Placing art in an aesthetically fine environment does not distract one from the art. Thus when Yvor Winters says that poetry should 228 Chapter Eleven offer a means of enriching ones awareness of human nature; . One imagines the events that occur in the fiction. Both take up the offer. This latter view is explicitly endorsed in Lamarque and Olsen (1994, 44956). While for some novelistic purposes that would be fine, it would ruin Green Henry in just the way a lame thriller is ruined by unconvincing villains. An experience that is both visual and imaginative is thus claimed to be the constant feature of grasping pictorial content by looking at a picture. Simple functionalism: An approach to defining art in terms of one or more functions artworks fulfill. It is characterized by two properties not possessed by ordinary seeing: non-existence and a tendency to twofoldness. Works and Worlds of Art. It is to these that I now turn. On the other hand, when this deficiency is remedied, these views either begin to look like or at least suggest definitions. It is natural that, if Im imaging myself in the world of the fiction and hearing about the sad fate of the character, I would also imagine myself pitying her. When they say, These ruins are positively elegant, they are reporting an impression of elegance, but (unlike the impression view stated above) not a steady disposition in the ruins to produce that impression. cit. For other properties, a more antirealist (subjectivist or relativist) view may be the right one. If one despairs because of a lack of agreement, one ought to despair about philosophy, and much else besides. The claim made by the argument is that, where a feature contributes in an essential way to the realization of an admirable aim, the work is valued partly on the basis of this feature. Some claim that musical and literary works just are these context-independent, abstract structures (Goodman and Elgin 1988, 4965; Kivy 1993, 3594; Dodd 2000, 2007). This implies that interpretations of works cannot coherently aim to discover their meanings, because there is no fixed meaning to be discovered. Aaron Ridley builds an evocation theory of expressiveness on the fact that music presents emotion characteristics in appearance. Media such as cinema and television constantly trade in stories that are fictional. First, we have to look at the issue of response-dependency. Of these reasons, the last is the most controversial, since not everyone agrees that artworks have the degree of autonomy hypothetical intentionalism attributes to them. Oxford: Blackwell. Further, if experiences are features of a mental life that we can describe but not express, as just claimed, it seems that the expressivist about aesthetic judgments would have to settle for a hybrid subjectivist/expressivist theory: subjectivist about the descriptive aspect of aesthetic judgments and expressivist about the evaluative aspect. One example of this, mentioned in chapter 7, is the residual racism in Jules Vernes portrait of the former slave Neb, co-existing with an intentionally expressed abolitionist point of view. There could be three reasons. A last objection is that the account of musical expressiveness in terms of HI (or moderate actual intentionalism) tells us what is expressiveness without telling us what hearing emotion in music is. This chapter has defended affirmative answers to both questions, although we have also seen that great care is needed to define the role of intentions in fixing work meaning, and in not overstating the importance of this role. Such adjustments, while needed to make the pretense view work, are not hard to make and hence do not pose a serious problem for the view. They claim that fictional characters are akin to theoretical entities that we acknowledge because of their theoretical utility such as gravity or the average American income. Though simple, this is not a very clear way of putting the matter. An object is aesthetically fine (excellent, beautiful) if an ideal observer of the object would experience it with a high degree of satisfaction (will have an experience highly valued for its own sake) based on the relevant type of apprehension (perception, imaginative awareness) of more basic properties of the object (such as its form, qualities or meanings).10 An object has a specific-value property if an ideal observer will react with satisfaction (dissatisfaction) in virtue of apprehending features f1-fn, where the features identify the descriptive content of the specific-value property. The mere variety of art forms, and the vagueness of the boundaries between such things as art and craft and art and entertainment, is another equally compelling reason. Ridley claims that to fully understand emotions, moods, and their expressions in human behavior, we have to be able to do something more than form true beliefs about when people are in those states. Others, like being sad, seem to be purely descriptive. 1989. (This is a point where fiction in the sense we are concerned withas a type of representationties in with fiction in the first sense discussed above.) If this is so, then discovering that artworks provide uniquely valuable experiences is no reason to accept an essentialist view of artistic value. Even if we grant all of the above, many styles of depiction dont capture this sort of resemblance. Songs often tell fictional stories. Making Sense. Music, Art, and Metaphysics. There is an analogy here with the cognitive value of uttering truths. Further, this view does not ignore the fact that aesthetic experience can be cognitively demanding (see below), but nevertheless, it emphasizes something that seems completely absent from Kant: the sensuous pleasure of the experience. 1992. Refining Art Historically. