didn’t create the

sentifact. This is consistent with Duchamp’s being known as the artist of

Fountain. It is a very unusual application of the term artist but one whose

possibility must be allowed. Where there is clear evidence that a sentifact’s

maker simply did not do the shift, we can do it in their stead. The


14 WHAT IS ART?


intentional re-perceiving and re-making of the object can be as simple

as titling and signing the object (as Duchamp did with Fountain), thereby

intending that its previously unnoticed or unstressed aesthetic features be

brought to the foreground as such.

If the preceding argument is correct, it follows that the creation of

a Sentifact 1 or Sentifact 2 is tantamount to the creation of art. Since

Sentifact 1 is the standard case of artistic creation and Sentifact 2 is

statistically unusual, we might want to distinguish a strong sense of the

word art from a weak sense. But both cases clearly involve a perceptual

shift from function to form, as well as some kind of intentional making or

re-making of the requisite sentifact.

In concluding this section, two things should be stressed: (1)

Performance of the perceptual shift is already explicitly or implicitly

intentional, but we have focused on deliberate making to underscore

the belief that all art is intentional. No doubt, there were many random

experiments performed by Dada artists where the specific result of artistic

making was not known until the end. It may well be that the specific result

was not known at the beginning, but there was still an initial intention

to produce some kind of object which would be a candidate for aesthetic

notice. The entire process, therefore, was intentionally guided. (2) Our

full definition of art can be stated as follows: Art is any sentifact which has

been intentionally produced (or which can be intentionally experienced)

as a candidate for aesthetic notice by way of a perceptual shift. In the next

section, various criticisms of this theory will be considered.

1.5 Criticisms of the Sentifact Theory

The first criticism has to do with the scope and status of the term

sentifact. Is it possible, for instance, that ideas could be regarded as

sentifacts and thus experienced as artworks? We normally think of ideas

as part of the causal process leading up to the production of art. We also

do not usually think of them as having been made in any straightforward

sense (we speak of having ideas, not of making them). Thus, although it

is perhaps true to say that certain kinds of ideas are necessary conditions

for certain kinds of art, it may be problematical to go further and say

that ideas themselves could be art. It is similarly unclear whether ideas

have formal properties—such as line, shape, and color—which could be

experienced aesthetically. Undoubtedly, they have conceptual properties

which could be found to be aesthetically interesting; for example, the

elegance of a mathematical formula or the winning pattern in a game of

chess. In defending the sentifact theory, one might be reluctant to elevate

ideas to the status of artworks. However, there seems to be no decisive

refutation of someone’s insisting that, when they generate ideas, they

can notice them aesthetically. (If one has an excellent visual memory,

it would seem that he or she can notice, sometimes in great detail, the

line, shape, and color of mental images or ideas—e.g., the image or idea

of a horse.) Such a claim seems to be a rather unusual application of the

term sentifact, but it is perhaps irrefutable. Of course, in order to share

aesthetically noticeable ideas with others, one must describe them or put

them into some kind of publicly accessible medium. The latter case is

what we would more normally associate with physical sentifacts as opposed

to the mental kind.

The distinction between physical and mental sentifacts is not

meant to settle definitively the issue of the being or reality of artworks

(philosophers call this the “ontology” of artworks). This is an extremely

complex topic which we will deal with only in summary fashion. It seems


16 WHAT IS ART?


clear that some artworks are individual, physically discrete objects (such

as paintings and uncast sculptures), while others cannot be identified

with any single physical object per se (such as literary and musical

works). In other words, the Mona Lisa is a good example of the first point

inasmuch as it is a singular sentifact and if it were destroyed, the famous

painting would be gone. On the other hand, no one performance—or

CD copy or piece of sheet music—is identical with Beethoven’s Ninth

Symphony. The same is true for Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. Therefore, some

philosophers have suggested that, at least for literature and music, we

need to distinguish between the artwork as an abstract structure or type

versus tokens or reproductions of the artwork.20 In the philosophical

literature, there is considerable controversy as to what these abstract types

are and how they come into existence.21 The sentifact theory leaves open

the nature of these types. As we have seen, most of the time we think of

art as a physical phenomenon—one we can access through our senses—but

this may not always be the case. The sentifact theory is broad enough to

encompass both physicalist and non-physicalist interpretations of what

artworks are. The reason for this is that the term sentifact means “an

object created by any being aware of itself and its environment,” and such

an object could be either physical or mental.

A second criticism of the sentifact theory has to do with the

perceptual shift. Does this mean that “art is in the eye of the beholder?”

For example, suppose you have a friend who is a painter. She invites you

over to admire a new canvas, and instead of doing so, you focus instead

on her palette. You say something like, “Your palette is an interesting

work of art!” She is confused, of course, and claims that the palette is

merely a tool for creating art, not art itself. You insist, though, and

explain to her that by the criteria of the perceptual shift her palette is art

after all. What are we to make of this example? You regard the palette as

art; she does not. Who is right? It seems that the sentifact theory provides

a conceptual template, if you will, for identifying sentifacts as artworks.

So, even though you didn’t actually make the palette, you are in a sense

its artist since you were the first to perceive it aesthetically. This example

is exactly analogous to Duchamp’s readymades.

Does this mean that the artness of the palette is “in the eye of the

beholder”? Certainly, the idea of a perceptual shift is a conceptual

template in the mind of the perceiver, but there must be actual

properties of the sentifact in question which stimulate or attract the

perceiver in an aesthetic way. Perhaps artness is a kind of emergent

property which results from the bringing together of sufficiently

intelligent perceivers with sentifacts that have lines, shapes, colors,

and tones of certain sorts; artness would thus be a potential property

of sentifacts which is brought out or actualized by sentient perceivers.

Imagine a world in which intelligent sentient perceivers—such as

humans—could only experience utilitarian aspects of objects, not

aesthetic aspects. Would this mean that art had ceased to exist, or only

that it existed in a state of potentiality, waiting for perceivers with the

right conceptual template? Is there a duck in the duck/rabbit image if

all sentient perceivers can only see a rabbit? Would duckness, then, be a

potential property of the image?

A third and related criticism of the sentifact theory is this: if

Duchamp could proclaim a urinal as art, why couldn’t one do the same

with respect to natural phenomena? George Dickie has argued that in

creating the object known as Fountain, Duchamp used the already existing

urinal as a kind of medium or raw material for his intentions.22 Dickie

suggests that the same could be done in regard to a piece of naturally

occurring driftwood. That is, one could create an aesthetic sentifact out

of the raw material of the driftwood by manipulating it somehow—by

painting it, by making it part of a larger found object sculpture, by

displaying it in an art museum, and so on. Dickie’s argument here seems

correct. Clearly, when one manipulates or changes a natural object in

some way, one could be using it as a medium for the production of an

aesthetic sentifact; i.e,, art. On the other hand, if one merely points to

a natural object and, without touching or manipulating it in any way,

deems it to be art via a perceptual shift, one has committed a conceptual

mistake. Driftwood as such does not have deliberate madeness as one

of its properties, and it is clear that allowing it to be called art would

destroy the vital sortal function which is crucial for the term art to be


18 WHAT IS ART?


meaningful in the first place. If driftwood as such is art, then so is any

natural phenomenon, and “art” is once again potentially synonymous

with “everything.”

The fourth criticism of the sentifact theory is that it is sometimes

said that the notion of creativity is central to the concept of art. That

is, it might be argued that we need to consider the notion of a creative

sentifact being perceived aesthetically. Of course, everything depends

on what “creative” means. If it means “imaginative and new,” then

this is saying that in order for a sentifact to be considered as art, it

must be imaginative and new. But this seems false for the simple

reason that a sentifact could be experienced as art and yet be a blatant

copy, a computer generated image that is unoriginal, an uninspired

graphic design piece, and so on. Creativity is not a condition for the

identification of a sentifact as art.

The fifth criticism is that the sentifact theory is deficient in not

emphasizing that art must be a product of self-expression or that all art

is expressive of emotions. The problem here is determining the meaning

of “self-expression.” In one sense, almost everything we do shows or

expresses our inner state of mind, even scratching, yawning, and so on.

The defenders of expressionism typically mean more than this, though.

They often mean—in the manner of Romanticism—that art must contain

powerful emotions such as anxiety, fear, and love. But this also seems

false for the reason that not all art is meant to be expressive in this way or

must be taken to be so. It is surely possible to create or notice a sentifact’s

aesthetic aspects without powerful (or any) emotions being involved. We

will return to these issues again in Chapter 4.

The sixth criticism is that the sentifact theory ignores the possibility

that art is an open concept; that is, a concept that has no necessary and

sufficient conditions for definition. Morris Weitz has led the way with

this idea.23 Following some of the thoughts of Wittgenstein, Weitz claims

that contemporary art is too diverse and fragmented to have an essential

definition. As soon as one is given, he thinks, new forms of art appear

which falsify it. In place of an essentialist definition, Weitz suggests

that art has no definition and the best we can do is note various “family

resemblances” among artforms. Weitz also thinks that an essentialist

definition of art would foreclose future types of artistic creativity.

There is a considerable amount of philosophical literature concerning

this issue.24 Briefly, the three necessary conditions for defining art in

the sentifact theory—namely, sentifactuality, aesthetic notice via the

perceptual shift, and intentional making—are sufficiently general to

encompass all present and future artforms. And the conditions would

hardly threaten artistic creativity because the ways in which sentifacts

can be fashioned into art seem virtually endless. We will return to the

issue of the general adequacy of the sentifact theory in the last section of

this chapter.

The final criticism of the theory is extremely important. It consists

in noting that a variety of historical or institutional theories of art

have emerged in the last twenty years or so, and that these theories are

almost always non-formalist in nature. That is, the theories reject the

notion that art can be defined via aesthetic properties. In place of this,

they maintain that the identification of sentifacts or artifacts as art is

historically contextual and/or dependent in complex ways on the cultural

institution of the artworld. They constitute a major challenge to the

sentifact theory. In the last section of this chapter, we will conduct an

overview of two of the major spokespersons for these theories, Arthur

Danto and George Dickie.


20 WHAT IS ART?


1.6 Historical and Institutional Approaches to Defining Art

The specific background of Danto’s famous article, “The Artworld,”

is unquestionably the perplexity that audiences often feel with respect

to the issue of what sorts of objects can be called art. How is it, for

example, that ordinary items like urinals, beds, and Brillo Boxes could

be so designated? As artworks, how would they be phenomenologically

different from real urinals, beds, and Brillo Boxes?

Danto argues that they wouldn’t be phenomenologically different.

He cites in support of this claim Andy Warhol’s displays of facsimiles of

Brillo cartons, maintaining that it is “an atmosphere of artistic theory,

a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld”25 that makes Warhol’s

boxes art, whereas the usual kind of Brillo Boxes at the supermarket are

not. There are no perceivable properties as such, he says, which would

distinguish the former as art. Rather, Warhol’s boxes are experienced as

art only in terms of a kind of conceptual or theoretical shift whereby a

properly informed audience senses that something has happened in the

artworld. That is, a new understanding has emerged. Ordinary objects

can now be perceived in terms of the “is of artistic identification,”26 as in

the case of someone walking into an art museum, seeing Warhol’s boxes,

and uttering sentences such as: “Look at those Brillo Boxes. They’re

an interesting work of art.” The artistic context, the theory of the

readymade, and the ideology of Pop Art make such sentences intelligible.

Exactly the same sentences, uttered at the supermarket in the absence of

such theoretical shifts, would be absurdly false or simply unintelligible.

Conceptual shifts in the history of art, as well as specific artworld

contexts, determine the identification of various objects as artworks,

says Danto, not any particular properties of artifacts that are accessible

through the senses.

Noël Carroll has formalized Danto’s approach to defining art in the

following way:

X is a work of art if and only if (a) X has a subject (b) about which

X projects an attitude or point of view (c) by means of rhetorical

(usually metaphorical) ellipsis, (d) which ellipsis requires audience

participation to fill in what is missing (interpretation), (e) where both

the work and the interpretation require an art-historical context.27

This complicated-sounding formula is actually fairly

straightforward. It says that a work of art must have a subject (it must be

about something) toward which the artist is expressing an attitude; the

technique of expression involves “ellipsis” or some kind of shortening

or coding of the subject and point of view; the shortening or coding

requires that audiences produce an interpretation or theory of what is

“being said” in the work; and this latter task can only be accomplished

in a given art-historical setting. Thus, the only way to distinguish

between Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and ones at the supermarket (“visually

indistinguishable pairs,” as Danto calls them) is that the former satisfy

criteria (a) through (e) above, whereas Brillo Boxes at the supermarket

do not.

It is not necessary to dwell on conditions (a) through (c) except to

note in passing that it seems possible to have artworks that are not about

anything or that do not project an attitude or point of view.28 Rather,

we need to focus on Danto’s claim that artworks can only be identified

as such in terms of interpretations in a given art-historical setting.

In doing so, we will zero in on the “visually indistinguishable pairs”

example. Are there inherent properties of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and

those at the supermarket that phenomenologically could constitute both

as works of art?

The answer is yes. Both these objects have lines, shapes, and colors


22 WHAT IS ART?


that could be noticed simply as such (via the shift). When so noticed,

and when the conditions of intentional making or re-making as outlined

above are in place, what one is perceiving is basically the same in either

case; namely, art. Undoubtedly, Warhol’s boxes are considerably more

avante-garde than those at the supermarket and have a much higher

dollar value. But this is irrelevant to their basic identification as art

objects. Danto is surely correct in making visible the atmosphere of

art theory which interprets such things as urinals, beds, and Brillo

Boxes within modern art history, but it seems to me that they could be

intentionally created (or altered) and perceived aesthetically without

knowing anything about such theory or history. It is true that there is still

an aspect of concept-laden perception in the shift, but it is hardly the

full-blown, art historical perception that Danto has in mind.

This last statement needs to be developed more fully. The

physiological and psychological processes underlying our ability to

identify figures such as ducks and rabbits, as well as our ability to shift

from the experience of function to that of form, are certainly complex.

They involve “top to bottom” neurological processing, acquisition of

the ability to use and understand a natural language, and an impressive

array of mastered concepts. We must learn, for example, what ducks and

rabbits look like, and how correctly to use the words duck and rabbit. In

like manner, we must also learn how to understand and use the concept

of an object’s having a function, as well as what it would mean to suspend

such an interest in favor of simply experiencing formal qualities as formal

qualities (line as line, tone as tone, etc.). However, once the relevant

concepts are understood, we seem able to exhibit a sort of smooth

effortlessness in switching from one animal shape to another, and from

function to form. Perceptual shifts are thus anything but neutral and

simple. On the other hand, however, the sorts of artworld concepts

and theories that Danto finds indispensable to the very recognition of

sentifacts as art seem considerably more complex than anything found in

the notion of the perceptual shift from function to form. Just in the case

of readymades alone, think of the extensive historical knowledge of the

artworld which is presupposed in gaining insight into what Duchamp did.

What Danto is talking about in this case are sophisticated philosophical

ideas which have interpenetrated the perception of a urinal as art. In like

manner, Danto discusses Roy Lichtenstein’s Brushstroke paintings of the

1960’s. He argues that these paintings are heavily surrounded by complex

theories which must be understood as fundamentally rejecting the style

of brushstroke-making found in Abstract Expressionism.29 Presumably,

if Danto is right, an untutored viewer unaware of these theories could

not interpret and perceive Lichtenstein’s paintings as art. No doubt, it is

likely that all sensory experience is interpretational to a greater or lesser

extent, but the conceptual machinery of the perceptual shift is far less

complicated than Danto’s way of experiencing art through sophisticated

artworld theories. If it is possible to perceive sentifacts as art in a more

straightforward manner than Danto has suggested, then inference to the

simplest explanation might warrant taking this approach.

In concluding our discussion of Danto, we need to return to

readymades one last time. What Duchamp did with Fountain was to

broaden and mundanize the concept of art. In The Blind Man commentary,

he appeared to be establishing a perceptual shift from function to lower-

end aesthetic form. He seemed to be implying that any sentifact could be

so shifted and experienced as art if certain types of intentional re-making

were also presupposed. And this would be true quite independently of

the intentions of the creator of the sentifact, since it seems unlikely that

the original maker of the Fountain urinal had any aesthetic agenda in mind

per se. Of course, he might have had such an agenda, in which case the

famous urinal was already perceived as art (via the shift). But Duchamp’s

actions lead us to infer that he (Duchamp) did not think this to be the

case. Rather, his procedure was typically Dadaistic and subversive, and

could be read as the incredible notion that all sentifacts have artness as

one of their potential properties if the function-to-form shift is done on

them and they are intentionally altered somehow.

Finally, if a urinal is a type of raw material for the perceptual shift,30

does this mean (as Danto has suggested) that “it is not even clear what

color Fountain is, or if it has a color.”31 In other words, Danto believes-

-quite consistently with his theory of art--that Fountain is basically an


24 WHAT IS ART?


idea superimposed on an artifact that must be understood via a theory-

shift in the artworld. As an idea, it can have no perceivable aesthetic

properties, such as color. But this seems very problematical. Fountain does

have (or at any rate the original did have) aesthetic properties: once we

shift away from its function as urinal, we can notice its white color, its

shape, and its feel, all for their own sakes. In other words, we can hold

it in our hands and have direct sensory access to it. This is true even

notwithstanding Duchamp’s comment that readymades have “no beauty,

no ugliness, nothing particularly aesthetic about them.” In making

this comment, it seems, he was referring to the absence of higher-

end aesthetic properties (such as beauty or ugliness in the traditional

European senses) but not to lower-end properties such as the mere

presence of line, shape, and color as such. No doubt, Duchamp was

more interested in the joke he was playing on the artworld and the new

idea of ordinary objects as art, but such interests would hardly negate

the presence of lower-end aesthetic properties and the possibility of

perceiving them in terms of an intentionally re-worked Sentifact 2.

The ostensive theory of The Blind Man commentary is the idea that we can

arbitrarily impose the notion “that’s art!” on sentifacts at will without

grounding this in their formal elements, whereas the sentifact theory’s

position—a deconstructed version of The Blind Man commentary—is that

artness is determined by a perceptual shift from function to form as

grounded in low-end formal elements.

It is true, of course, that the 20th Century saw many conceptual

experiments in the artworld. This has led a number of theorists

to conclude that formal properties are not important or relevant

in conceptual art. Where the idea of a work is paramount it can

certainly seem as if sensory qualities are adventitious. But from a

formalist perspective it is imperative to realize that sensory qualities

are phenomenologically foundational--they help to establish the very

artness of the work. It is the task of critical interpretation thereafter to

determine what kind of art has emerged or what the artist is attempting to

say in the conceptual piece. If the distinction is not maintained between

(A) intentional making or re-making and the perceptual shift from

function to form as determinative of artness per se, and (B) the critical

interpretation of the work’s meaning or its place in art history, then a

certain confusion arises in which artworld interpretations are taken to

be constitutive of the piece as art rather than constitutive of the piece’s

meaning. It is precisely this problem which is evident in Danto’s visually-

indistinguishable-pairs argument.

Following to a certain extent in the footsteps of Danto, George

Dickie has proposed an “institutional” definition of art. Dickie accepts

Danto’s claim that artworks cannot be identified by means of aesthetic

properties and offers the following definitions of his key terms: “Art is

an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public.”32

“An artist is a person who participates with understanding in the

making of a work of art.”33 “An artworld system is a framework for the

presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public.”34 “The

artworld is the totality of all artworld systems.”35 Although Dickie claims

that the interconnectedness of all these definitions is inevitable and

that they “bend in on, presuppose, and support one another,”36 the

circularity is obvious. Even though Dickie does not find the circularity to

be “vicious,” nowhere do we find a clear, non-circular definition of art.

Neither do we find a plausible account of how the artworld developed in

the first place.

A central stumbling block for theorists such as Danto and Dickie is

giving a plausible account of how the artworld itself could have arisen in

the first place.37 Danto’s position is that the identification of artifacts as

art can only take place in terms of various theories which are pre-existent

in the historical artworld. This would mean that artworld theories are

conceptually prior to and phenomenologically constitutive of individual

works of art: theories of art precede the facticity of art. Thus, the

artworld is a kind of regulative idea whose historical genesis is unclear.

In his defense, Danto has articulated the thought that the artworld has

emerged from historical thinking about the business of artifactuality and

the point of art-making in a way that provides for the development of

new works to be recognized in the context of theory and history. There

is, he believes, no problem with the artworld’s genesis; it is coeval with


26 WHAT IS ART?


artistic practice and appreciation. The sentifact theory, however, is

designed to make clearer the role of perceptual shifts and intentional

making or re-making in this historical process. It is important to stress

how the earlier emergence of Sentifacts 1 and the later emergence of

Sentifacts 2 make possible a basic understanding of art and the artworld

in a way that does not heavily presuppose a great deal of complicated art

historical theories.

