As to the first problem, it is not clear that we have said much by mentioning this impression. For him, what makes something first art is that it is the ultimate causal source and intentional reference of later activities we take as paradigmatically art. Furthermore, first art aims at many of the same effects and values, that later, paradigmatic art has enshrined (1993, 421). Urmson, J. A psychologist claims he can provide the very same benefits to a significantly greater degree through subliminal processes. One has to apprehend the clue in a more or less imaginative way to find the right word. The widely shared intention is to create an object for public consumption, an object available to a public absent the artist. M. Hjort and S. Laver. 2. However, whether there is an art form of architecture depends not only on the existence of architectural artworks but on the existence of practices or institutional arrangements for presenting, classifying, explaining (interpreting), and evaluating architectural works for artistically minded audiences. Consider the design for the 1995 Buick Skylark. A third account is the persona view. . Other arguments for immoralism are aware of this critique of the CIA and attempt to get around it by trying to find something in the morally defective stance itself that contributes to the works artistic value. More generally, the same art-historical context leaves room for artists to do quite different things with the same structure. This may be a fair reply to my treatment of the argument up to this point. His current view, however, is that the earliest art, the prototypes from which art and its institutions arose, are to be understood functionally. Among the papers published in the, In this introduction to Aesthetics and the Revolutionary City: Real and Imagined Havana, Kent begins by exploring the idea of the imaginary city. Thus, despite the doubts expressed above, I mean to leave the question of the objectivity of these evaluations an open one, hoping that others can give better and more decisive answers. Do we see objects in photographs as we do in painting or drawing, or do we just see objects when we look at photographs as we see objects when we look at a garden? Victoire.) The painting contains the artists usual grid of geometrical figures painted in primary colors Conceptions of the Aesthetic: Aesthetic Experience 43 but, in this instance, they atypically suggest movement, pulsing with energy. 1952. In the history of western thought about art and beauty (a concept closely related to aesthetic value), there is much that precedes the eighteenth century. For example, if one hears in the music the expression of an emotion by an imaginary persona that counts as hearing the emotion in the music, even if this is not entirely typical of hearing emotion in music generally. Davies, Stephen. For a building to have features that can be subject to aesthetic appraisal, those features neednt be intentionally designed for this purpose. 2005. Each of these proposals can, and has also been put forward, as a free-standing account of depiction. (I think it is not completely obvious that this is how the novel should be interpreted, but it is a plausible interpretation.) In the case of goldfish art, it is the artist rather than the work that deserves criticism (if criticism is deserved). Hence an account of the experience of music as expressive falls short of an account of expressiveness. 1988, Evaluating Art. It is very hard to believe the statement that it could be true that the pile of rubble is David. This example is too messy to be effective. Most everyone can see the beauty in that. This is surely why Fountain is the most famous of the ready-mades, the one that always shows up in art-historical surveys, and the one that has by now been discussed ad nauseum. Carlson is the chief proponent of the environmental model. Alternatively, in fiction we intend to refer to things that dont exist and in nonfiction we intend to refer to things that do. There can still be diverse seeings-in, but some might be incorrect. Aesthetics of the Environment. Is it more like a musical work or a painting? A forger of a Rembrandt selfportrait may intend that his work be regarded in many ways as the original is correctly regarded without thereby creating another artwork (Sartwell 1990, 157). Regarding awareness of aesthetic properties outside aesthetic experience, I think there is a kind of appreciation for an objects experiencible features that falls short of aesthetic experience. One is temporarily freed from willing and strivingthe source of endless human misery, according to himas one contemplates the essential forms of reality. The seeing-in intuition is that whenever one sees what a picture depicts, one is engaged in seeing-in and to bring this about is the central (but not the only) proper function of depictions. We can identify a practice as an art practice by examining its origins.12 Whether art has an original nature is one of the most difficult questions for a historical conception of art. There are evaluative reactions and there are impressions, where the latter purportedly capture the descriptive content of an aesthetic property. The Harmony of the Faculties 4. 1987. Internal versus External Representation. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62:2336. Levinson denies that ways of appearing are either dispositions or response-dependent properties. The conception is automatically true of and adequate to the intentional object, since it is defined as having just those properties it is conceived to have. But there is both positive and negative aesthetic experience: positively valued experiences of aesthetically good things, negatively valued experiences of aesthetically bad things. Walton (2002) suggests that the make-believe view is better placed than the seeing-in view to account for the point of view from which we see pictures: It is the point of view from which we imagine seeing the objects represented in them. Some people think that what Peter is doing is best characterized as attempting to grasp or discover certain truths about the play (Beardsley 1970; Carroll 2001b; S. Davies 1998; Hirsch 1967; Levinson 1996; Stecker 1997, 2003; Wollheim 1980). An attempt to show that music can express complex emotion when conceived as the expression of a musical persona. A critique of realism. Could one go even further, and say that this house in particular and the subdivision in general is expressive of a wasteful, high consumption lifestyle and the contemporary American society that encourages such a way of life?2 These suggestions are not far-fetched, and in fact they have recently been raised with increasing frequency. Hence, there are always fairly straightforward counterexamples to any simple functionalist definition. 