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47:2133. Finally, determining which properties of artworks contribute to artistic value is an empirical matter based on the aims of artists and the expectations of audiences. Aesthetic Properties. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 2006. A collection of essays arguing for the superiority of traditional architecture over modern and postmodern styles. The examples given so far are untendentious illustrations that intentions bear on the nature of things though they belong to people, and so an investigation into the identity of certain intentions is not merely biographical. PDF | On Dec 31, 2020, Paul A. Kottman published Introduction. 2. We have just argued that both do have such features, and if this is correct, both are amenable to hypothetical intentionalist treatment, despite their differences. Notice that the claim that an example supports 3 is inevitably going to be more controversial than the parallel claim concerning the original premise 3, which merely says that works with flawed commitments can succeed. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. If one is wearing red-tinged sunglasses one imposes an intervening medium that affects the light waves that reach ones eyes. The immersion approach tells us that nature is to be appreciated by immersing oneself in it: wandering through it with all ones senses alive to what is on offer. The last objection concerns the by now familiar issue of replaceability. Part of having a concept is to be able to extend it to nonprototypical members, which are extremely numerous given the way prototypes are formed. Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. Clearly, we can evaluate such attitudes ascribable to a work from an ethical point of view. There are advocates of both approaches. Art and the Domain of the Aesthetic. British Journal of Aesthetics 40: 191208. 2004. 1996. A final reason to reject selfless absorption as the correct account of the aesthetic experience is simply the existence of others, which emphasize other strands of thought about the aesthetic. Further, by abstracting from various features important in the accounts previously considered, this proposal succeeds in casting a wider net without succumbing to the apparent disunity of the second Kantian conception. Unfortunately, there is disagreement over when an intention is unrealized, which leads to different intentionalist theories. Recently, the DVDs of many of Charlie Chaplins films have been assembled. Since we share a world, I can imagine that where I am in that world, monsters could be lurking. Kant takes aesthetic judgments to be subjective and thus they do not make truth claims, but he nevertheless thinks that they claim universal assent. 1981. Lets now bring our emotional reactions back to center stage. (There are countless examples along these lines.) If no, there are not, and then we would have to accept one of the three antirealist views mentioned above: subjectivism, expressivism, or relativism. The Ethical Value of an Artwork An artwork can be ethically evaluated in many ways. So what makes a given property in each category aesthetic? Knowledge and Nature Appreciation There is no doubt that the acquisition of knowledge can both enhance and, on some occasions, irrevocably alter our appreciative experience of nature. If HI is correct, the poem is such an expression if this is the best hypothesis about the poets intention. Tolhurst, William. Are we to ask the same question as Gabriel, and is the answer more accessible to us than to him? 1981. All accept Dantos view that art must be defined historically, and all, in the end, are committed to a definition that consists of a disjunction of sufficient conditions rather than a set of necessary conditions that are jointly sufficient (so-called real definitions). The complexity of the concept of art appreciation is its overlap with related concepts, Cognitivism in respect to the arts refers to a constellation of positions that share in common the idea that artworks often bear, in addition to aesthetic value, a significant kind of cognitive, Why is imagining things in words a serious business in relation to the rest of life? Some may dismiss the above reflections because of the humble and utilitarian object on which they centereda toaster. Wollheim, Richard. Art, Emotion, and Ethics. Two statements of the style-historical definition of art. Would the answer consist in a definition of art? Chapter 10 explores the expression. This is because such vividness depends on other perceptual color properties such as saturation and brightness. Wollheim famously wants to distinguish seeing-in from seeing-as. There are two subsequent objects constructed by each of the two interpretations enriching the initial object in their different ways. It is the latterthe interpretationthat tells us how an interpreter conceives of an object, but then it is always open for us to ask: is the conception true or false, plausible or implausible, adequate or inadequate, useful or not useful? Oxford: Oxford University Press. There are many different conceptions of the implied author. The reason is that it is a standard feature of such works that they investigate ethical aspects of societies, cultures, traditions, and individuals in ways that explore real options for us. Instead, there are still mainly competing hypotheses, and anyone who appeals to cognitive science is making bets on which of these will turn out to be the winners. We dont imagine ourselves hearing about Anna taking a lover; we simply imagine Anna taking a lover or someone telling of Anna taking a lover, but not telling us. Contextualism is the view that the central issues of aesthetics can only be satisfactorily resolved by appealing to the context in which a work comes into existence: the context of origin or creation. Let me suggest three routes to identifying these. In particular, we will look at some recent arguments for a positive answer to this question. Literature and philosophy have long shared an interest in questions of truth, value, and form. To appreciate some, but not other, properties of an object is not to distort it but to appreciate it selectively. Consider War and Peace by Tolstoy. A 102 Chapter Five more straightforward way to itemize the formal properties of a bowl would be color, three-dimensional shape, and the patterns, if any, that mark its surfaces. It is not very important whether one ultimately agrees with the novels resolution of the ethical issues it raises. 