The sort of perceptual shift we have examined would give a

phenomenologically foundational account of how singular acts

of perception (i.e., those that focus only on lower-end aesthetic

properties of sentifacts) probably existed--along with various forms of

intentional making--and established early prototypes of art and the

artworld. In other words, art would have been historically all and only

Sentifacts 1 (and then Sentifacts 1 and 2 after the introduction of the

readymade), and the artworld would have been the cultural contexts in

which Sentifacts 1 were produced, displayed, bought and sold, critically

discussed, and so on. This grounding of the identification of artworks

in the old tradition of aisthetikos—i.e., the perceptual shift as applied to

intentionally produced sentifacts—can be defended as an alternative to

artworld or institutional theories.

We have reached, then, the end of this chapter and a tentative

definition of art. Some additional definitions are included below for

further thought.

Art Is:

1. “The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms,

movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of

beauty; specifically, the production of the beautiful in a graphic or

plastic medium.” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

2. “Something is art when it is made or done to be enjoyed or

appreciated.” Ada Long and Bob Yowell, eds., Stepping Out: An Introduction to

the Arts.

3.“Art is a human activity consisting in this. That one man consciously,

by means of external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived

through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also

experience them.” Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?

4. “A work of art is a kind of idea—but one that is expressed in visual

terms rather than in words.” James M. Carpenter, Visual Art: A Critical

Introduction.

5. “Art is first of all a word—one that acknowledges both the idea and

the fact of art. Without it, we might well ask whether art exists in the

first place. The term, after all, is not found in every society. Yet art

is made everywhere. Art, therefore, is also an object, but not just any

kind of object. Art is an aesthetic object. It is meant to be looked at and

appreciated for its intrinsic value.” H.W. Janson, History of Art, Vol. I.

6. “All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.” Sir Thomas

Browne, Religio Medici, Part i, Sect. xvi.


28 WHAT IS ART?


7. “Art is sublimated libidinal energy.” Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the

Theory of Sexuality.

8. “Art is the objectifying of the will in a thing or performance, and the

provoking or arousing of the will.” Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation.

9. “Art is teetering on the edge of technical disaster and creative

orgasm.” Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party.

10. “Art is anything you can get away with!” Andy Warhol, quoted in

Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage.

Thought Questions

1. Perhaps art is precisely the entire process which begins with an

idea and culminates in a physical object as evidence of the process. In

other words, is “art” a verb? If so, it might be argued that art is never

completed because different audiences have different reactions to

evidences of art. Also, artists may continuously add to their works, either

mentally or physically. What do you think of this view?

2. George Dickie has argued that chimpanzee paintings are not art

because chimps cannot have the appropriate intention to create art.38

Since he insists on using the word artifact in his own theory, Dickie is

saying in effect that only humans can make art. Do you think this view is

correct?

3. Does it really make any difference if art can be defined or not? After

all, artists will continue to do what they do irrespective of having or not

having such a definition. So what is the cash value of the whole issue? Are

there political dimensions to defining art? Must all areas of intellectual

or practical activity have their key terms defined?

4. What do you think of the view that “art is what artists do and an

artist is anyone who makes art”? Do you believe that this is in any way an

important and informative statement?


30 WHAT IS ART?


Notes

1 David E.W. Fenner, Introducing Aesthetics (unpublished manuscript),

Chapter 2.

2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe

(New York: Macmillan, 1953), pp. 193-214.

3 Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and H.P. Roche, The Blind Man, May,

1917, No. 2, p. 2, in Collections, TOUT-FAIT: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online

Journal, Vol. 1/Issue 3, December 2000.

4 Marcel Duchamp, cited in Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical

Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 34.

5 Arthur C. Danto, “Marcel Duchamp and the End of Taste: A Defense

of Contemporary Art,” in News, TOUT-FAIT: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online

Journal, Vol. 1/Issue 3, December 2000, p. 7.

6 Marcel Duchamp, cited in Arthur C. Danto, TOUT-FAIT, p. 7.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., p. 8.

9 Louise Norton, “Buddha of the Bathroom,” in The Blind Man, May,

1917, No. 2, pp. 2-3, in TOUT-FAIT. Of course, this is Norton speaking,

not Duchamp, but the statements occur directly under “The Richard

Mutt Case” and were undoubtedly approved of by Duchamp.

10 Arthur C. Danto, TOUT-FAIT, p. 8.

11 Immanuel Kant, “Analytic of the Beautiful,” in The Philosophy of Art:

Readings Ancient and Modern, ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1995), pp. 270-271.

12 See George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1997), Chapter 3.

13 For a detailed discussion of various aesthetic terms or concepts and

how they relate to “non-aesthetic” properties of objects, see Frank Sibley,

“Aesthetic Concepts,” in Neill and Ridley, Readings, pp. 312-331.

14 Kendall L. Walton, “Categories of Art,” in Readings, p. 333.

15 Ibid., pp. 334-337.

16 A similar difficulty occurs in Sibley’s discussion of the connection

between “non-aesthetic” properties and aesthetic concepts. Sibley’s claim

is that certain kinds of factual statements about physical objects reveal to

us their non-aesthetic properties such as type of line or shape as line or

shape, saturation of color as color, aspects of tones as tones, and so on.

These properties provide a foundation for aesthetic concepts, although it

is impossible, he thinks, that any collection of such properties would ever

be logically sufficient to justify the application of the requisite aesthetic

terms. What Sibley seems to miss, however, is that we can focus on lines,

shapes, colors, tones, etc., for their own sake in a phenomenologically

foundational way. Such focus would be “aesthetically primitive” and

would be distinguishable from the higher-end aesthetic concepts—such as

delicacy, gracefulness, vibrancy, garishness, and so on—that Sibley cites.

He is surely correct in arguing that these latter concepts are complicated

matters of taste, but the sentifact theory is an attempt to uncover a kind

of raw experience of formal elements in terms of the old tradition of

aisthetikos.


32 WHAT IS ART?



18 Ibid., p. 352.

19 Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism

(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), pp. 527-530.

20 See Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1980).

21 See Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Lanham: Rowan &

Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), Chapter 6.

22 George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach, p. 87.

23 Morris Weitz. 1956. “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Journal of

Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15: 27-35.

24 See Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Chapter 5.

25 Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” in Neill and Ridley, Readings, p. 209.

26 Ibid., p. 206.

27 Noël Carroll, cited in Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, p. 94.

28 See Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, p. 95.

29 Arthur C. Danto, “Aesthetics and the Work of Art,” in The

Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1981), pp. 105-111.


31 Arthur C. Danto, Disenfranchisement, p. 38.

32 George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics, p. 92.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Although not an artworld or institutional theory of art, Jerrold

Levinson’s theory shares a similar difficulty in that it attempts to define

present artforms in terms of historical antecedents and is thus essentially

recursive in nature. See Jerrold Levinson, “Defining Art Historically,”

in Readings, pp. 223-239.

36 George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics, p. 85.


34 WHAT IS ART?


Chapter Two: The Task of the Critic:

Describing and Interpreting Art

CASE STUDY 2: Francis Ford Coppola’s classic movie, Apocalypse

Now, has been the center of critical controversy ever since its release in 1979.

Interpreting or saying what art means is extremely difficult in the case of such a

complex work. Some critics have argued that the film is basically a commentary

on American involvement in Vietnam. Others have suggested that it is an

exploration and development of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,

although set in a different locale and time period. Still others claim that it is a

revelation of the tragic failure of Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando)

to be an existential hero or Übermensch—a superior person beyond good and

evil—in Nietzsche’s sense of the term. The film is richly layered, suspenseful, and

even mythic in proportion. Saying precisely what it means is difficult because

some viewers will accentuate certain aspects that others will ignore. Problems

of interpretation complicate the basic issue of describing the film. For instance,

how should we describe the relationship between Kurtz and Captain Willard

(played by Martin Sheen)? Willard has been sent to kill the Colonel—or

“terminate his command with extreme prejudice”—because the Army claims he

is insane and operating in Cambodia with no legal justification. This much is

clear. But beyond that, one’s interpretational ideas will color what features of

their relationship should be described in what ways. Thus, the film is extremely

complex and enigmatic. Describing and interpreting art are challenging tasks

of the critic.236 THE TASK OF THE CRITIC

2{CHAPTER TWO} THE TASK OF THE CRITIC 37


On the other hand, we do expect serious critics to have a variety of

characteristics, including open-mindedness. As David Hume indicated

in his essay, “Of the Standard of Taste,” the ideal art critic or judge

should be unbiased and have a “serenity of mind” when he or she is

critiquing art.2 Other important qualities for Hume include delicacy

of taste (a trained and experienced point of view), keen senses, and

significant familiarity with models of excellence in the various fields of

art. Hume was saying in effect that not just anybody can be a successful

critic. It takes time, training, and effort to do the job right.

David Fenner has suggested that there is an informational part

of what critics do that complements the descriptive aspect. Such

information may include the following:

a) What are the origins of the work? Who was the artist; what were his/

her circumstances?

b) What was the environment in which the work was created? When was

it created? Where?

c) What was the context of the work? What was the society like in which

it was created? What were the religious, moral, and social values of that

time and place?

d) What was the genre of the work? How does it relate or compare to

others of its kind? What is its kind?

e) What is the history of the work? Was it valued when it was first

created? Who valued it? How did it come to be in this museum/gallery/

collection?

f) (And for natural objects…) How did this object come to exist? Who

found it, or who adopted it as art?3

{CHAPTER TWO} THE TASK OF THE CRITIC 39

In this and the following chapter, we will address the most

fundamental issues facing art critics: describing, interpreting, and

evaluating art. In theory, describing art involves reviewing its relevant

features without making any value judgments about the work or trying

to say what it means. For example, Apocalypse Now can be described in

terms of its plot, its cinematography, its sound track, its directorial

techniques, and so on. On the other hand, interpreting art usually

involves explaining what the work means or what the artist’s intentions

are in terms of what he or she “is trying to say.”1 As noted earlier, there

have been many interpretations of Coppola’s film, ranging from the

political to the deeply philosophical. Lastly, evaluating art involves

judging whether the work is a good or bad example of its kind, and being

prepared to give reasons for such judgments. Evaluations usually deal

with the artistic value of a work, but could also deal with cognitive value

or ethical value. Thus, it has been argued that Apocalypse Now is a classic

film because of its suspenseful plot and the stunning confrontation at the

end between Willard and Kurtz (among other things).

2.1 Description and Interpretation

It is undoubtedly naïve to assume that there can be such neat and

tidy distinctions among description, interpretation, and evaluation.

When the critic is describing a work, he or she is already making value

judgments about which features are worthy of mention. Interpretational

and evaluative stances tend to color our perceptions very strongly. It is as

if we were asking the critic to observe in a neutral way and give us “just the

facts” about a piece when we know that this is all but impossible. Theories

and facts—or expectations and observations—are always interwoven in

subtle ways. This means that in reality description, interpretation, and

evaluation can be very difficult to separate.

38 THE TASK OF THE CRITIC


2.2 Interpretation

At first glance, nothing seems overly difficult or problematical

about saying what a work of art means. Interpretations suggest themselves

from clues inside the work, from what we know about other works by the

same artist (or similar works by other artists), from evidence we have of

the artist’s intentions for the work, from scholarly studies of the artist’s

work, from the context of the work’s creation, and so on. Sometimes

we track an interpretation from our first exposure to an artwork, while

at other times an interpretation comes to us later on in a sort of “Aha!”

experience. Either way we often tell ourselves and others with great

conviction that we really do know what a piece means. We don’t think

interpretation is so hard after all.

Problems begin, however, when we learn that some philosophers

have attacked the concept of interpretation at its core. Susan Sontag,

for instance, in a famous essay entitled “Against Interpretation,” argues

that interpretation destroys a work of art by substituting a “sub-text” for

“text.”6 By the term text she simply means any work of art as such. By the

term sub-text she means any interpretational scheme which is one-sided

and exclusive (or reductionistic). For example, she claims that whole

armies of interpreters have virtually destroyed the works of Franz Kafka.

Freudian critics look only for evidence of neurosis (such as an unresolved

Oedipus Complex in the story The Metamorphosis); religious critics see

novels such as The Trial and The Castle only in terms of Kafka’s alleged quest

for God; social critics focus only on the frustrations and insanity of

modern bureaucracies which they find exposed in his works; and so on.

In the midst of such narrow and ideological biases, says Sontag, the great

writings of Kafka are lost—we look past the layered richness of the texts

in terms of our fixation on sub-texts. She traces the tendency to conduct

interpretation in this way to the ancient Greeks, especially Plato, for

whom the meaning of art was problematic because of its status as illusion.

She thinks we have come to a kind of dead end where we need to pay

Notice that Fenner is pointing to contextualist information in

this list. [Contextualism is the theory that artworks should be analyzed

only—or primarily—in terms of factors which are supposedly external

to artworks, such as artist intentions and historical considerations.]

This is different from description where a formalist approach is more

appropriate. That is, description is product-oriented and refers to the

work itself, whereas the search for information is process-oriented and

refers to the history and context of the work. Both of these aspects help

critics do a better job of reviewing artworks for audiences.

We have seen in Chapter 1 that Kendall Walton reinforces these

points in his article “Categories of Art.” He argues that correctly

perceiving a work’s aesthetic properties entails a prior knowledge of and

training in a variety of artistic categories, some of which are formalistic

but others of which are clearly contextual and historical. Familiarity with

such categories enables the critic to identify some features of artworks

as standard, variable, or contra-standard.4 Normally, critics grasp

very quickly the relevant features of artworks that they wish to describe

or interpret for the public. But there are many cases where in-depth

knowledge of artistic categories pays off in terms of works done in

existing genres or in terms of new genres themselves.

As stated earlier, the way a critic describes a work of art seems

invariably connected with his or her understanding of what the work

means. Many philosophers have recognized this symbiosis of description

and interpretation. For example, Anne Sheppard gives an interpretation

of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot in which she makes much of the

fact that a boy tells the two tramps (the “heroes” of the play) that Mr.

Godot will not come for them today, but will surely come tomorrow.5

She infers from this scene that the situation depicted in the play was in

existence before the play began and will continue after it stops. But the

very fact that she chooses to talk about the scene with the boy at all is

a function of a particular interpretation of the play (as she recognizes).

Thus, description is an activity which is highly selective and dependent on

interpretive factors. Because of this dependence, we will now turn to the

more complex issue of analyzing what it means to interpret a work of art.




relationships between signs and significations are inherently unstable and

problematical. We cannot establish with finality the meanings of signs

and texts, including such things as artworks. This is because meaning is

inevitably historical, cultural, nuanced, provisional, and perspectival.

c) Tentative interpretations of texts can be ventured in terms of close

formalistic and contextual readings where stylistic techniques are analyzed

and various internal inconsistencies or blind spots of the work are

exposed. Hidden assumptions or aspects of texts—whether consciously or

unconsciously known to the creators of texts—are thus revealed and shown

to be part of the totality of the work.

d) This latter point can be especially seen in terms of how certain ways

of constructing reality or “binary opposites” subtly interweave in texts.

Examples of such opposites would include male/female, rational/

intuitive, speaking/writing, heterosexual/homosexual, master/slave, and

so on, where, according to Derrida, the first term in each pair has been

privileged by the Western tradition at the expense of the second. Thus,

the gesture of deconstruction attempts to un-privilege the first terms and

demonstrate how both terms are mutually dependent and important in

understanding texts.

e) Attention is paid by deconstructionists to the so-called intertext, the

larger cultural background of works that saturates them with numerous

conventions, concepts, figurations, and codes. It is argued that the

notion of intertext makes problematical the Romantic idea of the single

artist working alone as a creative genius (as Shelley and others believed).

Artists are caught in vast webs of influence and interdependence in their

productions.

f) Finally, deconstructionists believe that meaning drifts in the text itself

and in the intimate dialectic between audience, text, and intertext. Not

even the artist’s own intentions for a work are privileged. In a famous

essay entitled “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes argued that

much more attention to the sensuous surface of artworks. She concludes

her article by suggesting that what is needed today by critics is an “erotics

of art.”7 That is, they need to pay attention to the formal aspects of

artworks and stop trying to say what these works mean.

There is no doubt that Sontag has struck an important chord in her

article. Sometimes critics do get carried away with their interpretations

and, as a result, they seem to be discussing something alien and distant

from the artwork itself. We need to be on guard about this. On the

other hand, it seems likely that Sontag has swung too far in the opposite

direction. If a work is highly complex and enigmatic—such as Henry

James’ The Turn of the Screw or Coppola’s Apocalypse Now—we often think it is

appropriate to entertain a variety of interpretations of it. Perhaps this is

acceptable as long as we are not dogmatic and try to favor interpretations

which are comprehensive and supportable by reference to many formal

and contextual features of the work itself. We should also be suspicious of

reductionistic, all-or-nothing types of interpretation.

A greater challenge to the whole enterprise of interpretation has come

from the post-modern movement called deconstruction. Originally a

development in literary criticism and philosophy, deconstruction has

spread throughout the artworld since the 1960’s. Its founder was the

French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Although Derrida consistently

resisted all attempts to give a formal definition of deconstruction, there

are various threads that run through its interpretational gestures or

methods of unpacking or opening up texts (which would include not just

novels, poems, paintings, sculptures, and so on, but also such cultural

productions as shopping malls and buildings):

a) All texts are complex, layered, historical, and cultural in nature.

Additionally, texts are caught in subtle webs of interconnections with

other texts.

b) The idea that a text has one, unequivocal meaning that can be fixed

by reference to the “pure thought” of its creator or by reference to

some transcendentally absolute realm of meaning is a myth. The




2.3 Good vs. Correct Interpretations

Deconstruction does us a service in raising the issue of correct

interpretations of art. What is a correct interpretation? And how can

we know if we have one? To begin with, it is important to distinguish

between correct and good interpretations. Marcia Eaton suggests that a

good interpretation is one that gives a person pleasure; it somehow works

for that person.9 For example, if someone enjoys experiencing Apocalypse

Now as a kind of Greek tragedy with numerous parallels between the

character of Colonel Kurtz and that of Oedipus Rex, then this is fine.

The viewer is happy with this interpretation and is likely to watch the

movie repeatedly because of it. We are free to relax and enjoy whatever

meanings we find in artworks.

What does it mean, however, to speak of correct interpretations?

The answer depends on what we mean by “correct.” If it means an

interpretation which is definitive and final, then in all likelihood correct

interpretations do not exist. On the other hand, if “correct” means

“reasonable and supportable by reference to formal and contextual

features of the artwork,” then it is quite likely that we can have correct

interpretations. Anne Sheppard argues that the more comprehensive

an interpretation is—the more features of the work that it accounts for

and integrates—the better it is.10 Also, correct interpretations must be

sensitive to any features that do not support them; they must give an

account of why this is so. We can have two or more correct interpretations

of a single work, says Sheppard, if they account for the same number of

features or the same features. She cites as an example of the latter two

very different interpretations of William Blake’s poem “The Tiger”:

we must not be a slave to what authors—or artists in general—tell us

about their works because texts will reveal many layers of meaning that

artists were not or could not have been aware of. As we interact with it,

the text “speaks for itself,” and the primacy of artists’ intentions for the

process of interpretation (as stressed in traditional models) has been

superceded.8

Although this list is hardly definitive of all the nuances of

deconstruction, it does suggest a number of its central themes.

Deconstructionists believe that texts are rich, enigmatic, and open-

ended. We can never catch and hold them in any final way with the nets

of our interpretations.

Deconstruction has brought with it, of course, a storm of

controversy. Some of its critics have claimed that it amounts to a kind of

interpretational anarchy where works of art can mean anything we want

them to mean. That is, these critics find great fault with deconstruction

because they think it destroys the notion of correct interpretations

of art. They have also said that deconstruction is inane, incoherent,

and even meaningless because, by its own method of interpretation, it

would have no stable meaning and would thus be useless as a theory of

interpretation. Its defenders, however, say that deconstruction has been

a liberating movement in art criticism which has freed audiences from

the “tyranny” of artists and critics. We are forced to interact with art on

our own and form theories of meaning that are autonomous, although

provisional and incomplete.




