Edited by
Anna Christina Ribeiro
www.continuumbooks.com
EISBN: 978-1-4411-9791-7
Contributors vii
Acknowledgments x
1 Introduction 1
Anna Christina Ribeiro
2 Research Methods and Problems in Aesthetics 14
Brandon Cooke
13 Film 184
Amy Coplan
14 Architecture 201
Rafael De Clercq
15 Popular Art 215
Aaron Smuts
16 Environmental Aesthetics 228
Glenn Parsons
17 Global Standpoint Aesthetics: Toward a Paradigm 242
David I. Gandolfo and Sarah E. Worth
18 New Directions in Aesthetics 255
Paisley Livingston
Part II Resources
19 Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art 271
Darren Hudson Hick
20 Research Resources in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art 298
Darren Hudson Hick
Bibliography 308
Index 345
vi
vii
ties all of this together is a concern for what those at the center of world power
can learn from critiques of the status quo being offered from the standpoints of
those on the global margins.
James Harold is Director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the
Liberal Arts and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College.
His principal research interests are in meta-ethics and the philosophy of art.
Darren Hudson Hick is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Susquehanna
University. His research focuses on the ontology of art and philosophical
issues in intellectual property. His work appears in the Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, British Journal of Aesthetics, Contemporary Aesthetics, Journal of
the Copyright Society of the USA, and elsewhere. He is the author of Introducing
Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Continuum, 2012).
Sherri Irvin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma.
She received her BA from the University of Arizona and her Ph.D. from
Princeton University. Her research interests center on the philosophy of con-
temporary art, the relation between aesthetics and ethics, and the aesthetics of
everyday experience.
John Kulvicki is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College. His
work focuses on philosophy of the visual arts and philosophy of perception.
His book On Images was published by Oxford University Press in 2006.
Paisley Livingston is Chair Professor of Philosophy at Lingnan University,
Hong Kong. His most recent book is Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as
Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Derek Matravers is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University, and an
Afliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy at Cambridge. He is the author
of Art and Emotion (Oxford University Press, 1998) and is currently working on
a book on narrative.
David Osipovich holds doctorate degrees in both philosophy and law, and is
currently an attorney with the law rm of K&L Gates LLP. From 200106 he
taught philosophy, rst as an adjunct professor at The College of William and
Mary and then as an Assistant Professor at Marist College. He has published
several papers on the philosophy of theater and, for the past eight years, has
regularly presented on the subject at academic conferences in the United States
and the United Kingdom.
Glenn Parsons is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at
Ryerson University in Toronto. His current research focuses on the aesthetics
of nature, everyday artifacts, and persons. His publications include Functional
viii
Beauty (coauthored with Allen Carlson; Oxford University Press, 2008) and
Aesthetics and Nature (Continuum, 2008).
Anna Christina Ribeiro is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech
University. Among her publications are Toward a Philosophy of Poetry
(Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33, 2009) and Intending to Repeat: A Denition
of Poetry (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, 2007). She was the recipient
of a 200910 Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Fellowship for
Junior Faculty, to work on a monograph on the philosophy of poetry tentatively
titled Poetry: Philosophical Thoughts on an Ancient Practice.
Elisabeth Schellekens is Senior Lecturer at the University of Durham, and
Associate Editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics. Her main areas of research are
aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of Kant. She is the author of Aesthetics and
Morality (Continuum, 2007), Whos Afraid of Conceptual Art (with Peter Goldie;
Routledge, 2009), and the coeditor of Philosophy and Conceptual Art (Oxford
University Press, 2007) and The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology
(Oxford University Press, 2011).
Aaron Smuts is an Assistant Professor in the philosophy department at Rhode
Island College. His interests range across a wide variety of topics in ethics, the
philosophy of art, and general value theory. He has published over two dozen
articles in a variety of academic journals, including American Philosophical
Quarterly, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Pacic Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies,
Philosophy Compass, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Sarah E. Worth is Professor of Philosophy at Furman University in Greenville,
SC. She writes primarily in topics in aesthetics and narrative, most recently
in the intersection of memoir and fraud. Her work has appeared in the British
Journal of Aesthetics, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Journal of Aesthetic
Education, Philosophical Forum, Philosophy in the Contemporary World, and Journal
of Norwegian Philosophy among others.
ix
The word aesthetics traces its root to the ancient Greek word for sense per-
ception (, aisthsis); on that basis one might be justied in presuming
that this book is concerned with the science of perception in general. But words
sometimes emigrate to distant countries, and come to acquire new meanings in
their new home languages. Although aesthetics still retains its root connection
to sense perception, it came to mean the study of our perception of the beautiful,
both in nature and in works of art, when Alexander Baumgarten used it in 1735
in his Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus (Philosophical
Meditations on Some Matters Pertaining to Poetry), and unwittingly baptized what
was then emerging as a new discipline within philosophy. However, the theo-
retical study of the beautiful and of art had a long history before this fairly
recent label, and it has had a rich and variegated history since. Indeed, that
history goes back to the very culture that gave it its name, for the rst philoso-
phers to discuss the arts were Plato (429347 BCE) and Aristotle (384322 BCE).
It is fair to say that the history of aesthetics isas A. N. Whitehead said of the
history of philosophy as a wholea series of footnotes to Plato, for he set the
topics and terms of the debate, and every philosopher after him either followed
or reacted against the views he rst set forth, any innovations along the way
occurring within the framework he established. It is also fair to say that the his-
tory of the philosophy of art in particular, the area of aesthetics concerned with
art forms and works, is largely the history of the philosophy of poetrynot
in the sense in which we generally think of poetry today, that is, as lyric poetry,
but in the broader sense of an art that included the composition and creative
performance of epics, dramatic plays, and the lyric, accompanied by music and
dance. It is predominantly to that art that philosophers devoted their attention
for most of the past 2,500 years, even if the art itself underwent considerable
change over the centuries. Music and dance did not seem to exist independ-
ently of recitation and performance, and, while painting and sculpture were
discussed, to tell by the extant literature it is only in the sixteenth century that
they received dedicated theoretical treatment.
The present Companion to Aesthetics is devoted to contemporary topics and
art forms in aesthetics and the philosophy of art in the analytic tradition of
philosophy (the tradition dominant in the Anglophone world, one that adopts
eighteenth century; rather, education was. Now taste was something at once
ineffable and indicative of a superior character; it was accorded its own mental
faculty, although it seemed that only the chosen few truly had it. Finally,
the notion of art (, techn) underwent its own transformations over the
centuries since the time of Plato. This has mainly to do with a shift, also dating
to a few centuries ago, from works of art existing as part of larger cultural prac-
tices to their emancipation from these practices. Songs, for instance, were often
part of religious rituals, just as paintings in medieval churches served educa-
tional and illustrative purposes. Importantly, through and despite this partial
decontextualization, artworks continue today to be understood as sources of
valueof a unique pleasure, moral guidance, and knowledge which, for many
of us, cannot be found in any other human practice.
When we look back on ancient Greek culture, we nd that public recita-
tions of epics such as Homers Iliad, and performances of tragedies and com-
edies such as those of Sophocles and Aristophanes, played a central role in
it, especially as poets had from time immemorial been revered as the teach-
ers of humankind in matters religious, moral, and even historical (the three
were very much entangled). Moreover, poetry was composed and inscribed
or performed by commission for all manner of signicant occasion: weddings,
anniversaries, epitaphs, and so on. But by Platos time, philosophy had been
around for some two centuries, and, as a foremost representative of the new
approach to knowledge, he took the poets to task for being mere imitators,
and for being unable to explain the meaning of their works: like soothsayers,
they may have been divinely inspired, but were not wise. They thus stood in
the way of knowledge as well as virtuea radical idea that ew in the face of
an ancient tradition. Furthermore, poets engaged our emotions, a lower part of
our soul, and thereby demoted reason from its rightful place, again weakening
its capacity for knowledge and virtue. Aristotle then came to the defense of
poetry and poets, arguing that poetry is in fact philosophical insofar as poets
must know what is possible: in particular, how different characters might react
to certain circumstances. Poets thus evince a deep, if implicit, knowledge of
human nature. Moreover, Aristotle claimed that poetry had a cathartic effect
upon us: this left us better able, rather than unable, to exercise reason in our
daily lives. Poetry is thus something useful with a view to virtue, purifying . . .
the irrational part of the soul as well as providing us with a more acute insight
into human nature.
Much is said about pleasure in post-Aristotelian, pre-Christian times, by
the various philosophical schools that formed in that period, but the primary
focus of the discussion concerns pleasure in relation to moral value, pleasure
in the beauty of nature or works of art being valued as a means to moral edi-
cation rather than as an end in itself. In this Hellenistic thinkers continued to
stress the connection between the beautiful and the good already found in Plato
and Aristotle and that would survive until the eighteenth century, but they
now emphasized the experience of delight felt in the presence of the beautiful
and in the attainment of virtue, an idea that was to nd fuller expression in
the Catholic mysticism of later centuries. Subscribing likewise to the Classical
Greek idea that art imitates nature, Stoics and Epicureans followed that idea to
the conclusion that if nature constitutes an objective reality, then the criteria for
the evaluation of works that seek to represent it must themselves be objective.
Amusingly, some Stoic thinkers argued that some letters in the Greek alphabet
were more euphonic than others, and that the quality of a poem could, therefore,
be established on the basis of the ratio of euphonic to cacophonous letters found
therein. The Epicurean Philodemus of Gadara (c. 11035 BCE), whose work is
being painstakingly reconstructed from the charred papyri that were buried
under lava in Herculaneum when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, showed
the absurdity of such theories by drawing attention to the essential importance
of content. Similarly, Longinus (rst century CE) distinguished between knowl-
edge and passion (content) on the one hand, and gures of speech, diction, and
composition or word arrangement (form) on the other, claiming that only the
latter could be taught, and sensibly arguing against those who claimed that the
quality of a work could be measured by the number of tropes in it. Longinus is
also famous for introducing the notion of the sublime, the type of feeling lit-
erary works should aim to elicit in those who read or heard them recited or per-
formed. This notion would become of central importance in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, when it was contrasted with the notion of the beautiful.
A couple of centuries after Longinus, the Neoplatonist Plotinus (205270 CE)
wrote a treatise on beauty, and set the stage for how the topic would be treated
for centuries, distinguishing between beauty perceived by the senses and
beauty perceived by the soul or intellect. The soul partakes in the Form of
Beauty, which is also the Form of the Good (concepts drawn from Plato, who
also equated these with the Truth), and it is what makes any other beautiful
things or actions beautiful. Not only is this beauty bestowed by the soul supe-
rior to the beauty perceived by the senses, but the senses, and anything physi-
cal, are now considered impediments to the soul sharing in what is natural to
it. Thus, Plotinus helped establish the dichotomy between body and soul, and
earth and heaven, that became a central characteristic of medieval thought. In
the few instances where Christian philosophers spoke of beauty or of the arts
Augustine (354430), Bonaventure (121774), and Aquinas (122574) are the
main examplesthey operated within this framework. On the one hand, the
beautiful and the (moral) good were different ways of naming or speaking of
the same good; on the other, the sensible good or beautiful was considered infe-
rior, or merely a means to, the ethical and the intellectual good or beautiful.
Besides the concepts of the beautiful/good/truth, the notion of pleasure, and
that of imitation (, mimsis), another aspect of the framework within
which these and all Western thinkers up until the eighteenth century were
operating concerns the meaning of art and the role and social standing of
artists. The words (techn) in Greek and ars in Latin, signied craft or
skill, already indicating how artists and their products were regarded. They
were (demiourgoi, literally those who work for people), that is,
craftsmen, paid to write verses for the epitaph of a nobleman or to sculpt bas-
reliefs for the tomb of a tradesman; summoned to set mosaics for a living room
or paint frescoes on its walls; commissioned to create statues depicting gods
and myths, realistic representations of the professions, or busts of a wealthy
politicians forebears as a means to honor and remember them, much as we
might have photos of our grandparents in our living rooms today. Poets had a
separate and higher standing than painters or sculptors in part because, as men-
tioned earlier, they performed a serious role as moral, religious, and historical
guides, and in part because the ability to use words well, and to read and write,
was the privilege of a minority and, importantly, did not involve manual labor,
something openly scorned by those who could afford not to live by it. Music,
in addition, had the good fortune of having been associated with mathematics
by Pythagoras (who was venerated by Plato and many others), and both in turn
with astronomy. It is to the association of poetry with grammar and rhetoric,
and of music with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, that we owe these two
arts being part of the fundamental liberal education for some 2,000 years.
Together with logic, the disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy, and musical harmony comprised the seven liberal arts (the skills
to be learned by free citizens); in the Middle Ages, the rst three, known as the
trivium, were preparatory for the latter four, known as the quadrivium. Even so,
although poetry and its attendant arts of music and dance were treated with
higher regard than architecture, sculpture, or painting, for most of their his-
tory they too were generally treated as skills one could acquire and put in the
service of those who could pay for them, in quite the same way one could pay a
cobbler to make shoes, a smith to make a sword, or a carpenter to make a bed.
All of these, and many others, were artes or technai, and the artist, anonymous
except for some poets, was a trader of his skill. (This partly explains why nearly
all of them were men, since the public realm of trade and study was eminently
male, while womens province was the private world of the home.)
Given this bias against the senses and manual labor, and the consequent
low standing of any art other than poetry and music up until the sixteenth cen-
tury, when architects, sculptors, and painters emancipated themselves from
artisans guilds and formed their own Academia del Disegno in Florence in 1563,
it is not surprising that it took two more centuries for philosophers, themselves
emancipated from the connes of Catholic scholasticism, nally to dedicate
their thoughts to analyses of the arts and of our sense of beauty. Before them,
however, artists themselves were writing treatises on the newly emancipated
art forms. Leon Battista Alberti (140972), Leonard da Vinci (14521519), and
Albrecht Drer (14711528) wrote variously on painting, sculpture, archi-
tecture, geometry, and on the all-important new discovery of perspective in
painting. Meanwhile poets such as Sir Philip Sidney (155486) also wrote on
their own craft, continuing the Platonic-Aristotelian debate. That artists them-
selves were writing about their craft was historically signicant: they were now
educated not only in their artistic mtier, but also in critical and philosophical
theory. Their theoretical contributions would go a long way toward earning
prestige for arts other than poetry, and toward the radical changes that would
take place in the artworld in the eighteenth century.
The eighteenth century can truly be considered a period of revolution both
in the artworld and in philosophical aestheticsindeed the time when both
the artworld and aesthetics, as we understand them today, were born, and
when our four notions of beauty, pleasure, representation, and art underwent
radical transformation. Until then, artworks and performances were always
part of a larger cultural practice or setting which gave them whatever mean-
ing they had. In medieval Europe, that context was in large part provided
by the Catholic church, as evinced by the architecture (e.g., Romanesque and
later Gothic churches), sculpture (statues of saints and of the Christ crucied),
painting (depiction of biblical scenes), music (Gregorian chant), and theater
(morality plays) of the time. Artists were now beginning to produce works
that were separate from these practices and settings, and offering them up
for appreciation on their own, in a setting of their ownnot in the private
houses of the nobility, or within the walls of a church, but in a museum or a
performance hall; not serving the purposes of a ritual, a festival, or a house-
hold tradition, but for their own sake. Likewise, philosophical thought about
beauty and the arts was, from the beginning, part of the larger framework of
ethics, epistemology, and later on, theology); aesthetics was now emerging as
a subdiscipline of its own. It is a testament to the power of art that artworks
retained the power to speak to us and move us profoundly independently of
their traditional contexts; were that not so, it is unlikely we would have an
independent philosophy of art today.
This new cultural environment was thus reected in many philosophical
treatises written in the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth cen-
tury, most of which were concerned with the grounds for the evaluation of
works of art. As in other areas of philosophy, we can detect a rationalist and an
empiricist trend in aesthetics as well. In keeping with the trend in other areas of
philosophy and with the inuence of Ren Descartes (15901650), rationalist-
minded writers hailed mainly from France. Unlike the British empiricists, they
were mostly literary theorists and art critics rather than philosophers. French
rationalists, or neoclassicists as they came to be known, looked to the ancients
for their models and standards. As was the case with some ancient writers,
neoclassicists rmly believed that there were strict rules to be followed in the
making of art, rules which in turn served as principles by reference to which
one work could be deemed better than another. Here again the notion of art
as the imitation of nature was paramount; among others, it was the principle
in Baumgartens Meditations on Poetry mentioned earlier, and in the inuential
Les beaux Arts rduits un mme principe by the Abb Charles Batteux (1746).
But whereas for Plato that was a reason why the arts were decient, for the
neoclassicists nature became the rule. Standards of taste were thus taken to be
objective, and the closer an artists work was to what had been produced by the
Greeks and the Romans, the better. It is to this time that we owe more and less
successful attempts to t the various prosodies of the Romance and Germanic
languages to Greek poetic meters; but Greek meters were based on syllable
length and generally did not fare well as an import. Greek and Roman models
were also the paradigm to be followed in sculpture and architecture, a marked
contrast to what had been produced in the Middle Ages. It is also in this period,
as indicated by Batteuxs Beaux Arts and by Diderots Encyclopdie (175172),
that the arts of poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture are rst
grouped together as the Fine Arts, and the search begins for what their mme
principe, or common essence, might be. The wisdom of this search would only
be questioned two centuries later, by the philosopher Morris Weitz (191681), in
his inuential The Role of Theory in Aesthetics (1956). Inspired by the work
of Ludwig Wittgenstein (18891951) and the analytic orientation in philosophy
that had by then established itself, his essay was a clear sign that a peculiarly
analytic philosophy of art was now ourishing.
Because they argued for our role, and, in particular, the role of our senses,
in constructing the world around us, the eighteenth-century empiricists turned
the notion of beauty on its head: rather than being something objectively exist-
ing in the world, it was a pleasurable sensation that some external qualities
had the capacity to arouse in us. For the third Earl of Shaftesbury (16711713),
humans were endowed with a moral sense that enabled us to perceive both
the beautiful and the good (themselves identical with truth). We can thus see
him as a transitional gure, still holding on to the ancient Platonic idea of a
conjoined ethical-aesthetic-epistemological value. Another residue of earlier
thought is evident in the notion of disinterestedness that he posited and that
would come to be seen as an essential characteristic of the aesthetic attitude
and of aesthetic pleasure. At heart, this is an ethical notion, for the attitude
betrays a resistance to the physical world already found in Plato. For an action
to be truly virtuous, as for an experience to be truly aesthetic, desire or inter-
est could not be present; the same, of course, goes for the pursuit of truth if it
is to be considered truly intellectual rather than instrumental. It was left to his
follower Francis Hutcheson (16941746) to make a real break with the past and
posit a sense of beauty that was purely aesthetic, and which was activated
when the proper ratio of uniformity and variety presented itself to it via objects
in the external world. Characteristically more skeptical of any such objective
standards, David Hume (171176) proposed instead that any standard of taste
would still have to refer to individuals, in this case those possessing consider-
able experience with the art in question, in addition to what he called delicacy
of taste and an unprejudiced attitude. Since such true judges, no matter how
great their efforts, could never fully overcome the particularities of their time,
place, or temperament, we simply had to give up on the idea of a fully objective
criterion of evaluation, although Hume did not think that such critics were to
blame for those limitations. The joint verdict of such ideal critics was the new
standard of value in art.
Again as elsewhere in philosophy, rationalism and empiricism were fol-
lowed by idealism, and the key gures are likewise Immanuel Kant (Critique
of Judgment, 1790), Georg Friedrich Hegel (Philosophy of Fine Art, 1835), and
Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Idea, 1819, 1844). What is striking
in this philosophical school, and in the literary romanticism that followed, is
the metaphysical and epistemological elevation of the arts to the top of their
grand philosophical systems. From an obstacle to truth, as we had seen with
Plato, artworks were now the concrete embodiment of it; consequently, from an
impediment to proper learning, they were now necessary to a complete educa-
tion. Besides enshrining the notion of a disinterested pleasure as paradigmatic
of the experience of beauty, the idealists also vindicated the ancient notions of
art as representation (mimsis) and of the artist as divinely inspired by inter-
preting them in direct opposition to what we had seen in Platos philosophy.
Divine inspiration now meant direct, unmediated access to truth, through
the imagination as opposed to reason or understanding. Whereas philosophers
and scientists arrived at their conclusions via the painstaking work of obser-
vation, analysis, and synthesis, artists had a special communion with a deep,
underlying reality not easily amenable to the cool tools of logic and reason.
This emphasis on artists and art has the additional consequence of demoting
beauty from the pride of place it had held until then: for nature certainly could
be beautiful, but it had not gone through the organizing, conceptual lter of the
artist. Aesthetics thus becomes principally the philosophy of art.
Directly related to this metaphysical turn of the notion of art, and the epis-
temological turn of the artist as the spokesperson for truth, is the new focus
on the artist as a genius that ourished in the Romantic movement of the nine-
teenth century; the expression of the artists thoughts and emotions is now
by default worthy of our attention for the insight into life that it can bring
about. This would have been anathema to Plato for, as we have seen, the idea
of the artist as an oracle whose pronouncements we ought to respect was
precisely what he argued so vehemently against in the Republic and the Ion.
for the unique techn of the artist; this line of argument still has its defenders
(e.g., Roger Scruton). Similar arguments were made against granting art status
to lm, to the ready-mades of Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, and later
on to works of installation and conceptual art such as Robert Rauschenbergs
Bed, John Cages 433, or Vito Acconcis Following Piece. Time and again novel
art forms have won the battle against prescriptive criticism and theory. Though
the old forms are alive and well, the erstwhile new ones are today established
and ubiquitous.
A survey of twenty-rst-century thought about beauty and the arts soon
reveals that we are still the children of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aes-
thetics. The various denitional approaches mentioned here are answers to the
problem bequeathed to us by the cultural forces that led theorists to group vari-
ous cultural activities and crafts into the Modern System of the Arts, as the
art historian Paul Kristeller called the eighteenth-century grouping of the ne
arts. The concern with beauty that in the eighteenth century became a concern
with the qualities in the world that promote the experience of beautyaesthetic
propertiesis still a central topic in aesthetics, though it now draws much more
heavily from theories of properties in metaphysics. The notion of disinterested
pleasure that is presumed to characterize the aesthetic experience, though it
has not gone unchallenged, remains of central interest. That we feel pleasure in
engaging with artworks also led Hume to ponder why we should enjoy even
those that depict profoundly sad events; discussion of the paradox of tragedy
remains alive and well today. So does debate concerning the paradox of ction,
the question of why we should care for the fates of ctional characters and
whether we can be said to have real emotions for them while remaining rational.
The connection made between art and aesthetic experience to the effect that the
former was dened in terms of the latter (so that artworks are, by denition,
those objects and activities that promote the aesthetic experience) culminated in
the work of Clive Bell (18811964) and Monroe Beardsley (191585). Denitions
of this sort are now charged with having divorced artworks from the contexts
which once gave them meaning and value. And the ancient Platonic problem of
whether art can convey knowledge is still widely discussed under the label of
the cognitive value of art. Although philosophers may no longer be willing
to automatically grant the title of oracle or genius to artists, the Romantic
perception of the artist as someone with something profound to convey contin-
ues to hold sway; one will be hard-pressed to nd anyone today claiming that
artists are merely skilled workers.
However fascinating these historical continuities may be, genuinely novel
topics and avenues of inquiry did emerge in aesthetics in the twentieth cen-
tury. One of them concerns the ontology of artworks. What kinds of entities in
the world are works of art? Musical works cannot be merely the scores where
10
they are set, any more than literary works can be identied with the paper
copies in which their texts are inscribed; neither can they be identied with
their performances or recitations. Unlike paintings, sculptures, and buildings,
they can be read or heard in different parts of the globe at the same or different
times. Various theories have been offered to handle the ontological difculties
raised by works of art, difculties that seem to be peculiar to them and that do
not arise with other things in the world whose nature we wish to understand.
Some have argued that artworks are mental entities in the mind of the artist,
and the work a medium via which others may reconstruct that artistic object
(Benedetto Croce, Robin Collingwood); others that they are the actions of the
artist (Gregory Currie, David Davies); others that some of them (musical works
in particular) are eternally existing universals (Peter Kivy), and still others that
they are types (Richard Wollheim, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Jerrold Levinson).
Another area of interest, one that could hardly have emerged before the twen-
tieth century, is evolutionary aesthetics. While the history of philosophizing
about beauty and the arts dates back to the fth century BCE, the history of our
aesthetization of life goes back much, much further. The earliest records we
have date back to 40,000 years ago, and consist of cave paintings, such as those
of Chauvet in France and Altamira in Spain, whose beauty cannot be attributed
to mere chance. Far from being utilitarian depictions that might aid a viewer in
identifying, say, the animal depicted, their attention to color, shape, and real-
ism is striking. How much longer before then were we already sensitive to such
properties? Some today speculate that perhaps as long as 400,000 years ago,
since some apparent stone tools of that age also seem to exemplify a concern
for the aesthetic, inasmuch as their beautifully symmetrical teardrop shape was
not functional. Clearly, this stretches the notion of we to pre-Homo sapiens
time, but if our species ancestors already had aesthetic inclinations, then that
only reinforces the claim that we came around already equipped with them.
Inquiry into the evolution and psychology of our aesthetic sensibilities and the
evolution of our artistic practices was only made possible after the publication
of Charles Darwins works on the theory of evolution in the nineteenth century.
And if the popularity of Dennis Duttons The Art Instinct (2009) is any indica-
tion, evolutionary aesthetics should remain an area of interest throughout the
current one.
Other new areas of debate include environmental aesthetics, standpoint
aesthetics, everyday aesthetics, and popular art forms not previously included
under the umbrella art.
Environmental aesthetics pertains to our aesthetic appreciation of nature.
Although aesthetic interest in the natural environment was widely discussed
in the eighteenth century (especially in connection with the notion of the
sublime), discussion today includes ethical issues that were not part of that
11
12
Under Resources the reader will nd two tools thus far absent from com-
panions and handbooks on aesthetics: the rst, an extensive chronology of works
in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, from the fth century BCE all the way
to the twenty-rst century CE2,500 years worth of textsand the second, a
list of resources, including online resources, in the eld. The serious student of
theories about the aesthetic and the arts, after having a taste of the current philo-
sophical debates in these pages, will know exactly where to go for more.
13
1. Introduction
14
adequate answers to two fundamental questions: rst, what are the data of aes-
thetics, and secondly, what are the criteria for an acceptable aesthetic theory?
The rst question concerns the objects of aesthetic theory: what are they, and
what is their relation to theory? The second question can be thought of as a ques-
tion of how aesthetic theorizing ought to be accomplished. The two questions
are connected. For instance, if some object of our experience, say the natural
environment, is a proper object of aesthetic experience, then an aesthetic theory
will be inadequate if it fails to cohere with an account of the aesthetic experi-
ence of nature. Another possibility is that the most compelling aesthetic theory
might imply that we are mistaken to treat certain instances of appreciation as
genuinely aesthetic. Since these questions are so intimately bound, I will exam-
ine a number of topics that bear on them in tandem.
I cannot hope here to provide a comprehensive methodology of philosophi-
cal aesthetics. Much of the method of aesthetics is comprehended within the
methods of rational argumentation in general, and as that body of literature is so
vast and rich I will only point in its direction with the platitude that arguments
are the currency of philosophy, and no philosopher can afford to ignore the
work of those who directly investigate logic and argumentation. Still, much of
what follows will bear on considerations of good argumentation. I also restrict
my attention to recent analytic aesthetics. The absence of a historical overview
here should not be understood as implying that an awareness of the history of
these questions is only of historical interest. Many of the issues examined here
are not specic to aesthetics, and some have just begun to present themselves in
any explicit fashion in the literature of analytic aesthetics. The present discus-
sion goes only a short way toward answering the two fundamental questions
of method, though I hope it will also illuminate (if only dimly) the lay of the
path beyond.
15
us that the origin of the word aesthetic is the Greek aisthsis, which means
sense perception. But then, is the aesthetic simply identical to sense percep-
tion or its contents (or both), or is it a special mode of sense perception? Either
way, the question is moot, since we prephilosophically accept that any number
of different objects that are not objects of sense perception are proper objects
of aesthetic appreciation: works of literature, conceptual art, dreams, scientic
theories, and mathematical proofs, to name but a few.
Philosophers have tended to make use of two different approaches to
the question. The rst is an object-oriented approach. This way attempts to
delimit the domain of the aesthetic by identifying the objects (or their relevant
properties), either as paradigms or as items on a complete and comprehensive
list, of aesthetic appreciation, judgment, and experience. The second way is
subject-oriented, and seeks to distinguish the aesthetic by characterizing the
affective, cognitive, and phenomenological features of a particular mode of
appreciation, judgment, or experience. The object-oriented approach cannot
stand on its own, for two reasons. First, although artworks are taken by most
aestheticians as the paradigm object of aesthetic appreciation, most agree that
the range of aesthetically appreciable objects is far wider. Apart from art,
it is generally agreed that natural environments, scenes, and objects can be
appreciated aesthetically. So can various non-art artifacts and events, (argu-
ably) everyday garden-variety sensations, mental objects (such as dreams and
fantasies), and abstract objects (such as geometric gures and mathematical
proofs). This diverse and heterogeneous group of objects can obviously be
experienced and appreciated in many non-aesthetic ways as well, and so
something will need to be said about how aesthetic experience is different.