1997. If that is common ground, this is where it ends. A best hypothesis is one that is most justified by the evidence, and where there is a tie among such hypotheses, one that makes the work aesthetically better. If this is so, then discovering that artworks provide uniquely valuable experiences is no reason to accept an essentialist view of artistic value. Let us begin with what I take (perhaps unwisely) as common ground. The crucial point is expressed in premise 2 in the more formal version of the argument stated above. The specific treatment depends on the art institutions of the day and the culture. Loves Knowledge. The ready-mades, for example, have such properties on more than one level. in the major areas of philosophy, among them metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and moral theory, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, aesthet-, ics and the philosophy of art, feminist philosophy, and social and political, of second- through fourth-year students and serve as the perfect cornerstone. Then they constitute a fiction. 1986. Similarly, there may have been a time when people were faultless in believing whales and dolphins were fish. . Some items have natural meanings in the sense of causal connections of human significance (as in blossoms indicating fruit). There are many examples of nonlinguistic, nonliterary fiction. . Preliminary Issues There are at least two senses of the word fiction that are easy to run together, but need to be distinguished for our present purpose. Jacobson, Daniel. Finally, I raised questions about the objectivity of our evaluations of architecture. I. The works discussed so far are good examples of this. [and] these effects should naturally be carried over into action (Budd 1995, 8, my italics), he is surely claiming that poetry should be instrumentally valuable in being such a means and inducing the said effect, not willy nilly, but by being reliably so constituted to do so. But it neednt be. Central Approaches So far we have been talking about the issues central to the philosophy of art. You can only form beliefs or hypotheses about what I intend or what someone might intend. If we wanted to explain the existence of beech trees along a ridge in a forest, we would refer to various features of the forest environment, properties of beech trees, and laws of biology. References 295 . 1990. Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination. Environmental Values 5:191204. Finally, even if we can ward off objections to HIs (or moderate AIs) account of musical expression, we need to ask whether the proposal has advantages that make it deserving of acceptance, or at least further consideration. While aesthetics today is the study of value, philosophy of art deals with a much wider array of questions not just about value . Since we are not interested in the qualities of the toaster for its own sake or for the sake of a payoff intrinsic to the experience (such as pleasure), this is not an aesthetic experience, according to the minimal view. A novel might put us in mind of a real person or people who suffer a fate like Annas, and we might unproblematically pity them (Charlton 1984). In chapter 6, we investigated how this context provides properties essential to the identity of these works. It can help one to understand the characters motivations, strengths, weaknesses, and in general it can be one of the things one finds interesting and important in the work (Johns 2006, 336). However, in one case the experience is valued for its own sake, in the other it is not. It can be summarized as follows: when we interpret a work of art, 1. we are imputing properties to something which either alters that very thing or creates something new; 2. hence the objects of interpretation have a degree of dependence on the interpretations people give of theses objects; 3. such objects are identified in terms of the properties they are conceived as having (intentional objects); 4. Summary In this chapter, we turned from a focus on the aesthetic experience of appreciators to the (purported) aesthetic properties of objects. Both sustain contemplation that could be aesthetically gratifying. The Style Theory of Art. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72: 27389. The argument is that one has to experience the bad to understand the good. 2. And, it might be claimed, that food, despite the existence in people of nonrational preferences for some items over others, can also provide aesthetic experience. In the middle range of the spectrum are those who accept response-dependency, but advocates support different accounts of what it consists of (Goldman 1995, Levinson 1994, Zangwill 2001). Within this contextualist and pluralist framework for thinking about art, aesthetic value no longer has an essential role to play, but it still has an important one. 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. G. Dickie, R. Sclafani, and R. Roblin, 2nd ed. Hence, the moral flaw of such works is essential to their artistic value. Wollheim might be taken to mean that one discerns something standing in front of or behind the surface of which one is visually aware. Evaluating the Distortion Objection Do we distort the object of aesthetic appreciation by looking at it in isolation from its surrounding environment, by focussing on a view for the visual pleasures it provides, or by attempting to capture the impression of the moment? The fact is that some would say of course, while others would say, of course not. When we form a conception of something, that is, when we come to think of an object as having certain properties, this conception is not the object of thought, but the content of thought. 1998.Moderate Moralism versus Moderate Autonomism. British Journal of Aesthetics 38:41924. This textbook is oriented around the question 'What is the value of art?" It represents a state of affairs. 1981. If aesthetic properties are the properties of an object that are appropriately related to certain experiences of an object, we need to specify what this relation is if we are to identify aesthetic properties in this way. But what exactly is the argument behind the attitude? What Is Art? (Since this imagining is about real events, it is hardly make-believe in its ordinary sense.) Further, in the Vermeer case, there might have been a real scene corresponding to the one represented in the painting. There are decisive objections to this sort of intentionalism. 