Tiger! Tiger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?11

One interpretation of this poem--put forth by Kathleen Raine—

claims that the tiger is “a symbol of competitive, predacious selfhood”12

that is to be regarded as evil:

In her view the answer to the poem’s final question, “Did he who

made the Lamb make thee?’ is a firm ‘No.’ Among her evidence

is Blake’s use of the word ‘forests’ in the second line, ‘In the

forests of the night.’ She argues that ‘forest’ in Blake always

refers to ‘the natural, “fallen” world,’ a world created in Blake’s

view by a secondary, evil creator, distinct from Christ, the creator

of the Lamb.13

Sheppard then goes on to discuss a second interpretation of the

poem put forth by E.D. Hirsch. In Hirsch’s view, “The Tiger” celebrates

“the holiness of tigerness”:

In this poem the ‘ferocity and destructiveness’ of the tiger are

transfigured. Terrible as the tiger is, it is also beautiful. The same

God created both tiger and lamb, in a creation which transcends

human good and evil. Hirsch too appeals to the word ‘forests’ but

understands that word in quite a different way. ‘”Forests.’” he says,

‘suggests tall straight forms, a world that for all its terror has the

The Tiger

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

And watered heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?




2.4 The Role of Artists’ Intentions in Interpretation

At the opposite end from deconstruction, E.D. Hirsch has

presented a spirited defense of the role of authors’ intentions in our

interpretations of their literary works (and presumably, by extension,

he is defending artists’ intentions more generally). In his article “In

Defense of the Author,” Hirsch considers five theses which attempt to

banish authors’ intentions as irrelevant to the process of interpretation:

a) The claim that authors are irrelevant because texts have semantic

autonomy (semantics is the study of meaning in linguistic forms).

The problem with this, says Hirsch, is that “meaning is an affair of

consciousness not of words. Almost any word sequence can, under

the conventions of language, legitimately represent more than one

complex of meaning.”17 Word sequences mean nothing in particular

until someone means something by them or understands something

from them. But this leads to multiple interpretations and disagreements

over meaning, and to banish the original author as the determiner

of meaning creates a situation where texts have no stable or valid

interpretation. Any interpretation would be as good as any other.

b) The claim that the meaning of a text changes over time for the

author. Hirsch presents numerous examples of this fallacy in which what

has really happened is that the significance of a text has changed for

an author over time, not the meaning of the text. If an author changes

her mind about an earlier work and rejects it in part or whole, she has

developed a new perspective on the work but its original meaning hasn’t

changed at all. As Hirsch says, “…an author’s original meaning cannot

change—even for himself, though it can certainly be repudiated.”18

orderliness of the tiger’s stripes or Blake’s perfectly balanced

verses.’14

Both interpretations of Blake’s poem account for virtually all of the

same textual features. Yet they are quite divergent. How can this be? How

can contradictory interpretations be equally plausible or correct?

Sheppard suggests that the two interpretations are not, after all,

referring to exactly the same features of the poem. The key feature is

“forests.” Raine means one thing by this and Hirsch means another.

Additionally, Sheppard notes that Raine brings in “a wealth of other

evidence from Gnostic, Hermetic, and cabbalistic texts”15 which

were known to Blake, while Hirsch’s interpretation “rests partly on a

detailed discussion of the imagery, rhythms, and syntax of the whole

poem,”16 among other things. Thus, says Sheppard, it is the “total web

of evidence” that we must look at. This example illustrates very well how

complex correct interpretations can be.

Such complexity is complicated by the mystical and enigmatic

nature of Blake’s own words. It is equally complicated with respect

to other artworks, such as non-objective paintings and instrumental

music. For instance, what is a correct interpretation of Jackson Pollock’s

Lavender Mist? Or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? These are open-ended

texts which can be approached from many points of view. But whatever

interpretation we choose, we must try to insure that it is comprehensive,

that it brings in as much formal and contextual evidence as possible,

that it has a minimum (or no) counterexamples to it, and that in the last

analysis the text can be read or experienced in a significantly important

way by means of the interpretation. Finally, we must not be dogmatic.

Important works of art are usually rich and layered; we must be sensitive

to alternative interpretations.




one does not mean, though it is very possible to mean what one is

not conscious of meaning.”22 If an author’s intended meaning is

complicated, she cannot possibly at any given moment be paying

attention to all its complexities. There is clearly a distinction between

attended and unattended meanings but this distinction does not

entail that texts are unstable and that we cannot formulate reasonable

hypotheses about what the author’s realized, intentional meaning was.

It is interesting to see how the “deconstruction model” and the “author’s

intentions model” take such different approaches to the question of the

stability of the text and the roles of artists and interpreters. The reader

should consider how well these models would work for understanding

various kinds of artworks, not just literary works.

2.5 Art and Truth

Two more issues remain for this chapter. The first has to do with the

question of whether or not works of art are true in some straightforward

sense of the term. This has a bearing on interpretation. For instance, it

has been said of Meursault’s final outburst at the end of Albert Camus’

novel, The Stranger, that it is a powerfully true statement of the attitude

of the absurd hero. But the obvious problem here is that Meursault is

a fictional character. He doesn’t exist, so how can anything about him

be true? Other cases are similar. What if someone said that some of

Giacometti’s sculptures (e.g., “Tall Walking Man”) make importantly true

statements about the alienation of the human condition? What are we

to make of such claims? If we thought that truth couldn’t be a property

of sculptures or works of fiction (or other works of art), wouldn’t this

change how we interpreted them?

c) The claim that “it does not matter what an author means—only what

his text says.” Hirsch believes that this claim is properly relevant only

to the issue of the evaluation of a text where there is a clear distinction

to be made between what an author intends for a work and how well

he or she achieves this intention. In the realm of interpretation,

however, “the intentional fallacy has no proper application whatever

to verbal meaning.”19 If a poet, for instance, intended her poem to

convey desolation and if every competent reader of the poem only got

a sense that “twilight is coming,” then such critical unanimity would

make a strong case for the irrelevance of the author’s intention.20 But

Hirsch argues that such unanimity almost never happens and that it is a

mistake to let such a myth take the place of careful attention to author’s

intentions. Texts don’t “say” anything on their own. Meaning is, again,

an affair of consciousness and it must be construed as closely tied to

author’s intentions.

d) The claim that the author’s meaning is inaccessible. Hirsch argues

that if this claim means that we cannot know an author’s intended

meaning with absolute certainty, the claim is self-evidently true but too

extreme. It does not follow from the fact that we cannot “get inside”

the head of an author and compare his or her intended meanings with

meanings we understand that correct understanding is impossible.

The question is one of probability and Hirsch thinks that “it is far more

likely that an author and an interpreter can entertain identical meanings

than that they cannot.”21 Such a likelihood is insured by the fact that

both author and interpreter share in the process of having learned a

common language.

e) The claim that the author does not know what he or she means.

Hirsch’s answer to this claim is that “it is not possible to mean what




2.6 Criticism as Rational or Non-Rational

In concluding this chapter, it is important to take up the issue of

whether or not describing and interpreting art is a rational or non-

rational enterprise. In a famous essay, “Critical Communication,”

Arnold Isenberg has claimed that what critics do is basically point to

various features of a work of art that they want us to notice.23 They are

inviting us to experience what they experience. He says that there is

nothing rational about this activity. What he means is that he doesn’t

think that there are any valid generalizations about all the arts which

critics can use to make deductive statements about particular works. A

generalization that is relevant for one work might not be for another.

Also, across the centuries, what one period condemns as bad art—or

interprets in a certain way—may be praised—or interpreted differently—by

another period. So, says Isenberg, critics must realize that what they

are doing is “pointing” and this activity is entirely subjective and

preferential.

Isenberg is right, but only up to a point. Critics do indeed function

like scouts for us; they experience important aspects of artworks and

point these out to us. They are like radar in this respect. But even

accepting this function, it doesn’t follow that critics cannot give cogent

reasons for their interpretations—or for their evaluations, as we will

see in the next chapter. An interpretation of a work of art is very much

like an hypothesis. If it is a good one, it will be well thought out and

comprehensive. It will also be testable. If the interpretation does a solid

job of explaining and tying together all the features of the work and we

experience the work more meaningfully because of it, then we might say

that the interpretation has been verified (tentatively anyway). Otherwise,

it is weak and the search for a better one continues. Along the way, of

course, as Sontag points out, we must also find time simply to appreciate

the work as a sensory delight.

Clearly, everything depends on what “truth” means. Analytic

philosophers—especially philosophers of language—have argued for a

narrow definition. They have asserted that only declarative sentences can

be true or false; for example, a sentence such as “The cat is on the mat.”

This sentence is true if and only if the cat is really on the mat. If the

cat is not on the mat, the sentence is false. Using this definition, these

philosophers have argued that works of art can neither be true nor false

since they are not themselves declarative sentences (although declarative

sentences could be uttered about them). Besides, they say, fictional works

create all kinds of characters and situations which have never existed and

never will. We can’t even imagine what the truth conditions would be

like for statements about imaginary entities. It would be like trying to

determine the truth conditions for a statement such as “Leprechauns

like oysters.”

Other philosophers have rejected this approach to truth in art as too

narrow. They have argued that many works—especially those of literary

fiction—should be understood as imaginary or possible “worlds.” Within

these worlds, artists quite typically develop intricate plots and characters

which have a kind of coherence and consistency all their own. Audiences

can come to understand and appreciate these plots and characters. This

make it possible to talk about various truths in the plot or in the behavior

of the characters. For instance, having read and thought about The

Stranger, one can come to an understanding of who Meursault is, what he

is likely to say or do, and why he acts as he does. With this in mind, one

can grasp deeper truths of an existential nature from his final outburst

at the end of the novel. In this sense, works of art can suggest truths to

us—they don’t have to be themselves true (in the narrow sense). No one

would ever claim that Guernica, as a canvas, is literally true. It can’t be. But

it can nevertheless open many doors for us in terms of thinking about

the horrors of modern warfare. The issue of truth in art is much more

complex than these comments suggest, but they point to a general way of

handling the issue.





Thought Questions

1. Do you think there is a hard and fast line between description,

interpretation, and evaluation of artworks? Or is the line more blurred?

What examples can you cite to support your thoughts on this issue?

2. What is your reaction to Susan Sontag’s powerful argument against

reductionistic interpretation? Is her position too extreme? Read her

essay and try to determine what sorts of interpretations she favors.

3. As you can imagine, deconstruction has created a swirl of controversy

in the artworld. What do you think of its basic approach? Do you find

it to be liberating or destructive? In order to understand the force of

deconstruction, take a literary text and provide an interpretation of it.

Then attempt to derive a totally different interpretation from the same

text. Which of these is correct?

4. Are critics being rational in what they do? Or are they merely foisting

their likes and dislikes on us? As a case study, tune in the “Antiques

Roadshow” on PBS. Listen very carefully to what these experts say about

the items brought to them for interpretation and appraisal. Do you

think Hume would approve of these critics? Are they being rational and

do they give cogent reasons for their statements? Or are they a bunch of

snobs who dictate their tastes to the public?



Notes

1 This is not the only goal of interpretation that philosophers have noted.

Some have stressed that having an “enhanced aesthetic experience” is

the main point of interpreting texts. See Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the

Philosophy of Art (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005),

p. 128-129.

2 David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Neill and Ridley, Readings,

pp. 254-268.

3 David E.W. Fenner, Introducing Aesthetics (unpublished manuscript),

Chapter 18.


5 Anne Sheppard, Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 80; hereafter abbreviated AI.

6 Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Readings, p. 460.

7 Ibid., p. 465.

8 For a brief discussion of deconstruction, see The Penguin Dictionary of

Philosophy, ed. Thomas Mautner (London: Penguin Books, 1996), pp.

122-123.

9 Marcia Muelder Eaton, Basic Issues in Aesthetics (Belmont: Wadsworth

Publishing Company, 1988), p. 107.


10 See Anne Sheppard, AI, Chapter 6.

11 William Blake, “The Tiger” in The Mentor Book of Major British Poets, ed.

Oscar Williams (New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1963), pp. 31-32.

12 Anne Sheppard, AI, p. 89.

13 Ibid., pp. 89-90.

14 Ibid., p. 90.

15 Ibid., pp. 90-91.

16 Ibid.

17 E.D. Hirsch, Jr., “In Defense of the Author,” in Readings, p. 392.

18 Ibid., p. 395.

19 Ibid., p. 397.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., p. 400.

22 Ibid., p. 403.

23 Arnold Isenberg, “Critical Communication,” Philosophical Review 58:

330-44.



{CHAPTER THREE} THE TASK OF THE CRITIC: EVALUATION ART 59

Chapter 3: The Task of the Critic:

Evaluating Art

Case Study 3: The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) was founded in

Boston in the fall of 1993 and presented its first show in March 1994.

The directors of MOBA say that the museum is “dedicated to the collection,

preservation, exhibition, and celebration of bad art in all its forms and in all

its glory.” [MOBA Website] They also claim that “the pieces in the MOBA

collection range from the work of talented artists that have gone awry, to

works of exuberant, although crude, execution by artists barely in control of the

brush. What they all have in common is a special quality that sets them apart

in one way or another from the merely incompetent.” [Ibid] The museum has

sponsored a number of interesting shows:

● The “I Just Can’t Stop” Exhibition—“The artist as slave to creativity—

an exploration of the compulsive need to create—tirelessly,

relentlessly, repetitively, repetitively, endlessly.”

● The “Fine Wine/Bad Art” Exhibition—“It takes a lot of fine wine

to truly appreciate bad art.”

● The MOBA Reject Auction—“A rare opportunity to acquire near-

museum-quality work at a bargain price.”

● “Awash With Bad Art”—The world’s first drive-thru art gallery

and car wash.358 THE TASK OF THE CRITIC: EVALUATING ART

3


One of the most important tasks of the critic is determining artistic

value. Since it is likely that art has many aims and a variety of evaluative

stances can be taken towards it, it is also likely that artistic value will be

pluralistic in nature. That is, works of art can have a cognitive value

(we learn new facts about the world or ourselves when experiencing the

work), a therapeutic value (the work helps us deal with a psychological

difficulty), an ethical value (the work makes an important moral

statement about some aspect of the world), a religious value (the work

deepens our understanding of spirituality), an aesthetic value (we attend

to the lines, shapes, colors, tones, textures, etc., of the work for their

own sake, or to its simplicity and elegance, etc., for its own sake), and

so on. It is probable that no hard and fast line separates these values.

Formal and contextual factors blend together in many ways to determine

artistic value.

Initially, we will be exploring artistic value from the point of view

of formal aesthetic properties such as line, shape, color, tone, texture,

aroma, and so on. We will consider the theories of subjectivism and

emotivism in this regard, as well as the theory of Monroe Beardsley.

Subsequently, we will expand the discussion to include contextual aspects

of artistic value as well.

3.1 Subjectivism and Emotivism

Is the Mona Lisa really better than Elvis on Black Velvet (from a formalistic

point of view)? Is a Dürer figure study superior to common stick figures

or completely amateurish renderings? In other words, is it rationally

possible to distinguish between good art and bad? Note the use of the

word “rationally.” It suggests an aspect of competent judges, the giving

of reasons for evaluative statements, and a general aura of some degree

of objectivity. But this is precisely what subjectivists and emotivists deny.

Subjectivists claim that the only possible meaning of “X is (aesthetically)

good” is “I like X”—I will discuss the first-person variety of the theory

rather than variations such as “is liked by some group of persons.” They

are not, by the way, total non-cognitivists because they say that “I like X”

is a statement which is capable of being true or false about the person

uttering it. Emotivists, on the other hand, hold a position which is

completely non-cognitive. They say that uttering “X is (aesthetically)

good” really amounts to a kind of disguised grunt of approval. That is,

all evaluative statements are nothing more or less than emotive

utterances. For obvious reasons, emotivism is sometimes referred to

as the Yea/Boo theory of art. In the final analysis, subjectivism and

emotivism are theories about how we use evaluative utterances—either to

express a state of liking or disliking, or to express a pure gut reaction.

What are we to make of these theories? If they were true and widely

adopted in the artworld, they would certainly revolutionize the aesthetic

appraisal of artworks.1

Let’s consider subjectivism in more detail. If it were true, the

artworld as we know it would be radically altered. Appraising artworks

would turn out to be completely subjective; comparing and contrasting

artworks in evaluative terms would be useless (except to say things like

“Hate it!” or “Like it!”); giving art lessons or instruction would be

strange and useless; art criticism would be out of business; and so on.

No doubt, there is a subjective element to appreciating and evaluating

art. But subjectivism carries this so far that few of its defenders ever really

examine the apparently disastrous implications of their position.

But can we show that subjectivism is false? It is not clear that a

decisive refutation is at hand. However, the following points seem to

count against it:

a) The statement “I like X” tells us about the subjectivist’s frame of mind

only. It says nothing about the work itself. Thus, to treat subjectivism

as a theory of art evaluation is dubious. It is, rather, autobiographical

commentary pure and simple. Subjectivists respond to this by arguing

that liking X is just what X’s goodness means to them. They also claim


60 THE TASK OF THE CRITIC: EVALUATING ART


that all reason-giving is merely a sophisticated smoke screen for foisting

one’s views on someone else.

b) Subjectivists seem to ignore the fact that humans can like a work of art

they do not regard as particularly good, or be in the presence of art which

is commonly regarded as good and not like it. Also, we often do think

that it is appropriate to give reasons for our evaluative statements. And

when we do so, we think we are referring to the work itself, not just to

our state of mind.

c) A stronger line of criticism against subjectivism was proposed by

the English philosopher G.E. Moore in his book Principia Ethica. Moore

took subjectivists to be establishing a tautology or identity-relation

between goodness and liking. [Simple tautologies include the statement

“All bachelors are unmarried males,” where what’s before and after the

predicate are identical concepts.] But if this is the case, Moore believed

an open question tactic could be used to break the tautology. In other

words, if “X is good” is exactly identical with “I like X,” then it would

make no sense at all to say to a subjectivist: “Yes, I understand that you

like X, but is X good?” That would be like saying: “Yes, I understand that

X is good, but is X good?” (treating goodness and liking as a tautology).

But, said Moore, it certainly does make sense to say: “Yes, I understand

that you like X, but is X good?” It’s a perfectly meaningful question.

This shows that X’s goodness cannot be reduced to subjective liking.

The question of goodness, said Moore, is an open question or one that

cannot be settled by definitions. He went on to claim that goodness

cannot be defined by reduction to any natural property such as pleasure

or liking.2

The issue of competent judges becomes relevant here as well. In the

area of wine tasting, for example, we have come to recognize that some

individuals are able to achieve a level of expertise beyond that of the

ordinary person. This doesn’t mean that the ordinary person’s taste in

wine is wrong and should be rejected. It does mean that the connoisseur

has a more sensitive palate, if you will. He or she can defend particular

value judgments about particular wines by means of reasons which refer

to objective properties of the wines (bouquet, acidity, etc.). The scheme

isn’t perfect because connoisseurs sometimes disagree among themselves,

but it’s a far cry from subjectivism. A surprisingly high degree of

agreement among connoisseurs with respect to certain wines is not only

possible, it’s a fact.

Returning now to emotivists, remember they claim that a statement

such as “X is good” is really a code for “Yea X.” Reason-giving is

impossible in art criticism, they say, and all evaluational discourse is

totally emotional. Again, it may not be possible to refute emotivism

straightaway, but we can indicate at least two general moves against it:

a) “Yea X” is clearly an attitude concerned with a gut reaction to art; it

is not concerned with the properties of the piece itself.

b) “Yea X” (or an equivalent grunt of approval) can hardly exhaust the

meaning of “X is good.” The application of Moore’s open question tactic

would demonstrate this.

If we reject subjectivism and emotivism, however, as theories of art

evaluation, it need not follow that we are committed to a totally objectivist

view. The latter would mean that all aesthetic evaluations are somehow

quantifiable and all value disputes about works of art are resolvable in

principle. Such a level of objectivity is not always achieved even in science.

What we need, perhaps, is some kind of middle ground between these

“attitude” theories and pure objectivity. We will now discuss Monroe

Beardsley’s theory as a contender for this middle ground.




3.2 Beardsley’s Theory of Art Evaluation

First of all, Beardsley claims that art critics most definitely can and

do give reasons for their value judgments (i.e., he opposes subjectivism

and emotivism), and also that they use deductive reasoning when they

evaluate art.3 Deductive reasoning is reasoning that moves from the

general to the specific (more precisely, it is reasoning which unpacks the

conclusion of an argument as being latent in its premises). An example

would be: (1) All humans are mortal; (2) Socrates is human; therefore

(3) Socrates is mortal. The conclusion of this simple argument is a

specific statement (3) which follows from another specific statement

(2) coupled with a very general statement (1). The argument is true and

valid. But how do art critics use deductive reasoning? They may do so

either explicitly or implicitly. Most of the time it’s done implicitly in the

sense that the critic’s statements can be reconstructed after the fact to

demonstrate the latent presence of deduction. Occasionally, deduction

may be used by the critic formally and self-consciously (although it may

be rather awkward to do so). An example of the latter would be:

1. A unified work always has some good in it. (Assumed premise)

2. The Raft of the Medusa’s colors are harmonious and its spatial design

of planes and volumes is tightly organized. (By observation)

3. The Raft of the Medusa is unified. (From 2 or by observation)

4. The Raft of the Medusa has some good in it. (From 1 and 3)4

Notice that this is a valid and true argument. The specific conclusion

(statement 4) follows from the coupling of two specific premises

(statements 2 and 3) with a very general value statement (statement 1). We

find this basic pattern, says Beardsley, in all evaluative statements made

by critics, even if we have to dig it out and reformulate it. The pattern

involves one or more general statements concerning good-making

characteristics and one or more specific statements instantiating the

good-making statements. Also, deductive reasoning entails that like cases

of art should be evaluated by like principles of aesthetics. In other words,

if we say that piece A is good because of properties X, Y, and Z, we must

also say that piece B is good if it contains the same properties.