Secondly, even if one declares artworks to be the paradigm aesthetic objects
and denes the aesthetic only by reference to them, it must still be noticed that
it is possible to appreciate or judge artworks in any number of ways, many of
which are clearly not aesthetic. One can appreciate the investment potential
of a painting by Damien Hirst, or appreciate its usefulness in covering the
hole in ones leaky roof, or in keeping one warm as it burns in the replace.
This means that a purely object-oriented approach will be inadequate. Some
appeal to the kind of appreciation or experience that falls under the label the
aesthetic is also needed.
A variation on the object approach centers instead on distinctively aesthetic
properties or aspects. The paradigm here is beauty (and ugliness). Since beauty
and ugliness do not seem to admit of some subject-independent characteriza-
tion la primary qualitiesafter all, they do not gure in scientic causal laws,
to give one reasonthis variation cannot do without an account of the con-
tent of aesthetic appreciation or experience. Indeed, the seminal approaches
of Hume and Kant depend on some qualitative features of the experience of
beauty as a way of analyzing that property.
16
What, then, are the characteristic qualities of aesthetic experience? Kant and
Hume, following their predecessors among the British empiricists, claim that
it is grounded in a feeling of pleasure or aversion, but, importantly, one that
is disinterested. Nearly all theories of aesthetic experience, appreciation, and
judgment follow Kant and Hume in holding some variation of this requirement.
A disinterested pleasure is pleasure that does not issue from the satisfaction of
some desire or preference of the experiencing subject. Kant imposes a much
stronger requirement, namely, that it is not a so-called propositional pleasure
(pleasure that something should be the case with respect to the object, includ-
ing pleasure that the thing even exists). Part of Kants motivation for character-
izing disinterested pleasure in this way is that it cannot be connected to a desire
determined by a concept, which would make aesthetic judgment a low form of
cognitive judgment (which Kant denies that it is), or a judgment of the merely
agreeable (which could not claim objectivity). A disinterested pleasure does
not include the satisfaction of a desire that ones present pleasure continue, or
be resumed in the future. Theories of aesthetic experience sometimes identify
other criterial aspects of the experience, some of which appear to be species or
aspects of disinterested pleasure.
Theories or denitions of the aesthetic can nonetheless be usefully distin-
guished from one another by examining the relative weight played by the
object-oriented and subject-oriented elements of those theories and denitions.
Consider this denition schema offered by Malcolm Budd (2002, pp. 1215):
(i) it is directed at the experienced properties of an item, its parts, and their
relations
(ii) it involves a disinterested positive or negative reaction to the item.
This is perhaps the most basic schema that combines the object- and subject-
oriented approaches. One way to understand different theories of the aes-
thetic is by comparison with this schema. Friends of aesthetic experience will
put few if any limits on the kinds of items cited in (i), and the properties in
question may be experienced in sense perception, thought or imagination.
Opponents of the idea of disinterested pleasure, or more generally of aesthetic
experience, will de-emphasize or eliminate the second condition. In so doing,
however, these theorists must then attempt to delimit the range of objects
which admit of aesthetic appreciation, or at least identify certain paradigms
of aesthetic appreciation. In contemporary aesthetics, this typically means
identifying art as the paradigm object of aesthetic appreciation. Indeed, many
aesthetic theories explicitly identify aesthetics as the philosophy of art, and
explicitly dene aesthetic properties in terms of artistic properties. Consider a
17
few signicant examples. Richard Wollheim argues that to take the aesthetic
attitude is to regard something as a work of art, and captures the view in
this striking passage: when the Impressionists tried to teach us to look at
paintings as though we were looking at naturea painting for Monet was
une fentre ouverte sur la naturethis was because they themselves had rst
looked at nature in a way they had learnt from looking at paintings (1980,
p. 103). Following Wollheim in spirit, Berys Gaut argues for a similar assimi-
lation of the aesthetic to the artistic. Aesthetic properties, on his view, are
just those properties that make things valuable qua art; aesthetic properties
of non-art objects are those of their properties that can gure among the
aesthetic properties of works of art (Gaut, 2007, p. 35). Alan Goldman says
that we may accept as our basic criterion for identifying aesthetic properties
that they are those that ground or instantiate in their relations to us or other
properties those values of artworks that make them worth contemplating
(Goldman, 1998, p. 20; emphasis added).
Despite the warranted objections against disinterested pleasure and other
purported aspects of aesthetic experience, this sort of move is methodologi-
cally dangerous. For if artworks are taken as the paradigm objects of aesthetic
appreciation, we immediately incur a requirement to attempt some denition
of art if we are to distinguish aesthetic from other appreciative modes. Even
granting that this can be done, a more serious worry remains. To the extent
that many objects of experience differ from artworks, these other objects will
be downgraded by the theory as lesser, derivative, or even non-objects of aes-
thetic appreciation. In an important paper, Ronald Hepburn (1966) identies
this problem, and argues that certain key differences between art and nature
lead to aesthetic theorys disregard of nature. For instance, unlike art, there is
no critical and interpretive discourse about nature. An artwork is the result of
a complex of intentional acts, and since they are our acts, we generally know
what is involved in their correct appreciation. For non-theists, at least, nature
is not an artifact. Artworks have frames of one sort or other, which indicate
(if sometimes only vaguely) what is within the work and what without, so
indicating what is relevant to their appreciation. Nature is not so framed. And
so on. If art is the paradigm aesthetic object, then to the extent that nature (to
take only one important non-art example) differs in these signicant respects,
a purely object-oriented theory will yield a distorted account of the aesthetic.
Hepburn argues that there is a practical cost as well: if we lack the theoreti-
cal concepts for a certain range of experiences, those experiences tend to be
less available in everyday life, and less profoundly so. I contend that it is a
serious methodological error to dene the aesthetic solely in reference to art-
works, despite the challenges involved in formulating an acceptable account
of aesthetic experience. The alternative involves denying that nature is truly
18
an object of aesthetic appreciation or, to the extent that it is, claiming that it
is somehow parasitic on our appreciation of art. Such claims often rely on
genealogical just-so stories, almost entirely speculative, that attempt to
establish that there was no aesthetic appreciation of nature until there were
artistic practices. Moreover, there seem to be categorical differences between
our appreciation of the two that stand in the way of dening the aesthetic
solely in terms of art.
If that is so, are there any limits to the range of objects of aesthetic appre-
ciation? That is, can the object-oriented component of the schema simply be
dropped? Are there any objects of experience that cannot be appreciated aes-
thetically? Budds clarication of component (i) of (AES1) might indicate not:
19
What is the relation between philosophical theory and its objects, the things the
theories are about? In the case of philosophical aesthetics, those objects include
the actual items of aesthetic experience, along with the experiences themselves.
Many of these items are the products of various complex individual and social
practices, and those practices themselves, along with their participants, thereby
become objects for aesthetic theory as well. Some of these practices are highly
reective, social, and communicative: art history, theory, criticism, and their
aims and products sometimes resemble those of philosophical aesthetics.
One conception of philosophical aesthetics sees it as a purely descriptive
enterprise. We have objects of aesthetic experience (whatever they may be),
the experiences themselves, and the various social practices (productive, appre-
ciative, critical, etc.) in which these objects and experiences are enmeshed. The
goal of descriptive aesthetics is to provide an explanatory framework of all
these things, and do so in a way that treats the experiences and prephilosophi-
cal claims about them as authoritative. Classical foundationalist epistemology
might serve as a useful analogy. As a research program, it seeks to provide a
theory that indicates when our beliefs are justied, and it does so by introduc-
ing a distinction between basic and non-basic beliefs. Basic beliefs concern our
present sensory experiences (e.g., that something appears red, or that I have a
sensation of red), while a non-basic belief is a belief about anything else. Basic
beliefs are infallible and self-certifying. Whether a non-basic belief is justied
depends on whether it is connected in the right way to a basic belief. So in a
sense, basic beliefs serve as incorrigible data, to which all our other beliefs must
conform if they are to be justied. But there is no question of revising or reject-
ing basic beliefs on the basis of any non-basic beliefs.
Descriptive aesthetics treats the objects of aesthetic theory (the items of aes-
thetic experience, the experiences, and the non-philosophical thought and talk
of those items and experiences) as data to which theory must conform. On this
view, it is philosophys task to organize the data, to provide general descrip-
tions and theoretical explanations for it, but not to assert that any of it is mis-
taken, unjustied, or excludable. Descriptive aesthetics is a cousin to the sort
of moral philosophy dominant in the mid-twentieth century, which took meta-
ethics as the only legitimate topic for philosophical ethics. Indeed, what little
analytic aesthetics was done around the same time took it as a methodological
assumption that the only legitimate topic for philosophical aesthetics was the
language of rst-order aesthetic practices. (Representative work can be found
in Elton (1954) and Margolis (1987).) Descriptive aesthetics might well take as
its credo Wittgensteins characteristically ambiguous remark that philosophy
leaves everything as it is (p. 42e).
20
In this spirit, Kraut inveighs against philosophers who argue against the claim
that music is a language. Kraut correctly points out that very many musicians
talk about music as if it were a language. For him, this is a piece of data that aes-
thetic theory must accommodate and explain. The pronouncements of artworld
practitioners are self-certifying and authoritative. The philosopher, as an out-
sider to those practices, lacks the standing to challenge those pronouncements.
And so any theory that ignores or denies this or any other artworld phenom-
enon (including the pronouncements of its inhabitants) is simply inadequate.
There is one decisive consideration against a purely descriptive aesthetics
such as Kraut advocates, and that is the fact that artworld discourse is loaded
with contradiction. Artists, critics, and art theorists routinely make pronounce-
ments that are mutually incompatible. Perhaps the most common case of con-
tradictory discourse is the type identied by Hume in Of the Standard of
Taste, in which he remarks that many people are happy to assert that there is
no disputing matters of taste, but will protest if someone proposes that Bunyan
is superior to Addison. It is possible, of course, that the correct aesthetic theory
21
is one that preserves all of the contradictions within the discourse, and explains
why this is so. But surely this is the last or next-to-last resort for a philoso-
pher. It is one of the most important criteria for the rational understanding of a
discourse or practice that contradictions be minimized, and so the aesthetician
cannot avoid exercising some judgment in deciding which items are data to be
accommodated and explained, and which are to be explained in terms of error
or some other fault.
Aestheticians are not, as the eld linguist in Krauts analogy is purported
to be, outsiders to the practices that they investigate. Indeed, the linguist is not
an absolute outsider either. The language she studies might not be her mother
tongue, but she too is a member of a linguistic community, and uses language
to accomplish many of the same things as the people she studies. Perhaps, then,
the distinction between outsider and insider is not a sharp binary distinction,
but one between regions along the same spectrum. So too with aestheticians
and artworld inhabitants. The values and ideas of the artworld are not her-
metically sealed within it. They must bear some relation to the wider world,
one which the artist and the philosopher both inhabit, if they are to be intel-
ligible and shareable. If that is so, then those values are subject to criticism,
revision, afrmation, and rejection. Indeed, many artworld values are funda-
mental human ones, about which the philosopher might be thought to have
some special expertise.
The aestheticians relationship to the artworld is frequently even more inti-
mate. Many aestheticians are also artists and art critics, and (one would hope)
all of them are serious spectators of one art form or another. Of course it is true
that the philosopher-musician is not (or not obviously) doing philosophy when
he plays the trumpet, nor is he playing jazz when he tries to work out a coherent
theory of the ontology of improvised musical works. In the Theaetetus, Socrates
defends himself and his confederates against the worldly jibe that while it might
be true that philosophers do not know how to tie up bedclothes into a neat
bundle or avor a dish with spicesindeed, Socrates agrees that the world
laughs at the philosopher partly because of his helpless ignorance in matters
of daily life (Plato, 1989, p. 880). But, he says, only the philosopher knows
how to wear his cloak as a gentleman. The advocate of descriptive aesthetics
would have the philosopher leave the various tasks of daily life (including their
description and evaluation) to the experts, and rest content in his sartorially
marked wisdom. But unless the philosopher is barred from reecting on his
own experienceand could philosophy even get off the ground with such a
restriction?the aesthetician who is also an artworld inhabitant appropriately
draws on his experience as an artist, critic, or committed spectator even when
wearing the philosophers cloak. Socrates should not have conceded so much
to his critics.
22
[t]he disconcerting fact is that there is no common folk concept of art that
we must respect. It is simply not true that English-speaking folk use the
English word art to pick out the arts that were selected in the Modern
System of the Arts or those arts that tend to be covered in philosophy of art
courses and textbooks. Many dictionaries list no such usage. (Philosophers
opinions about what the folk think is often an expedient mythology.) Gilbert
Harman notes the way philosophy instructors have to teach students to
make the analytic/synthetic distinction. It doesnt come naturally to them.
And that is because they are being taught a piece of theory, not something
they knew all along [see Harman, 1999, p. 142]. It is the same with the
notion of art in aesthetics courses. There is no pre-theoretic notion that
students are recollecting or making explicit [emphasis added]. Instead they
are imbibing and internalizing the ideology of the Modern System of the
Arts, which is embodied in the notion of Fine Art. The idea that students
are drawing on a neutral folk concept which they already possess, and
which can be analysed at leisure, is an illusion. Instead, the students are
being subtly indoctrinated. (p. 77)
If there are no stable prephilosophical concepts about what art is, then it seems
that philosophical theory is at least strongly prescriptive. This raises the worry
that much if not all philosophizing is indoctrination.
23
4. Reective Equilibrium
Given that there are many instances of mutually incompatible claims within
aesthetics, and surely no less conict and obscurity among our prephilosophi-
cal beliefs about the aesthetic, we need a procedure for deciding which beliefs
to give up and for justifying the beliefs we maintain. That procedure is reec-
tive equilibrium; the term also refers to the end state of the procedure. John
Rawls (1951, 1999) provides the canonical point of reference, though he says
that variations of the procedure are found in the British moral philosophers
through Henry Sidgwick and in Aristotle (1990, p. 45). He also points out that
24
the procedure is not limited to ethics, citing Goodmans remarks on the justi-
cation of inferential principles (1990, p. 18) and Quines arguments for natural-
ized epistemology (1990, p. 507). Apart from its pedigree, the procedure is so
basic to philosophical method that its importance cannot be underestimated.
In general terms, the procedure is a very simple one. Take some aspect or
object of our experience which is to be claried or explained, say, the ontol-
ogy of artworks. We describe that object in terms most neutral to the different
parties to the debate, and see if those terms are sufcient to deliver general
theoretical conclusions. Most likely they will not, and the initial terms will
need to be supplemented by additional claims. We must then compare the
supplemented theoretical account to various pretheoretical beliefs, say, about
how artworks are individuated, or whether they are created or discovered,
and so on. We will no doubt nd conicts between what the theory implies
about work identity (among other things), and here we must decide whether
to modify the theoretical account or the relevant pretheoretical beliefs. None of
the claims guring in the procedure, whether theoretical or pretheoretical, are
immune from revision. Once we make the needed modications, we continue
in the same way, bringing various theoretical implications and other relevant
pretheoretical beliefs under examination, and going back and forth in the proc-
ess of revision and adjustment until we arrive at a set of beliefs that have now
ostensibly withstood rational examinationin Rawls words, these are our
considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted (1990, p. 18)and a theory
that explains and lends justication to those judgments. This is the state of
reective equilibrium. As Rawls says, it is an equilibrium because at last our
principles and judgments coincide; and it is reective since we know to what
our principles and judgments conform and the premises of their derivation.
At the moment everything is in order (1990, p. 18). The state of equilibrium
might only be temporary. The introduction of new relevant beliefs might upset
the equilibrium and call for further adjustment, or even rejection, of the previ-
ously held theoretical claims.
The procedure is intended to lter out beliefs based on prejudice and infer-
ential error. Rawls own use of reective equilibrium makes this explicit by
conducting the procedure from behind what he calls the veil of ignorance,
which serves to lter out sources of distortion and bias (1990, pp. 1617). But
even without such a procedural constraint, the procedure can help lter out
prejudicial beliefs, since often a symptom of prejudice is that its holder tends to
disregard conicting evidence. As the number of beliefs input to the procedure
increases, accommodating false beliefs becomes harder. If the prejudicial belief
happens to be true, then we can expect that as the procedure is carried on the
belief will not be a merely prejudicial one, but will gain some genuine justica-
tion. But since no propositions within the procedure are immune from revision,
the sheer weight of conicting claims will, ideally, force out a false prejudice.
25
The idea that no claim within the procedure is immune from revision is
important. No claim is independently justied, but only so in virtue of its rela-
tion to the rest of our beliefs. This does not mean that any belief is equally vul-
nerable to revision or rejection. Beliefs about logical truths, for instance, enjoy a
great many connections to very many of our beliefs. They are in principle revis-
able, but doing so will demand revision of a vast number of inferentially related
non-logical beliefs. The use of arguments is central to the practice of philoso-
phy, and there is a great deal of agreement about what makes for a compelling
argument and what does not. Nonetheless, standards of rational argumentation
are open to revision, but doing so requires independently convincing reasoning
(e.g., showing that the paradoxes of material implication express formally valid
but intuitively awed patterns of inference forces a choice between truth func-
tionality and relevance). Similarly, fundamental beliefs about physical laws are
revisable, but have so many explanatory connections to other beliefs that they
enjoy a high degree of stability within the web of our beliefs. On the other hand,
beliefs that have few connections to other beliefs are especially vulnerable. One
consequence of this is that error theories, those which claim that some practice
or feature of our experience is founded on error, have the burden of proof over
theories that are less revisionary of our ordinary conception of those practices
or experiences.
A signicant concern about Zangwills claims about the ideology of the
Modern System of the Arts is that it too readily demands an error theory.
He claims that we should hold an error theory about the bourgeois concept
of art because the things it groups together have no common nature. But this
error theory is modest and restricted. The folk, or at least most of the English-
speaking folk, are not in error (p. 78). The trouble is that the people Zangwill
labels the bourgeoisie, though not in the majority, are likelier to be just those
people who are educated and informed participants in a certain set of appre-
ciative, critical, and creative practices. Even if their concepts are not the most
numerically common concepts, they are the ones that give content to the prac-
tices that we are trying to understand and explain. One of the pretheoretical
beliefs shared by participants to those practices is that artworks are typically
objects of interpretation. Another is, arguably, that any sort of artifact can, in
principle, be an artwork (or part of an artwork). Perhaps the common folk do
not share these beliefs, and so would not, as art-theoretical innocents (compara-
tively so, anyway), be disposed to count Duchamps Fountain as an artwork.
But (if this is right), then theirs are not the practices an aesthetic theory aims to
explain. Zangwill cannot evade the threat of counterexamples to his theory in
one quick move by asserting the judgments of the art-concerned bourgeoisie are
in error, since it is largely their beliefs and values (or at least the ones of theirs
that withstand rational reection) of which philosophical theory is intended
to give an account. This is why error theories are in general the last resort of
26
the responsible aesthetician, and being responsible here means giving a con-
vincing argument that the practices in question are indeed in error. Zangwill
fails to accord proper respect to much of the data relevant to his project. Still,
if my remarks about Krauts pure descriptivism are correct, then neither can
the responsible aesthetician wholly evade the task of deciding that some of the
apparent data is simply noise.
Consider a few examples. Gregory Currie states that
The pretheoretical inputs to the procedure are beliefs about art appreciation and
evaluation, as well as beliefs about the nature of art. Despite Curries talk about
their serving as constraints, these pretheoretical beliefs are not unrevisable. Part
way through the process of reection and reasoned adjustment, Currie con-
cludes that the pretheoretical belief that artworks are created must, on balance,
be rejected. This is arguably a substantial revision of ordinary beliefs about art
(which opens an opportunity to object to Curries project), as is Curries conclu-
sion that all artworks are action types, which are in principle multiply instanti-
able. But Curries argument is, in essence, that this conclusion enjoys a higher
degree of justication by way of coherence with our theoretical and pretheoreti-
cal beliefs, compared with alternative proposals for the ontology of artworks.
David Davies (2004) gives an exceptionally clear articulation of his use of the
reective equilibrium procedure in service of his own ontological project. Given
that one of our concerns in the philosophy of art is to explain our art-related
practices, theoretical claims about the ontology of artworks will be constrained
(in the same sense as above) by the features of our creative and appreciate prac-
tices that have been duly pruned and adjusted. Davies encapsulates this meth-
odological approach in a so-called pragmatic constraint: Artworks must be
entities that can bear the sorts of properties rightly ascribed to what are termed
works in our reective and critical and appreciative practice; that are indi-
viduated in the way such works are or would be individuated, and that have
the modal properties that are reasonably ascribed to works, in that practice
(p. 18). Davies strategy is to conjoin this pragmatic constraint with an epistemo-
logical premise, whose content is that rational reection conrms that certain
properties are rightly ascribed to works, and then derive a conclusion about
the ontological nature of artworks (p. 23). Again, Davies theoretical conclusion
27
28
reason to think that justied beliefs are true. If this is how the intuition is meant,
then, Tersman argues, the justication coherentist has an effective response to
the objection:
The fact that the beliefs of person A cohere well with her system [comprising
all and only the beliefs held by A] implies that the members of the system
are related so that each member is evidentially supported by the rest. The
more coherent her system is, the better each member is supported by the
rest. Thus, in such a case, for each of her beliefs, she holds other beliefs which
give her reason to think that it is true. (p. 101)
It is often said that science and philosophy operate in the same general fash-
ion. While scientists perform experiments which generate data used to test and
29
30
or just attractive, or neither, but nonetheless held just because? Can anyone
have them, or is some training or competence a (dis)qualication for holding
them? Perhaps the lack of agreement among those who spend time thinking
about intuitions informs David Lewis assertion that our intuitions are sim-
ply opinions (p. x), which would seem to give them no special epistemic status
as premises of philosophical arguments.
One response to this state of affairs is to adopt a skeptical attitude toward the
professed capacity of philosophy to yield new pieces of knowledge. Another is
to cultivate modesty about the yields of philosophical labor. Lewis holds that
just as intuitions are simply opinions, so too are philosophical theories.
Some are commonsensical, some are sophisticated; some are particular, some
general; some are more rmly held, some less. But they are all opinions,
and a reasonable goal for a philosopher is to bring them into equilibrium.
Our common task is to nd out what equilibria there are that can withstand
examination, but it remains for each of us to come to rest at one or another
of them. (p. x)
31
between empirical and experimental philosophy. The projects under the banner
of experimental philosophy range from modest ones whose practitioners see
themselves as bringing new tools to the philosophers toolkit, to more radical
ones who see their role as reducing philosophical problems to scientic prob-
lems per the recommendations of the Churchlands and Gilbert Harman.
Even at this early stage it is difcult to assess this diverse program, or predict
its effects on philosophical aesthetics. But there is some reason for caution. Most
of the experiments conducted make use of either social psychological question-
naires or brain scans, together with the presentation of questions about classical
philosophical concepts such as the analysis of knowledge as justied true belief
and the Gettier problem, or thought experiments in ethics. Surveys are taken,
usually of the folk (i.e., those with no philosophical background), or brain
activity monitored, and the aim is often the replacement of a philosophers
intuition about what we all believe in such cases with something allegedly
more robust, informative, and representative.
Note that one assumption behind this sort of work is that questions about
metaphysics should be recast as questions about concepts. Of course, the con-
cepts that are employed in grasping metaphysical matters are worth studying.
But consider some of the intuitive claims that aestheticians appeal to:
While it would surely be interesting to know what the common attitudes toward
these claims are, it is not clear that that knowledge would help settle the truth
or falsity of the claims. The social fact that a certain belief is more prevalent, or
the biological fact that some areas of the brain are active when presented with
these claims, does not help us come to grips with the metaphysical matters
themselves. Moreover, when it comes to claims such as these, the judgments of
the untutored really do not count. If the facts are constituted in any part by
anyones beliefs, it is surely by those who engage in the creative and apprecia-
tive practices surrounding the arts. The body of these beliefs is contradictory,
and so simple appeal to the beliefs of any of the folk, tutored or untutored, will
not serve to settle philosophical disputes. The presence of contradiction returns
us to the need for a process of reective equilibrium.
32
The facts about what people value are empirical matters, and can be discov-
ered by experimental methods. The facts about what they ought to valuein
other words, what is valuableare not. Or if they are, we require a philosophi-
cal argument to establish that what is valuable is just what is valued. If these
are genuinely non-equivalent matters, then the philosophers traditional use of
reason and reective equilibrium will not be displaced by experimental meth-
ods. Consider, too, that often the goal of a philosophical argument is a meta-
physically necessary conclusion. If such a conclusion is to be deduced, then the
premises must be more than merely contingent. For example, it is of little use to
replace the intuition claim that artworks are created, rather than discovered
with the empirical discovery that, say, most people believe that artworks are
created rather than discovered. The former, whatever is epistemic origin, is
ordinarily (by philosophers) understood as an a priori, metaphysically neces-
sary proposition. The latter is an a posteriori contingent proposition. The most
that the empirical result can do for us here is perhaps to show that what seems
intuitively obvious to the philosopher may not so appear to others, and indeed,
many experimental philosophers aver that this is one of the disciplinary correc-
tives their program offers. Despite much overheated rhetoric from some philo-
sophical naturalists, since so much of what aestheticians (and philosophers
generally) are interested in is modal claims, aesthetics cannot be reduced to
a purely experimental discipline. Experimental investigation of philosophical
problems does have value, but philosophers must think carefully about just
what the signicance of such investigation is, and how its results t within the
enterprise as a whole.
Science commands a great deal of respect as perhaps the most successful
knowledge-generating mode of inquiry. Next to the sciences, the persistence of
the same philosophical problems may easily lead to resignation and cynicism.
Many in philosophy and the humanities generally have responded to the suc-
cess of and broad respect for science in one of two ways: one involves disput-
ing sciences claim to provide an objective representation of the world (e.g.,
the sociology of science program), while the other arrogates to the humanities
the same kind of epistemic power attributed to the sciences, only engaged in
producing incommensurable bodies of knowledge. While there might be some
merit in some of the more modest arguments advanced in these disciplinary
battles, the extreme positions are surely unhelpful and mistaken. The claim
that only the empirical sciences and mathematics yield knowledge is scientism,
but the two extreme responses lead to global skepticism and relativism. If any
of these three is correctand I very much doubt thisthen we will require
much better arguments than have been offered thus far. Those arguments will
be philosophical. In the meantime, philosophical aestheticians can safely carry
on as usual, though an open-minded attention to the work of experimental phi-
losophers is warranted.
33
Philosophy, as the historical mother of all disciplines, has always seen dis-
putes about its proper domain. Unquestionably, in recent decades it has been
the sciences (including psychology) that are often identied as philosophys
main competitor, its largest disciplinary threat, and its ideal destination. As a
branch of philosophy, aesthetics faces these disputes, but also faces challenges
from other disciplines that also engage in theoretical or quasi-theoretical work:
history, art history, art criticism, art theory, cultural studies, and art itself, par-
ticularly in its more self-conscious and conceptual instances. (None of this is to
ignore the fact that aesthetics concerns matters apart from the arts, but there is
little if any disciplinary presence of, say, the aesthetics of nature, compared to
that of the arts.) All of this gives the appearance that philosophical aesthetics is
being squeezed in from all sides, and that appearance might lead one to won-
der if there is anything distinctively philosophical left, or whether the already
vague borders have been completely overrun.
Part of this appearance is due to the fact that philosophys problems are
(at least) human problems and manifest themselves in all domains of human
experience. But that does not mean that the philosopher, the scientist, and the
art theorist (if we are talking about art) are equally well situated to grapple with
them. In contrasting scientic problems with philosophical ones, Tom Sorrell
identies ve symptoms of the philosophical. These symptoms also help distin-
guish philosophys proper domain from the other humanities:
(1) they arise from facts that are readily accessible to prephilosophical
consciousness, facts that do not require a special training, let alone a
scientic training, to recognize; (2) what one learns by working on these
problems does not usually lead to their solution; (3) what one learns does not
improve anyones powers of explaining, predicting, or controlling natural
phenomena, though it may add to an understanding of the limits of those
powers and of other human powers; (4) what one learns cannot readily be
summarized and communicated to someone else who has not engaged with
the problem and arrived at some of the thoughts that constitute progress with
the problem; and (5) what one learns may make one more interested in new
interpretations of the problem than in would-be solutions or dissolutions of
the problem. (p. 129)
Naturally, there are many philosophical problems that do not display all these
symptoms. But, Sorrell argues, the problems that display these symptoms,
more than any distinctive method, might serve best to dene what philosophy
is. It is perhaps tempting to think that, in contrast to other disciplines in the arts
and humanities, philosophy is distinguished by its core emphasis on clarity
34
and rigor, and its use of logical argument. This would be a mistakethe best
work in history shows these characteristics. Rather, philosophy seems distinct
in that unlike other humanistic disciplines, it is concerned more directly with
the limits of human powers (Symptom 3), and unlike the arts, art theory, and
criticism, it is concerned with some sort of progress, which may not even be
an appropriate aim or value in those other elds. Philosophical aestheticians
must, as a matter of professional responsibility, take an active interest in learn-
ing about the history and current developments in the many areas bordering
aesthetics. This is as much a mark of sound philosophical methodology as the
others on which I have tried to shed some light. Given the kinds of creatures we
humans are, with our need to make sense of our experiences and our values, the
philosophers work, happily, will never be nished.