1994. This usage is common but some philosophers argue that the usage conflates two different distinctions: intrinsic/extrinsic value and valuable for its own sake/valuable for the sake of something else (Korsgaard 1996, 24974). This can mean different things, but one thing it is sometimes taken to mean is that the object of interpretation in the case of Macbeth is the play as it is conceived in the thought of an interpreter. 2001. If food is an aesthetic object, it is because of the tastes and textures we discern, or the relations among them, rather than the experiences the properties might cause. Essence, Expression, and History: Arthur Dantos Philosophy of Art. In Danto and His Critics, ed. This is because the most likely explanation for this attitude seeping into the work is that the author is inadvertently or unknowingly expressing some- Interaction: Ethical, Aesthetic, and Artistic Value 251 thing deeply ingrained in his psyche. Turning to the second version of HI, it fares no better with the second example. This leaves the boundaries of such appreciation uncertain at least until an Environmental Aesthetics: Natural Beauty 33 alternative conception, not limited to engagement with aesthetic properties, is proposed. Finally, it should be noted that typical connections can conceivably be broken. 2003. 2000. He returns to his village, where he becomes a civil servant. Those who deny (2) would balk at the claim that, when the feeling wells up in us, it is fictional that we feel pity. . This is because it does not pick out the whole class of items falling under the relevant concept. . When I leave myself out of the fictional world I am imagining, there is no place for me to imagine the proposition that the monster threatens me. Are any of the judgments we make about it aesthetic judgments? . The two defects are not identical, but the ethical defect is responsible for the aesthetic defect. There are expressive properties like sad, joyful, angry, or serene. Often, however, it is just a matter of (re)focusing ones attention in the right way. If we agree with his preference, is it a better, but different, film than the one Chaplin made or a better version of the same film? Aesthetic Concepts. Philosophical Review 68: 42150. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Is there some minimum of required knowledge for such appreciation to be proper or appropriate? One is those who are still interested in pursuing a simple functionalist definition, typically in terms of aesthetic experience or properties (see Anderson 2000, Zangwill 2000). No doubt some purely utilitarian features that one notices have nothing to do with the aesthetic such as the number and dimensions of its toasting slots. 1997. This does not keep my fishing rod from being replaceable. We have found that the mere fact that a work offers such an experience fails by itself to dispel these fears. I am pretending to sing by lip-syncing. 2. Thus, if the pleasure of a meal consists simply in the sensation of ones hunger being dissipated or the sheer pleasure of undiscriminated tastes in ones mouth, this is not aesthetic pleasure. Taking in the properties of the ceramic work may tend to make one a more discriminating perceiver of visual properties. This type of argument is vulnerable to criticism, the target of which is the third premise of the argument: that we have an aesthetic defect every time we have a prescribed response that is or ought to be blocked by a feature of the work. 11. Macro-Consequences Artworks can sometimes have a broad impact on society and culture. Further, merely hypothetical cases of such people are less likely to move us than the fictional characters we are engaged with. In the chapters on the aesthetic that follow, we will attempt to evaluate various conceptions of the aesthetic. If I say, Your PhD is a fiction, I am using fiction in this sense. In asking whether architecture is an art form, one is not asking whether there are buildings or works of architecture that are artworks. Most, though not quite all, parties to the debate would accept the second part of the idea, which I would also endorse.3 The first part, though, is simply an expression of aesthetic essentialism. 246 Chapter Eleven 11. Artistic Value and Opportunistic Moralism. In Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. This harmony between pure delight and practical pursuits creates an appreciation of beauty in nature that can be valued as intensely as selfless absorption, but the two experiences are not to be conflated. . Thus, the expressiveness of lyric poetry tends to consist, in large part, in the articulation of the propositional content of an emotional statebeliefs, desires, perceptionswhereas expressiveness in music must necessarily be located, for the most part, elsewhere. At this point, the reader may be thinking back to the discussion of hypothetical intentionalism in chapter 7, which argued that there are convincing counterexamples to this view as a theory of work meaning. The something standing in front of something else is an object that is part of the three-dimensional scene and what it is in front of is another part of the scene. 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