We are now ready to analyze Beardsley’s full theory of art evaluation.

The theory consists of two broad, interconnected parts:

● The General Criterion Standard of aesthetic evaluation; and

● The Instrumentalist Standard of artistic value.

3.3 The General Criterion Standard

The General Criterion Standard can be stated as follows: Any work

of art possessing some degree of intensity, complexity, or unity possesses

some degree of aesthetic goodness.5 Before we can understand the full

import of this standard, we must see how Beardsley defines his key terms.

What does he mean by intensity, complexity, and unity? And what is

aesthetic goodness?

By intensity, Beardsley means how the various elements of a work

strike one or more of our senses. Is the work fresh? Does it command

our sensory attention? Beardsley realizes, of course, that intensity has a

subjective aura. Even though it can’t be quantified in a scientific manner,

it is nonetheless an irreducible aspect of evaluating art. His language




does imply the possibility of measuring intensity in some approximate

way since he refers to its degrees. We all measure this quality to some

extent when we evaluate pieces, and even though the procedure is loose,

we can often reach a fair amount of agreement as to whether and to what

extent a work has intensity, especially when we compare the work against

known standards of excellence. It is also important to pay attention

to the consensus of competent genre experts who have a trained eye

for determining intensity. It is similarly important to point out that

Beardsley’s position here is anti-intentionalist. That is, he thinks that

the artist’s intentions for a work of art (e.g., her intentions for the

work’s intensity) are not strictly a part of the work and should therefore

be ignored in the evaluation process. This is consistent with Beardsley’s

well-known status as a proponent of formalism.6 The work, he says, must

“speak for itself” regardless of ideas or intentions which are external to

the work. After all, good intentions can be poorly executed and inept

intentions can issue into a masterpiece.

By complexity, Beardsley is referring to the various layers or parts of

a work. A work is complex if it is “busy” in terms of having many sensory

aspects and relationships among aspects. Complexity, therefore, may

be somewhat more objective than intensity. Assuming we could reach

agreement on what would constitute the parts of a piece (which formal

elements in which arrangements), we could almost quantify the piece’s

complexity. Again, Beardsley insists that complexity be experiential in

some way. It is not enough to say that an artist has had a complex idea

for a piece if we do not have direct, formalistic access to this idea in the

piece. Beardsley believes that the range or diversity of distinct elements

that the experience of the piece brings together into its unity, and under

its dominant quality, is the measure of the work’s complexity.7

By unity, Beardsley means how the various elements of the work

come together in an overall design. The idea of a gestalt is useful here.

A gestalt is a meaningful, integrated pattern where the whole is “greater

than the sum of its parts.” Beardsley also says this about unity:

One thing leads to another; continuity of development, without gaps

or dead spaces, a sense of overall providential pattern of guidance, an

orderly cumulation of energy toward a climax, are present to an unusual

degree … The impulses and expectations aroused by the elements within

the experience are felt to be counterbalanced or resolved by other elements

within the experience, so that some degree of equilibrium or finality is

achieved and enjoyed.8

Unity is a dynamic aspect of successful works of art, although all

works possess it in varying degrees. It can be measured to a certain extent

by referring to successful (or unsuccessful) relationships among the parts

of a piece and/or by referring to the competence of genre-experts. It is

thus, I believe, a somewhat less subjective standard than intensity.

When Beardsley talks about aesthetic goodness or value he is

referring to the capacity that artworks or natural phenomena have

for causing valuable experiences in us that are detached or distanced

from more practical, utilitarian experiences such as those dealing with

cognition, ethics, religion, politics, etc. As we will see in a moment,

he believes these experiences have their own intensity, complexity, and

unity which parallels that of the artwork or natural phenomenon. In

turn, the experiences are useful to the extent that they cause us to be

richer and deeper individuals. They help us develop an empathic and

humane aspect to our personalities. The notion of aesthetic goodness

or value is important because considerations of beauty are not always

relevant in evaluating experiences of art or nature. Sometimes, that is,

we can appreciate majestic or sublime experiences (or even disturbing

ones), or those of a more long-lasting and intellectual nature. The terms

“beauty” and “beautiful” do not always seem to be applicable to aesthetic

appreciation. Indeed, we often reserve these terms for purely sensory

experiences that we enjoy in the present moment. The broader idea of

aesthetic value supplies a missing ingredient here and Beardsley ties this

{chapter three} THE TASK OF THE CRITIC: EVALUATION ART 67



ingredient into enjoyable experiences that are evoked in us by art

or nature.

Returning to the General Criterion Standard, Beardsley says that

any work containing some degree of intensity, complexity, or unity

(I.C.U.) contains some degree of aesthetic goodness. [Beardsley calls

I.C.U. General Canons9 of critical evaluation.] An important corollary

of this standard is that Beardsley is distinguishing between goodness

in a work of art and the overall goodness of the work. This is surely an

important and valid distinction. For example, we often admire aspects of

a painting without thinking that in overall terms it’s a good painting (we

might only like the brushstroke technique, the use of certain colors, the

use of negative space, the composition, etc.). Beardsley’s theory allows

us to do this because he thinks that I.C.U. all vary by degrees. Some

paintings would have more of one than another. But wherever there is I.

or C. or U. there is at least one good-making characteristic, he says, and

the work has some good in it (it may not be much).

A second corollary of the General Criterion Standard is that a work

of art as a whole could only be said to be good if it had sufficiently high

magnitudes of all the primary criteria. But how would we know when

a work had such magnitudes? Undoubtedly, there would be clear cases

(e.g., The Raft of the Medusa) where most, if not all, competent judges of the

genre would agree about said magnitudes. Also, there would probably be

other cases (Elvis on Velvet? Dogs Shooting Pool?) where the magnitudes would

be so low that most competent judges would pan the works in question.

However, most artworks are somewhere in between, and competent

judges can disagree in good conscience. This suggests that art evaluation

is not a science; it actually often resembles an artform itself. But even

so, Beardsley would say, using the I.C.U. formula enables us to give

reasons for our statements about good or bad art. Thus, subjectivism and

emotivism are avoided to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the

particular critic’s expertise in identifying, articulating, and defending

specific I.C.U. claims about specific works.

A final word about the General Criterion Standard. Beardsley claims

that, in addition to the three General Canons of aesthetic evaluation, it

is possible to have an indefinite number of secondary criteria (he calls

them Specific Canons.)10 A Specific Canon is any genre-related aspect

of a work of art that enhances one or more of the General Canons.

For instance, in film and video productions successful editing could

be considered a Specific Canon that enhances the I.C.U. of a piece.

Successful brushstroke technique in a painting would be another

example, and so on. Given the joining of Specific Canons to General

ones, Beardsley’s theory has a broad and inclusive aspect to it.

3.4 The Instrumentalist Standard of Artistic Value

Beardsley believes that the Instrumentalist Standard provides a

foundation for the General Criterion Standard. The Instrumentalist

Standard can be stated as follows: Artworks only have instrumental

value to the extent that experiencing them causes the perceiver to

have experiences which are intense, complex, and unified.11 These

experiences, moreover, can be taken as valuable in themselves, or as

usefully valuable things. In order to understand Beardsley at this point,

we must distinguish between instrumental and intrinsic goodness (or

value). An item has instrumental goodness (or is instrumentally good) if

it is a means to something beyond itself; it is not itself a final value. A car

is a good example of an item possessing instrumental goodness. We use

cars as means of transportation. Many items have a similar use-value. On

the other hand, an item has intrinsic goodness (or is intrinsically good)

if it is an end unto itself; i.e., it has inherent value in and of itself. But

what sorts of things have intrinsic value? Philosophers disagree on this

issue. One school of thinking called hedonism maintains that pleasurable

experiences are the only real items of intrinsic worth. Hedonists say we

are pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding organisms, and that everything




we do is ultimately for the purpose of creating pleasure or reducing

pain. If hedonists are right, the world would roughly divide into those

items that are instrumental means to pleasure and those items that are

pleasures themselves—as well as those items that are means to pain and

those that are pains themselves. Notice that instrumental goods are

dependent on intrinsic goods since the former’s only justification

is the creation of the latter. It is not clear, though, that Beardsley himself

is a hedonist. He doesn’t say that he is. He merely says that works of

art are instrumental to the creation of valuable experiences which are

intense, complex, and unified. These experiences can be taken as worth

having for their own sake or they can be means to broaden and deepen

our personalities.

Beardsley’s stand on instrumental artistic value is especially apparent

in his claim that there is a parallel between the I.C.U. of the artwork

itself and the I.C.U. experiences which the piece can evoke in the

perceiver. For instance, consider the Mona Lisa. There is apparently a high

degree of intensity, complexity, and unity in the painting itself. But these

properties can cause us to have parallel aesthetic experiences of a relatedly

intense, complex, and unified nature. The latter items (the experiences)

are aesthetically good. To the extent that the Mona Lisa has the capacity

to induce such experiences in us, it has a certain aesthetic value. It is a

means to aesthetic enjoyment; it is not itself intrinsically valuable.

It is important to stress at this point that Beardsley believes that

aesthetic experience is detached from normal experience and that

cognitive and moral aspects of artworks are not part of aesthetic

experience. The latter, he says, is unique in that it has its own firm focus

on the artwork; its own intensity; its own coherence and completeness;

and its own complexity. There is, as it were, a “hard edge” that separates

aesthetic experiences from all others. The purest way to evaluate artistic

value is through the presence (or absence) of aesthetic experience;

considerations of represented facts or ethical factors are not part of the

aesthetics of a work, according to Beardsley.

3.5 Criticisms of Beardsley’s Theory

● It has been argued that conceptual art is not amenable to Beardsley’s

canons. Where the idea is king, the audience may need to know what the

artist had in mind for a piece before it can be properly evaluated. As

we have seen, Beardsley’s response to this has been typically formalistic.

He insists that the artist’s idea or intention is a process factor; i.e., it

is concerned with what went into the piece, not the piece itself. Unless

there is very clear evidence of an idea or intention in the work, Beardsley

rules out all external references in evaluating the work. The work must

speak for itself.

Although it is hard to be unsympathetic to Beardsley’s focus on the

work of art per se, he has undoubtedly overstated his position in rejecting

contextual factors. Critics often do find it useful to know something

about an artist’s mindset in creating a work. They are also interested,

among other things, in artistic conventions of the piece’s time period

that may have influenced the structures of the piece. The basic notion

here is that artworks do not exist in a vacuum outside of historical and

cultural considerations. Contextualist criteria do have a role to play in

artistic value.

● A number of philosophers have argued that Beardsley’s attempt to

identify and detach aesthetic experience from other sorts of experiences

is not convincing. For example, George Dickie cites the experience of

reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

Does this experience have the detached nature that Beardsley

attributes to aesthetic experience? There are references in the

novel to Illinois, Missouri, the Mississippi River, and the Ohio

River. The novel has a clear moral point of view in its depiction




of the institution of slavery in the United States. Of course,

Beardsley would not deny that the references and the moral

point of view are there, but his theory requires that they make

no contribution to the experience on which the evaluation of

the novel is based because it is claimed that the detachedness

of that experience (aesthetic experience) nullifies references to

the actual world.12

Dickie goes on to argue that all the referential and moral aspects of

this novel support and considerably enhance the intensity of the novel

which is, according to Beardsley, one of the three main criteria for

artistically evaluating a work of art. It is thus quite possible that there is

no hard edge at all between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, and that

cognitive, referential, and moral factors (among others) should be seen

as important parts of determining the artistic value of a work or, in a

general way, its aesthetics.

● Even though Beardsley’s General and Specific Canons provide a

broad umbrella for evaluating art, it is likely that they do not embrace

the entirety of relevant evaluative criteria. Elegance, simplicity, fine

craftsmanship, and creativity—just to mention a few examples—are

undoubtedly important to critics. Beardsley’s strategy for each of these

criteria would be to reduce them to the main or ancillary canons. For

instance, he would point out that creativity is really a type of intensity, and

that alluding to creativity per se is useless unless we can determine whether

the resulting piece is still good (i.e., creative pieces can be bad). The other

examples might be approached in approximately the same way. But still,

it is unclear that all evaluative criteria could be so reduced and explained

away. Evaluative pluralism seems a much more reasonable and accurate

point of view.

3.6 Beardsley’s Theory and Beyond

We have examined some of the virtues and failings of Beardsley’s

theory of art evaluation. Most philosophers today are convinced that

Beardsley is right in terms of attributing instrumental value to artworks,

not intrinsic value. Disagreements have come over the issue of what sorts

of valuable experiences artworks can cause. It seems that in going beyond

Beardsley’s position we must at least consider the following factors:

a) Intensity, complexity, and unity are very often important criteria in

determining artistic value, but they are not exhaustive. A multiplicity

of perspectives is more pragmatic and realistic.

b) Contextual factors have a central role to play in evaluating art.

Formalism by itself is not the last word.

c) The line between aesthetic and non-aesthetic aspects of works is not

hard and fast.

d) Evaluative standards are not precisely quantifiable and art evaluation

is not a science. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that informed

audiences and/or competent genre experts will have a broad

experience of artforms and will be knowledgeable of paradigms of

excellence in the artworld.




Thought Questions

1. Critical Singularism is an approach to art evaluation which claims

that each work of art is unique and no general principles of evaluation

can be applied from one case to the next.13 This seems to suggest that

artworks are like worlds unto themselves. One could call attention to

various properties of each work, but beyond that no comparisons in

regard to other works would be possible. What do you think of this view?

2. How important are subjectivism and emotivism to art evaluation?

Have the earlier arguments against them succeeded in refuting them?

3. Try to develop your own system of art evaluation and then compare it

to Beardsley’s. What are the points of similarity and difference? Which

system is more rationally defensible?




Notes

1 For a detailed discussion of subjectivism and emotivism, see George

Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997),

Chapter 13.

2 G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1903), Chapter 1.

3 See Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism

(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981), pp. 470-473. See

also Chapter 11. My discussion of Beardsley’s theory follows George

Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics, Chapter 14.

4 George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics, p. 144. I have changed Dickie’s

example somewhat for my purposes.

5 Ibid., pp. 142-145.

6 See W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,”

in The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, ed. Alex Neill and Aaron

Ridley (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), pp. 375-385.

7 See George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics, p. 146.

8 Monroe C. Beardsley, cited in George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics,

p. 146.

9 Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism,

pp. 465-466.

10 Ibid.

11 See George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics, pp. 145-151.

12 Ibid., p. 150.

13 Ibid., p. 140.




4{CHAPTER FOUR} ART AS THE EXPRESSION OF FEELING 79

Chapter 4: Art as the Expression

of Feeling

Case Study 4: In 1893, the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch

produced his famous work The Scream. “In The Scream, Munch

makes us ‘see’ what it feels like to be afraid. It is a picture of fear, the kind of

terrifying fear without reason that grips us after we wake up from a nightmare.

The long, wavy lines seem to carry the echo of the scream into every corner of

the picture—earth and sky have become one great sounding board of fear.”1

4.1 The Artist and Audience Theories

The view that emotion is the essence of art can be traced back many

centuries. Its modern influence, however, began in the 19th century with

the Romantics. Most of the latter virtually defined art as a product of

human imagination which both captures the feelings of the artist and

causes audiences to experience the same feelings as the artist. These two

claims can be designated as the artist theory and the audience theory.

They are classically stated in Leo Tolstoy’s famous definition of art: “Art

is a human activity consisting in this. That one man consciously, by

means of external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through

[the artist theory], and that others are infected by these feelings and

78 ART AS THE EXPRESSION OF FEELING


also experience them [the audience theory].”2 According to Tolstoy,

art is a type of communication which is centered in the exchange of

feelings between artist and audience. Interestingly, some defenders of

expressionism use the notion of feelings in art not simply to define art

but also to evaluate it. Thus, a work rated as boring or unemotional

would perhaps be designated as pseudo-art, but most certainly as

inferior. As the British philosopher Anne Sheppard points out,

Tolstoy’s theory, when applied literally, might lead to the interesting

conclusion that the music of the Beatles would be superior to that of

Bach due to the greater extent of popular infection in the former case

(assuming that such a phenomenon could be measured—perhaps through

record sales).3 Many aestheticians find expressionism attractive because

they see in it an essential connection between art, creativity, and the

vibrancy of human feelings.

Several questions immediately arise, however, about expressionism.

The first has to do with the scope of the theory: is all art emotional

or passionate in some sense? Obvious counter-examples come to

mind. What about a graphic design project done according to a client’s

specifications but with no significant emotion on the designer’s part?

What about conceptual art? Or minimalist pieces? These are forms of

art where the idea is king and intellectual elements are often stressed

at the expense of emotion. Certainly, feelings may be involved in such

examples, but they need not be primary or exclusive as expressionism

would have us believe. There are other counter-examples as well.

For instance, if one simply traces an illustration onto a piece of

paper—or runs it through a copier—the result is a sentifact which can

be experienced as a candidate for aesthetic notice (i.e, art), but there is

hardly any residue of emotion involved. Thus, the claim that the very

nature of art is emotion is almost certainly false, even though expression

is a central aspect of many artworks.

A second question about expressionism pertains to the artist and

audience theories. Are they both true? The artist theory seems to

be problematic. In its stronger form—a form not necessarily held by

Tolstoy—it asserts that at the very moment of creating a work of art

the artist feels some kind of emotion and injects this into the work.

But the difficulty with this claim is threefold. First, as we have seen,

it cannot be universally true. There are artists who assert that they do

not feel and inject works with emotion as they are creating them. It is

likely that at least some of the time we should take them at their word on

this. Secondly, many artists use the technique of a persona in creating

artworks; that is, a kind of imaginary person or voice that speaks in and

through the work. Although it may seem sometimes that works are filled

with passion, it is often the case that the artist is imaginatively producing

this illusion through the persona and that he or she is not actually

feeling this passion while creating the work. Thirdly, the strong claim

about artists’ feelings seems to ignore the function of craft and skill.

Consider the example of love poetry. Must one be in love romantically

at the precise moment of writing a love poem and pour this feeling into

the poem? In one sense, the answer is clearly no. An accomplished poet

could probably write successfully about many emotions that he/she did

not feel at the time of the poem’s creation. This is essentially a function

of the exercise of craft, technique, and skill. And besides, someone who

is hopelessly in love is probably too distracted to write a poem (or at

least write it well). We might be reminded here of William Wordsworth’s

view on the connection between feeling and good poetry: “All good

poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…recollected in

tranquillity.”4 The strong artist theory seems to overvalue emotion at the

time of creation as it simultaneously undervalues emotion “recollected

in tranquillity,” as well as the crucial importance of craft, technique, and

formal aspects of creation in a given medium.

The weaker artist theory—which Tolstoy did appear to hold—simply

maintains that the artist is a conduit for passing along feelings which

he/she has felt antecedently, but is not necessarily feeling at the moment

of creating art. Interestingly, the weaker theory seems susceptible to the

same types of objections as above: (1) Not all artforms are intended to

be expressive of feelings nor is it imperative that audiences experience

them this way; and (2) Through the use of the persona, as well as craft

and skill, artists may be able to create works which seem expressive of

{CHAPTER FOUR} ART AS THE EXPRESSION OF FEELING 81



emotions, but it turns out to be the case that the artists never actually

experienced these feelings. In other words, could a poet write successfully

about romantic love if he/she had never been in love? It is tempting to

answer no—perhaps thinking of the analogy with blind persons being

incapable of having any familiarity with colors. But this is unclear. Blind

persons can certainly have sympathetic experiences of color based on

extensions of their other sensory abilities (witness the movie Mask where

the protagonist Rocky tries to help a blind girl appreciate the color red

by handing her a boiling potato, and the color blue by handing her ice

cubes). Why couldn’t an accomplished poet write sympathetically (and

successfully) about romantic love even being bereft of such feelings?