Perhaps it is telling that the manner in which I have gestured toward answers
to the two fundamental questionswhat are the data of aesthetics, and what
makes for an acceptable aesthetic theoryhas been piecemeal and non-system-
atic. In trying to establish some conclusions about method in aesthetics, I have
at best argued for a few methodological anchor points. (1) The data are not
exhausted by artworks and the practices in which they are enmeshed. (2) That
being so, determining the domain of aesthetics requires a reference to the nature
of aesthetic appreciation, and one contender for a criterion of aesthetic appre-
ciation is disinterested pleasure. (3) The contradictory nature of our thought
and talk about aesthetic matters demands that the philosopher exercise some
reasoned judgments about which of those pieces of thought and talk are true,
and which are falsein other words, philosophical aesthetics has an inescap-
ably normative aspect. (4) One important test of the acceptability of theoretical
and non-theoretical beliefs is reective equilibrium. (5) And although many of
those beliefs are empirical, experimental approaches to philosophy can at best
contribute to, but not exhaust or replace, the armchair work of a priori reec-
tion that is emblematic of philosophy. Philosophical method is a philosophical
problem, or set of problems, and at least as it has been described and practiced
here, it displays all ve of Sorrells symptoms of the philosophical. It is probably
inevitable that further philosophical work will recommend additional anchor
points or the repositioning of old ones. As that work continues, we can hope
that it will seem less nave to maintain that philosophy has something genuine
and distinctive to contribute to our understanding.
35
1. Introduction
Work on the denition of art in the past several decades has been dominated,
it seems fair to say, by views that either defend some sort of broadly insti-
tutional denition, or are skeptical about the denitional project.1 Not unre-
latedly, perhaps, denitions of the individual art forms have proliferated
recently.2 Denitions of the individual art forms are compatible with a vari-
ety of different approaches to the denition of art, including non-skeptical and
non-institutionalist ones. But most important recent work dealing with the rela-
tionship between art and the individual art forms approaches the matter from
this dominant institutionalist or skeptical orientation, focusing on the individ-
ual art forms in a reductionistic spirit.3
This chapter focuses on the denition of art and its relationship to denitions
of the individual art forms, with an eye to clarifying the issues separating domi-
nant institutionalist and skeptical positions from non-skeptical, non-institutional
ones. Section 2 indicates some of the key philosophical issues which intersect
in discussions of the denition of art, and singles out some important areas of
broad agreement and disagreement. Section 3 critically reviews some inuen-
tial standard versions of institutionalism, and some more recent variations on
them. Section 4 discusses some recent reductionistic approaches to denitional
questions, which advocate a shift of philosophical focus from the macro- to the
micro-levelfrom art to the individual art forms. Section 5 sketches, against this
background, an alternative, non-institutionalist and non-reductionist approach
to denitional questions.
There is fairly wide agreement that most works of art are made to be appreci-
ated; that a signicant amount of art appreciation is aesthetic; that denitions
of art that do not illuminate why art is valued, leave important philosophical
work undone; that art has vague boundaries: some things are clearly artworks,
some are clearly not, and some are on the borderline; that, if natural kinds are
39
Institutionalist denitions of art hold that being a work of art consists in stand-
ing in the right relation to either art institutions or the history of art. They
deny that anything substantive and more fundamentalsay, a commitment
to aesthetic or creative valuesunies the nature of the art-institution or the
history of art. Characteristically, they either include some sort of analysis of
the art-institution, where the terms in which the art-institution is analyzed are
interdened, or they dene art in terms of its forms, or functions, or the kinds
of attitudes that people should or have had, toward artworks. These forms,
functions, or attitudes are merely listed: there are, on institutional denitions
of art, no deeper facts or principles that explain what gets on the lists of art
forms, or art functions, or art-attitudesno informative explanations of what
makes all artists artists, or different art forms all art forms, or the different art
functions all art functions. So whether institutionalisms fundamental appeal
to inexplicable lists is philosophically acceptable depends on whether the func-
tions/forms/attitudes that typify art really are so disunied that they can only
be enumerated.
On George Dickies institutionalism, art has an essence, although it is not a
natural kind. Artworks form a social kind; they are artifacts of a kind created to
be presented by an artist to an artworld public.6 Dickie denes artists in terms
of artworlds. Artworlds are dened in terms of artworld systems, which are
in turn dened as frameworks for the presentation of works of art by artists to
artworld publics. One implausible consequence of Dickies denition is that art
produced outside the institution is impossible. Moreover, given its uninforma-
tive interdenitions of artists, the artworld, and the artworld public, Dickies
denition has little to say about the nature of the parties who make up the art
circle. For the same reason, it lacks the resources to distinguish art institutions
40
from other institutions that share the same abstract relational structure.7 This is
a lot to leave unilluminated.
Jerrold Levinson defends a purely historical denition of art.8 Artworks,
on his historical institutionalism, are all and only those things that are either
(1) intended for regard or treatment in some way that past artworks were cor-
rectly regarded or treated or (2) are the earliest artworks. So his denition
requires some account of the nature of the rst artworks, as well as an account
of the ways artworks are and will be correctly regarded or treated. Levinson
holds that what makes the rst artworks artworks is the fact that they are the
ultimate cause of, and share aims with, the artworks we take to be paradigms.
For something to be art, then, is, for Levinson, for it to stand in the right histori-
cal relation to, and to share the same goals as, predecessor artworks. Predecessor
artworks are in turn characterized as the artworks that stand in the right his-
torical relation to, and share goals with, artworks we take to be paradigmatic.
Hence, for something to be art is for it to stand in the right historical relation to,
and share the same goals with, artworks we take to be paradigmatic. But the
only account of what it takes for an historical relation to be of the proper sort
comes down to an enumeration of ways in which art has been regarded. And
the denitions exclusively historical focus leaves it unable to explain, in partic-
ular, why radically new ways of looking at things, which seem to differ in kind
from traditional ones, should make it on the list of art regardsas revolution-
ary avant-garde ways of regarding art. Nor is it clear that Levinsons view can
exclude from the list of correct ways of regarding art purely pecuniary- or
status-focused perspectives, which, though in a straightforward sense correct
ways of regarding art, cannot plausibly be regarded as essential. Moreover,
the purely historical nature of Levinsons view leaves it unable to explain what
makes either our art tradition orsomething that is clearly possiblean histor-
ically disconnected alien art tradition, art traditions.9 So it leaves a fair amount
unaccounted for.
On Robert Steckers historical functional denition, something is an artwork
at a time just in case (1) it is either in one of the central art forms at that time or
in something recognizable as an art form because of its derivation from one of
the central art forms, or (2) it is made with the intention of fullling a function
art has at that time, or else (3) it is an artifact that achieves excellence in fullling
a function art has at that time.10 His view, then, requires an account of the vari-
ous art forms and art functions. Do the art forms and art functions constitute
a mere arbitrary collection, or do they have a degree of unity?11 Well, being
in a central art form at a given time consists in being derived from earlier art
forms, for Stecker, so for a form or function to be an art form or an art function,
it must be historically connected to, or share properties with, logically prior
art forms and functions. But this does not explain what makes the central art
forms central artforms, or what makes the various art functions all artfunctions.
41
42
4.1 Deationism
A novel deationist proposal about the denition of art has been defended by
Dominic McIver Lopes.15 It has two parts. One is an explanation of the error
of those who, failing to grasp the philosophical signicance the individual art
forms, seek a non-minimal denition of art: they commit a Rylean category
mistake. The idea is that wanting a substantive denition of art, provided that
one knew all about the individual art forms, would be like wanting to know
where the real university is, after one has seen all of the university buildings.
The second, positive, part of the proposal is the claim that the problem of
analyzing the macro-category of art may be reduced, in the spirit of methodo-
logical individualism, to two problems: the problem of analyzing arts con-
stituent micro-categories, the art forms, and the problem of analyzing what
it is to be an art form.16 If those two problems were solved, Lopes holds, then
a very thin denition of artcall it the Deationistic Denition (DD)would
be adequate:
43
Call the thesis about DD the Adequacy of the Deationist Denition thesis (ADD):
44
4.2 Eliminativism
Call the view that no denition of art or the art forms is possible or desirable
eliminativism. Several eliminativist arguments, inspired by Morris Weitz, have
been put forward by Aaron Meskin. One, driven by enthusiasm for empirical
psychology rather than Wittgenstein, runs as follows: The search for deni-
tions involves submitting proposed sets of individually necessary and jointly
sufcient conditions to the dubious tribunal of philosophers intuitions. But
empirical psychological theories of categorization suggest that humans catego-
rize things on the basis of their similarity to prototypes, not on the basis of
internalized sets of necessary and sufcient conditions. If that is true, efforts
aimed at discovering an adequate set of necessary and sufcient conditions
by appealing to philosophers prototype-driven intuitions will probably fail.
So, Meskin thinks, only logical, mathematical, and technical concepts admit of
non-arbitrary denition. So ART and many of its subconcepts do not admit of
non-arbitrary denition.24
This interesting argument raises at least three issues. First, the technical/non-
technical distinction bears a lot of weight. So the force of the argument will
45
be somewhat reduced if there are reasons for thinking that technical and non-
technical concepts form a continuum. This will be pursued in Section 5. Second,
most metaphysicians take themselves to be trying to discover what fundamental
kinds of things there are. It is certainly possible that they are wrong about that,
and are actually, unwittingly, studying the mind. But this idealism about the
subject matter of philosophy, to use Timothy Williamsons phrase, is, at least,
quite controversial.25 Third, it is not obvious that somethings being vague pre-
cludes its denability. Being black and being a cat are necessary and sufcient
for being a black cat, even if black and cat are vague.26 So, arguably, the vague-
ness of the class of artworks can be accommodated by denitions that employ
vague predicates just as well as by a psychological theory of concept-formation
like the prototype theory, which construes membership in a concepts exten-
sion as graded, determined by similarity to its best exemplar.27 Still, Meskins
argument would be more satisfactorily answered if there were independent
theoretical reasons to blur the technical/non-technical distinction, and recogniz-
ing vague denitions; this is pursued in Section 5.
46
concept of natural number, which cannot be subsumed under any one head. In
brief, from the fact that numbers have an ordinal and a cardinal function and an
abstract symbolic function, additional argument is needed, before concluding
that there are three unordered concepts of number.29
There are parallels elsewhere. Pluralism about biological species does not
entail eliminativism about species.30 Deationism about truth does not follow
from the fact that truth can be realized in many domains: a substantive view
of truth on which truth is a single, higher-order propertymultiply realized
in many domains, so that the plurality of truth lies within the bounds of a sin-
gle typeis a live possibility.31 So the fact that the concept of art is used for a
number of purposes does not settle the concept individuation issues.
In fact, something more constructive can be said. Virtually everyone, reduc-
tionist or not, agrees that artworks are typically made to be appreciated. If
appreciation typically involves critical considerations, and conversely, and if
artists engaged in the creative process imaginatively adopt critical/apprecia-
tive perspectives on that process and its products, and if the experience of art
involves a creative contribution on the part of the appreciator, then there is rea-
son to hold that the concept of art has three interrelated normative facets.32 This
is, evidently, an extremely quick sketch of an argument. But it is a very familiar
sort of argument. If, as Meskin rightly notes, the different concepts (subcon-
cepts? concept facets?) of art interlock, there is no pressing theoretical reason
to draw an eliminativist conclusion without more attention to the ways in which
the conceptsor the concepts facetsinterlock.
This emphasis on the normative nature of the concept of art connects with
another Weitzian argument offered by Meskin, this one for the conclusion that
thinking normatively rather than descriptively about the issue of denition
may be fruitful when it comes to the individual art forms, and especially when it
comes to one particular art form, the comic.33 Meskin, operating on the assump-
tion that works of art are appreciated, evaluated, and interpreted with refer-
ence to the art categories in which they are judged to fall, suggests that for
art-critical and art-appreciative reasons, certain concepts of comicsand the
case generalizes to other art formsare more useful than others. For exam-
ple, sequential pictorial narrative and narrative with speech balloons are not useful
concepts of comics, because they treat aesthetically relevant features of comics
as if they were necessary.
Meskins argument goes as follows: The aesthetic use of atypicality and
typicality effects is central in contemporary art, and non-classical concepts of
comics allow for maximal typicality and atypicality effects. Non-classical con-
cepts of comics, therefore, allow something whose aesthetic use is central in
contemporary art. Moreover, whatever allows something whose aesthetic use
is central in contemporary art is critically and appreciatively fruitful because
criticism and appreciation have to do with the aesthetic. Only concepts that are
47
critically and appreciatively fruitful should be used. But classical necessary and
sufcient concepts of comics do not allow for typicality and atypicality effects.
So, classical necessary and sufcient concepts of comics are not critically and
appreciatively fruitful. We should, therefore, use non-classical concepts of com-
ics, rather than classical ones (and this holds for the concept of art, and of the
other art forms, as well). Consequently, given the intimate connection between
classical necessary and sufcient concepts and denition, we should not dene
comics, or any of the individual art forms or art, in terms of necessary and suf-
cient conditions. That would not be fruitful.34
The argument rightly calls attention to the preeminence of aesthetic considera-
tions in our thinking about art. That said, it is natural to wonder whether, in so
doing, it concedes something that can be as well accounted for by denitions of
art as by psychologistic approaches that eschew them. It was remarked above that
atypicality might be as well explained by a denition that employs vague predi-
cates/properties as by a psychological theory of concepts like the prototype theory.35
But this raises a question: How much difference there is between saying that we
should use a certain concept of art because it best serves certain normative/critical/
appreciative purposeswhich seem fundamentally aestheticand defending an
aesthetic denition of art? The priority accorded to this sort of should seems to
suggest that the aesthetic dimension of art is fundamental. If so, then it is natural
to wonder whether the aesthetic concept of art is more fundamental than the other
concepts of art, with which, according to Meskin, it interlocks. That points away
from eliminativism and toward an aesthetic denition of art.
48
49
50
6. Conclusion
Notes
1. The main inspiration for skeptical views is Weitz (1956), and, through Weitz,
Wittgenstein.
2. See, for example, Hamilton (2007), Ribeiro (2007), Kulvicki (2006).
51
52
53
54
It is tempting to think that most artworks are simply a subset of the physical
objects in the world: there is my bike in the shed out back, the magnolia tree
in the yard, and then the small painting by Ruth Ann Borum on my dining
room wall. Ruth Ann made the painting by applying paint and ink to canvas
stretched over wood. I bought the painting in her studio, carried it home, and
hung it on two screws so it would not go out of level.
These facts seem compatible with Ruth Anns artwork being a physical
object. However, there are reasons to resist the idea that the artwork is identical
to the painted canvas. In this essay I will present the difculties faced by the
claim that artworks are simple physical objects (or, in the case of non-visual art
forms, simple structures of another sort), and will examine alternative propos-
als regarding their ontological nature. Though my focus in what follows will be
on works of visual art, much of the discussion applies to works in other forms
as well.
1. Methodology
Ontological theorizing about natural objects might aspire to carve nature at its
joints, picking out and characterizing groups of objects that share many fea-
tures and stand in common causal relations to other objects. Though our desire
to theorize about natural objects is undoubtedly inuenced by the way in which
they serve human interests, it seems that the objects themselves exist independ-
ently of us, and grasping their natures is, in large part, a matter of ascertaining
features whose import is not exhausted by their salience to us.1
Artworks, however, are not like natural objects. An artwork comes to exist
as a result of human activity and is understood within the context of social
practices that govern appreciation and interpretation. Indeed, it appears that
many of an artworks features cannot be grasped unless such context is taken
into account.2 It is, accordingly, not clear that we can even make sense of the
55
[a]rtworks must be entities that can bear the sorts of properties rightly
ascribed to what are termed works in our reective critical and appreciative
practice; that are individuated in the way such works are or would be
individuated[;] and that have the modal properties that are reasonably
ascribed to works, in that practice.4
the only appropriate method for determining [the] ontological status [of
artworks] is to attempt to unearth and make explicit the assumptions about
ontological status built into the relevant practices and beliefs of those dealing
with works of art, to systematize these, and to put them into philosophical
terms.5
An account of the ontological status of artworks that is seriously at odds with the
art communitys intuitions about the nature of art, then, should be rejected.
Because of the way in which artworks are constituted within human prac-
tices, appeals to our intuitions and to common claims about artworks are una-
voidable. As many have observed, though, these intuitions and common claims
are not all consistent with one another. To do ontology, we must decide which
intuitions and claims are to be treated as central and which as marginal; and,
predictably, different theorists disagree about these matters. As we will see,
56
the argument for any ontological theory about art must include assumptions,
whether implicit or argued for, about the primacy of a subset of claims com-
monly made about artworks.
A natural starting point in thinking about the nature of many familiar exam-
ples of artworks, such as the paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi and the sculp-
tures of Michelangelo, is to see them as identical to certain physical objects:
a canvas with paint on it, a piece of carved stone, and so forth.6 Many of the
things that we say about them seem to concern their physicality: we may speak
of the sculptures size and the smoothness of its surface, of the thickness of the
application of paint on the surface of a painting, of the fact that one or the other
has suffered damage. Encounters with these artworks happen largely through
vision, which is a mode of detecting the physical properties of an object; and
when a work is to be included in an exhibition, the object may be shipped
around the world so that different audiences may have such encounters. The
creation of such artworks centrally involves the manipulation of a physical
material, and when the integrity of that physical material is sufciently com-
promised, or its visible features irretrievably obscured, the artwork is thereby
destroyed.
In addition, it seems that we have direct ontological intuitions about the
nature of artworks: when asked what kind of thing a particular visual artwork
is, most people will likely say (or give an answer that implies) that it is a physical
object. What is Michelangelos Piet? A piece of stone that Michelangelo carved.
Such an answer may well be given by both ordinary people and experts, such
as curators and conservators. If the content of our concept is xed by our onto-
logical intuitions, as Thomasson suggests, then both our implicit and explicit
notions about the ontology of art seem to point toward the idea that visual
artworks are physical objects.
This idea is appealing for other reasons as well. In ontology as elsewhere, it
is attractive to start with the simplest theory we can, invoking familiar kinds
of objects whose relations are not overly complicated. The physical object is a
familiar kind of entity, subject to causal relations of familiar kinds with other
physical objects. If artworks turned out to be physical objects, this would allow
us to account for them within straightforward ontological categories that are
already required to account for other phenomena in the world. Though onto-
logical theorizing about art might turn out to be a pursuit rather lacking in
excitement, the parsimony of the resulting theory would be a strong considera-
tion in its favor.
57
One kind of challenge to the identity of artworks with physical objects has
appealed to Leibnizs law, which states that if two entities have different prop-
erties, they cannot be identical. This type of challenge involves a claim that
artworks possess properties that physical objects do not or cannot possess.
An early formulation of such a challenge, discussed by Richard Wollheim
(1968), holds that physical objects cannot possess representational or expres-
sive properties (e.g., the property that a yellow patch on the painted surface
represents the sun, or the property of expressing the power of a king), whereas
artworks do possess such properties. A related worry pertains to the artworks
aesthetic properties, at least some of which seem to be underdetermined by
the objects intrinsic physical properties. Kendall Walton (1970) argues that one
and the same object, seen in relation to two different categories, will yield art-
works with different aesthetic properties. It might thus be concluded that the
artworks aesthetic properties cannot belong to the object alone.7
A further important class of properties we assign to the artwork is that of
properties related to the artists achievement: the artwork may be innova-
tive, masterly, and so forth.8 However, the mere physical object does not have
these properties.9 Had it been deployed in a different context, it might well
have manifested very different achievement-related properties: it might have
been more or less innovative, for example, depending on what other works had
already been created. Since the artists achievement is a central aspect of what
we appropriately consider when we appreciate an artwork, according to this
challenge, the artwork cannot be identical with the physical object.
58
of the fact that they have been deployed in specic contexts. The expressive,
representational, and other properties discussed above would then be thought
of as relational properties of the object.
Can such a response allow us to see the artwork as identical to the physical
object? Unfortunately not. For the artwork possesses the properties in question
necessarily, whereas the physical object is deployed in a particular context only
contingently and, thus, possesses any properties attributable to its context only
contingently. One and the same sign could be hung in one context to indicate
that the road curves ahead, but then moved into another context (perhaps where
different conventions are operative) and used to indicate that the road surface
is slick. An artwork, on the other hand, has its meaning properties necessarily,
not contingently: to speak of Michelangelos Piet as representing something
other than Mary holding the lifeless body of Jesus would be to say something
incoherent.10 Indeed, the very property of being an artwork is possessed neces-
sarily by the artwork but contingently, if at all, by the physical object, which
could have existed in a world without art.11
A related challenge pertains to the identity conditions of artworks. Given
the way we ordinarily identify artworks, it does not seem incoherent to suggest
that Leonardo could have created the Mona Lisathat very artwork, not simply
some other work of the same nameby painting on a different piece of canvas
and using different tubes of paint.12 If this is indeed a logically possible circum-
stance, Mona Lisa cannot be identical to the particular painted canvas hanging
in the Louvre.13
A nal challenge pertains to the persistence conditions of artworks and phys-
ical objects.14 Marcel Duchamp created his work In Advance of the Broken Arm by
acquiring a manufactured snow shovel, titling it and presenting it for display.
The physical object existed before the artwork did. The persistence conditions
of the two entities are distinct; thus, they cannot be identical.
Most of the above discussion pertains to cases in which the artwork bears a
special relation to some particular physical object; its just that there are rea-
sons to think this relation must be something other than identity. An additional
problem arises in cases where the relation of artwork to physical object is not
one to one.
The most obvious sort of case is in art forms such as printmaking, photogra-
phy, and cast sculpture, where one act of artmaking may result in the genera-
tion of multiple objects, each of which is (under standard accounts) an instance
of the artwork. The problem of multiples has been discussed extensively
59
elsewhere, and I will not recapitulate the discussion here.15 However, even
within the singular visual arts, there are cases where no one-to-one relation
holds between the artwork and a particular physical object. In such cases, the
identity of artwork to physical object is clearly ruled out.
Several of the installation works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres involve the dis-
play of piles of candy that viewers are permitted to consume. When a particular
work is on display, curators top up the pile with new candy from time to time.
When the work is not on display, there may be no candy kept in storage; an
entirely new batch of candy may be purchased for the next exhibition. However,
it doesnt seem that the work itself goes out of and then back into existence
(any more than a musical work exists only when it is being performed). Thus,
the work cannot be identical to any particular physical object or assemblage.
Something similar is true of many works of contemporary installation art: some
or all of the physical objects displayed may be constituted anew for each exhibi-
tion and discarded after the exhibition is over.16
John Dilworth (2005) discusses the possibility that two artists, working at
different times and without communication on the manipulation of some com-
mon physical material, might compose two distinct artworks. Each of them has
the option to either accept or reject changes in the object made by the other. If, at
some point in the process, both artists come to regard their respective artworks
as nished, they will, Dilworth claims, have made two distinct artworks which
stand in a symmetrical relation to a single physical object (pp. 1336). Clearly,
that relation cannot be identity, since identity is transitive: on pain of contradic-
tion, two non-identical things (the artworks) cannot both stand in a relation of
identity to some third thing.
Dominic McIver Lopes (2007) discusses an intriguing sort of case in Japanese
architecture. The Shinto shrine Ise Jingu, which is some 1,500 years old, con-
tains a structure known as the goshoden, housing Amaterasu Omikami, the sun
goddess. However, the goshoden is not made up of any 1,500-year-old materials;
it is rebuilt approximately every 20 years. The present goshoden is not torn down
to accommodate a new construction on the same spot; instead, the structure
that will become the goshoden is constructed on the kodenshi, the vacant lot next
to the current goshoden. Once the construction of the new structure is complete,
the sun goddess is transferred to it in a ritual; at this point the new structure
becomes the goshoden, and the earlier structure is dismantled to leave behind
only the vacant lot, or kodenshi. In this manner, the goshoden and kodenshi switch
places every 20 years. One way of regarding this situation is to think that the
goshoden is a single architectural work that has persisted (albeit with a complex
history) over a thousand years, and that bears symmetrical relations to many
distinct physical objects while being identical to none.
Finally, some instances of conceptual art, which grew out of and is normally
treated as belonging to the visual art tradition, involve no candidate physical
60
object at all. For Robert Barrys 1969 Closed Gallery Piece, the artist declared
the gallery closed for the duration of the exhibition. The typed card by way of
which this declaration was made seems inessential to the work, and clearly is
not identical to it.
Works such as these demand an ontological account that does not make
them out to be identical to physical objects. Of course, they might be thought of
as special cases; however, an ontological account that can accommodate both
central cases of singular visual artworks and these unusual cases in the same
way will, at least to that extent, have parsimony in its favor.
4. Alternatives to Identity
If the visual artwork is not identical to a physical object, what might it be? In
this section, I describe and assess a variety of alternative theories that have been
offered.
Benedetto Croce (1921) and R. G. Collingwood (1938) suggested that the art-
work is in fact an idea in the mind of the artist. On this account, the viewers
task is to use the physical object to reconstruct the artists idea. Only when such
reconstruction has been accomplished can the viewer be said to apprehend the
artwork.
Such a view violates the pragmatic constraint invoked by Thomasson (2004)
and D. Davies (2004): our practices of interpretation and criticism do not seem
typically to have us regard the physical object as a prop for reconstruction
of the artists idea. Moreover, our ontological intuitions seem clearly at odds
with the notion that artworks, in general, are ideas: asked about the nature of
Donatellos Abraham and Isaac, we will not say that it was an idea Donatello
had that led him to carve a hunk of stone in a certain way. Finally, as has often
been pointed out (e.g., Stephen Davies, 2003), it seems atly incorrect to sug-
gest that someone can create a work of painting or sculpture simply by having
an idea, no matter how complex and rened. Even if we charitably regard the
idea in question as one that pertains to the use of a medium and can be fully
developed only through manipulation of that medium, it seems incorrect to say
that the idea itself, rather than some outward product of the manipulation, is
the artwork.
Clearly, a theory with such signicant drawbacks would need strong
independent reasons to motivate it. For the purposes of this essay, we may
simply note that it goes much further, in rejecting a relationship between
61
the artwork and the physical object, than is warranted by the considerations
adduced above.
If artworks are not identical to physical objects, they still seem to stand in some
signicant relation to such objects. Some have proposed that this relation is
that the artwork is constituted by a physical object. A constitution relation may
be invoked to deal with concerns about identity and persistence conditions.
It seems that a lump of clay can maintain its identity through any number of
manipulations: one and the same lump of clay may be shaped into a portrait
bust or a streamlined abstract form, or it may simply be rolled into a ball and
put away to await its owners next inspiration. A particular sculpture made
from the clay, however, does not survive such major changes in conguration:
if I roll the clay into a ball, I will have destroyed your portrait bust. The clay,
then, constitutes the sculpture without being identical to it.
What exactly is the relation of constitution? Lynne Rudder Baker (2000) dis-
cusses Michelangelos David and Piece, the block of marble that constitutes it.
David, for as long as it exists, shares both the physical properties and the spatial
location of Piece. Moreover, many of Davids aesthetic properties depend on
Pieces physical properties: Davids pent-up energy depends on, among other
things, the way that the marble is shaped to distribute the weight (p. 31).
However, David and Piece are not identical: David has causally efcacious prop-
erties (such as the power to evoke certain kinds of reactions in people) that
Piece alone could not have had, if it had never been placed in the circumstances
that brought David into existence. These properties, if they belong to Piece at all,
belong to it only contingently, whereas they belong to David necessarily.17
It is important to emphasize that the view that David is constituted by Piece
does not rule out the possibility that David itself is a physical object. This sort
of account is often given for non-art artifacts: a candle may be a physical object
colocated with the lump of wax that constitutes it, though we resist saying that
the candle and the lump are identical because they differ in their identity and
persistence conditions. David, while not identical to Piece, might nonetheless
be a physical object of a different order that shares the spatiotemporal location
of Piece. Strictly speaking, then, the constitution account need not be seen as
denying that the artwork is identical to some physical object; it denies only that
the artwork is identical to a mere physical object like a hunk of stone.18
To claim that artworks are constituted by physical objects is not yet to explain
many of their most signicant features. The relation between the artwork and
its constituting matter may be quite complex (for instance, an artwork may lose
part of its constituting matter, as when an arm falls off a sculpture, or gain
62
matter, as when a painting is restored) and may vary from case to case. The con-
stitution view in itself also does not explain the artworks possession of essen-
tial features like a title and a correct orientation. A fully eshed out account of
artworks would need to supplement the constitution view with an account of
the persistence conditions for artworks and of the way in which an artwork
gains its signicant features by virtue of the sociocultural positioning of the
constituting matter. This is not, of course, to deny that the constitution relation
may play a role in the correct account of at least some artworks.