107 but rather invites, definition. Simply summarized it is an image of a dying but still glowing fire. . Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson. This is because its whole focus is on what is conveyed. First, it involves props. It is just that recognition of such aesthetic properties seems optional, in the sense that other experiences of nature engage our aesthetic appreciation without noting the descriptively thicker aesthetic properties. . . The forger may not be able to make all the regards that are applicable to a Rembrandt, applicable to his own painting (e.g., being an example of seventeenth-century painting), but can make many others applicable (expertly exhibiting the chiaroscuro technique). There we argued against the claim that for the idea of artistic value to be coherent, there must be a value unique to art or shared by all artworks, aesthetic value being the most plausible candidate. It is also tempting to suppose that beauty in nature is a simpler thing than beauty in art, because it can be recognized without much understanding of structure or context. Hence, to complete an account of expressiveness, one needs to identify a relation between apprehension as if and artworks, which holds only when works are expressive of an emotion, mood, or attitude. Let us begin with the first version, which says that the meaning of a work is the intention an ideal audience would attribute to the actual artist based on the total admissible evidence and, where needed, considerations of aesthetic merit. One such line is developed by Carroll (1996, 1998, 2000a). We get a sufficient condition when we add the additional condition that the valuable feature is one artists intend or audiences expect to be in works of the relevant kind. The features that underlie the vividness of these objects and portrayals are all very different. This viewcall it the intermediate viewhas the advantage of co-opting the plausible intuitions behind convention-constrained and whatever-works 152 Chapter Seven intentionalism, while avoiding their unattractive consequences. This is not an exhaustive list of current proposals, but it gives the reader an idea of the diversity of views on the table. Hence, the types come into existence at specific times. Shostakovitchs Tenth Symphony and the Musical Expression of Cognitively Complex Emotions. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53:40115. Each time it has a different look though one can recognize it as Mount St. For example, if one is anemic, objects appear to have a yellow tinge whatever their true color. Suppose you are looking out of a window during a blizzard. One feature, or rather a family of related features, has attracted a number of theorists. Some poems tell stories that are obviously fictional. However, there is the problem of choosing between them. The first objection is that HI fails to meet the requirement that, in music, expressiveness is typically heard rather than inferred. . Do you think it is easy to decide in which category a property belongs? (However, most works will offer rewards beyond the social good they achieve, so that it would be absurd to judge them simply on the basis of such impact.) If artworks were sad in the same way sports cars are fast, this topic would have generated considerably less controversy. 6. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. This appearance is impermanent because it is the consequence of the joint operation of the properties of the object, the condition of the perceiver, and the properties of the medium (such as the condition of the light) through which the object is viewed that can easily change within a 50 Chapter Three short period of time. Jerrold Levinson. First, as is probably obvious, my approach and viewing of the house from the nature trail was peculiar. Indicated structure: The use of an abstract structure by an artist at a time in an art-historical context where the time is time the work is created, and the context is the artists cultural world at this time. First consider the essentialist conception. Critical pluralism: The idea that artworks can have several equally acceptable, non-combinable interpretations. Some would feel it is too minimal. The idea that one can have different artworks with the same abstract structure derives from arguments offered by Danto (1981) that one can have indiscernible artworks and thought experiments like that provided by Borges in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. This objection and the next are intimately linked. One line of thought reaches a negative conclusion. Hume, David. This sums up the norms of appreciation with regard to the knowledge we must bring to nature. 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. This suggests that the view has different or at least additional roots. . Diagrams, maps, charts, and graphs also do. If the antiessentialist view of artistic value is correct, this may even be an artistic defect, but it is not an aesthetic defect. The attitude behind this argument is expressed by the thought: How can the objective intrinsic value of aesthetic experience be made comprehensible in a world where evolution reigns? (Carroll 2002a, 157). Making Sense. This is demonstrated by the fact that some hold that immoral art has something valuable to offer and should be protected, while others maintain that it should be protected even if it has nothing valuable to offer as a matter of free speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 562. Zemach, Eddy. Nowhere can the artistic be distinguished simply by the fact that its products are made with aesthetic intentions or are capable of aesthetic appreciation. However, seeing-in cant be the whole story about pictorial representation because it occurs when no depiction is present. The argument claims that this difference is insufficient to show that one experience is aesthetic and the other is not. Some of the categories we use may be purely nonaesthetic, but we will exclusively use such categories, only when our evaluative purpose is highly specialized. An amazing variety of opinions regarding the response-dependent character of aesthetic properties exists. All the evidence suggests that the latter approach has led to a standoff, but whether appeal to artistic practice will lead to progress remains to be seen. I believe conceptual change along these lines might be justified, but only if there are insuperable problems for our current conception, or at least advantages for the new conception more substantial than tidiness.