Some might argue at this point that although the poet doesn’t have to

be in love while creating the poem or have any direct acquaintance with

love, it certainly makes for a better and more convincing poem if he/she

has this acquaintance. But this is an assertion that cannot be decided

in advance of examining the finished poem itself. Again, everything

depends on the poet’s skills with respect to language, image, metaphor,

empathy, and so on. It is not logically or psychologically impossible that

a very fine, romantic love poem could be created by someone who has

never known this kind of love personally.

The audience theory has its own difficulties as well. For example,

how can one know that the emotions a work evokes, if any, are the same

as those which the artist put into the work? There are serious problems

here. If the artist is dead and/or has left no record of the mental

processes involved in a given work, then we cannot confirm the audience

theory. If the artist is incommunicado, if he/she deliberately dissembles,

if there are unconscious aspects to the work, then again the audience

theory cannot be confirmed. Additionally, Robert Stecker points to

the variability of human responses to art: “One person may react to a

deeply sad musical passage with sadness, another with joy at its beauty,

and a third with no feeling at all.”5 It is also likely, says Stecker, that “the

evocation of emotion in an audience is more a reaction to expressiveness

than the expressiveness itself.”6 Thus, it would be wrong to use evocation

of feeling to analyze expressiveness.

The difficulties inherent in a literal or strong interpretation of

the audience theory have led some critics to advocate a weaker version.

It is only necessary, they say, that works of art evoke some kind of

emotionality in the audience, even if it is not the identical emotionality

of the artist. The point of art is to “wake up” the perceiver in some way,

shape, or form; if he or she reacts emotionally to a piece, that’s all that

matters. Problems with this thesis are twofold: (1) Stecker’s point again

that it is incorrect to use evocation of feeling to analyze expressiveness;

and (2) The criticism that if we allow works of art to evoke any feelings

at all, we run the risk of allowing totally inappropriate reactions to art

(in cases, that is, where we have some kind of evidence of the artist’s

intended feeling for the piece). Such liberality may water down the

audience theory to the point of being insipid. Most artists seem to

desire appropriate emotional reactions to their works, notwithstanding

the difficulties inherent in deciding what “appropriate” will mean.

Undoubtedly, this means that it is important for artists to be as precise

as possible in their use of technique, symbolism, and other elements

which assist audiences in interpreting emotions. We must also remember

that some pieces of art may have had no feelings put into them and

that audiences may not be significantly moved by the pieces. It is

certainly possible to be unemotional about art, either in creating it or

experiencing it.

4.2 What Does it Mean to Say that Artworks Express Feelings?

In this section, we will examine a brief survey of some of the ways in

which philosophers have analyzed the formula “A expresses E,” where A is

any work of art and E is any emotion or feeling. There have been a wide

variety of answers to this question and no one analysis rules the field.

This suggests that “A expresses E” probably involves a cluster concept




which is multi-contextual and pluralistic. Marcia Eaton7 distinguishes

among the following meanings of “A expresses E”:

1. The artist and audience theories where “A expresses E” means either

that the artist felt an emotion and put it somehow into a work of art,

or that the work caused an emotional reaction in an audience. We have

already analyzed some of the difficulties inherent in these two positions.

2. “A expresses E” might mean that A is E. For example, a symphony

may be said to express sadness if and only if the symphony is itself sad.

In other words, perceivers actually hear the symphony as sad quite

independently of the intentions of the composer. Although this view

sometimes seems to work, there are many other cases where perceivers

carefully attend to the same piece of music and get different impressions

of the emotions they hear.

3. “A expresses E” might mean that A has properties of people who feel

E. For instance, a sonata may be said to express happiness if it is in a

major key and has a faster tempo, with the implication being that happy

people are more likely to speak and behave in these ways. The problem

with this claim is that tempo and key considerations vary from culture

to culture and it is possible to find counter-examples such as sad music

done in a major key which does not have a slow tempo. There is even

a school of thought which maintains that music cannot meaningfully

be said to express anything at all because expressing sadness—or other

feelings—makes it sound as if there were some sort of mental state

underlying the notes, when in fact there are only the notes and nothing

else. Perhaps a portrait painting could be said to express feelings in

the sense that we have an analogue of the human face and can make

reasonable psychological projections (although technically there is

nothing there but the paint). But we cannot do this, it is said, with music

and many other artforms.

4. “A expresses E” might mean that A describes or depicts someone

feeling E. For instance, certain paintings may be said to express suffering

if they actually depict someone who seems to be suffering (such as a

painting of the crucifixion of Christ). This analysis would work in a

few cases but its general applicability is very much in doubt because

counter-examples are easy to imagine (e.g, what does a drip painting

describe or depict?).

5. “A expresses E” might mean that A treats something in a way that

demonstrates E. Thus, a sculpture may be said to express love if it was

made in a loving fashion. The success of this claim seems to presuppose

that the audience would have access to—or some reliable evidence

about—the creative process. It is also possible, of course, that a work that

was made in a loving fashion could seem to express hate or almost any

other emotion.

Finally, Robert Stecker has articulated a view called hypothetical

intentionalism:

Applied to music, the view now being proposed is that a musical

passage is expressive of an emotion if the best hypothesis of an

ideal listener is that the composer intended the emotion to be heard

in the music.8

An ideal listener would be a properly backgrounded listener who is

well-acquainted with the composer’s works and musical time period, and

who experiences the piece in the proper context. He or she would form

the best hypothesis as to the composer’s intended emotion based on such

formal and contextual evidence. This is not a perfect way of handling the

issue of art’s expressivity, since ideal listeners might still disagree about

the composer’s intentions. It is, however, a useful beginning because it

could form the basis for some kind of consensus about artists’ intentions

where there is any degree of evidence for them.




4.3 How Does Art Express Emotion?

Given that the vast majority of artworks are inanimate, it is

reasonable to wonder how they can be said to express anything at all,

since our main model for expression is the animated human body.

In this section, we will explore an example of how this process might

work. Consider Munch’s famous painting The Scream. Let’s assume for

the sake of argument that a consensus of ideal viewers has determined

that the best hypothesis as to Munch’s intention for this painting is

that he wanted to express what the existentialists call angst (or anxiety).

How could he express this emotion and how could viewers of the piece

somehow get the emotion? The best answer to the former question

would reference his use of compositional and technical elements such

as the stark figure of the screamer and the outwardly radiating wavy lines

which seem to carry the scream to the edge of the painting and beyond.

The best answer to the latter question might be what Anne Sheppard

calls imaginative projection.9 That is, when one sees a painting that is

expressive of anxiety, one imagines what it is like to be anxious, even

though he/she may not actually be anxious. Of course, such a projection

can only work given a history of certain kinds of experiences, a history

that is best explored by psychologists. With this history in place, it is

hardly surprising that seeing The Scream will make someone imagine

anxiety. To be sure, this is a curious anxiety that only mimics real

anxiety. For instance, experiencing this painting and understanding

its expression of anxiety is hardly the same as feeling anxious about a

real terrorist attack. It is an illusory anxiety that seems to coordinate

logically enough with art’s being a realm of virtual or imaginary space.

No doubt, there are many other factors that feed into one’s experience

of The Scream, such as the title of the piece, the context in which one sees

it, one’s mood, and the reactions of those around one who are seeing

it. But imagination is clearly the key which allows a person to project the

mental state of anxiety as an appropriate reaction to the painting. Such

an explanation would likely work for other artworks as well, and has the

added virtue of being open to discoveries about correlations between

artistic techniques and psychological states (e.g., research results in the

area of color theory and psychology).

In an interesting article on ventriloquism, David Goldblatt has

suggested that there is a “ventriloquial exchange” which may occur in

all works of art.10 He cites the example of Edgar Bergen and his dummy

Charlie McCarthy. Bergen was so adept in his skills that audiences

had the distinct impression that he was actually carrying on a wildly

comedic conversation with Charlie at the same time that they recognized

the illusion and knew that Bergen was really only talking to himself.

Goldblatt sees these two dimensions of ventriloquism as ontological

levels that interweave in subtle ways. Thus, it may be said that Bergen was

engaged in an ecstasis, a standing out of himself, so as to create a new

voice or self through the character of Charlie. Just as Charlie is the voice

of Bergen (i.e., has been created by Bergen), so are possible selves in

Bergen actualized by interacting with Charlie. There is a curious kind of

mutual creativity inherent in the relationship between artist

and medium. Sometimes the artist gets the impression that he/she is

speaking in the piece; other times the impression is that the work is

speaking to the artist. And audiences, as we have seen, play a key role in

facilitating this illusion in terms of their own imaginative projections or

types of ecstasis.

This is a rough and preliminary sketch, but it suggests ways in

which we can approach and understand the incredibly complex ways in

which many works of art do their magic and enthrall us with varying kinds

of expressivity.




4.4 Collingwood’s Theory of Expression

It is important to note that many aestheticians have found fault with

Tolstoy’s simple version of expressionism. The English philosopher

R.G. Collingwood developed a more sophisticated analysis of the role

of expression in art. In general terms, he attempted to locate art proper

somewhere between raw emotions and general concepts of feelings.11

Collingwood begins by recognizing the spontaneous spewing forth of

emotion as the lowest level of human reactions. He clearly does not see

this level as involving expression in the true sense, nor as involving art.

An example would be pure anger. Here, he would say, the affected person

is only dimly and non-cognitively aware of their mental state because one

is one’s anger virtually as a function of the involuntary nervous system.

Bodily signs such as agitated behavior and a flushed face indicate to

others one’s state of mind, but these signs are hardly conscious attempts

at expression. True expression emerges at a higher level when a person

becomes more aware of the particularity of feelings by expressing them to

himself or herself and possibly to others. As Collingwood says:

At first, he is conscious of having an emotion, but not conscious

of what this emotion is. All he is conscious of is a perturbation or

excitement, which he feels going on within him, but of whose

nature he is ignorant. While in this state, all he can say about his

emotion is: ‘I feel…I don’t know what I feel.’ From this helpless

and oppressed condition he extricates himself by doing something

which we call expressing himself…the emotion expressed is an

emotion of whose nature the person who feels it is no longer

unconscious.12

Insofar as Collingwood identifies true expression with art proper,

he is saying that a real artist does not know what emotion he/she will

express until the expression is actually achieved. Then and only then will

it be clear to the artist what specific emotion in all its individuality and

uniqueness was there all along waiting to be given form. Any type of art

which uses standardized techniques to arouse or evoke emotions which

are clearly foreseen in advance cannot be true art, says Collingwood.

As examples of such false art, Collingwood cites amusement art and

magical art. Amusement art occurs when something is created to

evoke preconceived emotions about unreal or pretend situations, and

these emotions are dissipated in the pretend situations without being

applied to practical life. The Star Wars series would be a good example of

amusement art. Magical art, on the other hand, occurs when something

is created to evoke preconceived emotions about real situations, and

these emotions have a practical application to daily life. This is a broad

category which would include patriotic songs, religious art, historic

monuments, and so on. Again, in both cases, Collingwood only sees the

clever display of technique in the service of evoking emotions that are

already fully known. This is not true art to him.

Collingwood also claims that art proper involves imaginative

expression. Imagination grasps the uniqueness of an emotion through

the help of some kind of medium, such as music, poetic language,

a canvas, and so on. In other words, Collingwood believes that true

art is an exact imaginative expression which grasps the specialness of

a feeling without foreknowing the feeling in any way. The process is a

voyage of self-discovery in which the artist works in media until he/she

has the “Aha!” impression that at last what was there all along has been

precisely expressed. Thus, art proper falls in between raw emotions and

intellectually well-processed techniques that are designed to cause pre-

known emotions.

An example at this point would be useful. Consider that of fear.

At the most basic level, one would experience fear spontaneously and

involuntarily with the usual bodily symptoms. Collingwood is surely

correct in not seeing this level as involving art. Next, when one has

gained a certain psychological distance from raw fear, one can explicitly




discover and express it with the help of some kind of medium. Let’s

say one draws a picture, composes a song, or creates a sculpture. Such

imaginative expression tries to capture for oneself and others the

specialness of one’s feeling of fear. This is the level of art proper. Lastly,

if one wanted to evoke fear in others, one would choose an appropriate

artistic medium and manipulate its formal elements so that the fear—now

already fully known and analyzed—could be aroused in an audience.

This leads to amusement or magical art—“art falsely so-called,” as

Collingwood claims.

An interesting aspect of this system is Collingwood’s belief that

the true work of art is the expression in the artist’s mind and not its

externalization in an outward medium.13 This stems partly from the

fact that he was an Idealist; that is, he believed that mental processes are

more real and important than physical objects. Of course, Collingwood

conceded that external media are often helpful in making feelings clear

in the artist’s mind, but he still regarded the inward mental expression

as the true art object. As we have seen in Chapter 1, this claim works

better for some artforms than for others. Music and literature are more

amenable to it. For instance, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is hardly to be

identified with any or all recordings or copies of the score, just as T.S.

Eliot’s The Waste Land cannot be identified with any or all copies of the text.

On the other hand, painting, sculpture, and architecture are less clear

examples. It seems odd to say that Guernica, The Thinker, and the Parthenon

as we know them are not the true works of art. If Collingwood is right,

does this mean that the true artwork dies with the artist? Perhaps he

would argue that in listening to Beethoven’s Ninth or reading Eliot’s Waste

Land, I am attempting to recreate in my own mind the levels of expression

that these two artists achieved in their minds. It is sometimes true, of

course, that in experiencing a work of art we too have an “Aha!” feeling

and believe that the artist has exactly captured just how we felt about

something all along but couldn’t articulate it. But in the absence of

evidence other than the Ninth or The Waste Land, how could we ever know if

we had achieved such an analogous level of expression? There are many

problems in this part of Collingwood’s system.

4.5 Art vs. Craft

A final and central aspect of Collingwood’s system has to do with

his attempt to distinguish between art and craft. As we have seen, he

thinks art proper occurs when the maker does not know what his/her

final product—the expressed emotion—will be until the work is finished.

The craftsperson, on the other hand, knows in advance what the final

product will be and uses various means to actualize this pre-known end.

This is the basis for Collingwood’s dismissal of the artforms mentioned

above as pseudo-art. Here, he says, the creators quite self-consciously

use various techniques to arouse feelings in their audiences. But this

is exactly what the true artist does not do. Rather, he or she is involved

in an inward process of creative self-discovery where the productive

result is recognized only at the end in terms of the “Aha!” experience.

Collingwood has to be careful here. He mustn’t say that the artist’s

end result is fully known from the start, since this would convert the

example to craft. And yet he is committed to the view that the true work

is expressed in the artist’s mind. No doubt, he simply means that the

entire mental process of artistic creation is one of self-discovery for

the artist and then, at the end, what one expresses to oneself is the true

artwork. Unfortunately, though, Collingwood’s attempt to settle the

art/craft controversy in this way is extremely problematical. There are

too many obvious counter-examples. Graphic designers and illustrators,

for instance, often have a clear mental image from the beginning of

what their end result will be, and many craftspersons discover as they are

working what the final outcome will be. It is unlikely that the art/craft

morass could be resolved in so simple a manner.

George Dickie14 suggests that there are other difficulties in

Collingwood’s system as well:




a) Collingwood simply assumes without proof that all art has

something to do with the expression of emotion. As we have

seen in Chapter 1, this claim is almost certainly false.

b) Collingwood’s understanding of art proper is at once too

narrow and too broad. It is too narrow because he dismisses the

works of Shakespeare as true art since they were written, he says,

only with the intention of arousing emotions in Elizabethan

audiences. It is too broad because any statement such as “Go

brush your teeth” would be art proper as long as it was uttered

in a way that expressed emotion and did not try to arouse it.

In spite of its difficulties, however, Collingwood’s system is an interesting

and sophisticated treatment of expression in art. It is undoubtedly an

improvement on Tolstoy’s simple infection theory.

4.6 Plato and Aristotle

In concluding this chapter, we will briefly examine Plato’s and

Aristotle’s attitudes toward emotions in art. Both philosophers seem to

hold a view of expressivity akin to Tolstoy’s; namely, that the artist puts

emotions into an artwork and the audience gets these emotions out.

Recall for a moment Tolstoy’s infection theory. It must be stressed

that Tolstoy did not favor all feelings in art. As a devout member of the

Russian Orthodox Church, he vigorously advocated Christian values or

feelings, and in fact endorsed censorship of works which were obscene,

immoral, and/or self-centered. Interestingly, toward the end of his life,

Tolstoy came to think very little of most of his own masterpieces such

as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He had adopted a type of Christianity

which only valued uplifting spiritual themes and he claimed not to find

these themes in much of his own work.

Plato’s view is akin to Tolstoy’s, although considerably broader in

terms of advocating censorship of many artforms. Plato’s position cannot

be understood without recognizing its grounding in metaphysics, which

is the branch of philosophy that studies ultimate reality. Plato held that

there are two fundamental dimensions of reality. The first is the world of

objects whose existence is reported to us through our senses. He felt that

this world is one of extreme impermanence which cannot be trusted as a

source of reliable knowledge. In contrast to this world, Plato postulated a

completely different world of transcendental forms. These he described

as eternal and intangible models of true being which correspond to

abstract nouns (such as Goodness, Beauty, and Justice), class or common

nouns (such as tableness, chairness, and bedness), as well as mathematical

and geometrical forms (such as numbers in pure form and the perfect

triangle as opposed to one that is drawn on a blackboard).15 Plato is

unclear about the precise relationship between sense-world objects

and their transcendental models, but he does think that the former

are imperfect copies of the latter; the former somehow resemble and

participate in the latter. In other words, the transcendental forms

signify for Plato a perfect world of ultimate realities, and the sense-world

is a faded and imperfect reproduction of this world. He discusses these

forms in many sources but the most famous discussion is in The Republic,

which is a blueprint for a utopian state. Here Plato develops his famous

“allegory of the cave.” Imagine a number of prisoners chained in a cave

in such a way that they can only face forward and see shadows cast on

a wall in front of them. They take these shadows for reality but in fact

true being lies behind them in the fire casting shadows of objects and,

ultimately, above them in the bright sun outside the cave (which signified

for Plato the highest form which he called the Form of the Good).16 In

like manner, Plato believed that we humans are ignorant of the true

models of reality. The educational system which he presented in great

detail in The Republic is his answer to this problem and shows how the mind

can be gradually trained to come to know the forms and thereby secure

absolute knowledge.

To return to the main issue, Plato thought that art is an inherently




suspicious product of the human mind. He argues in The Republic and

elsewhere that it cannot be trusted for the following reasons:

a) Art is a “copy of a copy” and is not, therefore, a type of knowledge.

Artworks imitate or resemble forms in the natural world, but these

forms in turn are imperfect copies of their transcendental archetypes.

Art is thus twice removed from ultimate reality. It’s almost as if the artist

holds a mirror up to sensory reality and we are deceived by the resulting

reflections. Plato is claiming here that art is a basic kind of illusion.17

b) Artworks are expressive products of the human imagination which

essentially function at the emotional level, not that of rationality. For

instance, in the Apology Plato has Socrates argue that poetry appeals to the

lower human feelings, and that no rational account can be given of it.18

In the Ion, Socrates claims that rhapsodes (readers of dramatic poetry)

are “possessed by the gods” and cannot say why or what they are doing

in their art.19 Although Plato never advocated total censorship of art in

his dialogues, he is very strict in his moralistic stand: if any artform is

too seductive in terms of luring us toward the world of the senses and

away from the world of the forms, or is likely to have irrational and

negative effects on audiences (especially children), then it is the duty of

responsible administrators of government to ban such forms.

It is interesting to note that Aristotle’s general approach to the

question of art’s expression of emotion is virtually opposite from Plato’s.

Aristotle denied the existence of transcendental forms; he believed that

knowledge was achievable in the world of the senses. He agreed with

Plato that artworks are representations of human actions or objects in

nature, but since he attributed to nature a degree of reality that Plato

was not prepared to allow, art was fundamentally much more real to

Aristotle. He also believed that many works perform the useful function

of catharsis, or purging, of undesirable emotions.20 A simple example

will illustrate what he had in mind. Imagine that you attend a movie that

has considerable violence in it. Aristotle would argue that in viewing

such violence you could experience a vicarious release or reduction of

your own violent tendencies. As a result, you could leave the theater in

a healthier state of mind. This is similar to a physiological cleansing.

Indeed, the notion of catharsis originally carried strong connotations

of a medicinal purging. In sum, Aristotle denied the central tenets of

Plato’s attack on art and was a great admirer of the arts, especially tragedy

(see his Poetics). His discussions of art are more detailed and complex than

this short summary suggests, but it is important to stress that Aristotle was

not afraid of emotions in art. He felt that they could even play a positive

and healthy role for audiences.

We might consider for a moment whether the question of art’s

effect on the emotions can be settled somehow. Is this in any way a factual

matter? The issue is, of course, extremely complex. Whether or not a

particular artwork will have a beneficial or detrimental effect on human

feelings depends on many variables, such as the person’s chronological

and mental age, the specific nature of the artwork, the conditions under

which it is experienced, with whom one experiences it, and so on. Many

studies in social psychology indicate that the effects of violence in art

can be extremely infectious, particularly in regard to small children.