The constitution view also faces challenges from cases discussed in
Section 2.3. The works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres do not seem to go into and
out of existence, even though there may be times when the pile of candy has
been completely depleted (or, in between exhibitions, when no candy is kept in
storage). The work, then, cannot be essentially constituted by a physical object.
The same is true, a fortiori, of works of conceptual art like Barrys Closed Gallery
Piece. Perhaps the goshoden at Ise Jingu is always constituted by some physical
object; however, the fact that the work leaps from one chunk of constituting
matter to another may leave us unsatised with the explanatory power of the
constitution relation. If the relation can be instantiated so differently, and may
fail to hold at all in some cases, we may suspect that there is something further
about the nature of the artwork that must be invoked to explain whether and in
what circumstances a constitution relation holds.
63
Dilworth (2005, 2007, 2008a, 2008b, among others) claims that the relation
between the artwork and the physical object is one of representation: the
painted canvas, rather than being identical with the artwork, in fact represents
the artwork, which may in turn represent some subject matter (if the artwork
is representational). The artwork, then, is a kind of content possessed by the
physical object.
Dilworth (2008a) draws an analogy with language. The following is a con-
crete linguistic sentence token (p. 342):
The concrete sentence token represents the proposition that the Dude is a cat. It
represents this content only contingently: in other circumstances where differ-
ent linguistic conventions were operative, it might have represented a different
proposition, such as that The Rock is a wrestler.
64
The proposition that the Dude is a cat, Dilworth suggests, has content of its
own: it represents a particular animal, the Dude, and represents him as a cat.
The proposition represents this content necessarily, not contingently: a proposi-
tion with different content would not have been that proposition.
The proposition is not identical to the concrete sentence token, which might
have represented some other content or been meaningless. Also, that same
proposition can be represented by any number of distinct concrete sentence
tokens. The proposition also is not identical to the content it represents: the
proposition is an abstract entity with truth-conditions, whereas the Dude is a
concrete entity with whiskers.
Dilworth proposes that we see the artwork as analogous to the proposition,
and the associated physical object as analogous to the concrete sentence token.
The connection between the object and the artwork is a purely contingent one,
while the connection between the artwork and its representational content is
necessary.
The artwork, thus, is a form of content contingently represented by the phys-
ical object. As Dilworth acknowledges, representation functions differently in
the artwork case than in the proposition case. The connection between a sen-
tence token and the proposition it represents is purely conventional (those same
marks could have been used to represent a completely different proposition),
whereas the connection between a physical object and an artwork involves a
form of representation that functions iconically, or through exact resemblance:
an irregularly shaped and textured physical brushstroke on the surface of the
paint would express an exactly similar shaped and textured brushstroke con-
tent element in the relevant artwork structure (2007, p. 25).
The theory of artworks as representational content of physical objects has
notable advantages. It gives the same account of the artwork regardless of art
form, and it allows us to give similar accounts of different kinds of objects each
of which may bear a special relation to the work, whether the work is singular
or multiple. Thus, a photographic print, a negative, and a digital le may all
represent the same work of photography; the original score, a copy of the score,
a performance, and a recording may all represent the same work of music.21
A consequence of the representational content view, acknowledged by
Dilworth, is that any physical object that is not perceptibly different from the
object presented by the artist, and that is offered for consideration in relation to
the same context in which the artists object was presented, represents exactly
the same content that the original physical object did. Thus, there is no unique
relation between the artwork and any particular physical object; it is merely a
contingent matter that we have not yet perfected the ability to make perceptu-
ally indistinguishable replicas of paintings and sculptures that would represent
exactly the same content.22
65
66
sort Dilworth successfully deploys do not rule out a parthood relation between
physical objects and artworks in the way they rule out the identity relation.
67
The interest in recognizing the role played by context in xing the artworks fea-
tures has led some to eschew altogether the idea that the artwork is a physical
object or any other kind of structure. Gregory Currie (1989) and David Davies
(2004) defend the view that the artwork is to be identied not with the artists
product, but with a particular sort of event: the artists activity in producing it.29
Whereas one might regard the Levinsonian maneuver of identifying an artwork
with a contextualized, indicated structure as somewhat ad hoc, it does not seem
ad hoc to see the artists activity as directly responsive to artistic, historical, and
sociopolitical context, such that there is in fact no separating the activity from
its context. The aspects of the context that really did shape the artists activity
will thus be regarded quite naturally as essential to the artwork, on this view.
Moreover, as Davies argues, the view that the artwork is identical to the art-
ists activity can allow for nuance in just which aspects of context are relevant
to a given work. Levinsons view suggests that the entire musico-historical
context, which includes the whole of cultural, social and political history,
is relevant to the artwork, such that even slight differences in context invari-
ably generate (perhaps subtly) different works, even where the structures
presented are exactly identical.30 Davies argues that this is a mistake: some
works have their identities bound to particular aspects of context, but others
do not; whether a change in context is relevant to the works identity will vary
from case to case. The view that the artists activity is the true artwork, Davies
68
suggests, accounts for this fact in a way that the view of artworks as contextu-
alized structures cannot.31
The view of artworks as identical to the artists creative activity has the
advantage of assigning the artwork to a metaphysically respectable category:
namely, that of events. There is nothing obscure or mysterious about events, and
it seems clear that any adequate account of what there is in the world will need
to appeal to them. Moreover, it is very easy to account for the representational
and expressive properties of artworks on this view, since it is uncontroversial to
say that people can express and represent things through their actions.
The chief disadvantage of this view is that it seems to violate central and
deeply held intuitions about the nature of artworks. Just as viewers are unlikely
to characterize Donatellos Abraham and Isaac as an idea in the mind of the artist,
they are unlikely to accede in the identication of this sculptural work with a
now-unobservable event that happened in the fteenth century. If there is any
truth to Thomassons (2004) view that our ontological intuitions x the referent
of our term artwork, a view like Curries and Daviess appears to change the
subject rather than elucidate what the artwork is.
It should also be noted that on the view that artworks are events, the ques-
tion about the ontological nature of the artists product, referred to by Davies
as the focus of appreciation, does not go away. Is the focus of appreciation
of Donatellos Abraham and Isaac a physical object, an entity embodied in or
constituted by or represented by some physical object, or what? Are all foci of
appreciation the same sort of thing, or are some different from others?32 For
those who believe that the focus of appreciation, rather than the activity of cre-
ating it, is the true artwork, the account of artworks as events is ontologically
uninformative.
69
and sometimes generates single-instance works; cast sculpture, where the mold
may be destroyed after the rst cast; and even lm, where on occasion avant-
garde lmmakers have produced an aesthetic effect by scratching directly onto
the lmic medium, with the result that a new printing of the lm will not be
the same work.
What accounts for the fact that some works in a medium are singular and
others multiple, and the fact that works of traditional painting and sculp-
ture have an intimate relation with a particular physical object while a work
of installation art may involve different objects on different occasions? Sherri
Irvin (2005, 2008) argues that artists determine the specic relations between
their works and the relevant physical objects through the process of sanction-
ing, which includes both presenting objects for consideration and stipulating
parameters that govern how they are to be displayed and conserved. It is open
to the artist to stipulate that a particular object is essential to the display, or
to allow that different objects may be used on different occasions. The artist
may also determine whether a particular feature of the physical object is to be
treated as relevant to the work or not: the paint aking from one painted can-
vas may count as damage that requires restoration, whereas the paint aking
from another painting may be an aesthetically relevant feature that should be
allowed to unfold naturally.33
The relation the artwork bears to a particular physical object or assemblage,
then, varies in accordance with the artists sanction. The artist may specify that a
particular physical object must be present for the work to be exhibited, in which
case the work might be partly constituted by that object (or might be a structure
that has that object as a part). Or, instead, the artist may specify that the artwork is
such that each display must involve some object or other of a given type, in which
case the artwork is only contingently connected with some particular object or
series of objects. Ultimately, on this view, the artwork is whatever entity satises
the parameters expressed by the artist in the act of sanctioning (Irvin, 2008).
The view of artworks as ontologically diverse can explain why some works
in a particular art form (such as printmaking) are singular while others are mul-
tiple. It accounts for the intimate relation of the artworks characteristics to a
generative act by the artist, as emphasized by Currie and D. Davies. It respects
the ontological intuitions expressed in the critical practice of the art commu-
nity, according to which works are thought to have varying kinds and degrees
of connection to physical objects.
The view will not be satisfying to those who wish to see a common onto-
logical account given of all visual artworks. Someone seeking a unied account
might think that the artwork should be identied with the parameters them-
selves, rather than with some entity that satises them. This might be helpful
in cases where the parameters are internally contradictory or otherwise unsat-
isable: to identify the artwork with an entity satisfying the parameters seems,
70
Notes
1. This conception of the ontology of natural objects is controversial; some hold that
even natural objects must be understood as socially constructed insofar as we
attempt to theorize about them. My aim here is not to argue for the adequacy of
this conception but simply to point out that, while intuitively attractive for natural
objects, it lacks plausibility with regard to artworks.
2. A seminal argument for this thesis is found in Kendall Walton (1970).
3. See Morris Weitz (1956) for an inuential discussion.
4. D. Davies, 2004, p. 18.
5. Thomasson, 2004, pp. 878.
6. Curt John Ducasse (1929, 1944) offers such a view. Margaret Macdonald (195253,
p. 206) identies visual artworks with physical artifacts. Richard Wollheim consid-
ered the view that visual artworks are identical to physical objects of sufcient inter-
est that he added a supplementary essay on the topic to the second edition of Art and
Its Objects (1980), without pronouncing on the truth of the view. Jerrold Levinson
(1996) defends a sophisticated physical object view that is immune to some of the
criticisms discussed below.
7. Levinson (1980) offers several helpful examples of the context-dependence of the
aesthetic properties of musical works.
8. This point is discussed extensively by Gregory Currie (1989).
9. This does not show, however, that the properties could not be attributed to some
more richly construed physical object. See the discussion of the constitution relation
in Section 4.2.
10. John Dilworth (2005) argues at length for the non-identity of artworks and the asso-
ciated physical objects, on the grounds that artworks have necessary content proper-
ties while physical objects cannot. Dilworth does not claim that the artwork has all
of its content properties necessarily; thus the argument does not fall afoul of Guy
Rohrbaughs (2003) observation that artworks exhibit at least some modal exibility
(such that an artwork could have had slightly different content, yet maintained its
identity as that very work).
11. See Baker (2000, p. 30). Also, for reasons discussed by Ruth Barcan Marcus (1961), it
is not viable to say that the artwork is identical to the physical object in this world
but not in other worlds; identity relations are necessary relations, and must hold in
all worlds if they hold at all.
12. Dilworth, 2005, p. 70.
13. Those persuaded by arguments for the necessity of origin may resist the claim that
the Mona Lisa could have been made with a different canvas and different paints.
See, for instance, Nathan Salmon (1979).
71
14. Technically speaking, issues of persistence are distinct from issues of modality; I
treat them together here because they are closely related and because frequently the
same theoretical maneuver will resolve problems of both types.
15. For an excellent overview, see Stephen Davies (2003). I will note, below, instances
where theorists are motivated in part by an attempt to give a unied account of sin-
gular and multiple artworks.
16. For further discussion of such cases, including an explanation of why I see them as
singular rather than multiply instanced works, see Sherri Irvin (2008).
17. For more on the distinction between the identity relation and the constitution rela-
tion, see Baker (1997) and Mark Johnston (1992).
18. Baker (2000) endorses the idea of colocation of physical objects of different orders, as
do Levinson (1996) and Stecker (2003).
19. If Dilworth (2005) is correct in claiming that one physical object might bear sym-
metrical relations to two distinct artworks by different artists, the individuation of
artworks will not be able to proceed simply by the individuation of the associated
physical objects in the way Margolis suggests.
20. Margolis also holds that the work can change over time as the cultural context
changes.
21. Dilworth, 2005, p. 76; 2007, p. 29.
22. Currie (1989, esp. ch. 4), holds a similar view, and Jeanne Wacker (1960, p. 224),
makes a comment in the same spirit. Dilworth (2005, pp. 789; 2007, p. 28) acknowl-
edges that artistic genres such as painting recognize the special status of original
representations; his view does not conict with the idea that there may be a unique
original representation in such cases.
23. I am grateful to Martin Montminy for this point.
24. Danto often speaks as though the physical object itself becomes the artwork. Given
the arguments advanced above, I charitably interpret his view as claiming that the
object becomes part of the artwork.
25. Stecker (1997) makes a related point.
26. Levinsons (1996) actual view about singular works of visual art is that they are phys-
ical objects of a complex and sophisticated sort. As he acknowledges (1985, 1996), the
title of a visual artwork may need to be counted as a non-physical component.
27. For further discussion of this possibility, see Section 4.7.
28. For discussion, see S. Davies (2004, pp. 712).
29. Currie holds that the artwork is to be identied with an action-type, whereas Davies
identies it with a particular action-token. For Davies discussion of the reasons for
moving away from the action-type view, see D. Davies (2004, pp. 13140).
30. Levinson, 1980, p. 10. It should be emphasized that Levinson restricts his account
to fully notated classical composition[s] of Western culture (p. 6), leaving open
the possibility that a different account may be required for other sorts of musical
works.
31. D. Davies, 2004, pp. 10520. Carl Matheson and Ben Caplan (2008) call into ques-
tion Daviess claim that Levinsons contextualized structure view cannot account for
nuances in the role played by context in shaping the artworks identity.
32. Currie holds that the focus of appreciation is an abstract type rather than a concrete
object. However, Rohrbaugh (2003) argues that it is impossible to account for the
modal exibility of artworksthe possibility, for instance, that a work of painting
might have had one more brushstroke than it in fact hadon such a view.
33. It should be noted that there are limits, determined by the art-historical context,
on what can be sanctioned at a given moment. The context also supplies certain
defaults, such that particular features of the work are implicitly sanctioned as long as
72
the artist does nothing to contravene this: for instance, the artist implicitly sanctions
that the painted surface of the canvas is relevant to the artwork, and the oil-stained
reverse of the canvas irrelevant, unless the artist explicitly sanctions otherwise. To
sanction is not merely to intend or to state ones intention; the artists sanction must
be communicated in such a way that there is a reasonable expectation of uptake. See
Irvin (2005) for further discussion.
73
Belief in a type of mental state worthy of the name the aesthetic experience
seems to have two sources. First, there is experience: to some, it is apparent that
there is some common feature to their experiences of works of art and some
pieces of nature (paradigmatically sunsets, landscapes and seascapes) that is not
present in other experiences. That is, there is something distinctive that it is like
to have these experiences. Second, the aesthetic experience is taken to be valu-
able (in a sense yet to be explained), and hence taken to be the explanation of
value we attribute to the objects of those experiences. That is, our experiences of
art and the relevant pieces of nature are thought to be valuable, and the capac-
ity to provide the aesthetic experience is thought to be what explains that value.
The primary question is whether there is such an experience as the aesthetic
experience. Only if there is such an experience does the second question, con-
cerning value, arise. There are two sorts of boundary: the internal boundary
(can the aesthetic experience be distinguished from experiences such as the sub-
lime?) and the external boundary (can the aesthetic experience be distinguished
from religious, sexual or other everyday experiences?). As marking the internal
boundaries has largely disappeared from common parlancedespite the efforts
of a few postmodern theoristsI shall discuss only the external boundaries.
Within Anglo-American aesthetics there are two broad approaches to expli-
cating the aesthetic experience. The rst approach focuses on what it is like to
have such an experience; that is, on whether the experience has a distinctive
phenomenology. The second focuses on the content of the experience; that is,
what the experience is an experience of (Iseminger, 2003). I shall call these the
phenomenological approach and the content approach, respectively. As
they both have their roots in Kant, I shall start with him. Another advantage of
starting with Kant is that he dened the terms of the debate, and raised ques-
tions that we struggle with to this day.
Kant assumes that the experience associated with the judgement of taste
that object is beautifulis a pleasurable experience. It contrasts with two
other pleasurable experiences: the agreeable and the good. Things are agreeable
to us if they gratify our senses: this experience does not involve our rational
facultiesthat is, it does not involve those mental states such as beliefs and
desires. Animals can have experiences of the agreeable: a cat lying in the sun is
74
having one such. Kants view of the good is slightly idiosyncratic, being bound
up with his account of ethics: it involves a belief that the goodness of some
action or state of affairs binds all rational beings. The experience associated
with the judgment of taste needs to be distinguished both from the former (in
that it is universal where the agreeable is idiosyncratic) and the latter (in that
it is not provable while whether something is good is provable). Kant argued
taste differed from the agreeable in being cognitive while the agreeable is non-
cognitive, and differed from the good in being non-conceptual while the good is
conceptual. In short, the experience that gives rise to the judgment of tastethe
ancestor of the modern aesthetic experienceis an experience that is both cog-
nitive and non-conceptual. It is the disinterested appreciation (i.e., an apprecia-
tion that is not informed by any interest we might have in the object) of the form
of an object, which results in the cognitive faculties becoming engaged, yet not
in such a way that involves concepts. The challenge of explicating the nature
of the experience was picked up by the phenomenological approach, and the
challenge of explicating what could be meant by the perception of the objects
form was picked up by the content approach.
There is much that Kant seemed to get right. The aesthetic experience, unlike
experiences of the agreeable, seems to involve cognitions: in short, there is think-
ing going on. Second, those cognitions are part of the experience, rather than
being externally related to the experience. It is not that the experience causes
the beliefs; it is rather that the experience is, in part, an experience of having
beliefs. The problem is that Kants account seems too irredeemably obscure to
be enlightening. It is difcult to know how we would describe a mental state
that was cognitive but non-conceptual in modern parlance. It would be some-
thing like having beliefs and yet those beliefs having no content (not being about
anything) which is not an idea that makes much sense. Furthermore, we can
see there are difculties in providing any account of the integration of beliefs
into experiences. First, experiences have duration and beliefs do not. Second,
there is something that it is like to have an experience, while (we are told
by philosophy of mind) there is nothing that it is like to have a belief. Finally,
beliefs are thought to possess only instrumental value: we do not value them
for their own sake, but for what they can do for us (e.g., result in successful
action). In contrast, the aesthetic experience is held to be the paradigm of non-
instrumental value. In short, the task is to integrate some instrumentally valua-
ble non-experience into a non-instrumentally valuable experience (Guyer, 2003;
Matravers, 2003).
Modern work on the phenomenological approach begins with Edward
Bullough. Bullough claimed to have identied a particular type of men-
tal statea sui generis psychological happeningwhich he used to explain
several puzzling phenomena associated with our experience of the arts. This
mental state he called psychical distance (Bullough, 1995). This is a technical
75
76
explained by this blocking (e.g., the audience not leaping on the stage to save
the heroine) are better explained by something else (the conventions of theater).
He concludes, generally, that there is no reason to think that a psychological
force to restrain either action or thoughts occurs or is required in . . . cases of
aesthetic experience (Dickie, 1974, p. 111).
The argument against Stolnitz can be stated in a number of ways. My recon-
struction is trueI thinkto the spirit rather than the letter of Dickies origi-
nal argument. First we need to examine Stolnitzs claim: that there is a type of
mental state, characterized phenomenologically, that is true of our experience
of art (and more besides). That is, there is a sense in which our experience of a
Beethoven symphony, a Mondrian painting, a Caro sculpture all feel the same.
The oddity of this claim is that there is an intuitive pull to accepting it (as can be
seen by its widespread acceptance) although a moments reection reveals it to
be implausible. How could the experiences of such different objects be phenom-
enologically similar? The answer to this question is that they are all experiences
of the objects for their own sake; experiences in which there is no concern
for any ulterior purpose. The temptation is to think that an experience of an
object for its own sake is a distinctive type of experiencea funny mental state.
However, as Dickie points out, this confuses motivations and experiences:
[T]he aesthetic-attention theorists claim that there are two ways of attending,
namely, disinterestedly and interestedly, but when their denition of
disinterestedness is substituted for the term into descriptions of particular
cases, it seems that interested attention means attending with certain
motives and disinterested attention means attending without those
motives. The claim that there is a perceptual or attentional power, the
operation of which determines the aesthetic nature of experience, seems to
be only the obvious observation that people attend with different motives.
(1974, p. 118)
77
The difculty for Beardsley is in balancing the desiderata: making the charac-
terization weak enough to cover all that he wants to cover, yet strong enough
to do useful work. He provides ve criteria, the rst of which he says is
necessary, and any three of the remaining four are sufcient for the experi-
ence to qualify as aesthetic. The necessary condition is object directedness,
which is (roughly) the claim that we are perceptually attending to the object.
The others are felt freedom (a sense of release from wordly concerns), detached
affect (a sense that the objects are set at a distance from use emotionally), active
discovery (a sense of intelligibility), and wholeness (a sense of personal inte-
gration), for each of which Beardsley provides an account. George Dickie and
others have raised questions as to the value of this conception (Dickie, 1974;
Carroll, 1986). The debate, however, does not really stand in need of resolu-
tion. Beardsley describes certain threads that he thinks run through a range
of experiences. If the reader nds this familiar and enlightening, then so be it.
The attempt to use the characterization to ground important theoretical con-
structions must, however, be reckoned a failure if by that Beardsley meant his
attempt to provide a denition of art adequate to our modern notion of that
concept (Beardsley, 1983). The modern concept of art is simply not grounded
in aesthetic considerations. Furthermore, it is not clear that Beardsleys criteria
stand up to much scrutiny; in particular, the discussion of wholeness does
not escape Dickies earlier criticism that the notion is not specic enough to do
any useful work (Dickie, 1974, pp. 184200). Furthermore, the notion of active
discovery (Beardsleys attempt to solve the Kantian problem of how to get
cognitions into the experience) is a fudge, giving us a feeling (a sense) of
thinking going on, which does not entail that thinking is going on. Beardsleys
characterization might be sufcient to distinguish an aesthetic experience from
experiences such as shock or horror; the legacy of Kantian experiences of the
agreeable. At best, however, we are left with an excessively vague description
of a peculiar sort of experience that is not able to do much useful work.
Dickies criticisms dampened the debate on the aesthetic experience for
a number of years. Recently, however, this has made something of a return,
and a denition in the spirit of Beardsley has been given by Gary Iseminger.
Iseminger claims that A work of art is a good work of art to the extent that it
78
has the capacity to afford appreciation (2004, p. 23). Appreciation counts, for
Iseminger, as the aesthetic state of mind and he denes it thus: Appreciation
is nding the experiencing of a state of affairs to be valuable in itself (p. 36).
There are a few things to note about this. First, that what is appreciated is a state
of affairs: what is appreciated is that something has a certain property, not the
thing or the property. The second is that we have to come to know the state of
affairs through experience. The third is that what we value is the experience of
coming to know that a state of affairs obtains, rather than the state of affairs. So
the view is that appreciation (the aesthetic state of mind) is the belief that the
experience of a state of affairs obtaining is good. There are two issues that puz-
zle about this denition. First, there are surely instances of our valuing an expe-
rience of a state of affairs obtaining that are not in the vicinity of the aesthetic.
Take the case in which, running for a train, I fall headlong down the escalator.
Reaching the bottom, I value my experience of the state of affairs that I am in
one piece, in part because I am mightily relieved that I am still able to experi-
ence. The second is that it appears to make the aesthetic state of mind non-
experiential: my experience that a state of affairs obtains is a matter of learning
(by experience) that a certain proposition is true. So the aesthetic state of mind
appears to be the belief that it is good that a certain proposition is true, with the
constraint that I come to believe it is true by experience. However, this does not
seem to be an experience (something that has a duration) at all.
Isemingers approach has some similarities with that of Kendall Walton.
Walton does not claim to provide an account of what anyone has ever meant by
aesthetic. However, he does identify a distinctive sort of value that might qual-
ify with little strain as aesthetic value (Walton, 1993, p. 509). At least some of the
pleasure we take in objects is a pleasure in their capacity to engage us. In listening,
for example, to a Beethoven String Quartet, we take pleasure in the complexity of
the music and the eerie expressive qualities. However, part of the pleasure we take
in the work is an admiration of it for these qualities: a pleasure in the experience
of judging the work or the performance highly (Walton, 1993, p. 504).
We may admire a work for the way it soothes us, or excites us or provokes
us, for the intellectual pleasures it affords, or the emotional ones, for the
insight it provides or the manner in which it does so, for the way it enables
us to escape the everyday cares of life, or the way it helps us face life, and so
on and on. But none of these grounds itself constitutes the works aesthetic
value. If we take pleasure in admiring the work for whatever we are admiring
it for, then this pleasure is aesthetic. (Walton, 1993, p. 506)
Later in his essay, Walton broadens his account such that it is not only pleasure
that might be provoked by the objects capacity to engage us, but also attitudes
such as awe, wonder, and even annoyance.
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Both Iseminger and Walton hold that the aesthetic experience (or state of
mind) involves a reective engagement: in Isemingers case, reecting on the
experience of some state of affairs and in Waltons case, reecting on the value
of the capacity of some object to engage us. The doubts I have about the latter
mirror those I had about the former. The rst doubt is whether admiration of
an objects capacity to engage us is a necessary part of our aesthetic engagement
with an object. Certainly, there is a contrast between our taking pleasure in a
hot shower (Waltons example of a Kantian pleasure of the agreeable) and our
admiring its capacity to provide such a pleasure. However, a more usual con-
trast would be between taking pleasure in a hot shower, and being engrossed
in a production of, for instance, Othello. Ones attention is riveted on the events
as they unfold on the stage; lled with foreboding as Othello is duped by the
unscrupulous Iago, and lled with horror when he eventually smothers his
wife. The kind of reective appreciation of the plays capacity to engage us is
not a necessary aspect of this experience; hence, if it is an instance of the aes-
thetic experience, Waltons theory has not captured it. The second source of
doubt is that Walton allows that our admiration for a works capacity to engage
us might take place in the absence of our experience of the work. For example, I
might admire the capacity of Duchamps Fountain to provide challenges, with-
out my seeing (or indeed having seen) the work. Indeed, the problem is more
general than that. Walton holds that we take pleasure in the objects capacity
to engage us. Like Isemingers account, this looks as if it would naturally be
construed propositionally: taking pleasure in the fact that the object engages
us. However, that removes the rst-order engagement with the object entirely
from the account, which is surely contrary to most peoples conception of the
aesthetic (Budd, 2008). Neither of these doubts is likely to worry Walton, as,
recall, he did not claim that his account captured everything that anyone had
ever meant by the term aesthetic experience. They suggest, however, that the
source of pleasure that he has identied is sufciently far away from the core of
the traditional concept for the debate to continue.
I have focused on the phenomenological approach, as that has been dominant
in the tradition. The content approach can be discussed more briey. Nol Carroll
has given a particularly deationary account of the aesthetic experience. He con-
trasts the content approach with three others: the affect-oriented approach
(which is roughly what I have meant by the phenomenological approach), the
epistemic approach (that of Gary Iseminger) and the axiological approach
(which takes the aesthetic experience to be one valued for its own sake) (Carroll,
2002, 2006). He takes the best argument for the content approach to be the failure
of the other three (Carroll, 2006, p. 70). The account is as follows:
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The account, then, is that the aesthetic experience is simply the experience of
focusing on those things the tradition has bequeathed to us as being artistically
important. This seems to me unnecessarily pessimistic, and I shall shortly come
to one modest version of the axiological account that escapes Carrolls criti-
cisms. Before then, however, let us look at one further version of the content
approach that is less deationary. Jerrold Levinson attempts to distinguish the
aesthetic pleasure we might take in an object from other sorts of reaction we
might have to it. His characterization is as follows: Pleasure in an object is
aesthetic when it derives from apprehension of and reection on the objects
individual character and content, both for itself and in relation to the structural
basis on which it rests (Levinson, 1996, p. 6).
One puzzle with this account is why Levinson favors the conjunction. Surely
there are instances of the aesthetic experience in which we do not reect upon
the relation between the content and its structural basis (Budd, 2008). Indeed,
the conjunction is puzzling in itself: we apprehend the objects individual char-
acter and content (1) for itself and (2) in relation to the structural basis on which
it rests. This certainly includes the cognitive content; however, it is left unclear
what it is to apprehend, for example, a political message for itself, as opposed
to apprehending it to acquire political insight. Later in the essay, it looks less as
if Levinson is arguing for a conjunction. Aesthetic pleasure is contrasted with
the acquisition of insight, and characterized as [an] appreciation of the man-
ner in which, the work being viewed in its proper historical context, these are
embodied in and communicated by the works specic elements and organiza-
tion (Levinson, 1996, p. 7). This makes it look as if what is characteristic of
aesthetic pleasure is our focusing on the way the cognitions are embodied in
81
the works elements and organization, regardless of what those contents are. In
short, Levinson either owes us more of an account of what it is to apprehend
cognitions for themselves, or he owes us an account of why our appreciation
of the way in which the cognitions (no matter what the content in question) are
embodied should be thought distinctively aesthetic.
