beginning aesthetics
by John M. Valentine
an introduction to the philosophy of art
savannah college of art and design
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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
1
2
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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
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{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.
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{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?
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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.
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{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?
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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17 Kendall L. Walton, “Categories of Art,” in Readings, p. 351.
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.
30 George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach, p. 87.
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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
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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.
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{CHAPTER TWO} THE TASK OF THE CRITIC 55
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?
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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.
4 Kendall L. Walton, “Categories of Art,” in Readings, p. 334.
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.
{CHAPTER TWO} THE TASK OF THE CRITIC 57
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.
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{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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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:
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
8 Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, p. 174.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
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Notes
1 See Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York: Mentor Books, 1969), pp.
108-110.
2 Anne Sheppard, Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, p. 8.
3 Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, p. 270.
4 Ibid., p. 273.
5 Ibid., pp. 273-278.
6 Anne Sheppard, Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, p. 10.
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.
10 Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, p. 155.
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.
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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
120 BEAUTY
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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)
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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
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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.
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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,
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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
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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
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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.
21 George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach, p. 17.
22 Ibid., p. 18.
23 Ibid., p. 17.
24 David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays, Literary, Moral and
Political, p. 139.
25 George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach, p. 22.
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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.
30 George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach, p. 23.
31 Cited in Robert L. Zimmerman, “Kant: The Aesthetic Judgment,”
in Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 396.
32 Ibid.
33 George Dickie, Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach, p. 24.
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.
42 Ibid., Chapter 6.
43 Ibid., p. 199.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., p. 177.
46 Ibid., pp. 172-176.
47 Ibid., pp. 31-32.
48 Ibid., Chapter 5.
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