Although the results are less clear in the case of older children and

adults, a number of media watchdog agencies have used these studies as

a basis for advocating stricter governmental control over television and

movie violence. We cannot settle such a complicated issue here, but it is

interesting to note that many studies tend to support Plato’s position on

the deleterious effects of some artworks on some audiences, although the

issue is still very much in dispute.

In ending this chapter, it should be reiterated that expressionism

is a powerful perspective in aesthetics, since many works certainly do

seem to be highly expressive of human passion. Yet, it is not an exclusive

perspective because not all art is intended to be expressive nor must it be

taken that way.




Thought Questions

1. Throughout this chapter, we have taken expressionism to be

concerned with the expression of emotions or feelings in

art. But there are variations of the theory. Perhaps a number

of artworks express ideas or concepts of various sorts. The

possibility that they do express these things would allow us to

form a cognitive theory of expression which could be used to

understand and evaluate art. For instance, it has been said of

Picasso’s Guernica that it expresses important ideas about the

horror of war and the destruction of innocent civilian life.

What do you think of this general approach?

2. Which of the various ways we analyzed “A expresses E” makes the

most sense to you? Why?

3. Both Plato and Aristotle are consequentialists about the role of

emotions in art: everything for them depends on the beneficial

or detrimental outcomes of experiencing artworks. Is it possible

that this viewpoint is too moralistic and that art should be

experienced for its own sake independently of emotive results;

i.e., that we should appreciate art for art’s sake?




Notes

1 H.W. Janson and Dora Jane Janson, The Picture History of Painting

(New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1957), p. 275.

2 Leo Tolstoy, from What Is Art? in Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley,

The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, p. 511.

3 Anne Sheppard, Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, p. 21.

4 William Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, in Neill and Ridley,

Readings, p. 23.

5 Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, p. 166.

6 Ibid.

7 Marcia Muelder Eaton, Basic Issues in Aesthetics, pp. 23-29.


9 Anne Sheppard, Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, Chapter 3.

10 David Goldblatt, “Ventriloquism,” in Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of

the Arts, ed. David Goldblatt and Lee B. Brown (Upper Saddle River:

Prentice Hall, 1997), pp. 466-472.

11 R.G. Collingwood, from The Principles of Art, in Neill and Ridley, Readings,

pp. 118-153.

12 Ibid., p. 135.

13 Ibid., pp. 150-153.

14 George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach, pp. 66-68.

15 See, for example, Thomas Mautner, Dictionary of Philosophy, pp. 425-429.

16 Plato, The Republic, trans. F.M. Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1971), Chapter 25.

17 Ibid., Chapter 35.

18 Plato, Apology, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and

Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 8.

19 Plato, Ion, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, p. 227.

20 See Thomas Mautner, Dictionary of Philosophy, pp. 89-90.




5

5{CHAPTER FIVE} ART AS PICTORAL REPRESENTATION 101

Chapter 5: Art As Pictorial Representation

Case Study 5: In Greek mythology, the sculptor Pygmalion fashioned a

statue of a woman that was an incomparable work of art. So realistic was his

work—so lifelike in every detail—that he eventually fell in love with the statue.

His infatuation with the sculpted woman came to the attention of the goddess

Venus who caused the woman to come to life. Pygmalion married the maiden,

whom he named Galatea, and they eventually had a son, Paphos, who gave his

name to Venus’s favorite city.1

When we look at realistic paintings or sculptures—or even videos and

films—how do we know that the forms depicted stand for or represent

anything? And how does this depiction work? One of the oldest theories

of art is the view that artworks somehow imitate or copy objects in nature.

The Greek term for imitation is mimesis from which we derive “mime”

and “mimicry.” Indeed, the extreme point of imitation is the trompe

l’oeil style in which mimicry is taken to the extent at which the piece in

question “fools the eye” of the viewer. Although the mimesis theory is

rarely defended today as a theory which can exclusively define and/or

evaluate art, it has many adherents who see in it a powerful explanation

of a central tendency in many artforms.

100 ART AS PICTORAL REPRESENTATION


5.1 Representational, Abstract, and Non-Objective Art

It is important to be clear about the differences among

representational, abstract, and non-objective art. Representational

art copies the forms of nature in a more or less exact way; witness the

realistic depiction of a successful still life. Abstract art takes the forms of

nature and variously stretches or distorts them, as in the case of Picasso’s

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The five central figures of this painting are clearly

women but many of their features are distorted from the norm. Non-

objective art, on the other hand, is not strictly a function of copying or

distorting forms. Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings do not depict anything

realistically, not even by distortion. They leave the viewer’s eye open to a

kind of free association.

Along with the view that art is essentially a copy of natural forms,

the mimesis theory brought the view that art is a type of illusion. The

most famous example of this attitude, as we have seen, is found in Plato

whose low opinion of art was centered in his belief that it copies a world

of transient and dubious realities. Art is like a seductive mirage which

lures us from the world of the forms. In like manner, Aristotle was well

aware of art’s mimetic function, although for him art’s potential for

catharsis could override the negative effects of illusion.

Regardless of how they landed on questions of censorship and

the effects of art, however, Plato and Aristotle both thought of art as

exclusively mimetic. The Greeks were evidently unaware of abstract

or non-objective art. Art, they thought, is clearly a realistic depiction

of nature (or mythological beings as well). We must now turn to the

question of analyzing what it means to say that art is mimesis.

5.2 Mimesis as Representation

Anne Sheppard notes that the Greek term mimesis may be

translated as both “imitation” and “representation.” She argues that

“representation” works better in most contexts because it is non-

committal about the value of representation, whereas “imitation” often

implies that one object is of lesser value than another; consider, for

example, the expression “That is an imitation Chippendale chair.”2

We might also add that the term representation is useful because it gives

us the notion of a work of art re-presenting—or presenting again—its

model. Thus, in the rest of this chapter, we will use the simple formula P

represents S (which indicates there is some work of art P that represents

an object or form S) and ask what can be meant by such a formula.

Philosophers often find it easier to work with such generic formulas

when attempting to determine what a concept means.

Before doing so, however, it is important to make a basic

distinction between depiction and portrayal in representational pieces.

Consider Jacques Louis David’s famous painting Napoleon at St. Bernard,

1800. Philosophers distinguish between what the painting displays in

generic terms and what it shows specifically. Monroe Beardsley uses the

following definition of depiction:

‘The design X depicts an object Y’ means ‘X contains some area

that is more similar to the visual appearance of Y’s than to objects

of any other class.’ 3

This definition means that David’s painting displays, among other

things, a man (who is apparently also a soldier) astride a horse in a rather

dramatic pose. Notice that this is quite broad and categorical in nature.

{CHAPTER FIVE} ART AS PICTORAL REPRESENTATION 103



One speaks of object-classes and how certain areas of the painting

resemble some object-classes more than others. Portrayal, on the other

hand, is more specific. Beardsley says:

‘The design X portrays the object Y’ means ‘X contains some

area that is more similar to the visual appearance of Y than

to any other object.’ 4

This definition means that David’s painting is specifically a

resemblance of Napoleon himself and his horse. In other words,

depiction displays what the object-classes of the painting are, while

portrayal displays who or what the subject of the painting is. We would

normally infer or recognize the portrayed subject from the title of the

painting, but he or she (or it) could be transparent because of fame

or because of contextual clues in the work itself. It is important also to

recognize that depiction is a necessary condition for portrayal. That is,

Napoleon can only be displayed if certain depiction criteria are satisfied

first: “a man on a horse” provides the foundation for “Napoleon on

his horse at St. Bernard.” There are some further intricacies involved in

the notion of portrayal; for instance, portrayal of an imaginary being.

However, these are not crucial for our discussion.5

Granting this distinction between depiction and portrayal, we

must still ask what it means to say that P represents S. Anne Sheppard

suggests that our formula should be understood in terms of some kind

of resemblance between P and S, as well as in terms of conventional

techniques which the artist uses to depict S:

Our appreciation of a painting, for example, depends on

seeing it both as a representation of something and as a

set of shapes and colours; we never entirely forget that

it is paint on canvas that we are looking at. When we

contemplate Constable’s The Hay Wain aesthetically

we are both realizing that it portrays a particular English

scene and at the same time admiring the balance of the

composition and the soft colours.6

The notion of resemblance will be addressed shortly. On the

other hand, conventional techniques for rendering natural forms

include a variety of strategies such as perspective and composition,

and are well-documented in the literature.7 It is as if artists working in

the representational style use a bag of tricks to achieve their illusion.

They also presuppose and build on general cultural assumptions—or

shared perceptual sets—about how depicted objects are supposed to

look. Sheppard is surely correct in pointing to the various technical and

cultural elements that are involved in representation.

5.3 Max Black’s Theory

We must now try to give a more complete account of P represents

S. Following the American philosopher Max Black, we will consider five

different ways of analyzing this formula.8

● “P represents S” might mean that we can establish a causal history

between P and S. In the case of one kind of P—a photograph, for

example—we might say that a picture of the Eiffel Tower represents the

Eiffel Tower because we know how photographs are made in terms of

the process of exposure of light-sensitive film and the use of chemical

solutions necessary to develop and print negatives. And we also know

that this particular photograph could only have been made by means




of a series of causes and effects beginning with someone’s pointing a

camera at the Eiffel Tower and snapping a shutter. Roughly similar

accounts (in terms of appealing to causal series) could perhaps be given

for representational paintings and other visual works. Black argues,

however, that causal histories can never capture the full significance of

“P represents S” because they are concerned with the origin of P rather

than with the meaning of saying that P represents S. In other words, just

because we know how P was made doesn’t tell us in general terms what

representation is. So causality cannot be the last word on this issue.

● “P represents S” might mean that P gives us reliable information

about S. Although this is an interesting suggestion, Black argues that it

is very unclear because no fully acceptable definition of information has

been forthcoming, at least not one that fits unique examples such as the

relationship between a photograph and its subject or a painting and its

sitter. Definitions that come from communications theory are probably

not helpful because they are strictly statistical and deal with signals that

have no intrinsic meaning. On the other hand, if we equate information

with facts and say that a photograph of the Eiffel Tower gives us reliable

facts about it, this may simply be an indirect way of talking about what the

Eiffel Tower “looks like” (a different contender we will address shortly).

And, of course, the photograph may not tell us much about the tower;

e.g., its height, its three-dimensional aspect, its building material, its

date of completion, and so on. These problems are compounded in the

case of paintings. For example, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is arguably

representational (to some extent anyway), but exactly what reliable

information does it give us about its sitters? What facts do we know about

them? There seem to be serious stumbling blocks connected with this

general approach.

● “P represents S” might mean that the artist intended P to be a

depiction of S. But appeals to artists’ intentions are very tricky. What if

the painter intended to create a painting of a horse and instead it looked

like a cow? Or he/she didn’t intend for a painting to resemble a vase but

it still does? There are also significant problems involved in the effort to

determine the artist’s intentions independently of the displayed subject-

matter. If this cannot be done, there will be an odd circularity in the

whole attempt. Without independent evidence, do we want to say that

da Vinci intended the Mona Lisa to be a representation of a young woman

because it’s a representation of a young woman? (He may have intended

it as a self-portrait.) Perhaps it would be better to classify intentions as

part of the causal process which results in P rather than as part of the

meaning of “P represents S.”

● “P represents S” might mean that P is an illusion of S, or that in

perceiving P it is as if we were perceiving S. This view is akin to Socrates’

position in The Republic where he suggests that, in order to mimic what

artists do, we need only hold a mirror up to objects in the natural world.

This would be the same kind of trick artists use to deceive us, he says.9

“P is an illusion of S” might suggest the following: Consider a trompe

l’oeil painting of a white poodle on a red sofa. If we look at the painting

and use our imaginations, it is as if we were seeing a real poodle on a

real sofa. Thus, the painting creates a kind of illusion that entertains

us and makes us think of an actual poodle. Robert Stecker calls this the

“make-believe” view: “If one is looking at a picture of a mill, then, on

the make-believe view, one is imagining seeing a mill. The viewer is

imagining her actual visual experience to be of a mill.”10 Problems with

this analysis include:

a) The obvious point that paintings, photographs, etc., do not resemble

their subjects nearly as much as one might think. The painted poodle

or mill are strictly two-dimensional, are frozen in space and time,

and do not present the multiplicity of perspectives that a real poodle or

mill would.




b) There are many cases—such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—where the illusion

of resemblance works only if certain artistic conventions used by the

maker are recognized and understood by the viewer. In such cases, it

seems as if the conventions are just as important as the illusion itself.

c) Robert Stecker suggests that one problem with the make-believe view is

that many of our perceptions of depicted objects are very straightforward,

almost passive, recognitions of similarity to the real objects where there

is little or no role for active imagination.11 Perhaps we are “just seeing”

resemblance and not really imagining anything at all.

d) The illusion or make-believe view seems to presuppose resemblance

anyway, so we may as well go the latter and by-pass the former.

● “P represents S” might mean that P resembles S or P looks like

S. This definition is the most obvious and natural choice. ( I treat

“resembles” and “looks like” as identical, although one can imagine cases

where they wouldn’t be. For instance, if I say that Jones’ style of playing

bridge resembles that of Smith, I’m not sure this means that Jones’ style

literally looks like Smith’s.) Returning for a moment to Beardsley’s

definition of portrayal—“’The design X portrays the object Y’ means ‘X

contains some area that is more similar to the visual appearance of Y

than to any other object’”—representation in this sense would apparently

mean that the look of a certain central area of the Mona Lisa would be

more similar to the look of a specific young woman than to the look of

any other object. But now, as Black says, we have to deal with “looks” as an

odd utterance, or with looks as odd phenomena. What is a look? And how

does it relate to the ordinary expression “P looks like S”?

Some philosophers have attempted to answer these questions

through the idea of outline shape: “The sort of shape that is often put

forward is one that would be identified by tracing the outline of the

objects one sees through a window on that glass.”12 So we might say that

the central figure of the Mona Lisa resembles the specific sitter for the

painting in terms of an outline shape that matches the young woman’s

shape. The problem here, though, is that there are highly stylized types

of portrayal (caricatures) where the outline shapes wouldn’t match very

well but we could still recognize the resemblance between the drawing

and the sitter. Also, it is possible to have outline shapes of things like

human faces or knife blades that are being shown from unusual angles

or positions so that we would not easily (if at all) recognize what they

represent.13 Thus, the notion of outline shape seems to have numerous

counter-examples.

Another problem is that all the “P resembles S” cases might not

have anything in common. Sometimes resemblance might entail a point-

by-point matching procedure; other times it might involve a loose

analogical or metaphorical seeing, especially given the brain’s tendency to

effect closure and experience imprecise similarities.That is, occasionally

it might mean that one visual gestalt—or the holistic appearance of a

shape—is suggestive of another one, but it may be very difficult to say

with much precision why this is so. Consider the case of identical twins

where “Larry looks like Paul” is readily understood, as opposed to a case

where “Jones looks like a wolf” is fairly resistant to precise analysis (but

Jones really does look like one). Certainly, to say that “P represents S”

simply means “P resembles or looks like S” as if this were an obvious and

unproblematic truism seems very questionable.

Black concludes his discussion of representation by arguing that

“P represents S” involves a cluster concept which has many meanings

depending on context, the purpose of the comparison between P and

S, the nature of the viewer’s background knowledge about P and S,

artistic conventions, and the precise points of matching (if any) between

P and S. This viewpoint certainly echoes Sheppard’s insistence on

including conventions and resemblance in any acceptable analysis of

representation.




5.4 Seeing-In

Some philosophers have used the notion of seeing-in to explain pictorial

representation. Robert Stecker describes the concept as follows:

So two typical features of seeing-in are, first, that one can

see something that is F in something else, call it P, without

it following that there is something F that I am seeing, and,

second, that I am aware of seeing P and some of its features,

while I am seeing-in P something that is F. Call the first

feature “non-existence” and the second “twofoldness.”14

An example will help to elucidate this description. Imagine that you

are looking at a realistic still life of a vase of flowers. You are seeing-in

the painting a vase of flowers without actually seeing a real vase of flowers

(the non-existence claim) and, as you notice the depiction of the vase,

you can also be aware of various properties of the canvas per se such as its

size and shape, the arrangement of colors on its surface, and so on (the

twofoldness claim). The non-existence claim is alluding to the capacity of

pictorial representations to present us with a kind of visual illusion, while

the twofoldness claim is alluding to our sense that the painting never

really stops being a physical object with certain formal properties. What’s

interesting about the seeing-in concept is that it is applicable to both

realistic seeing-in and imaginative seeing-in. The latter would occur if

you looked into the sky and claimed to see a dragon-image in some cloud

formation where other perceivers do not see the image or see a different

one. Notice that non-existence and twofoldness would still pertain to

imaginative seeing-in: you are seeing-in the clouds a dragon-image and

not seeing a real dragon, and you can be aware of various properties of

the clouds as clouds while you are seeing the dragon-image.

Whether or not the concept of seeing-in can be used successfully

to explain pictorial representation is a matter of dispute. Some

philosophers believe that seeing-in by itself is not sufficient to do the job

and that the concept needs to be supplemented.15 Perhaps we can better

understand how seeing-in works by examining studies of the concept of

recognitional ability.16 We may also need to join the concept of seeing-

in with the concept of resemblance as explored above. These moves

would undoubtedly give us a fairly powerful model in terms of which to

approach the whole issue of pictorial representation.

5.5 Gombrich and Goodman

In concluding this chapter, we will briefly examine an alternative

approach to explaining pictorial representation. This approach denies

that there is any natural or simple perceptual fit between realistic shapes

and the objects that the shapes depict. E.H. Gombrich and Nelson

Goodman have championed this point of view. Basically, they have

argued that there is a large cultural and conventional aspect involved in

our ability to recognize familiar shapes in representational art, and that

these artforms may be more akin to languages than we thought.

In The Sense of Order, Gombrich summarizes his position on how

representation works in art:

In Art and Illusion I have tried to show ‘why art has a history’

and I gave psychological reasons for the fact that the rendering

of nature cannot be achieved by an untutored individual, however

gifted, without the support of a tradition. I found the reasons in




the psychology of perception, which explains why we cannot

simply ‘transcribe’ what we see and have to resort to methods

of trial and error in the slow process of ‘making and matching,’

and ‘schema and correction.’ Given the aim of creating a con-

vincing picture of reality, this is the way the arts will ‘evolve’…17

Gombrich has in mind here a basic fact about pictorial

representation; namely, its conventional and historical aspect. For

instance, consider the use of Western techniques of perspective as they

were developed and perfected during the Renaissance. These techniques

seem so obvious and natural to us now that we forget, says Gombrich,

that they have a history of “making and matching.” Artists had to

perfect the techniques over time by means of trial and error. As certain

schemas—or forms of mark making—were slowly adopted, a new way of

seeing emerged both in the Western artworld and in Western culture

generally. Thus, artists and artworld publics are conditioned to see—and

expect to see—pictorial representations in a certain way.

Gombrich also suggests that there is a kind of referential dimension

to pictorial representation. Certain shapes in a painting, for example,

may stand for shapes in nature. Circular or oval shapes work best as

substitutes for the human face.18 Over time, as we learn to see and

associate these shapes with what they suggest, we learn to “read” realistic

art. In other words, learning to make and experience realistic art is a

teachable skill. Gombrich forces us to take notice of the psychological

and cultural histories of representational pieces.

In Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman has also questioned the assumption

that there is a natural perceptual match between realistic shapes and

what they represent. Marcia Eaton points out that Goodman’s position

is different from Gombrich’s. Gombrich claims that the shapes we

learn to recognize in pictorial representation are “good substitutes” for

their models, while Goodman suggests that these shapes “symbolize or

denote” their models.19 For instance, Goodman would say that we learn

to recognize what dog-shapes and tree-shapes in a painting refer to in

roughly the same way we learn to recognize what DOG and TREE refer

to. In either case, we have had to master a symbol system in order to

decipher certain kinds of mark making. Goodman goes on to argue

that these symbol systems are arbitrary and conventional, and we only

think that dog-shapes and tree-shapes naturally resemble dogs and

trees because such connections have become entrenched in our habits

of thought.20

The theories of Gombrich and Goodman have come under

criticism by many philosophers. The brunt of the criticism has been

that both men have overemphasized the conventional side of how

representation works. It certainly seems to be the case that sometimes

there is an appropriate perceptual fit between artistic shapes and reality,

a fit that cannot be fully reduced to theories of signs and symbols. In the

end, pictorial representation is a difficult concept, although nothing can

be easier, it seems, than seeing the shape of an enigmatic woman in the

Mona Lisa or that of a fine soldier in Napoleon at St. Bernard.