There are good reasons to think we need to be somewhat deationary. While
it is true that the claim that the aesthetic experience names some mental type
with a distinctive phenomenology is unwarranted, the content account seems
to me unduly deationary. Malcolm Budd has suggested a simple and elegant
account, which stands somewhat in the tradition of Kant. I shall give this in two
steps, rst by focusing on his account of the experience of art, and then more
narrowly on aesthetics. Budd holds that a work of art is valuable as art if it
is such that the experience it offers is intrinsically valuable (Budd, 1995, p. 5).
Intrinsic is here contrasted with instrumental, rather than with extrinsic,
and the experience a work offers is to be understood as the experience of
interacting with it in whatever way it demands if it is to be understood (p. 4). As
there are indenitely many ways in which our experience of works of art could
be intrinsically valuable, the phenomenological approach is undermined.
I shall deal with two criticisms of this approach before moving to the second
step. The rst is that locating the value in the experience to which the works
give rise renders the works instrumentally rather than intrinsically valuable.
However, this is a misunderstanding. The claim is that what it is for a work to
possess intrinsic value is for it to be of such a nature that the experience it offers
is intrinsically valuable; it is claim about the value of the work (Budd, 2007,
p. 363). The second criticism questions the notion of locating the value of a work
of art in an intrinsically valuable experience. That is, we can bring an argu-
ment Nol Carroll uses against the axiological approach to see if it applies to
Budd. Carroll asks whether, to be valuable, the experience needs to be objec-
tively valuable for its own sake or subjectively valuable for its own sake. He
interprets the rst as entailing that the experience possesses no instrumental
value whatsoever, and, of course, has no problem in casting doubt on there
being any such experiences (Carroll, 2006, p. 83). He dismisses the second by
considering two people listening to the same piece of music. The only differ-
ence between them is that one believes his experience to be valuable for its
own sake, and the other believes it to be instrumentally valuable. There are,
argues Carroll, no grounds for claiming that the former and not the latter are
having an aesthetic experience (2006, pp. 856). Clearly, this argument does not
damage Budds position. His claim is that the work is valuable if it is of such a
nature that the experience it offers is intrinsically valuable, which is compatible
both with the experience also being instrumentally valuable and with someone
believing the experience to be instrumentally valuable.
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One further amendment completes the view. As we have seen, Budd does not
think pleasure is adequate to the task of providing the grounds for value. Hence,
in the above quotation, pleasure should be seen as a place holder for the
rewards intrinsic to experiencing a work of art with understanding (Budd, 2008,
p. 28). This, I think, is a defensible account of aesthetic experience.
83
84
that of the properties in virtue of which we value those works. Whichever way
we look at it, then, it seems that the philosophy of aesthetic properties cannot be
isolated from the eld in which they matter most.
Aesthetics targets things that matter to us in at least two ways. First, aesthetic
and artistic experiences yield pleasure and enjoyment, such as when we look
at a painting that we nd particularly delightful and beautiful. Second, such
experiences mean something to us, something important that can be shared,
widely appreciated, capable of withstanding the test of time and of touching us
at the very heart of our humanity. Correspondingly, there seem to be two sides
to the coin here: facing one way is a highly subject-relative kind of satisfaction
based on ones own associations, memories, or individual psychology; facing
the other is a powerful normative force that aspires well beyond the sphere of
the purely personal.
David Hume captures this dual nature of the aesthetic well when he writes
in his essay Of the Standard of Taste that [a]mong a thousand different opin-
ions which different men may entertain on the same subject, there is one, and
but one, that is just and true. For [w]hoever would assert an equality of gen-
ius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton . . . 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. Nevertheless, he continues, it is
also the case that a thousand different sentiments, excited by the same object,
are all right; because no sentiment represents what is really in the object.2 It
follows, for Hume, that beauty cannot actually be ascribed to the object that
gives rise to the feeling of beauty, for [t]o seek the real beauty, or real deform-
ity, is as fruitless an inquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real
bitter.3 Beauty, then, is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the
mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.4
The philosophical problem highlighted by this passage takes several expres-
sions. In the rst place, it suggests that while the normative scope we tend to
attribute to aesthetic assessments is not unlike the one we grant ordinary judg-
ments, at least some aesthetic judgments seem to consist in little more than
the expression of personal preference and emotional disposition. In the second
place, there seems to be a tension between, on the one hand, our individual
experiences and natural inclination to ascribe that which those experiences are
of to the things around us, and, on the other hand, the claim that aesthetic quali-
ties cannot be said to pertain to these objects themselves.
Two principal concerns thus arise. At the ontological level, we may ask
exactly how aesthetic properties should be said to exist in the world, and in
85
86
Aesthetic anti-realism centers around the claim that aesthetic properties are,
fundamentally, not external to our minds but intimately connected to the
expression of our preferences, emotions, feelings, and convictions. As such,
they are not part of the reality of the external world, so to speak, but rooted in
the responses and dispositions of the subjects of experience. While some anti-
realists hold that aesthetic judgments are nothing over and above exclamations
of our own affective reactions, others defend more sophisticated versions of
87
the doctrine according to which those responses are not mere expressions of a
purely personal nature, but can also be subjected to generally applicable nor-
mative standards.9
In addition to the problem of the heterogeneity of aesthetic properties, three
main concerns motivate aesthetic anti-realism.10
Picking up on the great variety of taste that Hume describes so aptly in the
opening of his seminal essay, anti-realists emphasize not only the relativ-
ity of aesthetic taste and the irregularity with which aesthetic character is
perceived,11 but also the impossibility of an agreement or conformity suf-
ciently solid to warrant any genuine claims to objectivity. Echoing Humes
view that [o]ne person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensi-
ble of beauty and that in any case each mind perceives a different beauty,
Alan Goldman argues that aesthetic judgments are so seriously relative to
tastes that even ideally situated viewers will often fail to share aesthetic
judgments.12 That is to say, even those particularly well placed to exercise
aesthetic discernment and assess aesthetic character (i.e., those of us who have
plenty of relevant experience and a duly developed aesthetic sensibility) often
fall short of reaching the same conclusion. As John Bender writes, [s]ome
disagreements are fully informed but just as fully irresolvable, as when two
expert critics disagree whether a given painting is playful or merely trite,
daring in its color treatments or merely gaudy, serious or only self-absorbed,
and so forth.13
Importantly, the concern here is not limited to the observation that aesthetic
taste and perception differs from one person or culture to the next, somehow
restricting the relativity of aesthetic taste to intersubjective relations. The rela-
tivity that challenges realist intuitions and convictions equally affects the same
subject at different times, so that a subject may nd a painting beautiful or ele-
gant at a time T1 but not at T2 (even where the time-span between T1 and T2 is
very short). This point makes room not only for the gradual development of our
aesthetic taste, but also for cases where we quite straightforwardly change our
mind about somethings aesthetic character, perhaps by having our attention
drawn to certain less obvious features that inuence our overall assessment of
the object of appreciation.
This relativity of perception, response, and assessment, together with the
accompanying malleable nature of aesthetic matters, lies at the heart of the anti-
realist position, and is said to impose certain philosophical restrictions on what
our aesthetic experiences can truly be said to lay claim to.
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A closely related source of concern that drives anti-realism has to do with the
metaphysical status of aesthetic properties. For if there is considerable aesthetic
disagreement and the relativity of taste is indeed pervasive in the aesthetic
sphere, it not only follows that aesthetic disagreements are fundamentally
insurmountable, but the outcome must also be that, to use Humes words again,
[b]eauty . . . exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.14 Aesthetic
disagreement, it is held, can only be explained by the fact that aesthetic proper-
ties are not objective features and, as such, seem to have a rather questionable
ontology.
Now if, as anti-realists hold, the best explanation of aesthetic disagreement
is that there is no such thing as an aesthetic fact of the matter, or nothing on the
basis of which it can be established whether a certain thing really is beautiful,
graceful, unbalanced, or moving, what kind of ontology is still available? In
other words, once the possibility of realism and objectivity has been discarded,
how are we to account for aesthetic properties at all?
Many anti-realists endorse an analogy with colors, smells, and tastes, or sec-
ondary qualities. Famously, such qualities are to be contrasted with primary
qualities (such as size, mass, and shape) in virtue of their dispositional nature.
On this analogy, then, an aesthetic property is a disposition (grounded in less
controversial subvening properties) to give rise to certain responses in ideal
critics. In other words, to say that an object O has an aesthetic property P is to
say that O is such as to elicit a response of kind R in ideal viewers of kind V in
virtue of its more basic properties B.15 Aesthetic properties are thus tied to our
responses in so far as what it is for a property to be aesthetic is, precisely, to be
such as to give rise to R in V.
Aesthetic properties are then also relational properties in so far as their man-
ifestation or realization is dependent upon our responses to them. In this sense,
one can say that anti-realism casts the ontology of aesthetic properties in such
a way that its remit is necessarily limited to the sphere of the subject. This par-
simonious ontology goes hand in hand with an epistemology less than hopeful
about any cognitive aspirations that aesthetic judgments may harbor.
The third concern fuelling aesthetic anti-realism has to do with the epistemo-
logical ramications of the subjectivist framework and the philosophical reach,
so to speak, of aesthetic descriptions. On this position, aesthetic ascriptions or
aesthetic property attributions refer to affective states rather than belief states.
89
As Roger Scruton puts it, aesthetic descriptions dont assert that a certain state
of mind is justied but, rather, give direct expression to that state of mind itself.16
In other words, aesthetic judgments dont aim to make claims about states
of affairs in the world so much as to reect some of our reactions to (other)
features of that world. Obviously, this conception of aesthetic attributions ts
neatly into the alternative ontology outlined above: if aesthetic disagreement
is insuperable and aesthetic properties are not external to our minds, the scope
and applicability of aesthetic descriptions is, at best, severely reduced.
How, then, are we to conceive of aesthetic judgments, and what kind of
truth-conditions do they allow for, if indeed any?17 First, anti-realist accounts
of aesthetic attributions assume that the affective nature of the responses
involved in aesthetic descriptions rule out any substantial truth-conditions
of the kind that descriptions statable in belief terms can uphold. That is to
say, since aesthetic judgments are to be understood in terms of non-doxastic
responses and such responses dont set out to capture or map out something
in the external world (as most ordinary beliefs do), aesthetic judgments can-
not aspire to truth or correctness (in the way that most ordinary judgments
can).18 To capture this weaker mandate in philosophical terms, anti-realists
tend to replace talk of truth-conditions by that of acceptability-conditions.
This maneuver seeks to sidestep any difculties that might arise from allow-
ing aesthetic judgments to be epistemologically too demanding for the meta-
physics to follow suit.
Secondly, and on the more sophisticated anti-realist approach alluded to
above, aesthetic attributions can be said to express a non-doxastic response
itself held accountable to a normative standard. On this kind of view one is, to
use John Benders words, not seeing how the work is as much as one is see-
ing the work under a certain aspect, and responding appropriately.19 It is the
affective or emotional response in terms of which the aesthetic judgment is to
be explained, then, that must be held accountable to certain measures of suit-
ability. These measures, although falling short of the criteria for ordinary truth
or falsity, are nonetheless said to have a normative authority sufciently strong
to present a viable alternative to realism and cognitivism.
These three themes constitute the backbone of aesthetic anti-realist doctrine.
How, if at all, can these concerns be addressed? Before examining the realist
rejoinder, it will be helpful to bear in mind that realists dont actively set out to
reject all aspects of aesthetic experience that pose the problems outlined above,
namely, the relativity of aesthetic taste, the problematic ontology of aesthetic
properties, and the limited epistemological authority of aesthetic judgments.
Rather, in general, it is argued that these worries dont have quite such perva-
sive or devastating ontological and epistemological implications as their oppo-
nents assume.
90
The conviction that aesthetic matters are considerably less problematic than
anti-realists would have us believe is the starting point of realist strategy. First,
the relativity of taste is held to be neither as insidious nor as fatal to the possibil-
ity of realism, objectivism, and cognitivism as one might think. For even if we
exaggerate the rate of discord in aesthetic matters (there is, after all, a consider-
able degree of agreement about which artworks are considered excellent, such
as Shakespeares Hamlet or which landscapes are thought particularly beauti-
ful, such as the view from the Mont Blanc), it doesnt follow from that disagree-
ment that there is not in all cases something to agree upon in actual fact. In
other words, the mere occurrence of discrepancy of opinion doesnt in and of
itself settle that concurrence isnt possible by virtue of there being something
external to perceivers that they can agree upon. Moreover, many aesthetic disa-
greements are shown to rest on idiosyncrasies less concerned with establishing
somethings aesthetic character than with reecting ones own attachments and
past experiences.23
Second, a realist ontology of aesthetic properties need be neither enigmatic
nor awkward. Aesthetic propertiesbe they more or less mind-independent
or more or less value-ladenare, fundamentally, perceptual properties. As
such, they operate in roughly the same way as other perceptual properties:
by depending on intricate relations with our perceptual responses, aesthetic
properties are relational or response-dependent by nature. Helping himself to
an analogy frequently used by anti-realists, Frank Sibley compares aesthetic
qualities to color properties in this respect and develops an argument to the
91
effect that if we dont worry about being objectivists and cognitivists about the
latter, there is no need to trouble ourselves on this score over the former either.24
On this line, then, and as we shall soon see in greater detail, something like a
dispositional account of aesthetic properties is actually available to realists and
anti-realists alike.
Contrary to what one might expect, then, most realist accounts grant that
responses, perceptions and phenomenal impressions play an important role in
the ontology and epistemology of aesthetic properties and judgments. Aesthetic
properties are alternatively described as essentially perceptual,25 fundamentally
dependent on sensory responses,26 and even to be conceived as higher-order
ways of appearing.27 Rather than letting this aspect of the aesthetic single-hand-
edly settle the overarching debate in favor of anti-realism, realists thus hold that
admitting these dependence-relations leaves the metaphysical question wide
open. Although beauty may to this limited extent be said in part [to] be in the
eye of the beholderin so far as beauty refers in part to the experience of
some subjectsbeauty is certainly not simply in the eye of the beholder.28 In
other words, they are decidedly not to be accounted for in anti-realist terms.
According to a particularly inuential realist theory developed by Jerrold
Levinson, the content of aesthetic properties and the predicates we use to
ascribe them can be divided into two parts: one descriptive and one evalu-
ative.29 Whereas the rst affords phenomenal or perceptual impressions that
arise in normal perceivers under normal circumstances and can be shared by
all, the second is more closely connected to our axiological commitments and
affective reactions and, as such, allows for the variety and relativity of aesthet-
ics tastes and sensibilities that may seem so threatening to the realist cause.
By accepting the phenomenal nature of aesthetic properties and using it as
the cornerstone of their account, realists thus not only make room for some
anti-realist intuitions and charges at the level of the ontology of aesthetic prop-
erties, but also with regards to aesthetic appreciation and judgment-making.
92
ontology of such properties may not be quite as robust as that of primary quali-
ties, say, they depend upon non-aesthetic features in a way that strengthens the
realists case by enabling appeal to all sorts of (less controversial) properties
in support of our aesthetic assessments. And these appeals, it is held, form a
perfectly respectable base for justifying aesthetic judgments.31 So, just as the
elegance of a portrait by Modigliani depends upon the curve of the lines tracing
the face, the palette of colors used to draw it, and the shapes formed by the con-
trasting tones, so the judgment that this portrait is elegant is grounded on those
lines, colors, and shapes, and can lay claim to correctness in virtue of them.32
There are, then, ways of adjudicating disputes about whether a certain aesthetic
attribution can rightly be made of some object of appreciation even though the
tools available to us in this process call for more than mere reports of individual
pleasures (or pains).33 To use Nick Zangwills words, realists are not in danger
of losing the idea of correctness in aesthetic judgment, given that correctness is
relativized to sensory experiences.34
It is instructive to note that neither realism nor anti-realism in aesthetics are cur-
rently understood as purely metaphysical theories concerned solely with the
ontological status and character of aesthetic properties. As we have seen, the
debate impinges upon a wealth of epistemological and psychological concerns
that have to do with the processes leading up to and proceeding from the per-
ception, experience, and ascription of aesthetic properties. If only for this rea-
son, our answer to the initial question about the kind of philosophical inquiry
best suited to an examination of aesthetic properties should now be clear: mat-
ters of meta-aesthetics are rmly lodged within our discipline partly in virtue of
encompassing such a multitude of issues centered around the broader notions
of aesthetic value and experience.
It is also the case that something of a rapprochement may be observed to have
taken place between both sides of the debate of late.35 Whichever way ones
inclinations fall, it is fair to say that anti-realists have become more demand-
ing with regard to the cognitivist ambitions of aesthetic judgments, and real-
ists have, as we have seen, become more accommodating with regards to the
response-dependent nature of aesthetic properties. Indeed, even for anti-real-
ists wedded to the view that aesthetic judgments must be explained in terms of
projections of our emotions and feelings onto the world, there can be normative
requirements aiming to get, in the words of Cain Todd, other people to look
at, and then hopefully experience, the object in the same or relevantly similar
way to oneself and vice versa where such experiences will not be arbitrary
or whimsical.36
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95
Notes
96
97
1. Introduction
What makes artworks valuable? Most philosophers have offered two general
sorts of answers to this question. Either they have tried to explicate the value of
art in terms of its moral and political value, or they have attempted to describe a
sui generis mode of evaluationaesthetic evaluationfor judging the value of
artworks. Recent developments have complicated matters somewhat, but these
central ways of thinking remain dominant.
Throughout this article, we will focus our discussion on one well-known
and controversial work of art: Leni Riefenstahls Triumph of the Will, a docu-
mentary of the 1934 Nuremberg rally sponsored by the Nazis. It is just as
well known for Riefenstahls pioneering and innovative artistic lm tech-
niques, for which the lm won numerous awards (including the gold medal
at the 1935 Venice Biennale), as it is for the disturbing glorication of Hitler,
the Nazi party, and all of the immoral values for which the party stood. As a
result, there is a tension in our assessment of the lm: on the one hand, this
lm is crafted with careful attention to artistic qualitiesthe lms struc-
ture, the formal visual representations, and the aesthetic features. It is one
of the rst lms to exploit lms formal qualities, by alternating different
imagesof light and dark, of the army and women and children, of the
masses and crowds and the one leader. For these reasons, it is taken to be
one of the most aesthetically important lms. On the other hand, the lm is
immoral in its agrantly positive portrayal of Hitler and the Nazi regime,
and notorious for its endorsement of the cult of Hitler and the passive obedi-
ence of the masses. For these reasons, it is also a paradigmatically immoral
worka work that embodies both the actual evil of Hitler and the Nazi
regime, as well as the grandiose and positive image endorsed by the movie
of Hitler and the Nazi regime. One question for any theory of the value of art
is how well it can handle a case like this. (For a more detailed philosophical
discussion of this case, see Deveraux (1998).)
98
Like any artifact, works of art can have various kinds of value. They can have
economic value, historical value, instrumental value, sentimental value, and
many other kinds. Sculptures make good doorstops and paintings can be sound
nancial investments. But our philosophical interest in arts value is especially
focused on the types of evaluation that have to do with somethings being an
artwork, not a doorstop or an investment. Three candidates for art-specic val-
ues are moral, aesthetic, and cognitive.
The idea that we can measure the value of art using moral standards was wide-
spread in the ancient world; for example, in the ancient Chinese philosophi-
cal tradition, it was widely accepted that music should be judged by moral
criteria (Mozi, 2001/fth century BCE; Xunzi, 1994/third century BCE). Plato
is the best-known Western thinker taking up this view (Plato, 2004/~380 BCE).
Though Plato lacked a concept corresponding to our concept of art, he did dis-
cuss mimesis (imitative practices) at length, and he was particularly concerned
about poetry.
Some of Platos arguments against poetry in the Republic presuppose that if
poetry makes people vicious, then poetry is bad. Plato attempts to demonstrate
that poetry may have deleterious effects on the listeners moral character, and
that these effects of poetry are the primary measure of its value. Thus, Plato
endorses not just a moral standard for evaluating poetry, but a consequentialist
moral standard (a topic we will return to below).
However, there are contrary strands in Plato as well. Some of Platos argu-
ments against poetry and other imitative practices depend not on a moral
standard but an epistemic one. That painting is of objects, which themselves
are mere imitations of true forms, shows that painting cannot be a reliable
source of knowledge. While this has moral consequences, it is also independ-
ently important: paintings lack cognitive value, and this reduces their worth.
Another contrary strand in Plato is his discussion of the beautiful or the noble
(kalon) in dialogues like the Symposium and the Hippias Major. Plato argues that
there is a form of Beauty, and that this form is not reducible to any other form
(except in the sense in which all forms depend on the form of the Good). So
Plato holds that beauty is a distinct and valuable kind, not to be identied with
any moral virtue. However, this view has little application to his views about
poetry and painting, since kalon is used to describe human life more often than
it is used to describe artifacts. (See Nehamas (1998) for more details.)
99
The central idea of the aesthetic tradition, namely, that there is a special kind of
judgment that is employed in the appreciation of natural scenes and artworks,
developed in the eighteenth century. Alexander Baumgarten was the rst to use
the term aesthetic in this way, but it was Immanuel Kants view of aesthetic
judgment that has had the greatest inuence on later thinkers (Kant, 1987/1790).
Kant spelled out a special form of aesthetic evaluation and distinguished it from
100
moral evaluation. Despite the fact that few contemporary thinkers make use of
the particulars of Kants theory, Kants idea that there is a form of evaluation
that is completely separate from morality and politics, and which is aesthetic in
character, is still quite inuential.
Kants view, in rough outline, is that judgments of morality as well as ordi-
nary descriptive judgments involve placing the object being judged under a
denite concept, whereas aesthetic judgments do not. To see that some act is
morally right, or to see that a poem is written in English, is to see it as fall-
ing under a rule, and to grasp it in a particular way. However, to see that
the poem is beautiful is for the experience of the poem to elude ones cogni-
tive grasp almost completely. Apprehension of beautiful things generates a
free play between ones understanding and ones imagination, in which the
understanding fails to place the object under a denite concept. Therefore,
to judge that something is aesthetically beautiful is to say something about
ones experience (in fact, about everyones experience) of that thing, while
to judge that something is morally good or written in English is to say some-
thing about the object. Aesthetic judgments are subjective in the sense that
they are judgments about the experience of the subject. At the same time, this
subjective experience has a universal character, because that experience arises
from universal characteristics of our psychology. So judgments of beauty are
not mere likings.
While the details of Kants view remain contentious, his claim that an aes-
thetic judgment is a different kind of judgment from a moral judgment has
gained wide acceptance, and the specically Kantian ideas that aesthetic judg-
ment is importantly subjective and at the same time disinterested remain inu-
ential (see Guyer (1979)). Since Kant, many philosophers have assumed that
there is some way of judging art that is distinctly aesthetic, and that art and
other objects can be evaluated on that basis.
Perhaps the best-known contemporary view descending from Kant is for-
malism, according to which aesthetic judgments are caused by, and are about,
the formal properties of an artwork: in the case of painting, these are line,
color, texture, and shape (Bell, 2008/1914). Clive Bells formalism offers a dis-
tinctly aesthetic form of evaluation. The idea is that aesthetic evaluation attends
to features that do not have narrative meaning or cognitive content; these fea-
tures awaken distinct pleasures that are themselves intrinsically valuable.
However, Bells formalism faces some serious problems (Carroll, 1989). It
seems to imply that conceptual art (like Duchamps Fountain) has no aesthetic
value, and so seems to miss a lot of the value that art has. The very idea of a
formal property has not been made clear, and some doubt that it can be. And
most important, the theory seems circular: it denes signicant formal features
in terms of aesthetic emotion, but the idea of aesthetic emotion itself was to be
explained by reference to form.
101
These two ideasthat art is valuable because of its moral or political worth,
and that it is valuable because of some kind of distinctive aesthetic worthare
the two primary players in contemporary discussions of the value of art. But
there may be a third possibility: cognitive value.
102
Whether the value of a work of art is moral, aesthetic, or something else, there
is a question of the ground of that value. To what aspect(s) of the work are we
to attend in making our evaluation? What precisely are the criteria for holding
an artwork to be more or less valuable? There seem to be four sorts of answers
to these questions: the consequences of the work for the audience, the charac-
ter and intentions of the artist, the attitudes manifested by the work, and the
works intrinsic qualities. (See Harold (2006) for a discussion.)
103
The idea that a works value lies in its consequences has a checkered history, par-
ticularly, among those who take arts value to be moral. Plato (2004/~380 BCE)
and Tolstoy (1960/1896), for example, emphasize arts potential to have morally
corrupting effects on its audience. Some theories of aesthetic valuefor exam-
ple, reader-response criticismplace the value of art in the experience it gives
rise to in audiences as well.
But the approach is not very popular now, primarily because proving that
works do have particular measurable effects on audiences has been so dif-
cult, and social scientic research on the topic is conicting and inconclusive
(for a skeptical view, see Posner, 1997). There is also a further problem. If the
consequences of the work on its audience do make a work good or bad, then it
seems obvious that works themselves will only be good or bad in a particular
contextif Alice is made vicious by watching Triumph of the Will but Bart is not,
then whether or not The Triumph of the Will is morally bad depends on whether
Alice or Bart is watching it.
A second criterion for evaluating work is to look to the artist, her intentions
in creating that work, or even her overall character. As a basis for criticism,
this approach was famously attacked by Wimsatt and Beardsley in their The
Intentional Fallacy (1946). However, not everyone is persuaded by Wimsatt
and Beardsleys arguments, and many argue that at least some actual or hypo-
thetical artists intentions are always relevant to a works meaning and hence
its value (e.g., Iseminger, 1992).
Evaluating the character or intentions of the artist raises a set of complex
questions. If two Wagners write musically and lyrically identical Parsifals, one
with racist intentions, and one without, do the two otherwise identical pieces
differ in value? It would seem so. But this view is at odds with at least some
intuitions about what makes a work good or bad.
Another view is that artworks themselves manifest attitudes, and that these
attitudes can serve as the basis for our evaluation. Berys Gaut (1998, 2007) is
the best-known contemporary proponent of this view; he analogizes the atti-
tudes of artworks to the psychological attitudes in peoples heads, which might
never emerge in action: for example, a desire to molest children is morally bad,
104
regardless of whether or not one acts on it. A work, then is good (pro tanto) if
the attitudes it manifests are good, and these attitudes can be evaluated morally
or cognitively.
However, this view too faces difculties, for it is not universally accepted
that mere attitudes by themselves are proper objects of moral evaluation. But
even if psychological attitudes should be judged good or bad in themselves, it is
not clear that the same is true for the attitudes manifested by artworks. When
we speak of an artworks attitudes, we do not speak of literal psychological
states, but of properties of inert objects that are metaphorically attitudinal. The
differences between artworks, which have no feelings, beliefs, or minds, and
people, who do, are important.
105
4.1 Autonomism
106
107
The immoralist criticism of ethicism and moderate moralism is that some moral
defects actually seem to enhance an artworks aesthetic virtues, and some moral
virtues actually seem to enhance an artworks aesthetic defects (Jacobson,
1997; Kieran, 2003). Sentimental art, racist jokes, Marquis de Sades Juliette,
Nabokovs Lolita, and Riefenstahls Triumph of the Will have all been taken to be
cases where the immorality of the work seems to increase, rather than decrease,
the works aesthetic value. Likewise, kitsch art is the more aesthetically suc-
cessful the more it depicts simplistic, one-dimensional moral viewsthat is, the
more it endorses a morally defective perspective; Quentin Tarantino movies are
aesthetically successful in large part because of the immoral attitudes toward
violence represented in them. By the same token, some artworks seem to be
aesthetically worse because of their moral virtues. For example, overtly peda-
gogical and morally virtuous artworks tend to be sufciently forced that they
become less aesthetically successful. Consider, for instance, Uncle Toms Cabin,
Albert Speers architecture for Hitler, or many recent mainstream Hollywood
war movies (which glorify and romanticize war to the point of rendering the
lms aesthetically shallow and at). Immoralism is predominantly motivated
by the intuition that some kinds of artworks are aesthetically better in part
because of their immoral features, or aesthetically worse in part because of their
morally virtuous features. Immoralism was advanced as an account that makes
sense of such work.
Immoralists allow that a positive moral feature may in some cases increase
a works aesthetic features and that sometimes an artworks moral defect may
count as an aesthetic virtue. They take the counterexamples to ethicism and
moderate moralism to show that the valence constraint does not hold: moral
virtues can impact aesthetic values negatively, and moral defects can impact
aesthetic values positively. Immoralists think that there is still a systematic
relationship between moral and aesthetic features, but suggest that the valence
constraint imposed by ethicists and moderate moralists is mistaken. Once we
108
eliminate the valence constraint, however, we are still left with systematic
relations between aesthetic and moral features, but they are not ones that the
ethicists and moderate moralists endorse. Instead of the positive-positive and
negative-negative relationship between aesthetic and moral values defended
by moderate moralists and ethicists, immoralists allow for a positive-negative
and negative-positive relationship between moral and aesthetic values.
If this is right, then it is not clear whether, and if so how, the moderate moralist
position differs from the immoralist one. In a similar vein, Stecker (2008, p. 145)
has recently suggested that if immoralism is wrong, the anti-theoretical view
at best devolves into moderate moralismthe idea that moral defects some-
times, but not always, are responsible for artistic defects. Obviously, more
work needs to be done to explain how immoralism and the anti-theoretical
view are related to ethicism, autonomism, and moderate moralism.
109
Most of the positions so far discussed are dened in terms of claims about when
and how moral values impact aesthetic value, and most consider as their central
examples cases where moral values seem to impact aesthetic value. However,
when we think about the interaction between aesthetic and moral values, there is
no reason why we shouldnt consider how an artworks aesthetic value impacts
its moral value. For example, might we not judge some works so aesthetically
disastrous that they are morally repugnant? (This is at least one assessment of
kitsch and sentimental art.) To make sense of such art, we might imagine a new
version of ethicism, say, ethicism2, according to which an artworks aesthetic
virtues always count as ethical virtues, and that an artworks aesthetic defects
always count as ethical defects. Or, we could defend the moderate moralist2
position, according to which sometimes an artworks aesthetic value makes that
work morally valuable. Likewise, we can imagine alternate positions for mod-
erate autonomism, immoralism, and the anti-theoretical view. Indeed, Stecker
(2005) and Bonzon (2003) have both pointed out that the interaction between
moral and aesthetic evaluation can run both waysthe moral inuencing the
aesthetic, and the aesthetic inuencing the moral.
6. Conclusion
It is not easy to understand how moral and aesthetic values interact, and there
are a variety of positions on offer, and even more positions that have yet to be
formulated. As the debate has evolved, it has become clear that there is no sin-
gle question about interaction that denes all these competing views. Rather,
there are a variety of different questions to ask about the nature of the interac-
tion between values. For this reason, the positions surveyed so far are dened
110
Notes
1. Strictly speaking, it is not completely clear whether moderate moralists and immoral-
ists must endorse the systematicity claim. Since moderate moralists simply believe
that sometimes, ethical virtues are aesthetic virtues, the position leaves open whether
this occurs invariably, or irregularly; traditionally, the assumption is that moderate
moralists believe it is invariant for certain domains (and hence moderate moralists and
ethicists disagree on the scope of invariancefor ethicists, invariance occurs across
the boards, while for moderate moralists, it is simply domain specic). However, if
moderate moralists believe that it is not invariable for certain genres, then their view
runs the risk of collapsing into immoralism (if it is not invariable for certain genres,
then it would be possible that within, say, the domain of narrative, sometimes ethical
virtues enhanced aesthetic features and sometimes it did not, which comes remark-
ably close to immoralism).
2. Carroll, 2000, p. 379. Carroll makes a similar statement in a related footnote: The the-
sis that a work might be aesthetically good because it is morally defective is obviously
not an autonomist viewpoint, moderate or otherwise, and so it introduces a new issue
that requires moderate moralism to explore heretofore unexamined options. But Im
not convinced that a moderate moralist must be antecedently committed one way or
another on this issue on the basis of what the moderate moralist has said so far (2000,
p. 379, n. 32).
111
Music has been a subject of philosophical and scientic enquiry at least since
the sixth century BCE, when Pythagoras connected certain musical intervals
with denite numerical ratios. During the medieval period music was studied
together with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as part of the quadrivium
the exact portion of the seven liberal arts. It was not until the eighteenth cen-
tury that music gradually dropped out of the mainstream of what was then
considered science (Cohen, 1984). Philosophers as varied in their commit-
ments and approaches as Socrates, Ren Descartes, Arthur Schopenhauer, and
Ludwig Wittgenstein have reected on music, and they have been motivated
by a wide variety of concerns. Plato and Aristotle write about music in the
context of reections on political matters: the education appropriate for those
who will be rulers, and the nature and obligations of citizenship more gener-
ally. Descartes, in his Compendium of Music (1961/1618) is most concerned with
psychological issues such as the effects of music on listeners. Immanuel Kant
(1951/1790) considers music in the context of his work on aesthetic judgment,
but does not take music to be a very signicant art form. In contrast to all of
these, Schopenhauers discussion of music (1966/1819) is at the very heart of his
work, bound up with his views on metaphysics, aesthetic experience, and the
essential character of human life. Different philosophers treatment of music
have ranged from brief, incidental remarks (yet often extremely penetrating
and suggestive) to sustained and elaborate discussions. Philosophers who have
written about music have possessed various levels of musical competence. At
one extreme are those such as Descartes and Kant who seem to have had little
feeling for music. (Descartes once confessed in a letter that he could not dis-
tinguish between a fth and an octave.) At the other extreme are those such as
Friedrich Nietzsche and Roger Scruton, who have enough musical skill to be
composers. Together with the card-carrying philosophers who have written
on music, there have also been contributions of philosophical interest by critics,
musicians, and composers, including Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and
Aaron Copland.
While music has long been an object of philosophical speculation, the past
30 years or so have seen a great increase in the interest paid to music by analytic
philosophers. Articles on music are now found regularly in the major journals
112
While music has been a topic of philosophical speculation since earliest times,
philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition have turned their attention to
it comparatively recently. Nelson Goodmans Languages of Art (1968) has been
the inspiration for much recent work on three topics in particular: Musics pos-
sible capacity to represent non-auditory phenomena; the problem of musical
expression; and the ontological status of music and musical works. Of these
three traditional topics, it is the latter two that have aroused the most interest
recently and seem likely to continue to be widely debated.
1.1 Expression
People readily describe music in emotional terms: A work may be said to be sad,
joyful, yearning, or wistful, to name only a few possibilities. What is it to hear
music as expressive of emotion? Do we mean that music is literally sad, in the
way that a person is sad? Or is this a metaphorical or gurative use of sadness,
in the way that juries are said to weigh the evidence in their deliberations?
Much of the philosophical writing on musical expression has been a response
to the account laid out by Kivy in his The Corded Shell (1980), later reissued as
Sound Sentiment (1989). Kivy defends what he calls the cognitive theory of
musical expression, whereby we recognize emotion in music as a perceptual
113
property. Kivys main target was the arousal theory of musical expression; on
this account claims such as this music is sad entail that the music makes suit-
ably prepared and engaged listeners feel sadness. Kivy vigorously defended
the claim that music does not customarily arouse garden variety emotions
like sadness, fear, happiness, or anger in listeners in ordinary aesthetic contexts.
Rather, music is expressive in virtue of its resemblance to expressive human
utterance and behavior. For example, certain vocal and bodily patterns are typi-
cal of sad peoplethey tend to speak slowly, in low tones, and move as though
under strain. Music expressive of sadness will resemble these featuresit will
likely be slow and in a low register.
One of the most surprising developments in response to Kivys work has
been a revival of arousalism. These recent developments are sufciently differ-
ent from the philosophical predecessors that Kivy attacked to be called neo-
arousalism. Colin Radford (1991b) argued that, just as certain colors (primrose
yellow) have a tendency to cheer, and others (ice blue) have a tendency to
calm, so too will certain music tend to arouse the emotions it expresses. Derek
Matravers, in Art and Emotion (2001) has offered the most fully worked-out ver-
sion of neo-arousalism, and he qualies his view in a number of important ways
to make it more plausible than its predecessors. First, music is said to arouse
feelings in listeners, rather than full-blown and cognitively complex emo-
tions. Second, when listeners hear, say, sad music, their response is the arousal
of pitythe same feeling that would be appropriate in response to the expres-
sion of sadness by a human being. Although the view that music expresses the
emotions or feelings it arouses may have some intuitive appeal, it has not with-
stood philosophical attacks on a number of crucial points (Kingsbury, 2002;
Kivy, 2001). In his most recent thoughts on the subject (2007), Matravers recog-
nizes that neo-arousalism has not been widely adopted.
The main philosophical rivals to Kivys account of musical expression are
those of Davies (2006) and Levinson (2006). Davies calls his view appearance
emotionalism and it is a resemblance-based account. Claims such as the music
is sad are meant to be taken literally rather than metaphorically. Sadness is an
objective property of the music, not a subjective feeling in listeners. However,
the sadness of the music is a response-dependent property. This is to say, sad
music is music with the power to create a certain characteristic response in suit-
ably prepared and engaged listeners. Absent the possibility of such listeners, it
would make little sense to say that the music was sad. But all of this raises
a question: What does the sadness of sad music resemble? It seems odd to say
that sad music resembles a sad person, or even that it resembles the sounds
that a sad person might make. A more promising reply is that the music calls to
mind the movements, comportment, and posture of a sad person.
According to Levinson, to hear music as expressive is to hear it as an instance
of personal expression, specically, an expression of a mental state. Whose
114
mental state? Not necessarily that of performers or composers, but the men-
tal state of the musics personaan indenite agent, minimally character-
ized by the emotion listeners hear expressed in the music. Although Levinsons
account has been subject to criticism (Boghossian, 2007; Davies, 2006; Scruton,
1997), it has the advantage of anchoring musical expression rmly in human
psychological states.
1.2 Ontology
115
has argued that in the rock tradition, the primary work of art is the record-
ing itself, rather than a song or other sound structure that is then embodied
in particular performances. (Brown (2000b) defends a similar view; see also
Fisher (1998a).) Davies argues that Gracyk has not paid adequate attention
to the importance of live performance in the rock tradition. After all, almost
every rock group starts out by playing live, and before the advent of inexpen-
sive recording technology and do-it-yourself promotion and distribution over
the internet, relatively few groups could make professional quality sound
recordings. Davies proposes that works in the rock tradition fall into a differ-
ent ontological category: works for studio performance. See also Kania (2006)
for an overview and alternative account.
The most radical proposal about the ontology of music is from Aaron Ridley
(2003), who suggests that the whole enterprise is misguided and would be bet-
ter discontinued. In fact, he claims that serious engagement with music may be
hindered by the pursuit of ontological issues; for a critique, see Kania (2008).
Given the fruitfulness of this area for the philosophy of art in general and for
music in particular, Ridleys proposals are unlikely to be followed.
116
117
Long intellectual and cultural traditions in both the East and the West insist
on the connection between music and morality. The concept of harmony has
been prevalent in discussions of ethics since at least the writings of Heraclitus,
and is invoked by both Plato and Aristotle (Zink, 1944). In Book 3 of Platos
Republic Socrates discusses the inuence of music on the soul and argues that
only certain musical modesthose which support courage and manly behav-
iorshould be permitted in the ideal city. Aristotle ends his Politics with a dis-
cussion of musical education and the role of music-making in a complete life.
Christian and Islamic moralists alike found the use of music during worship
118
119
4. Biomusicality
The study of music as a biological function that humans may share with other
animals is recent. The Institute for Biomusicality was founded in 1995, and
held their rst international meeting in May 1997. The volume based on the
proceedings of that workshop (Wallin et al., 2000) is an important source in
this new area of study, as are The Biological Foundations of Music (Zatorre and
Peretz, 2001) and the special issue of the journal Cognition (100:1), devoted to
the biology of music published in 2006. There are several reasons why consid-
eration of music as a biological function might be signicant for philosophers.
Philosophy strives for a synoptic view of its objects; a broader perspective
120
There is now a signicant body of research suggesting that human infants are
born with the cognitive capacities to understand and appreciate music. Even
before one year of age, infants have musical abilities that are surprisingly
similar to those of adults (Trehub, 2000). Infants and adults appear to perceive
novel melodies in fundamentally similar ways (Trehub et al., 1997b). Six- to
nine-month-old infants process consonant (small-integer) intervals better than
dissonant (large integer) intervals (Schellenberg and Trehub, 1996). Indeed, this
bias in favor of consonant intervals is seen in infants, children, and adults, all
of whom retain more information from sequences whose component tones are
related by small-integer relations (Trehub, 2000). The fact that small-integer
intervals are important in all known musical cultures is thus likely not to be
a coincidence; rather different musical traditions all exploit natural human
processing capabilities. Infants are also biased toward perceiving regularity
and metricality, and able to perceive slight disruptions of these (Drake, 1998).
Indeed, it is surprising how little difference there seems to be between adult
and infant music processing capacities. Despite the great increases in cognitive
capacity from babyhood to adulthood, and the cumulative exposure of years of
hearing music, researchers have not found corresponding qualitative leaps in
music perception. The differences they have found between adults and babies
are on the order of subtle quantitative changes (Trehub et al., 1997b).
Just as all cognitively normal human beings have an innate capacity to learn
the language in which they are raised, all cognitively normal humans are able
to understand the music of their own cultures. Only a few cannot, due to either
congenital defects (tone deafness) or brain injury (see Sacks (2007) for an over-
view and discussion). Levels of musical sophistication vary across the popula-
tion, from those who comprehend music but cannot sing or play an instrument,
to professional musicians with expert abilities. While most people probably fall
somewhere in the middle of this continuum, it should be noted that levels of
musical competence may depend more on cultural expectations than on innate
121
122
not so far been well supported by the empirical evidence. Rothenberg (2008)
suggests that whale song has an aesthetic dimension for the whales and may be
a means of expressing emotion.
123
Note
1. The historical and conceptual background in which the modern system of the arts
was consolidated is laid out by Paul Oskar Kristeller (1951 and 1952). A recent cri-
tique is offered in Porter (2009), and a defense by Shiner (2009), with further discus-
sion by Carroll (2009) and Currie (2009).
124
125
Certainly the origins of language and literature are deeply intertwined, and
the circumstances that facilitated or constrained the evolution of one were inher-
ited by the other. For instance, our capacity for vocal imitation, unmatched by
any other species, is thought to be at the very origin of speech. (Darwin himself
already thought so: I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imita-
tion and modication of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals,
and mans own instinctive cries, aided by signs and gestures.7) The ability
to imitate the sounds we hear gave us an incredibly efcient and ne-tuned
means to indicate that we belong within a given group, and the auditory capac-
ity that enables this imitation also allows us to recognize members and outsid-
ers immediately and almost unfailingly (think of foreign accents). This same
aptitude enables us to imitate the sounds made by other animals: a skill espe-
cially apposite when we are able to imitate the sounds made by animals larger
than ourselves. Some think this ability to size-exaggerate by vocal imitation is
not only a keen defense strategy, but also a courtship one. Insofar as vocal tract
length is correlated positively with body size in humans8 and human males
are further enabled to exaggerate their size vocally by a second descent of the
larynx that occurs in puberty (a change that does not occur in women), a taller
human male will, in principle, be better able to protect those around himnot
only by being already tall, but also by being capable of giving the vocal impres-
sion of being even larger.9
Our striking capacity for vocal imitation is altogether in excess of what would
be needed for successful communication.10 This embarrassment of riches, if
recent scholarship on the origins of language is correct, is amply evident in the
phonetic richness of contemporary Southwestern African languages11 and in
the musical language of a tribe such as the Amazonian Pirah.12 So, if communi-
cation alone does not explain our capacity for phonetically complex, expressive,
and often musical speech, then perhaps, besides indicating group member-
ship and serving as a defense strategy against other animals, this capacity also
served as a tness indicator in those particularly adept at it, and we can see here
the beginnings of an evolutionary rationale for the origins of peculiarly literary
skills. Darwin speculated that sexual selection alone accounted for the origins
of music and literature:
[P]rimeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably rst used
his voice in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing, as do some
of the gibbon-apes at the present day; and we may conclude from a widely-
spread analogy, that this power would have been especially exerted during
the courtship of the sexes,would have expressed various emotions, such as
love, jealousy, triumph,and would have served as a challenge to rivals. It
is, therefore, probable that the imitation of musical cries by articulate sounds
may have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions.13
126
This sexual selection model is, evidently, a competitive one. The extrapolation
here from the early, more purely musical model is that, as language devel-
oped, those better adept at using it would be more successful on the romantic
market, and push further linguistic development along the same lines of pho-
netic rhythm and expressiveness, semantic expressiveness, novelty, and insight,
syntactic ingenuity, and so on. The explanatory value (if any) of the competi-
tion model notwithstanding, if the claims above regarding group membership
and defense strategies are correct, then cooperation, and thus natural selection,
are part of this story also, and we need not choose one model over another to
explain the origins of expressive speech and its descendants, poetic and narra-
tive ones. Let us designate as beautiful speech the phonetically expressive
and semantically inventive and signicant speech that goes beyond what is
needed for the practical purposes of imitative vocalization. Perhaps beautiful
speech was what set some of us apart, even if its survival-promoting basis
beneted the group as a whole. It is more costly, in evolutionary terms, to
produce a sentence that rhymes, or alliterates, or involves an interesting meta-
phor, than one that is mere plain, everyday talk. So the ability to produce speech
of this sort can be seen as a sign of (1) greater attunement to sounds, which we
have seen was important in imitative vocalization; and (2) greater attunement
to connections between things not obviously connected: a sign of general intel-
ligenceor, as Aristotle noted long ago in his Poetics, even of genius.14
The analysis so far would account for what today we would call lyric poetry
or poetic uses of language. But a similar cooperation-and-competition model
might account for the origin of stories in particularwhich is naturally not to
say that one practice developed independently of the other. It may be claimed
that knowledge about our conspecics behavior was, as it still is, a necessity
in deciding whom to trust, and, therefore, that being able to tell sufciently
convincing stories about their behavior spurred our ability to tell ever more
complex stories, since, the more complex the story, the less likely it was that
it was concocted for self-serving purposes.15 Such a gossip-system account
of the origins of our capacity for narrative clearly works on the competition
model. The telling of stories, however, may also be understood via the coop-
eration model. In early epic and drama, we see the telling and retelling of the
same storiesstories about gods, heroes, and important families. People joined
together to hear these stories told and see these stories enacted. If these ancient
practices of which we do have evidence may serve as possible clues to even
earlier practices of which we do not (and it is surely a question whether they
may thus serve, since we must hypothesize a continuity for which we have no
evidence), we may see these gatherings as fostering group cohesion, both in
coming together for the event and in learning the ethos of ones tribethe val-
ues, beliefs, examples, commitments, emotions, desires, behaviors, myths, mor-
als, manners, ideals, feelings, and so on.16 Narrative in such cases is reinforcing
127
ones belonging in a group, rather than serving the aims of individual learning
about whom to trust within ones group.
A similarly cooperative idea would trace the origins of lyric poetry in partic-
ular to the soothing effect of lullabies and humming, in turn (so the claim goes)
a development of sounds made while food gathering in groups, when sudden
silence would indicate that one might have noticed a predator.17 While it is evi-
dent one must exercise some circumspection in both developing and subscrib-
ing to such evolutionary hypotheses, we may nevertheless charitably admit that
they are not inconsistent with the history of the lyric, a history of personal, inti-
mate, subject matter matched by a personal and intimate performance setting
clearly in contrast with the public epic and drama. Interestingly, besides map-
ping onto the epic/drama versus lyric distinction, the public/private also maps
onto the male/female realms. If early cultures (such as the Classical Greek one)
and contemporary bardic practices (such as those of the Griots of Central and
West Africa, the Bertsolari of the Basque Country, the nomadic bards of Central
Asia, the epic bards of the Balkans, and the repentistas of northeastern Brazil)
are anything to go by, the epic and the drama were the exclusive realm of male
bards (the public), whereas womens preserve was the lullaby and the lyric (the
private). Indeed, though we have famous ancient lyric male poets (a man could
cross lines), we have no famous ancient epic or dramatic female poets.
We have thus gone from imitative vocalization, to phonetically complex and
musical vocalization, to chanted and expressive speech, or beautiful speech.
Darwin claimed that poetry may be considered as the offspring of song;18
we may say, in his spirit, that literature in general may be considered the off-
spring of poetry, or, more accurately, of versied language. In other words, that
all literature began with phonetically signicant patterning, whether it was in
genres that today we would recognize as the lyric (personal expression), the
epic (storytelling), or the dramatic (enactment). Phonetic patterning was not
merely useful for us as a mnemonic device, although it certainly was that also:
it was, before serving that purpose, a naturally developing manner of express-
ing ourselves vocally in virtue of our imitating sounds in our environment for
practical purposes (group membership, defense strategies, tness indicator).
Or so I claim. Perhaps the pleasure we derive from patterned speech ultimately
traces back to the skill necessary for it being an indicator of something desir-
able, namely, tness, in turn explained by indicating group membership and
ability to defend oneself and others by size-exaggerating.
Whether we speak of this speculative proto-literature, or of early literature
in general, it is often noted that it served primarily religious, funerary, didactic,
biographical, or other typically occasional purposes. This points to two fun-
damental aspects of what literature has been for nearly all of its history. First,
it has mostly been an activity, involving temporal events, often public, whose
occasional recording in writing was principally a function of the socioeconomic
128
status of its participants and of the nature of the event. Second, literature was not
primarily made for the sake of what we today would consider artistic expres-
sion (or for the sake of fullling some other exclusively or primarily artistic
function). That is, for most of its history, most of literature was made with some
goal other than what we, today, might consider an artistic goal. While the rst
aspect clearly raises the issue of the ontology of literary works (or activities)
in a new manner, the second raises the question of what makes a given text or
linguistic activity a literary one. The issues are closely intertwined, most obvi-
ously by our generally being more inclined to confer the title of art on more
or less stable entities that we might call works than on activities that may
never be repeated, or that may even be, in principle, unrepeatable. Let us con-
sider the relationship of literature to art and the issue of how to dene literature
before dealing with the ontological question.
Must something be art in order for it to be literature? Both terms, in the sense
in which they are understood today, are of recent vintage; indeed, their emer-
gence is more or less concurrent, and it is only with their emergence that this
can be a question at all. It is generally thought that the various contemporary
approaches to the denition of art, indeed the very idea that the various arts
are susceptible of a general denition, can be traced back to the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment, a time when, after a couple of centuries of revolution-
ary scientic innovation, the urge to classify and compile human knowledge
took hold (not for the rst time, to be sure). It is to this period that we owe
the modern encyclopedias (Chambers, 1728; Diderot and DAlembert, 175172;
Britannica, 176871), modern dictionaries (Robert Cawdrey, 1604; Dictionnaire
de lAcadmie franaise, 1694; Samuel Johnson, 1755), and, nearer to our concerns,
Abb Charles Batteuxs now much cited Les beaux Arts rduits un mme principe
(1746) [The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle]. Batteux not only proposed the
imitation of beautiful nature as the principle unifying all the arts, but also placed
poetry (the then used name for literature in general) under that umbrella, as
the imitation of beautiful nature by means of measured discourse (i.e., metrical
language).19 This view of the history of aesthetic thought was rst proposed by
Paul Oskar Kristeller in 19515220 and, although it has not gone unchallenged,21
it is largely accepted, or presupposed, by contemporary philosophers of art,
some of whom have recently argued that we should reject Batteuxs legacy.22
The term literature, for its part, is said to derive from a persons being liter-
ate, that is, well educated and well read; in other words, a person of letters, and
is thought to have emerged at about the same time when changes in academic
education were taking place in Europe.23
Now, one must be mindful of the fact that the recent vintage of a term or con-
cept does not, of itself, make it illegitimate. Placing art in its historical context
does not entail that its emergence did not answer to a felt need to set certain
practices and objects apart. Indeed, with all due respect to saddle-makers, it
129
is hard to see, today, what reason we might have to group their work with
paintings.24 Both activities, it is true, require techn or ars, that is, skill whose
development requires training, but while saddle making remained a useful
art (even when the saddle is painted), painting has moved on to new directions
indeedperhaps even partly as a result of the emergence of the modern notion
of art. That said, the lines drawn by Batteux and subscribed to by most thinkers
since him were perhaps based on too narrow a notion of the practices he set
apart, and above, those he left behind. The idea that art involved the imitation
of beautiful nature not only divested carpentry, medicine, archery, rhetoric,
statesmanship, and other practices of the title art; it also contributed to an
aestheticism about art that ultimately divested the new arts of their broader
human signicanceat least in theory, if not necessarily in practice. Literature
in particular is not, and never was, merely the imitation of beautiful nature by
means of measured discourse, as Batteux would have it. First, nature is not
always beautiful, and neither is that part of nature imitated by authors;25 sec-
ond, nature is not always imitated in literature; third, literature is not always
metrical. But not all writers have agreed with the prevalent aestheticizing of art
or literature:
If literature were just a subspecies of the category art, and if art were
something that is only properly understood and appreciated under aesthetic
principles [e.g., the disinterested contemplation of beauty26], then our
literary and cultural lives would be much impoverished.27
130
approaches to art consistent with one another, they are particularly well com-
bined when it comes to literature. So, adapting Carrolls suggestion, philo-
sophical inquiry about literature today would benet by focusing both on the
broader human signicance of literary practices (i.e., their signicance beyond
the connes of what we might consider art today) and on the narrower,
medium-specic aspects of the craft (i.e., linguistic manipulation, structure,
etc.). In other words, the philosophy of literature would do better by moving
away from the top-down approach that starts from a preconceived notion of
art and then looks at candidates for the label literature from that perch,
and toward a bottom-up approach that considers the long history and varied
manifestations of cultural practices involving the linguistic medium. A look at
the history of literary practices, and how they might have evolved, such as the
one offered here, naturally points us in both directions. That is, insofar as litera-
ture evolved from prior uses of phonetic, syntactic, and semantic manipulation
and innovation, and insofar as it began as mainly occasional activity, that is,
language used in a special manner for a specic occasion, be it ritual prayer, a
wedding song, storytelling, or a funeral oration, we would do well to under-
stand how the manipulation of the linguistic medium affects both our under-
standing of a given work and its aesthetic qualities and effects upon us,30 and
we would do well to investigate the practices in which these literary activities
were, and are, embedded. This may not be easily done nor culminate in a set of
literary works neatly divided from non-literature, and it may turn out that art
is dispensable as an organizing concept. But the neat division was never made
possible by an art concept at any rate, so this is no relative disadvantage of the
bottom-up approach. Indeed, dispensing with art we dispense with the
need to clarify two concepts or practices (not to mention how they are related)
rather than one.
If literature need not be art, then, what might a denition of the practice look
like? Indeed, once we have dispensed with art, ought we not do the same with
literature? Note how, in the passage quoted earlier, Carroll proposes that we
ask not What is literature? but What is tragedy? and What is comedy? in
lieu of the art question. This is even more narrowly conceived than the question
What is drama?, which would encompass both those practices. Traditionally,
literaturepoetry, to be more accuratehas been divided under three head-
ings: drama, epic, and lyric (but Aristotle, in his Poetics, also mentioned other
types of literary practices, such as the dithyramb, and mimespractices that
may be dead for us today). Today we have an array of literary categories that
might replace the What is literature? question:
131
4. What is a biography?
5. What is an autobiography?
6. What is a memoir?
7. What is poetry?
8. What is narrative poetry?
9. What is epic poetry?
10. What is dramatic poetry?
11. What is the play?
12. What is lyric poetry?
13. What is the poetic duel?
14. What is the (literary) essay?
15. What is the speech or oration?
16. What is the literary diary?
17. What is the literary letter?
132
as has been noted here, most literary activity throughout the millennia has not
been done for its own sake, but for a particular occasion or purpose.
Another question concerns stories and expressions of thoughts and feelings
we would not assign to any of the literary categories listed earlier, such as news
articles and, say, therapy sessions or journal entries. Regarding the former, it
must be noted that ancient as well as contemporary bards are often also news-
casters. That said, we should not conate the person with the practice: while the
person who conveys the news and recites a poem may be the same, the practice
under which each activity is performed need not be the same. Still, the story of
the Trojan war was, at least at the beginning, also news, and sometimes news
articles, speeches, and journals stand the test of the time and continue to be read
long after their practical purpose is gone. The reason can only be that they are
appreciated for their stylistic and humanistic value, values that emerge over
and above the original practical goals to which they were put: pieces where
language calls attention to itself, sometimes to the extent that it may distract us
from what is being said, and where the particularities of the subject may lose
interest while the message being conveyed retains its hold on our attention and
reection. To say this is not to say that such survival beyond original purpose
will be predictable in advance. Moreover, and in part for that reason, it may not
be wise to draw too strict a line between one practice and the other. As noted
above, literary practices have and will continue to evolve, and the same goes for
the non-literary practices whose medium is language. The newsman of Roman
times is not the news reporter of today, and even in modern times the manner
in which the news is conveyed has undergone major changes. The same goes
for the scientic and the philosophical paper.