Thought Questions

1. The verb “to represent” is certainly very complex.

Consider the following uses:

a. “The attorney represents her client.”

b. “Your statement represents considerable thought on the matter.”

c. “A funeral dirge represents sadness.”

d. “Lavender Mist by Jackson Pollock represents alienation and angst.”

Do these uses have anything in common? Are any of Max Black’s

analyses relevant?

2. What exactly is a visual gestalt? How susceptible is it to precise,

point-by-point analysis?

3. When artists create pictorial representations, what sorts of tricks do

they use to fool the eye of viewers? Would these tricks be the same—

would they work—in other cultures?

4. What is your take on the theories of Gombrich and Goodman?

Do you think that the ways in which we see art realistically are all

arbitrary and conventional?




Notes

1 See Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York: Mentor Books, 1969), pp.

108-110.


3 Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, p. 270.

4 Ibid., p. 273.

5 Ibid., pp. 273-278.


7 See Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (Los Angeles: J.P.

Tarcher, Inc., 1979).

8 The following discussion is drawn from Max Black, “How do Pictures

Represent?” in E.H. Gombrich, Julian Hochberg, and Max Black, Art,

Perception, and Reality (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,

1972), pp. 95-129.

9 Plato, The Republic, trans. F.M. Cornford, Chapter 35.


11 Ibid., p. 156.

12 Ibid., p. 157.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., p. 153.

15 Ibid., p. 154-159.

16 See Flint Schier, Deeper into Pictures: An Essay on Pictorial Representation

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

17 E.H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

Press, 1979), p. 210.

18 See Marcia Muelder Eaton, Basic Issues in Aesthetics, p. 61.

19 Ibid., pp. 61-65.

20 Ibid.




6

6{CHAPTER SIX} BEAUTY 119

Chapter 6: Beauty

Case Study 6: Psychologists David Perrett, Keith May, and Sakiko

Yoshikawa have presented controversial evidence that a beautiful face exerts its

allure on people regardless of culture. Using computer-generated composite

images of various male and female faces, these scientists claim that there is a

general preference for facial features which are rated as highly attractive beyond

the range of average features. According to Perrett, some of these features

include larger eyes relative to face size, and shorter distances from mouth

to chin and from nose to mouth. He believes that such preferences are cross

cultural and have an evolutionary basis.1 “The results coincide with research

directed by Michael Cunningham of the University of Louisville…(who)

theorizes that five categories of human facial features have evolved: childlike

traits which foster the trust of others; indicators of sexual potency; signs of aging

which denote wisdom; friendliness signals such as a large smile; and grooming

features that draw others closer.”2 In a comment on the work of Perrett, May,

and Yoshikawa, Nancy Etcoff, a neuropsychologist at Harvard Medical School,

has said: “The assumption that beauty is an arbitrary cultural convention may

simply not be true.”3

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Additionally, many artists and scientists have long known that the

so-called “golden ratio” of 1 to 1.618 can be found in various natural

phenomena and artworks. “Shapes defined by the golden ratio have long

been considered aesthetically pleasing in western cultures, reflecting

nature’s balance between symmetry and asymmetry and the ancient

Pythagorean belief that reality is a numerical reality, except that numbers

were not units as we define them today, but were expressions of ratios.

The golden ratio is still used frequently in art and design. The golden

ratio is also referred to as the golden mean, golden section, golden

number or divine proportion.”4 The existence of a cross-cultural

preference for forms embodying the golden ratio suggests, again, that

beauty may not be entirely arbitrary and conventional. For example,

maxillofacial surgeon Stephen Marquardt has developed a “beauty mask”

based on the golden ratio which he claims will fit any face in any culture

so long as the face is beautiful.5

6.1 The Trend Toward Subjectivizing Beauty

Since the 18th century, the general trend in aesthetic theory has

been toward the psychologizing and subjectivizing of what counts as

beauty. Many scholarly studies in cultural anthropology and sociology

as to variations in cultures have lent considerable ammunition to the

view that beauty is not an objective property of artworks or natural

phenomena, but rather a subjective aspect of our own responses to these

items. This reinforces the widespread view that beauty is “in the eye of

the beholder” and that its perception varies dramatically from society to

society. In like manner, many postmodern writers assume that universal

principles pertaining to beauty are myths or outdated meta-narratives

which are useless because of the influence of one’s intertext and the utter

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pervasiveness of cultural conditioning.

Another factor in the decline of classical theories of beauty (i.e.,

theories which postulated beauty as an objective feature of reality) can

perhaps be traced to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work in the philosophy of

language. Many aestheticians have been impressed with his attempt to

refute Plato’s definition of beauty as a transcendental essence which all

beautiful sensory objects imperfectly copy. These theorists have become

more comfortable with Wittgenstein’s ordinary language approach

to analyzing the concept of beauty. Instead of thinking of beauty as

transcendental, they want to examine how the word beauty is used in

various linguistic contexts (or “language games”). They note that the

word beauty involves a cluster idea with some uses overlapping and

others not. They do not assume that there is any common conceptual

thread that runs through all possible uses of the term, an assumption

made by Plato to justify his shift to the transcendental form. They

take their cue from Wittgenstein’s cluster-analysis of the concept of

games in the Philosophical Investigations where he argued that games do not

share a common essence, but only overlapping similarities or “family

resemblances.”6 For a number of aestheticians, this kind of philosophical

analysis has become their last word on the topic of beauty.

Also, the influence of Logical Positivism still lingers in many

circles. Logical Positivism was a philosophical movement of the 1930’s

whose members asserted that cognitively meaningful statements—i.e.,

statements capable of being true or false—must be verifiable by empirical

means.7 These philosophers were decidedly uncomfortable with what

they regarded as mysterious beauty statements: What is the status of

such statements? Are they testable? And in what sense? The Positivists

concluded that beauty statements are not testable and they consigned

them to the level of totally emotive utterances. There are many

philosophers today who have been indirectly influenced by Positivism and

who tend to dismiss conceptual forays into beauty questions as frivolous

or meaningless pursuits.

Finally, as Arthur Danto points out,8 many members of the avant-

garde during the 20th century attempted to divorce considerations

{CHAPTER SIX} BEAUTY 121


of beauty from their work. They felt that such considerations were

superficial and personal, and that serious artists would not be interested

in them. One can see this point of view at work in Dada and later on

in Conceptual art. Even today there are many artists who believe it is

irresponsible for artworks to be made with beauty in mind rather than

more serious societal issues.

The concept of beauty, therefore, has become extremely enigmatic

at the beginning of the 21st century. In this chapter, we will re-examine

the concept, partly from an historical perspective and partly from the

standpoint of giving an account of what “X is beautiful” means. Along

the way, we will also consider whether beauty is an objective or subjective

phenomenon.

Let’s begin by noting that the words “beauty” and “beautiful”

can be used in a wide variety of ways. We may speak, for example, of a

beautiful rose, a beautiful personality, a beautiful woman, a beautiful

mathematical formula, or even a beautiful right cross in boxing. The uses

are seemingly endless. Most of the time our concern with beauty deals

with sensory phenomena, but our interest in the aesthetics of sensation

leads us to the realization that there are other aesthetic categories

besides that of beauty; indeed, it is sometimes possible that our aesthetic

appreciation of an object or event will even exclude considerations of

beauty (e.g., aesthetic appreciation of Duchamp’s Fountain might allude

to its boldness or enigmatic character, but not to its beauty). But even

though this happens, the concept of beauty is still very central to our

appreciation of natural and human forms. In the following sections, we

will be focusing on the concept of beauty as it applies to the aesthetics

of sensation. We will not attempt to address deeper issues such as the

question of the beauty of ideas, personalities, or other intangible things.

Having narrowed our discussion in this way, we will consider the issue of

whether or not there is a shared essence in terms of which all beautiful

sense-phenomena are correctly described as beautiful. Or, to put the

question in terms explored in the 18th century, is there a common property

which is shared by all beautiful sense-objects in terms of which they cause

us to have the beauty experience? And what is the beauty experience?

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6.2 A Brief Survey of Beauty Theories

Historically, the first significant answer to these questions in the

Western world was undoubtedly Plato’s. Plato asserted that beauty itself is

a transcendental form—and thus an objective reality—which all beautiful

objects in the world of the senses participate in, albeit very imperfectly.

He believed beauty itself could only be known by means of rational

contemplation as opposed to the imperfect beauty of sense-objects which

is perceived via the pleasure or delight they give us. It is unclear that

Plato had a consistent theory about what, if anything, transcendental

beauty and empirical beauty have in common. In the Philebus, he offers

the thought that beauty is the same as or could be defined as “measure

and symmetry,”9 although he does not develop this as a theme which

could unify the two notions of beauty. What is overwhelmingly clear in

Plato’s philosophy, however, is the idea that ultimate beauty is mind-

independent, supersensible, and perfect; it is manifested in a very

fragmentary way in ordinary sense-objects.

Aristotle’s views on beauty are more pragmatic than Plato’s and

are tied to particular commentaries on specific genres of art (especially

tragedy). He believed, though, that beauty is an objective reality which is

knowable in universal terms. Properties such as symmetry, proportion,

and balance are found in nature and artworks, and these properties just

are beautiful as such:

Similarly in the Poetics Aristotle says that “beauty is a matter

of size and order” or consists in size and order. Thus he declares

that a living creature, in order to be beautiful, must present a

certain order in its arrangement of parts and also possess a

certain definite magnitude, neither too great nor too small.10



Aristotle also believed that contemplation of the beautiful should

be distinguished from the perception of the merely pleasant object of

desire. For instance, in perceiving a beautiful body, it is important

to distinguish between a sexual desire for that body as opposed to a

contemplative appreciation of its symmetry and order. As we will see, this

is somewhat analogous to the 18th century notion of disinterestedness.

Additionally, Aristotle gives an account of Plato’s forms which

is decidedly anti-transcendental. In his system, forms are real as they

exist in natural objects and, since art copies nature, it directly mimics

reality and has a metaphysical aspect that Plato was not prepared to allow.

Aristotle also recognized that there are outstanding examples of generic

types of items, such as good or beautiful art.11 In general, both Plato and

Aristotle believed in the objectivity of beauty. We do not encounter in

them any psychologizing or subjectivizing tendencies.

In the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas defined beauty as “dicuntur

quae visa placent”12 (“that which pleases when seen”). He also specified

three conditions or properties of objects which cause humans to

experience the beauty feeling: perfection of form, proportion, and

brightness of color. As Frederick Copleston notes:

…the form shines out, as it were, through colour, etc., and is the

object of disinterested (non-appetitive) apprehension. St. Thomas

recognizes, therefore, the objectivity of beauty and the fact that

aesthetic appreciation or experience is something sui generis, that

it cannot be identified simply with intellectual cognition and that

it cannot be reduced to apprehension of the good.13

Aquinas’ theory is interesting because it has both subjective and

objective aspects. “That which pleases when seen” clearly ties the

definition of beauty to felt pleasure which is obviously subjective. But

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there are objective properties of certain kinds which induce the felt

pleasure, and the emphasis on non-appetitive apprehension of beautiful

forms is a precursor of the idea of disinterestedness in the 18th century.

Thus, Aquinas’ position is a kind of transitional point between classical

theories and 18th century theories.

In the Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti defined beauty in terms of

a harmony of parts in which any change would be for the worse.14 He also

postulated a special internal sense by means of which beauty is perceived.

The notion of such a special sense was also thoroughly explored in the

18th century. Alberti used the terminology of Medieval philosophy and

assumed this inner sense is a kind of mental faculty which is specialized

for the perception of beauty. In contemporary terminology, we would

ask instead about genetic predispositions that humans seem to have for

perceiving symmetry and order. Although a beauty gene has not been

discovered, it is likely that scientists will uncover the precise genetic and

physiological mechanisms which control the perception of symmetry and

order, and how this perception has had survival value for our species.

Returning to Alberti, note that his concept of beauty as a harmony of

parts was a classical view which reflected the revival of Greek thinking in

the Renaissance.

In the 18th century, many aestheticians developed theories of beauty

which involved the following aspects:

a) The claim that the beauty experience involves a type of pleasure

which is disinterested. The Earl of Shaftesbury led the way here,15

but others quickly followed suit.

b) The claim that there are certain properties of external objects which,

when encountered by the human mind, produce the beauty

experience in us. There was widespread disagreement as to what

these properties are:

Hutcheson thought there is a single property—uniformity in



variety—which causes the experience; Burke produced a short list

including smallness, smoothness, being polished and others; Hume had

a longer, open-ended list including uniformity, variety, luster of color,

clearness of expression, and exactness of imitation; and Kant postulated

that the form of purpose is the cause of our experience of beauty.16

c) The assumption that the human mind has a special faculty of taste

in terms of which we are, so to speak, pre-wired to experience beauty. As

the century progressed, the emphasis on the connection between beauty

and pleasure, the disagreement about beauty-inducing properties of

objects, and the problems inherent in talking about mental faculties all

combined to push aesthetics in the direction of the subjectivizing and

psychologizing of beauty.17 David Hume, for example, developed a theory

of beauty which was a classic example of all these conflicts.

Hume begins his famous essay, “Of the Standard of Taste,” by

considering the view that beauty is totally subjective. He quickly casts

doubt on this view, however, through what George Dickie has called

a “disproportionate pairs” argument.18 That is, Hume cites pairs of

artworks where one of the works is clearly superior (in his mind) to the

other. The differential is supposed to be so great that the skeptic will be

forced to concede degrees of quality:

Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance

between Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and Addison, would

be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had

maintained a mole-hill to be as high as Teneriffe, or a pond

as extensive as the ocean.19

Hume thus concludes that the skeptical view that it is impossible

to dispute taste is false. He then proceeds to outline a method whereby

the rules of composition (i.e., the standard of taste) can be rationally

126 BEAUTY

determined. The method involves a kind of empirical survey of the taste

of individuals. There are special conditions which must be observed,

though, for the survey to be successful:

When we would make an experiment of this nature, and

would try the force of any beauty or deformity, we must

choose with care a proper time and place, and bring the

fancy to a suitable situation and disposition. A perfect

serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention

to the object; if any of these circumstances be wanting,

our experiment will be fallacious, and we shall be unable

to judge of the catholic and universal beauty.20

Hume apparently believed that these conditions of perception

would approximate disinterestedness. He also thought that some people

are more perceptive than others: “Only those persons who possess what

Hume calls ‘delicacy of taste’ are fit subjects for his experiment.”21

Delicacy of taste is learned competence for Hume; it is not inborn.

Even though he conceded that matters of taste can vary in terms of age

and temperament,22 Hume believed that a person with keen senses, a

familiarity with models or standards of excellence in given genres, a total

focus on the object in question, and ideal conditions for experiencing

the object would be able to make a reliable judgment about the object’s

beauty (or deformity). Critical disagreements about beauty, he thought,

stem from one or more of the necessary perceptual conditions being

absent, or from cases that are “the result of the caprices of fashion and

the mistakes of ignorance and envy.”23



Hume continues with the following observation:

Though it be certain, that beauty and deformity, more than

sweet and bitter, are not qualities in objects,

but belong entirely to the sentiment,

internal or external; it must be allowed, that there

are certain qualities in objects, which are fitted by nature

to produce those particular feelings.24 (My italics)

Notice that, according to this statement, beauty is a feeling in

humans and this feeling is specially caused in us by means of “certain

qualities in objects.” Hume actually specified a long and open-ended

list of such qualities: uniformity, luster of color, variety, exactness of

imitation, and so on. But beauty is now seen as a purely private mental

state. If this is so, how can one be sure that one’s beauty experience is

the same as another’s? Hume thus maintains that there are standards of

beauty, but the experience is subjective.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant developed a theory of

beauty which has had an immense impact on subsequent aesthetics.

“The theory may be summarized in a sentence: A judgment of beauty

is a disinterested, universal, and necessary judgment concerning the

pleasure that everyone ought to derive from the experience of a form

of purpose.”25 In order better to understand Kant’s view, we need to

break down this statement into its component parts. The following

commentaries are based on Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful.26

First of all, Kant thought that judgments of taste (such as “The rose

is beautiful”) are centered in disinterested experience. He explains this

by arguing that, in having such experience, we have no interest in the

real existence of the object we are admiring. It is as if the rose we see is a

sort of shimmering presence and we are to appreciate its formal beauty

without necessarily assuming that the rose has independent existence.

128 BEAUTY

This doesn’t mean that the rose has no independent existence nor that

we would ultimately be uninterested in its existence. Rather, it simply

means that we are enjoying the sheer sensory presence of the rose as a

formal representation and we should focus on that as opposed to any

kind of selfish or non-aesthetic purpose. It is also very important to note

that, according to Kant, when disinterested perceivers appreciate the rose

as a single beautiful presence, they are not “applying a concept” to the

rose. This claim relates to Kant’s general theory of human knowledge.

He believed that the human mind comes equipped with what he called

a priori structures (we would call these structures pre-loaded software).

These structures receive stimulation from the external world and shape

the various sorts of conscious experiences we have. We can only be aware

of phenomena—or the way things appear to us—Kant said. We cannot

be aware of things as they are in themselves, or noumena. Phenomena

are representations of reality which we experience in terms of space and

time, quantity, quality, unity, cause and effect, and so on. The mind

is automatically structured in such a way that it applies concepts—or

ordering principles—to the manifold of incoming sensations and, as a

result, we have a coherent experience of the world and objects in it.

In the experience of pure beauty, however, Kant believed that

this concept-applying function of the mind is suspended. The rose as

a singularly beautiful presence is experienced by the imagination and

understanding in a state he called “free play.” Free play involves an

experience in which the rose is not compared to any other roses or to

any other set of representations. Technically, this experience would

seem to occur beyond language and typological concepts. It is as if the

rose were a world unto itself and one must contemplate it as such. Any

cross-matching approach such as that found in art criticism would be

ruled out. While we are experiencing just this one rose in a state of

disinterestedness, we would seem to be in a purely intuitive state of mind.

This would probably mean that we could not make a judgment about our

beauty experience until it was over.

Kant also distinguished between free beauty (which was just

described as pure beauty) and dependent beauty. The experience of



dependent beauty is not disinterested and involves some mixture of ideas

or concepts so that aesthetic forms are compared to others of their type.

As Robert Zimmerman says:

For example, in a painting of a church the painted object

represents a church and since we have had innumerable

experiences of churches, we inevitably know what a church

is. Thus, the painted church is immediately correlated with

the concept of church and is judged as to the degree of

similarity. Our idea of what the painted object is supposed

to be mingles with our experience of it. Now there is thus

an element, namely, an idea of the church, interposed between

the mind and its pure apprehension of a visual form.27

In other words, Kant would not see the beauty of the painted

church as pure beauty since a comparison is being made to the concept

of churches. As examples of free or pure beauty, Kant cited “…foliage

for borders or wallpapers…what are called musical fantasies, and in

fact all music without words.”28 He also included such things as flowers

and tropical birds. By citing these examples, he apparently intended to

underscore the kind of disinterested—even fresh and unique—experience

that free beauty would involve. Of course, much human-made art is

concerned with projecting an intellectual content and Kant was certainly

not saying that such art could not be beautiful. As Zimmerman notes:

“Dependent beauty is beauty insofar as the intellectual content does not

destroy the formal structure of the presentation.”29 Kant seemed to think

that this is a real type of beauty, although secondary to pure beauty.

The second general feature of Kant’s analysis of pure beauty is

his claim that the beauty experience (and the judgment of taste based

on it) is both universal and necessary. He believed that both of these

130 BEAUTY

characteristics follow immediately from disinterestedness. That is, if one

is truly in a disinterested state of mind, one has supposedly transcended

the merely personal and idiosyncratic and has achieved a universal

voice or transcultural state of awareness. In reflecting on such a mental

state, one would implicitly expect that all other similarly disinterested

perceivers would have the same kind of experience if exposed to the same

object. This agreement is expected because the machinery of the human

mind functions the same regardless of cultural differences and because

disinterestedness is not merely personal or cultural. The experience of

pure beauty has a necessity to it in the sense that the pleasure given to one

person in seeing the singular rose ought to be the same as the pleasure

given to all. “In other words, the thing ought necessarily to give pleasure

to every person.”30

In this regard, it is important to say a word about the nature of pure

aesthetic pleasure. Kant clearly opposed the view that humans could only

experience selfish and appetitive pleasures (i.e., pleasures related only to

the fulfillment of bodily needs). He strongly believed

in the possibility of aesthetic or disinterested pleasure which would

involve a sensory satisfaction in which a form is enjoyed simply for its

own sake. No particular bodily needs are being fulfilled. Moreover,

there is “no interest in the real existence of the form.” Kant was

certainly no supporter of the philosophical tradition of Thomas Hobbes

which maintained that humans are completely selfish. Pure aesthetic

experience is an area where we can rise above such a narrow conception

of human nature.