The emergence of the term literature in academic circles and in a writing
culture also led to a focus on the literary work as a stable entity with a stable text
that is written down; as something that is produced only by those with literacy;
as something that is read, rather than heard. This, too, is an unfortunate (and in
practice elitist) narrowing of what literature is and of its breadth and possibili-
ties. Addressing now the ontology of literature, it is clear that recent work in the
philosophy of literature has relied too heavily upon the written text to establish
the identity conditions of literary works, often arguing that textual changes must
always result in a different work. Even when philosophers have challenged this
view, they have done so by envisioning new types of relationship between a
textual inscription and the abstract entity that is presumably the literary work.
For instance, Paisley Livingston (2005) proposes a locutionary approach to
individuating texts in response to syntactical accounts such as the one offered
by Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin (1986) and speech-theoretic accounts
of the kind proposed by William Tolhurst and Samuel Wheeler III (1979). First
Livingston shows the syntactical approach to textual identity defended by
133
134
author; these syntactic strings may have specic font, formatting, and rubri-
cation, whenever these are relevant to the meaning intended by the author.36
Those inscriptions whose characters were meant to be grouped together by the
author will form the text of a work:
On this view, two identical inscriptions may nevertheless not correspond to the
same text, in which case it would naturally follow that they do not correspond
to the same work, either. On the other hand, two inscriptions that do corre-
spond to the same text may yet not correspond to the same work. The reason
for this is that an utterances illocutionary force and generic afliation are not
determined by the locutionary act alone; that force and that afliation bear on
what an author intends to accomplish and on the success of that intention.38 For
instance, I may, by means of the same string of words as you, intend to create
a serious poem, while you intend to create a sarcastic aphorism. Or I may be a
Pierre Menard and recompose the entire Don Quixote text and nevertheless
produce a different work from that of Cervantes.
Livingston does not explicitly tell us what he thinks constitutes a work, but
one may surmise from his views on texts and versions that a work will com-
prise a text as dened together with illocutionary intentions, including inten-
tions involving genres. His account constitutes progress in relation to those of
Goodman and Elgin, and Tolhurst and Wheeler. It is not, however, without
its own difcultiesdifculties that arise for an ontological account written
from the perspective of a writing, or inscription, culture. If I follow Livingston,
we could have a situation where a syntactic string S as intended by Peter cor-
responds to text A, and an identical syntactic string S as intended by Paul
corresponds to text B, where these are both primary tokens, that is, nal-edit
inscriptions. A copy of S as it was intended by Peter will be a copy of Acall
it A*. A copy of S as it was intended by Paul will be a copy of B; call it B*. But
since it is irrelevant how those copies come to be, it seems that we must accept
that inscription A* is identical to inscription B* and, by transitivity of identity,
A will also be identical to B, which on this view should not be the case. So
Livingstons locution-as-intended approach still seems to leave us with some
of the same difculties we saw in Tolhurst and Wheelers pragmatic account
namely, those involving the status of the copies of a primary tokeneven while
it solves some of the textualists problems.
135
136
among themselves. They do so because they are working within a writing cul-
ture, a culture that requires printed works and consequently stable, in this case
ideal, texts. Arbitrary choices are inevitable: compare choosing the denitive
version of a jazz tune from one of its myriad performances.
Could a text-based ontology accommodate this textually uid aspect charac-
teristic of much of the worlds literature? Livingstons locution-as-intended
account of texts really is an inscription-as-intended account: his ontological
criteria center around intended and grouped characters in a notation scheme
used in a target language. But in the case of many literary works, the inscrip-
tion is non-existent, as in the case of traditional oral poetry. Moreover, works
that are only performedonly utteredwould seem to lack a primary token
on this account; in which case, it seems, they could never be copied! On the
other hand, if a poet creates and performs a poem simultaneouslythink of
poetic duels such as exemplied by todays rapperssomeone else with a good
enough ear and memory could repeat her very words. That is a case of copy-
ing a poem, it seems, and yet there need be no characters or notation schemes
at work in the mind of the copier: the person could be illiterate, or not a speaker
of the language (sometimes actors learn how to sound out sentences perfectly,
without knowing what they are saying).41
About three decades ago, J. O. Urmson argued that, contrary to rst
appearances, literature is a performing art, and he suggested that we view
literary works as a recipe or set of performing instructions for the executant
artist.42 This approach ts well with oral literary traditions; as we have seen,
in these the important thing was typically to learn the themes and meter of a
work, specic words being secondary to that goal. Similarly and more recently,
Peter Kivy (2006) defended the idea that All of the many copies of Pride and
Prejudice are tokens of a type, but that type is not the work: it is the notation of
the work; the work is instead instantiated by its readings, which in turn are to
be construed as performances.43 Indeed, why should our ontology give priority
to the written text, when that seems to be no more than a convenience, an aid
to memory, a means to make the work accessible to more people, more times?
Literature, as we have seen, did not begin with the written text; it is an ars of
speech, not of writing. Urmson and Kivy both endeavor to take this impor-
tant oral dimension of literature into account in their ontologies; however, they
both still hang on to the written copy as the recipe, the score, the medium that
makes possible the instantiation (though they differ in how they construe that
instantiation). But oral poets have no need for that. They learn directly from
more experienced poets by listening to and practicing with them. If we are to
retain the type/token ontologyanother important questionit may be more
accurate to call the instances of literary works their enunciations (whether
audible to others or silently to oneself), so as to remove any dependence on an
inscription or annotation. Moreover, such enunciations need not be construed
137
138
If evolutionary theory and speculation are right, we have some 40,000 years
of oral literature, and a mere 5,000 years of recorded literature, which, however,
was not widely available until the invention of the printing press in the 1440s,
that is, some 600 years ago. Oral literary traditions still exist in various parts of
the globe, and indeed have resurfaced in modern urban culture, in such prac-
tices as rap contests and spoken poetry, often among groups that are undere-
ducated or even illiterate. Philosophers of literature today would do well to
extend their vistas beyond the connes of written literature, and open their
theories to popular oral practices that are, at the end of the day, what was there
at the very beginning, and that inform everything literary done since.45
Notes
139
140
partly of holding our attention, since we more willingly follow the poem when read;
and partly through them there arises in us a blind consent to what is read, prior to
any judgment, and this gives the poem a certain emphatic power of conviction, inde-
pendent of all reason or argument (1969, Vol. I, 51, pp. 2434). Wittgenstein, too,
thinks otherwise: Can anything be more remarkable than this, that the rhythm of a
sentence should be important for exact understanding of it? (1980, Vol. 1, p. 378).
31. Livingston, 2005, p. 116, as cited.
32. Ibid., p. 117.
33. Borges, 1964, pp. 3644.
34. Livingston, 2005, p. 117.
35. Ibid., p. 118.
36. Ibid., p. 122.
37. Ibid., p. 123.
38. Ibid., p. 127.
39. Ibid., p. 128.
40. Ibid., pp. 1301, my emphasis.
41. One could argue that native and uent speakers of a language have an internal,
implicit, notational scheme, one that includes the division into words, phrases, and
sentences, plus the grammatical rules governing how words can be sequenced.
Indeed, part of learning a language, native or foreign, is learning how to segment
what at rst sounds like an unsegmented string of meaningless sounds, and the
various ways in which the segmented parts can be put together. That is one reason
why nursery rhymes are pedagogically important, for they teach children to recog-
nize the semantic importance of differences between similar sounding words (cat/
bat/mat), by learning to segment down to the phoneme. However, as the example of
actors performing in a foreign language should show, this is not necessary for suc-
cessful (oral) copying; actors in such situations would be analogous to any mechani-
cal copying method of an inscription, where the copying mechanism cannot be said
to know what is being written.
42. Urmson (1977/2004).
43. Kivy, 2006, pp. 4 and 63 respectively. See also Attridge (2010).
44. Kivy argues that in silent reading of ctional works, I am a performer, my reading
a performance of the work. It is a silent performance, in the head. I am enacting,
silently, the part of the storyteller. I am a silent Ion. . . . It is not a movie or a play in
the minds eye: it is a story telling in the minds ear (2006, p. 63); he acknowledges
that this may be a minimal performance, but a real performance for all that (p. 12).
For reviews of Kivys book challenging his conception of performance, see Davies
(2008), Feagin (2008), and Ribeiro (2009).
45. Certainly other questions of a philosophical nature arise in connection with lit-
erature that are not treated here. These include questions about the relationship
between form and content; about whether literature conveys truths, and truths that
could not have been conveyed by other means; about the nature of ction; about
the role of authorial intention in ascertaining the meaning of a literary work; about
metaphor and other tropes; about literary value; and many others. Discussion of
these important questions is easily found in the principal aesthetics journals, and in
other general aesthetics readers, bibliographical references for which may be found
in Chapter 20, Research Resources in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art.
141
1. Introduction
142
143
The rst serious departure from the traditional Literary Model did not abandon
that model entirely. Rather, the idea was to modify and moderate that model
such that theatrical performances could be recognized as artworks in their own
right without displacing the ontological primacy of written scripts that is at the
heart of the Literary Model.
One such modied model is known as the Recipe Model.6 This view char-
acterizes play scripts as types and performances as tokens of those types. An
act of interpretation creates each token, in the way that following a recipe for
a meal creates a token of that meal.7 Each token is an artwork in its own right
to the extent that carrying out the theatrical recipecasting and blocking the
play, constructing the sets, scoring the music, designing the lights, embodying
the characters, putting all these ingredients togetherinvolves a high degree of
artistic perception and ability. Nonetheless, the play script/recipe remains onto-
logically primary on this view: one cannot cook without it. On this view, even
if the recipe is not written down before the act of cooking, the cooks always
have a recipe in mind. Haphazardly throw together a bunch of ingredients
may not be a very good recipe, but even this simple directive is a recipe, argue
proponents of the Recipe Model.
The alternative to the Literary Model, in both its strong and its modied Recipe
Model forms, I will call the Performance Model. This is the view that theater
as an art form is primarily (on some versions, essentially) action shared between
someone who shows (an actor) and someone who watches (an audience). There
are several different versions of the Performance Model, but all versions con-
ceive of play scripts as important to understanding the ontological, epistemo-
logical, and axiological dimensions of some theatrical performances even as
they reject the notion that scripts are essential to theatrical performances per se.
As I noted in the Introduction to this chapter, the most important and conten-
tious recent debates in the analytic philosophy of theater concern the proper
formulation of the Performance Model.
What I call the Production Model takes the Recipe Model as its point of depar-
ture.8 This view appropriates the Recipe Models type/token structure, except
144
it designates productions as the types rather than the play scripts. The view
proceeds by arguing that even when a theatrical performance is of a written
play script, there are aspects of the performance that are not only in excess
of that play script but are completely divorced from any consideration of it.
These aspects, therefore, cannot be characterized as interpretations of the play
script. A production may make choices about casting based on the pool of
actors who show up for auditions. It may make choices about set design based
upon the materials in the designers shop, or based on the designers desire to,
this time around, design a set that uses large, free standing black and white
panels instead of realistic-looking walls. Many of the productions aesthetic
properties will depend on whether the space the production is staged in is
congured as a proscenium (the traditional conguration, with audience and
actors directly facing each other and the actors playing out to the audience), a
thrust (the stage thrusts out into the house, the audience sits directly in front
of the stage but also on either side of it), or an arena (the stage is surrounded
by audience members on all sides). While some of the choices a production
makes may be properly characterized as interpretations of the play script, oth-
ers simply reect a particular companys physical conditions of production,
whereas others may be a function of an aesthetic purpose over and against
anything found in the script. A script may simply provide the occasion for
the production, but it need not have any ontological primacy with respect to
that production.9
145
We can expand on this claim, as does one theorist, in terms of the ction of the
performance. A theatrical performance does not comprise a ctional world that
facilitates the audience seeing through to some reality that the ction stands for
or signies; rather, theatrical performance is a real event. A view that privileges
text over performance tells the following story about how audiences perceive
performances:
[T]he events that actually transpire in the theatre assume signicance only
insofar as they apprise the audience of some other event, often ctional,
always absent. The audience looks at the stage in order to look beyond the
stage. In performance, actors cease to exist as or for themselves, and become
instead the stand-in for an absent and perhaps nonexistent other.13
There is also a weaker version of this story that conceives the ctional and
performative aspects of a performance as existing side by side, but in such a
way that an audience member can only focus on one or the other at any given
moment: either I am conscious of Lawrence Olivier playing Hamlet, or I am
conscious of Hamlet, but I cannot be conscious of both at the same time.
The Ingredients Model, on the other hand, holds that, rather than a theatri-
cal performance signifying or existing side by side with the ctional story of
its script, the ctional story structures the real event of performance. A leading
proponent of the Ingredients Model calls this the inction of a performance
the ctional schema that structures the performance event. A theatrical per-
formance also has outction, which is the narrative content that we extract
from the performance event through an act of interpretation.14 So perform-
ances do not interpret scriptsthey use scripts to structure the performance
event for both actors and audience, and thus make the performance intelligible.
Audiences may interpret the performance in such a way that the story of the
script is derived. However, the inction alone is often sufcient to render a
moment meaningful in the theatre.15
Proponents of the Ingredients Model believe that it gets rid of the notion,
embedded in both the strong Literary Model and the modied Recipe Model,
that theatrical performances are of something extraneous to performance;
namely, the play script.16 This notion assumes a stable and coherent standard
for determining whether a theatrical performance is sufciently faithful to a
written text in order to count as a performance of that text (or a token of that
type). The Ingredients Model, however, dees anyone to nd such a stable and
coherent standard.
146
147
revision and even rewriting during the process of staging. Certain theaters,
like the Actors Theatre of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky,22 actually spe-
cialize in helping authors develop new plays and to this end employ a staff
of dramaturges and a company of actors whose task it is to stage the play
as a way of developing it. These theaters are patronized by audiences who
know that they are participating in the development of a new play, and
who respond to performances accordingly. Sometimes, audiences are even
invited to participate in a talk back session with the playwright and the
cast to discuss what worked and what didnt. It is at best awkward to say
that performances at such theaters are of a written text, since the perform-
ances are explicitly designed to improve upon the performed text, that is, to
generate a new (if similar) text, rather than to serve as faithful vehicles for,
or interpretations of, an established text. Once again, an Ingredients Model
seems more plausiblethe original written text is one of the elements that
go into the creation of the revised written text. The revised text may or may
not closely resemble the original, but whether it does or not depends at least
as much on how the staging of the original works out and how an audience
responds to this staging.
One can take issue with the Ingredients Model for not going far enough in its
efforts to ontologically decouple theatrical performances from written texts. The
Ingredients Model attempts to show that many theatrical performancesthose
that signicantly alter the elements of a written script because of the conditions
of production or to make some independent aesthetic statement, those that
rely on a script with no single, authoritative version, those that are deployed
with the express purpose of developing a new script, and script-less improvi-
sationsshould not be viewed as ontologically dependent on written scripts.
Many other theatrical performances, however (arguably, the vast majority of
theatrical performances), are faithful renditions of stable, established texts.
Productions based on such scripts mostly make choices in service of some inter-
pretation of that text. The success of these productions is often measured, by
the audience and by the theater artists themselves, by comparing the theatrical
performance to the text. Perhaps this is not the most exciting theater. It certainly
is not todays avant-garde theater. But does not this theatrical practice exist?
And does not the Literary Model, or at least the moderate recipe theory, explain
the ontology of this practice? Put another way: are not theatrical performances
that arise out of this practice ontologically dependent on the written text that
the production is of?
148
Critics of the Liveness Model cast doubt on the necessity of the features it picks
out: (A) a puppet theater, or a theater of robots, does not really involve anyone
showing;24 (B) a play could proceed in exactly the same way whether or not
anyone is in the audience; (C) there is no difference between a play seen from
the place of performance and a play seen via some televisual medium a thou-
sand miles away; (D) that same televisual medium can record a performance
for later viewing.
Proponents of the liveness model have the following responses to these
criticisms:
(A) A puppet or a robot performer that is controlled by a human being in
real time during the course of a performance is merely a type of mask or prop
employed by that human being. Therefore, someonethe human puppeteer/
controlleris the real performer who is showing something to the audience.
If the performance is entirely conducted by an automaton that is running
a preprogrammed set of movements, we have an art form much more akin
to a dynamic installation than to theater. Any attempt to equate an automa-
tons performance with that of a human being, no matter how wooden or
mechanical the human beings performance, conates axiology with ontol-
ogy: a human beings mechanical performance is probably not very good, but
the human being is still, in principle, capable of responding to her audience; the
automaton is not.
(B) Two identical performances are run. One is performed for a copresent,
cotemporal audience. The other is performed for an empty house. The on-stage
149
components of the two performances are a precise match for each other. Does
this example not illustrate that an audience is not necessary in order for a the-
atrical performance to occur?
The argument against this conclusion begins with the need to distinguish
theatrical performance from other, similar types of phenomena. The stuff of
theatrical performance is, at bottom, human action.25 Human action, however,
is an incredibly broad category. How do we distinguish theatrical action from
all other types? Proponents of the Liveness Model contend that the only dif-
ference between theatrical action and other types of action is that the former is
intended to be shown to someone watching:
Showing and watching are functions, and they can be performed by the same
person. So in one sense, the Liveness Models critics are correct that the pres-
ence of an audience is irrelevant to the ontology of theatrical performance, if
by audience we mean people other than the performers themselves. However,
someone must fulll the watching function in order for any human action to
count as theatrical. And someone always does: no actor, no matter how much
she is caught up in her role, ever forgets that the actions she is performing are
meant to be watched, even if she is the only one watching.
(C), (D) Just as theatrical human action needs to be distinguished from
other types of human action, so must we distinguish theatrical watching and
showing from other types of showing and watching, since other art forms
lm, televisionalso are at bottom of the art of showing and watching. On
the Liveness Model, the distinguishing feature is not just that theater, unlike
lm or television, takes places with the audience copresent with the perform-
ers in real time. This fact is merely the condition for the possibility of theaters
truly distinguishing feature: theatrical performers, since they share the same
space at the same time with their audience, must contend with their audience
members. At the same time, the audience must contend with the fact that they
are in the presence of the performers. This contention is not an impediment to
150
the performance. On the contrary, it is, according to the Liveness Model, the
ontological foundation of every theatrical performance. So the very fact that
a theatrical performance occurs in real time and in the physical presence of its
audience means that the possibility exists for the unexpectedfor spontane-
ous creation on the part of the actors and spontaneous happenstance on the
part of the world.27 Of course most performances of any given production
turn out to be largely indistinguishable from one another. The point is that,
because the performance is live, it is impossible to tellunlike with successive
viewings of a lmwhether the next performance will be like all the previous
others.
[E]very time one [performs live] one has to decide, based on the audiences
responses, whether this time a particular set of tactics will work. But the fact
that this decision has to be made during the course of every performance
. . . means that every performance has a unique set of circumstances.
Because this set of aesthetically signicant circumstances is based on the
interaction of a particular audience with a particular cast on a given night,
it is unscriptable, either beforehand or afterward, since every night the actors
will have to decide if the way they have been doing it will work for this
particular house.28
But why describe this interaction between actors and audience as contention?
In order to contend with someone, one must pay attention to their every move;
one must watch them carefully and think about what their actions and reac-
tions and appearance mean on visible levels and on hidden levels.29 Contending
with someone also implies that the person contended with is, at least to some
extent, your adversary and that you must be wary. There is danger in conten-
tion. There is the thought that just as you are contending with them, they are
contending with youand that means you must protect yourself.
Actors on a stage are extremely vulnerable to the people in the house. Not
only do they open themselves up emotionally to the rigors of the role and
the gaze of the audience, they also run the risk of being misidentied as their
characters. Audiences are equally vulnerable. They are addressed by the per-
formance, and its existence and quality depends on their reactions. Particular
audience members need not be aware of this fact, but they will feel it acutely if
an actor suddenly jumps off the stage or addresses them directly. And in live
theater, whatever the acting style or production style of the performance, what-
ever has happened in rehearsal and in performance before now, this is always
possible. This is just to say that both parties are subject to the dangers inherent
in any live interaction between people in a room together. The playwright and
director (and painter and composer, for that matter) never meet their public in
this way.
151
On the Liveness Model, there are two necessary conditions for theatrical per-
formance: liveness and enactment. Liveness, discussed above, refers to actors
and audience members sharing the same space at the same time. Thus live-
ness is shorthand for three separate necessary conditions: (1) someone show-
ing, (2) someone watching, and (3) the copresence and cotemporality of the
two. Enactment refers to a pretense, engaged in by both performers and audi-
ence, that the performance is somehow other than itself.
Why is enactment or pretense necessary for theatrical performance? Just
as it was necessary to distinguish theatrical action from human action and
theatrical showing/watching from cinematic and televisual showing/watch-
ing, so it is necessary to distinguish theatrical liveness from other types
of live performances, such as lecturing, speech-making, news reporting,
and storytelling. On the Liveness Model, the difference between theatrical
performance and these other types of live performance is that the former
involves a kind of pretense. The pretense may be that the actors are not
themselves but characters; or that the action is something other than what it
actually is; or that the action is taking place in a location other than where it
is actually taking place; or that the audience is not there; or that the audience
is something other than an audience watching a performance. Enactment
is, therefore, shorthand not only for the various ways in which the pretense
might unfold but also for the fact that both performers and audience must
be aware of and must (at least tacitly) consent to the pretense. An illustra-
tive example:
152
9. Conclusion
Notes
1. Although some of the issues discussed in this chapter are explored by practitioners in
the elds of theater studies and semiotics, this article only focuses on recent work in
analytic philosophy of theater.
2. [V]ery few professional philosophers have focused in depth on questions pertaining
to the phenomena of theatre or performance (Krasner D. and Saltz, 2006, p. 1).
3. In a now familiar history of the rise of the concept of the ne arts in the sixteenth
through the eighteenth centuries (Kristeller, 1951, 1952), theatre as an art form was
almost always discussed as a form of dramatic poetry or literature. Simply put, any
153
values of the theatrical performance worth talking about were taken to be those
of dramatic literature. If there were features of the performance that merited com-
ment, such as the delivery or persona of the actress, these were evaluated prima-
rily in terms of their contribution to the audiences grasp or appreciation of the
literary work being presented. . . . This traditional view is still with us (Hamilton,
2001, p. 557).
4. The [theatrical performance], though an attraction, is the least artistic of all the
parts, and has the least to do with the art of poetry. The tragic effect is quite pos-
sible without a public performance and actors; and besides, the getting-up of the
[performance] is more a matter for the costumier than the poet (Aristotle, 1984,
pp. 2323).
5. Blocking is the process of physically arranging the movement of actors on stage.
Blocking notes are notations made by actors during the staging process, for exam-
ple, say next line at center stage, then cross left. When working on their scenes with
the director, actors typically make these notations right onto their scripts. The stage
manager usually keeps a master script containing every actors blocking notes.
6. Nol Carroll is the author and chief proponent of the Recipe Model. His articula-
tion of this view may be found in Carroll (1998, pp. 21213). See also Carroll (2001,
pp. 31316).
7. Richard Wollheim has a similar view of the role of interpretation. See Wollheim
(1968, pp. 6475).
8. David Saltz articulates the Production Model in Saltz (2001, pp. 299306).
9. Ibid.
10. The Ingredients Model is developed by James Hamilton in Hamilton (2007).
11. Hamilton, 2007, p. 31.
12. Ibid., p. 33.
13. Saltz, 2006, p. 204.
14. Ibid., p. 214.
15. Ibid., p. 216.
16. Hamilton, 2007, p. 33.
17. Ibid., pp. 4150.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., p. 25.
22. The Actors Theatre is home to the well-known Humana Festival of New Playsan
annual showcase featuring new work by both well-established and novice
playwrights.
23. Osipovich, 2006. Paul Woodruff, although he does not put the point in terms of live-
ness or unscriptability, holds a similar view to the extent that he believes theater is
essentially a matter of someone showing and someone watching or, as he calls it,
The Art of Watching and Being Watched. See Woodruff (2008).
24. James Hamilton discusses puppet theater in this context in Hamilton (2007, p. 58).
Philip Auslander examines the robot example in Auslander (2007, pp. 87103).
25. Even the most avant-garde plays still contain human action. Samuel Becketts
Breath consists entirely of recordings of various types of breathing played on a
stage strewn with rubbish. At no point does an actor appear on stage. Nevertheless,
the action of breathingeven disembodied and cannedis still human action.
26. Osipovich, 2006, pp. 4656.
27. Ibid., p. 463.
154
155
156
(Beardsley, 1982; Carroll, 2003, pp. 58393; Carroll and Banes, 1982; McFee,
1992, pp. 6787; Sparshott, 1988, pp. 26496; 1995, pp. 1153). I also leave aside
the issue of how education in dance can uniquely contribute to the social-
intellectual development of todays youth and the concomitant question of how
dances developmental potential might be realized most fully in the context of
general education (HDoubler, 1940, pp. 5968; McFee, 2004). Finally, I do not
address the subject of style, nor do I take up the question of how important
dance-related aesthetic properties are best understood (Cohen, 1982, pp. 4557;
Sparshott, 1995, pp. 32534). These are important issues, ones with which any
person interested in dance aesthetics should become acquainted. For now,
however, I would like to broach a new topic in the philosophy of dancethat
of dances purported claim to be an ephemeral art form.
Ask any dancer what she thinks is special about her art, and she is likely to
respond without pause: dance is an art of the moment. It is remarkably com-
mon for dancers and choreographers to declare that artworks created in the
medium of dance are more eeting than are those created in the artistic tradi-
tions of music and drama. The general sentiment among practitioners seems
to be that capturing or holding onto dance art is futile because it is in the
moment of a dance performance that a dancework achieves physical exist-
ence, and every performance momentnot to mention every dancing bodyis
ineluctably unique. As noted dance critic and scholar Marcia Siegel famously
put it: dance exists at a perpetual vanishing point (Siegel, 1972, p. 1). It is
interestingand, I contend, philosophically importantthat Siegels provoca-
tive assertion has achieved something akin to the status of a mantra within the
dance community. But what does the claim that dance exists at a perpetual
vanishing point really mean?
A rst thought might be that Siegels sentiment is just a fancy way of express-
ing the uncontroversial descriptive claim that dance is a temporal performing
art (McFee, 2001, p. 546). When dancers say with pride and conviction that it is
a fundamental feature of their art form that it is ephemeral, they might simply
mean that their particular performances of dance art are constantly disappear-
ing as their personal dancing moments recede into the past. Although dance-
works are not typically created through the composition of a text that serves as
a recipe for future performancesand most danceworks are not transcribed
into any kind of systematic text once completedthere are a number of pow-
erful symbolic systems available for notating works of dance art that can be
used to produce a set of performance instructions comparable to a composers
score or a playwrights script. (The most popular of these are Labanotation for
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158
danced in the practice hall would have to be rejected or, at least, radically rede-
scribed. If those who take danceworks to be on an ontological par with events
are correct, then it is just plain false to say that what I did in the dance studio
yesterday was rehearse Martha Grahams artwork Lamentation. But, of course,
this is the most natural way to describe what I was up to when I repetitively
executed a certain sequence of movements in a seated position while wearing
a long, stretchy swath of fabric.1 And not only is this locution natural from the
point of view of those who do not support the view that danceworks are ephem-
eral in virtue of the fact that they are unrepeatable goings on that unfold in
the context of public dance performance, but those dance writers who claim to
advocate this ontological view often belie their commitment to its metaphysical
consequences by talking about rehearsals of Grahams Lamentation and per-
formances of Grahams Lamentation as though works of dance art can, indeed,
be wholly present on a number of different occasions. Such writers also under-
mine their professed theoretical commitments by making critical comparisons
between dance performances that presuppose that two or more dance events
are instances of the same dancework. For example, many say without hesita-
tion things such as, Mark Dendy Dance and Theatres performance of Beat was
technically and artistically superior to the recent performance by the University
of Washington Chamber Dance Company without qualifying such sentences
to render them consistent with their underlying ontology.
In addition, defenders of this brand of post-structuralist metaphysics are
hard-pressed to give an account of dance notation that is consistent with the
role scores actually play in the danceworld. After all, what is the notation
specialist dutifully transcribing into symbolic language if not the dancework
itself? If what she scores is not a particular work of dance art but is only some-
thing that happened during some occasion of dancing, then why should anyone
care aboutlet alone dedicate hours toassiduous translation of her score in
the hope of producing a performance that complies with it as fully as possible?
In short, standard danceworld understandings about rehearsal, notation, and
dance criticism would need to be dramatically altered if the ontological situ-
ation is as the person who thinks dance is an ephemeral art means dance-
works do not endure suggests. Butin practicesuch adjustments are not
made. More importantly, they are not made even by self-proclaimed defend-
ers of the metaphysical picture sketched here. Furthermore, it is not at all clear
what kind of post-structuralist redescription could satisfy the danceworlds
implicit commitment to repeatability given that it is manifested in different
ways in the activities of rehearsal, notation, and critical comparison between
performances. As a result, we are well advised not to interpret the claim that
dance is a (uniquely) ephemeral art form as an expression of the belief that,
unlike musical works or plays, artworks created in the medium of dance do
not persist.