Lastly, Kant thought that the experience of pure beauty (and the

judgment of taste based upon it) deals with the form of purpose of

the representation one is perceiving. That is, when we enjoy a single

rose we are intuitively appreciating its unity, its symmetry, and its

apparent purposiveness. The first two of these are the familiar aspects

traditionally appreciated by formalists. The third is more difficult and

requires explanation. Kant claimed that in a pure beauty experience

the imagination and understanding are “in harmony.” Imagination is

that function of the mind whereby the manifold of sensations from the



external world is freely arranged. Understanding, on the other hand,

involves the application of intellectual concepts. When Kant says that

the two functions are in harmony, he seems to mean that any unity and

symmetry which the imagination finds in the single rose will, so to speak,

appeal to the logical categories of the understanding (one of which is

unity). We cannot say what the exact purpose of the rose is, according

to Kant. However, there is an apparent purposiveness because the

shimmering presence of the rose seems to have all its formal features

contributing to an overall design. The intuitive recognition of this

seeming design pleases the imagination and satisfies the understanding.

Hence, the harmony between the two (keeping in mind that the

harmony must occur without any concept actually being applied to this

shimmering presence).

We are now in a better position to understand what Kant meant

by suggesting that pure beauty experiences are disinterested, universal,

and necessary experiences concerning the pleasure which everyone

ought to derive from the experience of a form of purpose. If you are

disinterested and derive an aesthetic pleasure from the shimmering form

of the single rose, then you should agree with others to the extent that

they can be disinterested too and attend to the rose in the same way you

do. You would all be enjoying the rose as a unique form which appears

in your sensory fields. If human perceivers ever disagree about such

kinds of beauty, it is apparently because, says Kant, one of them is not

truly in a state of disinterestedness, or because one is more focused on

the rose as a good example of its conceptual type (dependent beauty)

rather than the rose as a pure, unique form (free beauty). Kant’s

position here is fascinating because he tries to blend both subjective and

objective elements. The subjective element is that when you say “The

rose is beautiful” you are making a statement about your reaction to the

rose—the statement is about you and not about beauty as some externally

objective feature of the world. On the other hand, Kant believed there

is a kind of stability and shared nature to pure beauty experiences: all

similarly disinterested perceivers ought to agree with you because the

machinery of the human mind is identical for all.

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A final issue in Kant’s system has to do with whether or not beauty

experiences can be proven. He clearly thought they could not:

For though a man enumerate to me all the ingredients of a dish

and remark that each is separately pleasant to me, and further

extol with justice the wholesomeness of this particular food,

yet am I deaf to all these reasons; I try the dish with my tongue

and my palate, and thereafter (and not according to universal

principles) do I pass my judgment.31

And also: “I must immediately feel pleasure in the presentation

of the object, and of that I can be persuaded by no grounds of proof

whatever.”32 Kant is suggesting that reasons and proofs are of no avail

when it comes to getting a person to experience the beauty of a singular

object. We can talk around the experience—presumably having left the

state of disinterestedness—but no such talk does any good unless the

person has a type of “Aha!” experience and finally sees what we see.

Kant is consistent on this point since he has already maintained that

the recognition of singular beauty does not involve the application of

concepts. The use of reasons and proofs can only get us so far and then

an intuitive leap must occur.

Kant’s approach to pure beauty experiences is powerful but it has

not gone uncriticized:

a) Many critics have pointed to the seeming impossibility of achieving

a state of disinterestedness. They have also argued that all beauty

experiences involve the application of concepts. Kant himself seems to

waver on this latter point in his discussion of the role the understanding

plays in the recognition of a form of purpose. Perhaps some kind of Zen

enlightenment would allow us to perceive forms in a fresh and unique

way (i.e., non-conceptually), but to use this as a basis for a theory of the

aesthetics of beauty is very complicated indeed.



b) It is also very unclear whether Kant’s assertions about the subjective

universality of free beauty make any real sense. People often disagree

about beauty experiences and it is pointless to tell them that they ought

to agree without explaining how this is really possible. What are the

empirical conditions that would ensure such agreement?

c) Is disinterested pleasure possible? The whole tradition of psychological

egoism—the theory that humans are inherently selfish—is powerful and

Kant seems to underestimate it. If we take an interest in a singular object

because it pleases us, isn’t that a form of self-interest?

d) Is Kant justified in demoting dependent beauty experiences? They are

a very real and important type of beauty experience, and they may indeed

be the only kind of beauty experience if Kant has not made an ironclad

case for disinterestedness and the non-application of concepts in the case

of pure beauty.

e) Lastly, Kant argued that colors cannot be seen as beautiful because

they are not themselves forms, but rather constituents of forms. He

said colors are therefore merely “agreeable.” But this seems highly

problematical. There is no reason why we cannot take the pure azure

color of the sky to be profoundly beautiful. In like manner, there is no

reason why we should agree with Kant when he says that judgments of the

agreeable (which pertain to selfish pleasures of sensation as expressed in a

statement such as “I like red roses”) are impure. This would be true only

if his arguments for disinterestedness were indisputable.

According to George Dickie, theories of taste ran their course in the

18th century and reached a culmination in Kant’s theory.33 Thereafter, as

the philosophy of taste approach waned, theories of the aesthetic attitude

took over. Dickie cites the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer as

an example of the latter. According to Schopenhauer:

134 BEAUTY

When we say that a thing is beautiful, we thereby assert

that it is an object of our aesthetic contemplation…it means

that the sight of the thing makes us objective, that is to say,

that in contemplating it we are no longer conscious of ourselves

as individuals, but as pure will-less subjects of knowledge.34

This passage shows Schopenhauer’s partial debt to Kant: when

we experience beauty we become selflessly absorbed and come to know

a universal Platonic idea. Aside from the question as to whether such

absorption is psychologically possible and the issue of the provability

of Platonic ideas, Dickie interprets this passage to mean that beauty

is completely subjectivized in the sense that whatever one turns one’s

aesthetic contemplation on is automatically beautiful. He goes on to

argue that contemporary theories which connect beauty with aesthetic

consciousness have grown out of Schopenhauer’s assumptions. As we

saw at the beginning of this chapter, theories of beauty also came under

attack from Logical Positivism and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language.

And cultural anthropology seemed to leave no option but to conclude

that beauty is thoroughly relative to cultural conditioning.

Before ending this section, we will briefly consider two beauty

traditions in the historic Eastern world. One of these is called wabi

sabi, which is a style of craftsmanship and aesthetics found traditionally

in Japan. Wabi sabi is the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent,

and incomplete. Its material characteristics include the suggestion of

natural process (working with the grain of things), irregularity, intimacy,

unpretentiousness, earthiness, and simplicity.35 Its aesthetic style

has been heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, which emphasizes the

following marks of beauty:

a) Asymmetry in nature

b) Non-attachment (transcendence of ego)



c) Naturalness (absence of pretense)

d) Simplicity (admiration of water)

e) Silence (inward-looking mind)

f) Profound subtlety (water again in its many forms); and

g) Wizened austerity (like an old tree)36

Zen ideas of beauty find expression in the Way of Tea, flower

arrangement, gardening, calligraphy, ink drawing, haiku, archery, the

martial arts, and other genres. Precise attention to form and content is

stressed as a way of expressing inner peace and harmony.

The other beauty tradition is that of Chinese ceramics. The history

of Chinese ceramics began some eight thousand years ago with the crafting

of hand-molded earthenware vessels. In the late neolithic period, the

potter’s wheel was invented which facilitated the production of more

uniform vessels. The sophistication of these early potters is exemplified

by the legion of terracotta warriors found in the tomb of the Emperor

Qin from the 3rd century BCE. Over the following centuries new ceramic

technologies and techniques were developed, and the style especially

flourished in the T’ang dynasty (618-907 AD), the Yuan dynasty (1279-

1368 AD), the Ming dynasty (1368-1644 AD), and the Qing dynasty

(1644-1911). Improvements were found in the application and glazing

of color, symmetry, proportion, and perfection of form.37 Thus, for

many centuries Chinese craftsmen set a high standard of excellence in

fashioning beautiful ceramics. It is interesting to note how this very

formalized approach to beauty arose and spread in China while wabi

sabi and Zen had their time and place in terms of a more natural (and

sometimes even rustic) style of craftsmanship.

136 BEAUTY

6.3 Prima Facie and Evidential Beauty

We will now consider a somewhat eclectic theory of beauty, which

begins by distinguishing between Prima Facie beauty (B-PF) and

Evidential beauty (B-E). B-PF is that which pleases the senses when

experienced immediately and intuitively (“prima facie” means “at first

sight”). It is a common, natural, and spontaneous experience of that

which pleases one or more of our senses. B-E, on the other hand,

is that which pleases the senses of a competent judge or expert of the

genre in question. An example will be useful in clarifying these two

types of beauty. Suppose that you are given a glass of what is actually a

very fine wine. Suppose further that you are not a connoisseur, but you

taste the wine and exclaim, “That’s a beautiful wine! It tastes terrific.”

Such a response is a classic case of B-PF. It is certainly appropriate and

unquestionable as far as it goes. You like the wine very much; therefore,

the wine is aesthetically good or beautiful to you. To this extent, we are

under the ground rules of subjectivism and its formula X is good=I like

X. In this situation, giving reasons for your statement about the wine

seems oddly inappropriate. De gustibus non disputandum est! On the

other hand, if you are an accomplished connoisseur and maintain that

the wine is good or beautiful, you seem to be in an area other than pure

subjectivism. You are making a statement about B-E which you think you

can support by giving reasons which will refer to properties of the wine

itself, not merely to your state of mind with respect to the wine. B-E thus

seems to be a more objective type of beauty experience which is open to

public scrutiny and debate. It is apparently impossible to be wrong about

B-PF statements, but not so in regard to B-E statements. The difference

must be explored more fully.

What is the exact relationship between B-PF and B-E? Is the latter

meant to erase the former? Certainly not, although the issue is complex.

In the example above, your initial reaction to the wine is not invalidated

if you become a connoisseur. This is so even if you eventually come to



a point where you decide on rational grounds that you no longer like

the wine, or even if you decide that you like the wine because of certain

rational grounds. The initial impression of the wine—as an impression—

is irrefutable. However, it also seems apparent that taste can be educated.

It is not uncommon for individuals to discover that as they learn more

about a particular genre or medium their standard of taste evolves along

more sophisticated lines. Of course, evolution in this sense can be

confirming or disconfirming of B-PF.

Once you know a great deal about wines, you can go back to the

original wine and have two opinions: (a) “In retrospect, I was correct in

thinking of the wine as good because I can now defend that intuition with

good reasons”; or (b) “In retrospect, I was wrong in thinking of the wine

as good because I know more about how to classify and compare it with

respect to better wines of its type.” Judgment (a) establishes continuity

with the first impression, while judgment (b) establishes discontinuity.

It must be said, though, that establishing discontinuity in this sense does

not fully negate the first impression. People often continue to like wines

they know to be inferior. The same can be said of other aesthetic items

such as movies, books, poetry, and so on.

B-E involves the expertise of a competent judge. Definitionally, this

is a person who has mastered the relevant standards of a particular field.

He or she will have broad experience and will operate in an objective

manner. In particular, he/she is qualified to give reasons for evaluative

statements. In this regard, Kant may have been too pessimistic as to

the effectiveness of reason-giving. Open-minded perceivers are often

influenced by cogent reasons even though Kant was right in arguing that

reasons eventually come to an end and then beauty must be grasped in

an intuitive leap. The following points should also be emphasized: (a)

Relying on competent judges doesn’t excuse us from learning more about

aesthetic matters and becoming competent ourselves; (b) Becoming

a competent judge is a life-long process. It is not some kind of static

or finished state; and (c) It is often evident that competent judges

do not reach total agreement on matters of taste. This is natural and

unavoidable. Yet it need not follow from this that competent judges

138 BEAUTY

are useless. Where a consensus can be reached, it often is reached.

Having a consensus is important in terms of establishing canons of

evaluation which, although they may not be absolute, are useful in terms

of segregating higher quality items in a class from lower quality items.

This acknowledges one of the central definitions of beauty; namely, that

which pleases as a result of being an outstanding example of its type. It is

frequently important for us to believe that there do exist experts in many

areas of aesthetic evaluation.

This theory of beauty contains both subjective and objective

elements. The subjective element is clearly that beauty is strongly

correlated with that which pleases or delights our senses. The objective

element is that there are a variety of properties which inhere in external

objects and which, when perceived by us, cause us to have the beauty

experience. It is not hard to acknowledge the difficulty philosophers have

had in specifying exactly what these properties are. They are undoubtedly

an open set. As we will see in the next section, the new science of beauty

is expanding our knowledge of some of these properties. Of course,

an equally important objective element of this theory is the belief in

competent judges and their ability to bring valid standards to judgments

of beauty.



6.4 The Science of Beauty

During the past three decades, numerous studies in the evolutionary

sciences suggest that standards of human facial and bodily beauty may

not be entirely cultural and arbitrary. Nancy Etcoff, a faculty member at

Harvard Medical School and a practicing psychologist at Massachusetts

General Hospital, has summarized many of these studies in her book

Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. We will briefly review some of

Etcoff’s claims which are centered in her contention that natural

selection in the human species has favored certain physical, aesthetic

traits over others. She believes that beauty has mattered and will continue

to matter in terms of mate selection and reproduction.

● In regard to female facial beauty, many studies indicate that both

men and women have a distinct preference for the following features:

clear, smooth skin; larger eyes relative to face size; shorter distances from

mouth to chin and from nose to mouth; high cheek bones; lustrous,

healthy hair; full lips; a neonate or youthful aspect; and a relatively high

degree of facial symmetry (although a perfectly symmetrical face is not

usually found to be as attractive as one that has minor asymmetries).38

These features have remained fairly constant in cross-cultural studies

even though it is true that there is a wide societal variation in things such as

makeup and facial adornment (tattooing, scarification, piercing, etc.).

● In regard to male facial beauty, the results are somewhat less clear

but still demonstrate a few consistent preferences for both sexes: clear,

smooth skin; deep-set eyes that on average are somewhat more narrow

and closer together than a woman’s eyes; heavy brow ridges; prominent

chins; healthy hair; faces that are oval or rectangular in shape; powerful

masticatory muscles; and a relatively high degree of facial symmetry.39

Again, these preferences seem to persist across cultures independently of

makeup and facial adornment.

140 BEAUTY

● Interestingly, there are studies which suggest that the characteristics

of female facial beauty listed above can be exaggerated to a certain extent

(so-called “hyperfeminine” faces) and this elicits very favorable responses

from both men and women.40 On the other hand, exaggerating male

facial features (“hypermasculine” faces) does not elicit favorable

responses from both sexes.41 The latter can actually make a male face

seem more menacing and unattractive.

● In regard to female bodily attractiveness, Etcoff argues that the

stereotypical “hourglass” view has a basis in evolutionary biology. In

terms of mate selection and reproduction, the ideal waist-to-hip ratio

for women is approximately .70.42 Extreme variations from this ratio—as

in the case of obesity and anorexia or bulimia—are generally not found to

be attractive. Psychiatrist Anne Becker has found that even in places such

as Fiji, where there is a high prevalence of overweight and obese people

who want to maintain their current weight, line drawings of individuals

in the mid-range weight category are preferred over line drawings of

very thin and very obese human figures.43 Etcoff concludes from this

and other similar studies that sometimes considerations of social status

can override evolutionary factors—for example, in cultures where there

is a shortage of food, being overweight is an indication of high social

ranking. However:

Very similar figures [line drawings] have been shown to

people in Britain, Uganda, and Kenya by psychologist

Adrian Furnham and his colleagues. There is striking cross-

cultural consistency in which figures were found most

attractive. None rated the extremely fat or thin attractive,

and all picked the same cluster of mid-weight figures for

both male and female drawings. Anne Becker found that,

within Fiji, the ratings were consistent across both sexes,



and no matter how close or far a village was from an

urban center.44

Not surprisingly, many studies indicate that, in addition to a waist-

to-hip ratio of .70, both sexes find a female body to be attractive which

shows signs of healthiness, youthfulness, and symmetry. No doubt, these

traits have been important in the processes of natural selection.

● In regard to male bodily attractiveness, Etcoff notes that “the most

attractive male torso is thought to be V-shaped, tapering from wide

shoulders to a narrower waist and hips. The most strongly disliked

shape for men, according to both females and males, is the pear shape,

with thin shoulders and widened middle and bottom.”45 Other favored

characteristics for male bodies are signs of healthiness, muscular

maturity, and symmetry. Additionally, considerations of height seem to

be more important for the male body than the female body; both sexes

prefer men who are above average in height.46

According to Etcoff, a preference for all the characteristics listed

in the sections above is hard-wired in human biology. Even three-

and six-month-old babies will stare longer at faces which have been

independently rated as more attractive by adult men and women.47 This

suggests that there is something timelessly alluring about beauty in the

human form. There are variations on the theme, of course—for example,

studies indicate a slight preference for faces of our own race and faces

that resemble in some way those within our family lines48—but the

geometry of beauty is much more universal than most of us have

ever imagined.

142 BEAUTY



Thought Questions

1. Hume clearly believed that there are standards of beauty and that taste

can be educated. Do you agree with him? Is it not true that all standards

of beauty have histories to them, and that if we explore these histories we

will find a great deal of subjectivity involved? For example, we might find

that taste is imposed by those in power. And then, over the centuries,

what began as arbitrary likes and dislikes evolved to the point of seeming

natural and inevitable. What do you think about this?

2. Is it possible that “beauty” is just a code word for whatever we like or

whatever reinforces our behavior? If so, then literally anything could be

correctly described as beautiful—at one time or another, to one person

or another. Is this a viable position?

3. Maxillofacial surgeon Stephen Marquardt has developed a “beauty

mask” based on 40 golden decagons of six different sizes in the

mathematical ratio of 1 to 1.618. He claims that his mask will fit any

face in the world, regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity, so long as the

face is beautiful. Go to Marquardt’s website at www.beautyanalysis.com/

index2_mba.htm. Do you think his arguments are persuasive?

4. Given that we live in a global village of television, international media,

and the internet, do you think it is more than coincidental that many of

the criteria of beauty described by Nancy Etcoff are highly exemplified

in fashion models and the world of advertising? In other words, what is

nature here and what is nurture? Or is it simply the case that the fashion

world is echoing and reinforcing a set of biologically long-standing and

pre-existing beauty preferences?

144 BEAUTY



Notes

1 B. Bower, Science News, March 19, 1994.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldenRatio.

5 See Stephen Marquardt’s website, http://www.beautyanalysis.com/

index2_mba.htm.

6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe,

p. 32.

7 See A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1936).

8 See Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois:

Open Court, 2003), Chapter 2.

9 See Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy (Garden City, New

York: Image Books, 1962), Volume 1, Part 1, p. 282.

10 Ibid., Volume 1, Part 2, p. 101.

146 BEAUTY

11 Ibid., pp. 100-104.

12 Ibid., Volume 2, Part 2, p. 142.

13 Ibid., pp. 142-143.

14 See George Dickie, Aesthetics: An Introduction (New York: Pegasus, 1971),

p. 9.

15 See George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach, pp. 11-13.

16 Ibid., p. 25.

17 Ibid., pp. 9-16.

18 Ibid., p. 17.

19 David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays, Literary, Moral and

Political (London: 1870), p. 136.

20 Ibid., p. 138.


22 Ibid., p. 18.

23 Ibid., p. 17.

24 David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays, Literary, Moral and

Political, p. 139.




26 See Immanuel Kant, Analytic of the Beautiful, from The Critique of Judgment,

trans. Walter Cerf (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), pp. 3-52.

27 Robert L. Zimmerman, “Kant: The Aesthetic Judgment,” in Kant: A

Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Paul Wolff (New York: Anchor Books,

1967), p. 402.

28 Ibid., p. 403.

29 Ibid.


31 Cited in Robert L. Zimmerman, “Kant: The Aesthetic Judgment,”

in Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 396.

32 Ibid.


34 Ibid., p. 25.

35 See Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

(Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1994).

36 See D.T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, ed. William Barrett (New York:

Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), Chapter 10.

37 See Michael Sullivan, The Arts of China (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1967).

38 Nancy Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (New York: Anchor

Books, 2000), Chapter 5.

148 BEAUTY

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.


43 Ibid., p. 199.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., p. 177.

46 Ibid., pp. 172-176.

47 Ibid., pp. 31-32.




12/12/05 11:16:47 PM

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beginning aesthetics

by John M. Valentine

an introduction to the philosophy of art

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