159
Perhaps the right balance between a reading that is too weak and one
that is too strong can be achieved if we construe the sentiment that dance
is an ephemeral art as expressing a special kind of axiological commitment.
This remark might, for instance, bespeak a communal attitude of tolerance
for change with respect to choreography that has been previously performed.
After all, in the danceworld there does seem to be a widespread and deep-
seated allegiance to the idea that a relatively high degree of exibility in terms
of the movements that are danced in the performance of, say, Mark Dendys
Beat is acceptable (Sparshott, 1995, pp. 397419; Van Camp, 1982, ch. 4). Such
exibility is, in fact, generally heralded as aesthetically desirable given that it
is taken to contribute positively to the vitality of the relevant dancework as it
unfolds on stage. Although some works are admittedly more exible in terms
of movement sequences than others, many choreographers are committed to
the idea that performance authenticity can be achieved only when dancers
are permitted to own the works they dance, that is, when they are given the
artistic right to make choreographic adjustments as these are required by their
individual body-types or by divergent performance conditions. So the claim
dance is an ephemeral art might really mean that the choreography typically
associated with any given work of dance art is transitory insofar as it may be
altered to achieve its best effect in light of the particular talents and needs of the
dancers who perform it.
The statement that dance art is ephemeral might also be taken to convey
the belief that, while danceworks do endure across (or can be instantiated in)
multiple performances, theylike totem poles, persons, or works of land art
eventually suffer natural decline and, nally, irreversible death. In virtue of
the oral-kinesthetic nature of the art form, many dance practitioners maintain
that works of dance art have performance lifespans characterized by continual
growth and development. It is also widely maintained that the only way to
keep danceworks artistically alive is to pass them from dancing body to danc-
ing body. This is why, even in those cases where a score is available to assist
in the transmission of a particular dancework from cast to cast, it is often a
condition of setting a performance of this work from the score that new danc-
ers are coached by a style expert. These individuals are not authorities with
respect to dance notation, but are dancers intimately familiar with the original
choreographers aesthetic values, that is, persons who know the relevant cho-
reography from the inside out. Without the kind of training that only a per-
son who understands what it feels like to dance a particular work can provide,
newer performances of older danceworks often lack the specic movement
qualitiesand, hence, the particular artistic featurestheir choreographers
carefully crafted them to have. As a result, the claim that dance is an ephem-
eral art might express a basic danceworld norm according to which respecting
the artistic achievements of dancemakers means treating works of dance art as
160
aesthetically deceased when they have not been performed for so long that they
are all but lost to the kinesthetic memory of community members.
To summarize: dance is often claimed by practitioners of the art form to have
a distinctively ephemeral character, and I have suggested that the best way
to understand this pervasivebut puzzlingclaim is as the articulation of an
institutionally basic set of dance values. This raises the question: where does
the danceworlds commitment to ephemerality come from?
The idea that dance art exists at a perpetual vanishing point plausibly emerges
from several different aspects of dance practice. First, it is imperative for the
dancer to have her mind completely focused on the present moment during
performance. Congratulating oneself for having just pulled off a perfect triple
pirouette is certain to result in a wobbly pench and fretting over a bungled
entrance is almost sure to undermine ones partnering abilities. Although it is
important for all performing artists to adopt a past is past attitude, the need
to have ones attentions fully in the now acquires a different kind of urgency
in dance in virtue of the wholly physical nature of the art form. It is, after all,
artistically acceptable for Glenn Gould to focus his performance attentions on
only the sounds he produces by depressing clustered sequences of ivory keys.
As a musician, he is permitted to let his natural physical predilections take hold
in performance and, thus, to sway, hum, and frown as he plays the Goldberg
Variations for a live audience. Dancers, however, do not have any such luxury.
It might be objected that music is not the most apt performance example
here. After all, the actress must also attend to how she looks on stage. Indeed,
the job of the dramatic performer is prima facie more complex than that of the
dancer given that the actress must focus on the bodily postures she adopts, the
facial expressions she makes as she delivers her lines, and on her vocal inec-
tions and the rhythm of her speech patterns. In light of the nature of her artistic
task, it would seem that the actress is likely to be at least as physically engaged
in the moment of her performance as the dancer is.
While this may be true, it is also plausible that the way the dancer must inhabit
her performance moments is importantly different from the way in which the
actress is present in hers. First, most danceworks do not utilize vocalization or
the recitation of text to help audiences grasp the relevant narrative or emotional
ideas. As a result, the dancers focus must be on both the technical aspects of
her physical appearance (Am I making a pretty picture when I pique into
this arabesque?) and on the subtle physical changes that mark the difference
between an arabesque that expresses grief and one that expresses joy. Second,
161
162
A second reason for which the dance community is drawn to the notion of
ephemerality as a core dance value is that dance history has contributed to the
prevailing opinion that works of dance art are neither static nor permanent.
The idea of the dancework as a stable, enduring art object is a distinctly twen-
tieth-century notion, one that is plausibly the product of analogizing dance to
other art forms in an attempt to improve its artistic status. In the 1800s, when
dance rst emerged as an autonomous art,2 there was no assumption that cho-
reographers produced xed artworks that would be performed without sig-
nicant emendation year after year. Instead, dances were madeand radically
alteredto accommodate the technical demands of the theater, the cultural
concerns of the day, and the artistic talents of the dancers. From our current
vantage point, it is shocking to read about the extreme differences between the
ballets mounted under the title Swan Lake between 1877 and 1895 (Cohen, 1982,
pp. 315). While the idea that two versions of the same ballet might have little
in common upsets contemporary sensibilities, the danceworld has maintained
the legacy of this idea in its general endorsement of the sentiment that dance-
works should be allowed to grow and change as the timesand the dancers
require. The dancer is, after all, neither a tuba nor a canvas. She is an embodied
artist, one whose medium is her own very particular muscles, joints, and limbs.
Recognition of the fact that every dancing bodynot to mention every danc-
ing personis importantly different from every other underwrites the accepted
view that a dancers need to perform authentically may trump choreographic
command. And this generates the sense that works of dance art are ephemeral
insofar as they may (to some imprecise extent) be remade by the dancer in the
moment of performance without violating any artistic norm.
The recognition that dance is an embodied art and that, as Francis Sparshott
has noted, the dancers body is not simply an instrument she plays but is also
the physical manifestation of her unique values, concerns, idiosyncrasies, and
life experiences points to a third reason for which the danceworld is committed
to ephemerality, namely, art dance has grown out of a long history of under-
standing the human body in motion as a domain of both cosmic power and as
the expression of personal freedom (Sparshott, 2004, pp. 2804).3 And it is a
historical fact that ballet and modern dance have not emerged from a cultural
vacuum. Instead, their roots are rmly planted in the world of sacred ritual
and communal celebration, a world in which the recognition and active explo-
ration of the human condition of embodiment is routinely taken to affect the
physical world beyond the dancers immediate environment (as in fertility or
rain dances) and to cement social bonds (as in marriage or ceremonial dances).
Given that the body is no mere machine but is the corporeal aspect of a living,
thinking, feeling person, who is both part of the natural world and part of social
communities, it has long been believed that to truly dance in any context
whether to bring on the rains, to celebrate a marriage, or to play Giselles mad
163
sceneone must move truly. That is, one must inhabit ones body thoroughly
and completely in the moment of the dance. And, from a sociocultural point of
view, the distinctive power of dance has been widely taken to consist in the dual
nature of this activity. The dancer celebratesand draws on the transformative
potential ofhuman freedom by moving in special ways that are immediately
responsive to, that resonate in, and that directly affect the character of his local
environment. But, he simultaneously conrms the limitations of all corporeal
beings by, for example, making manifest our inescapable condition as creatures
subject to the force of gravity.
In short, it is important to remember that dance art is not just one more cul-
tural gimmick like the hula-hoop or the pet rock, a mere aesthetic pleasantry
designed to keep us amused. Instead, the world of contemporary dance art is
founded upon long-standing cultural traditions that reect substantive aspects
of non-dance life: communal hierarchies, the conditions requisite for social
acceptance, the joy of birth, the inevitability of death, and the painful process of
growing up, among other things. In light of this, dance art cannot be aestheti-
cally appreciated in the way one might delight in the skilled work of the master
bricklayersavoring only its demonstration of technical prowess and its for-
mal features. Instead, dance calls both dancer and audience member to attend
kinesthetically to his status as an embodied cultural entity and to, thereby, real-
ize in his own physical being the special kind of power and freedom that is the
natural endowment of every human being. The artistic potency of this aware-
ness is what many dancers maintain elevates their art above the level of the
merely aesthetically interesting to the level of the aesthetically profound. And
this heady train of thought conduces to the view that dance is an ephemeral art
in that, by their very nature, all such moments of heightened bodily awareness
and embodied artistic power are eeting.
Although this review of certain aspects of dance practice may help explain
why dancers and choreographers often speak of their art as essentially ephem-
eral, it does not yet tell us how this ubiquitous acknowledgment of the impor-
tance of ephemerality affects the aesthetic norms of the danceworld. Nor does
it indicate how the danceworlds commitment to ephemerality may have impli-
cations for topics of concern among philosophers of dance. I now turn to a brief
exploration of these issues.
When noted dance critic Arlene Croce reects on the status of dancework
revivals and the use of lm to preserve dance art, she demonstrates how the
164
In this dense but rich passage, Croce expresses several concerns that illustrate
the axiological consequences of taking dance to be an ephemeral art. First,
Croce maintains that we cannot save the moment of a dance performance on
video without considerable aesthetic loss. When we try to capture dance on
lm, we unwittingly compromise the artwork we aim to preserve by failing to
do it artistic justice. Implicit in Croces critique is the claim that dance, as an art
of the moment, is fully artistically accessible only in the kinesthetic interac-
tion between an animate dancing body and an animate watching body. Thus,
since most danceworks have not been designed to be appreciated on screen but
to be enjoyed in the context of live performance, when we observe a trace of a
dance concert on our televisions or our computer monitors, we lack the materi-
als necessary to fully grasp the aesthetic essence of the artworks we mean to
appreciate.
I suppose Croce might agree that viewing a at, 24-inch, pixilated represen-
tation of Mary Wigmans Seraphic Song could afford audiences historical context
for, and improved technical understanding of, certain aspects of contemporary
dance art. Nonetheless, I imagine she would also say that publicly exhibiting
old dance footage is ultimately injurious to the danceworks captured on mag-
netic tape because their artistic power can be realized only in the audience
members immediate experience of the dancer qua embodied artist. She might
also claim that preserving works of dance art on lm bespeaks an attitude of
artistic disrespect toward their creators, given that many choreographers intend
their works to be experienced specically in live performance. In short, the con-
nection suggested earlier between ephemerality and embodiment looms large
in Croces comments, and it seems to follow from this connection that dance
qua ne art can (in most cases) be fully understood and appreciated only in the
context of the theater, since it is only here that the audience members kines-
thetic reactions to the dancers movements can be fully realized.
In one way, what Croces reections suggest seems right: it is at least prima
facie plausible that the distinctive power of dance is best accessed in live per-
formance and that in even the very best dance lms something aesthetically
165
substantial is absent. But in another way, Croces suggestion is less than com-
pelling because it is somewhat mysterious. What, exactly, is the aesthetically
important something that is lost when we watch a dance on screen? A natural
response might be that what is missing is some kind of kinesthetic intensity on
the part of the viewers. But this intuitive answer raises the crucial philosophi-
cal question: in what way, if any, do our bodily reactions to dance performance
contribute to our aesthetic understanding and appreciation of works of dance
art? This is a question that deserves more thorough treatment by aestheticians
than it has yet received.
It has been argued by some philosophers that while our kinesthetic responses
to dance art may be a source of private delectation, they cannot contribute to
our understanding or appreciation of danceworks qua art objects because our
bodily reactions are simply too subjective to serve as the basis for objective
critical judgments and fruitful community discussion (Best, 1974, pp. 14152;
McFee, 1992, pp. 26373). Others have argued that our empathetic physical
responses to live bodies in motion are, in fact, central to our understanding of
dance art (Martin, 1995, pp. 1725) or, more cautiously, that they contribute
positively to our ability to identify fundamental aesthetic properties of dance-
works (Montero, 2006). The chasm between these two philosophical camps is
wide, and it is not obvious how to bridge it. It is, however, clear that any philo-
sophically acceptable attempt to respond to the theoretical gap that is present
in current discussions about the relevance of kinesthetic responses to dance
appreciation will have to be both conceptually credible and fully responsive
to the danceworlds commitment to the idea that part of dances ephemeral
character emerges from the fact that danceworks are designed to effectand
to be appreciated for how they effecta shared, but eeting, experience of the
power and limits of human embodiment. While I cannot pursue the details of
an account that satises both desiderata here, the discussion of ephemerality
conducted thus far has shown that to dismiss the idea that our bodily response
to dance art is deeply relevant to our appreciation and understanding of dance-
works is to blatantly out a danceworld value that has strong legs, so to
speak. Moreover, if the danceworld is taken to be constituted by the collection
of shared artistic values that dene the parameters of dance art practice, then
any philosophically satisfactory treatment of the aesthetic relevance of kines-
thetic responses to live dance performance cannot ignore this basic axiological
commitment and still claim to be talking about dance art. And this is just to
say that considerations about the distinctively ephemeral character of dance
art will not only raise important new discussions in the philosophy of dance,
but that they must also be given due consideration in future analyses of issues
related to dance appreciation that have already been addressed by aestheticians
interested in dance as an art form.
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I watched Martha Grahams Primitive Mysteries (1931) die this season in what
seemed, for the most part, to be scrupulous performances. The twelve girls
looked carefully rehearsed. Sophie Maslow, who had supervised the previous
revival, in the season of 196465, was again in charge. Everybody danced with
devotion. Yet a piece that I would have ranked as a landmark in American
dance was reduced to a tendentious outline; the power I had remembered
was no longer there . . . We know that Grahams own performances are
past recapturing, and we know, too, that the earlier Graham works, which
were made on bodies that hadnt been prestretched and rened by ballet
technique, are impossible to reconstruct without compromise . . . Perhaps
theres a statute of limitations on how long a work can be depended upon to
force itself through the bodies who dance it. (1982, pp. 289)
167
168
Notes
1. A word of caution is in order about this example, which may suggest to the reader
that I presume costumes to be necessary features of works of dance art. This, however,
is not my view: given the vast number of things that may be important in one dance-
work but irrelevant in another, I follow Selma Jeanne Cohen (Next Week, Swan Lake,
pp. viiviii) in thinking that the identity-constitutive features of danceworks may dif-
fer in kind depending on the particular artwork under consideration and the facts
about its history of production. My view is that any theory of dancework identity that
is faithful to deep-seated distinctionsand grounds for critical judgmentwithin the
dance community must be able to allow that, in some cases, the work just is a particu-
lar series of step sequences (and nothing more); in other cases, the work is constituted
by both a determinate choreographic sequence and the way this is highlighted or
obscured by the use of costumes, lighting, sets, and other theatrical elements; and,
in still other cases, the work is constituted by a general constellation of dance values
or understandings that do not involve any particular sequences of movement or any
specic set of theatrical trappings. In the case I consider as an example here, there
is a widespread intuition in favor of the claim that the stretchy, swath of fabric that
constitutes the original costume for Lamentation is an essential feature of the work
precisely because the costume directly affects how Grahams choreographed move-
ments appear to audiences, and there is a strong case in favor of the claim that it is the
appearance of the dancers motions through the fabric that is, in this case, Grahams
work of dance art.
2. It is generally acknowledged by dance historians that dance began to emerge as an
autonomous performing art in the late eighteenth century whenafter a century
of attempting to become more than mere decoration for royal spectacles, plays, or
operasdancemakers such as Jean Dauberval and Jean Georges Noverre began to
create choreography that was meant to be viewed for its own sake. In fact, the his-
torical moment at which dance is rst recognized as an independent art form is most
often associated with the rise of the Romantic ballet in the 1830s, and is frequently
linked to Filippo Taglionis masterpiece La Sylphide. Until that time, choreography
was either subservient to other theatrical demands or was nothing more than illogi-
cally connected sequences of physical tricks. It was with Taglioni that dance tech-
nique, dance instruments (such as the pointe shoe), and the potential for human
movement to serve as a forum for human expression were rst united to create a
pure dance theatrical event worthy to be considered an art form in its own right.
For more detailed information on the rise of dance as an art see: Susan Au, Ballet and
Modern Dance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), pp. 2960 and Lincoln Kirstein,
Dance: A Short History of Classic Theatrical Dancing: Anniversary Edition (Pennington,
NJ: Princeton, 1987), pp. 22963.
3. Sparshotts claims may, on rst blush, appear philosophically out-of-date and/or
conceptually puzzling. I take it, however, that Sparshott is pointing to dance-related
169
phenomena with which we are all well familiar, phenomena that do notin them-
selvespose any particular kind of philosophical problem. With respect to the claim
that the basis for this approach to seeing dance as uniquely ephemeral is the fact that
the dancers body is her own instrument, Sparshott is simply noting the uncontro-
versialand inevitablefact that, unlike the autist or cellist, the dancers artistic
medium is not distinct from her as a person because our bodily postures, muscular
habits, rhythmic tics, and so on, tell stories about us as individuals. As a result, the
movements of every dancing body are ineluctably (and sometimes, to professional
dancers, frustratingly) infused with facts about our personal histories. The obvious
fact that a dancer does not play her body in the manner of an independent instru-
ment but, instead, uses the very same physical structure she inhabits during times of
emergency, happy holidays with her family, or shopping for groceries in her acts of
dancing means that there is an unusually close connection between the perceptible
features she produces for aesthetic delectation and a wide variety of basic facts about
who she is. It is the very intimacy of the relation between the dancer (qua person)
and the dance she performs that underwrites the long-standing view that dancing
is a way of accessing an individuals (internal) power in a way that can both sub-
stantively affect the natural world around her (e.g., by promoting procreative capaci-
ties in other persons or in fallow elds) and can forge or destroy social bonds. And
it is in producing such effects through her moving that the dancer comes to expe-
rience a kind of personal freedom that is not generally accessible in other ways:
it is her particular way of moving in the moment that is responsible for whatever
changes she affects upon the world or upon other persons. While the idea that when
a mover attends to her body as a part of the natural worldand, simultaneously, as
the source of her individual personhoodshe may make a practical difference to the
world around her may sound esoteric to twenty-rst-century ears, two things must
be kept in mind. First, there is a long-standing cultural-historical tradition according
to which it is through dancing that we do make a special kind of contact with, and
thereby, affect the world beyond our immediate communities (consider, for example,
rain dances, war dances, fertility dances, trance dances). The belief in the power of
dance, whether it is logically defensible or remains a simple case of shamanism, runs
deep in many cultures. The strength of the history of this belief is, therefore, appropri-
ately part of the description of why contemporary dancers see their artform as having
an ephemeral character. Second, many practicing dance professionals continue to see
their art form as having a mystical quality because they are committed to the idea
thatunlike expressions of self through languagebodies in motion do not lie:
dance reveals facts about a person that might otherwise be hidden from everyone
(including the dancer herself) and, therefore, can serve as a forum in which the per-
sons true nature or character may be freely revealed.
4. To my knowledge, at the time of this publication there is only one exception to this
claim, namely, The Art of Re-Making Dances: A Philosophical Analysis of Dancework
Reconstruction, R. Conroy, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 2009. In
this work, I offer structured cases for and against dancework reconstruction based
on the arguments prevalent in contemporary dance writing; provide a taxonomy of
dance-related re activities that distinguishes reconstructions from revivals, rein-
ventions, and recreations; defend a new, continuity-based approach to theories of
dancework identity; and argue, on the basis of the taxonomic results and my pre-
ferred approach to identity, that the critics case against reconstruction fails because it
is founded upon important metaphysical and aesthetic misapprehensions about the
art of remaking (lost) danceworks.
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1. Introduction
The visual arts include works whose artistic and aesthetic value depends, at
least in signicant measure, on how they look. Paintings have masses and
material constitutions, they make sounds when thwacked, and many of them
will burn well, but none of these features seem particularly relevant to paint-
ings value as works of art or to their aesthetic value. Musical performances,
by contrast, usually involve visible elements, such as performers on stage, but
audible aspects are central to such performances artistic and aesthetic quality.
A shabbily dressed orchestra might distract one from a ne performance, but
state of dress is peripheral to the performances quality. Typography and text
layout might well be arts, and if so they are visual arts, but the art of the novel
is not a visual art. Even if a novels value is found in the way it excites the visual
imagination, the way a novel looks, if there is any way a novel looks, has no
relevance to its value.
Non-visual aspects of visual artworks can contribute signicantly to their
value. In early fteenth-century Italy, not just color but material was highly
prized in paintings, with the prices paid for pigments often specied in com-
missions (Baxandall, 1988, p. 11). It is a matter of no small signicance that
Marc Quinns self-portrait bust is carved out of his own frozen blood. Films are
works of visual art but nowadays almost always include soundtracks, theater
is rarely a purely visual phenomenon, and sculptures, not to mention some
paintings and dance performances, often engage ones haptic and kinesthetic
sensibilities. The visual arts thus form a diverse lot, tied together by the fact
that visual appearance plays a signicant but not exclusive role in their artistic
and aesthetic value.
Why would philosophers concern themselves with such a heterogeneous
category of artice? Two issues keep the visual arts within philosophers sights.
First, and most generally, how should we understand the artifacts constitu-
tive of the visual arts? Most work in this area concerns pictorial representation
and how it differs from other kinds of representation. Second, how do features
characteristic of such artifacts contribute, perhaps distinctively, to the aesthetic
appreciation of them? There is signicant range to the specic topics covered
171
under the latter category, but what follows focuses on pictorial realism. That
topic dovetails nicely with the discussion in Section 2 and it is for a number of
reasons a very confusing and particularly visual phenomenon.
2. Pictorial Representation
Ernst Gombrich, the famous art historian, sparked much philosophical interest
in artifacts with the publication of his Art and Illusion. That book investigates
the role that conventions play in making pictures the way that they are. This
is a curious topic, because, on the one hand, pictures are artifacts, so it seems
as though our cultural conventions should play a decisive and almost com-
plete role in determining their nature. On the other hand, pictures can seem so
easy to understandjust look and you see what the picture is about!that one
might think they depend less on conventions and more on inbuilt perceptual
capacities. We shouldnt think interpreting pictures involves conventions more
than seeing things in mirrors does. How do we sort out the nature and the cul-
tural nurture of pictorial representation? For example, marks on paper, paint
on canvas, low-relief sculpture, and wood carvings can all depict landscapes.
Articers are free to choose their media. But surely not any pattern on any sur-
face could depict a landscape. Facts about how perceivers are built, on how
light travels, and so on, must constrain the possibilities, but it is unclear how.
Pictures seem distinctively visual for two reasons. First, the intrinsic proper-
ties of pictures responsible for them depicting what they do are visible prop-
erties. Makers intentions and societys norms play some role in determining
representational content, but the properties intrinsic to pictures that are relevant
to what they depict are all visible properties. Their masses, material constitu-
tions, and so on, are not relevant. And second, pictures are usually understood
to depict visible things. This combination is not unique to pictures. Most writ-
ten languages satisfy the rst condition, and sentences in such languages that
concern visibilia, as such, satisfy both. What seems to make pictures distinctive,
and to explain these two facts about them, is that visual experiences of pictures
relate in a distinctive manner to visual experiences of their contents. The nature
of this relation is the focus of much theorizing about depiction.
According to Richard Wollheim (1980, 1987, 1993, 1998, 2003a), the relation
is what we can call inected inclusion. The typical experience of a represen-
tational picture as suchwhat he called seeing-inis a visual experience of
both the surface and the content that is not reducible to a mere combination
of the two experiences. This special state is not one in which an experience of
the surface trades places with an experience of the content in time: rst one,
and then the other, as Gombrich (1961) suggested. And these contemporaneous
aspects of such a twofold experience each affect the other. The experience of
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the content is inected by the experience of the surface, and vice versa. Michael
Podros work (1998) also emphasizes the mutual effects these aspects of experi-
ence have on one another.
Wollheim thought that what one sees-in a picture is determined in signi-
cant measure by ones knowledge of art and other matters, ones past experi-
ences looking at pictures, and so on. We are innately capable of having such
experiences, but the character of them is not set in stone by hardwired per-
ceptual capacities. Wollheims most striking and controversial example of
seeing-ins plasticity is that while one can see the famous Madonna depicted by
Parmigianino as having a long neck, one ought not to see it that way, and with
the proper exposure and training, one would not see a long-necked Madonna
in the painting (Wollheim, 2003b).
Wollheim has been criticized for failing to explicate seeing-in in sufcient
detail (e.g., Walton, 2002; Hopkins, 2003b), though he consistently denied this
and rejected others proposals for how to do so (e.g., Wollheim, 2003a, 2003b).
Seeing-in also excludes trompe loeil from the realm of depiction because such
artifacts do not engender twofold experiences. Some agree (Feagin, 1998, p. 236;
Hopkins, 1998, pp. 1517) but many nd this claim too counterintuitive to
accept (Lopes, 1996, p. 49; Levinson, 1998, p. 229; Kulvicki, 2006, p. 173).
Recognition theories of depiction envision a different kind of relation between
experiences of pictures and experiences of their contents: recognitional similar-
ity (Schier, 1986; Lopes, 1996). Experiences of pictures cause, or are partly con-
stituted by, the deployment of many of the same visual recognitional capacities
that are caused by or constitute experiences of pictures contents. We clearly
recognize many things on the basis of seeing them: qualities like redness and
squareness, kinds of things like bicycles and maple trees, and individual, par-
ticular things like the boss car, the Evangeline oak, ones best friend, and so
on. Depicting an X, for the recognition theorist, essentially involves making an
artifact that elicits deployment of ones visual recognitional capacity for Xs, and
perhaps other recognitional capacities as well. By contrast, there is no interesting
connection between the recognitional abilities evoked by inscribed words and
those involved in perceiving what such inscriptions represent. Onomatopoeia
might, however, engender a quasi-pictorial, albeit auditory, grasp of content:
buzzing bees, for example, and the chirping of chickadees and bobolinks.
The recognition theorist does not insist we are fooled by pictures into think-
ing we are looking at what they depict. Experiences of pictures are not recog-
nitionally identical to experiences of their contents, but they are similar in the
important respect that the picture provokes the visual recognitional ability for
something other than a colored plane, and that thing is usually the pictures
content. The range of things that can depict an X depends on how plastic human
recognitional abilities are. Dominic Lopes (1996, 2003) suggests that the devel-
opment of picture-making techniques has expanded perceivers recognitional
173
capacities. These capacities are not set in stone as some natural endowment so
much as they are capacities that, within heretofore unknown limits, are subject
to change.
It is a platitude that pictures resemble what they depict (see Walton, 1973,
p. 284), even though it is highly controversial just what makes it true. For the
recognition theorist, pictures resemble their objects just insofar as experiences
of pictures are recognitionally similar to experiences of those objects. The view
does not require that pictures share any interesting properties with what they
depict. The recognition theory allows that we can identify objects in pictures
even when there is limited similarity between picture and object (Lopes, 2003,
p. 644). And the recognition view does not require that pictures are generally
experienced as resembling what they depict. Many pictures might share rather
salient, visible properties with their objects, and this fact might sometimes
explain recognitional similarity. But recognitional similarity is the only impor-
tant relation between visual experiences of pictures and visual experiences of
their contents.
Experienced resemblance accounts of pictorial representation agree that
experiences of pictures are recognitionally similar to experiences of their objects,
but they also insist that an account of depiction ought to explain recognitional
similarity. Robert Hopkins (1995, 1998, 2003a), who has the most detailed and
carefully elaborated experienced resemblance account, explains recognitional
similarity in terms of experienced resemblance in outline shape. What makes a
representation pictorial is that it represents what appropriate observers experi-
ence it as resembling in outline shape. Christopher Peacocke (1987), Malcolm
Budd (1993), and Catharine Abell (2009) present other versions of the experi-
enced resemblance view.
Outline shape is a relational, spatial property that two-dimensional surfaces
and three-dimensional objects can share. Leon Battista Alberti (1435/1991), in
the earliest surviving Western treatise on depiction, described an objects out-
line shape. Consider projecting rays from a point out in all directions. Some
strike the object, some miss it altogether, and some just touch it tangent to its
surface. The collection of those latter, extrinsic rays trace a solid angle from
that point into which the object ts without remainder. Any number of patterns
traced on a plane surface can share the outline shape of that object, as long as
those patterns t into that solid angle without remainder. Most objects have
indenitely many outline shapes, corresponding to the many perspectives from
which they can be viewed, and objects can be depicted from many viewpoints
by mimicking their outline shapes from those different points on a plane sur-
face. While the notion of outline shape makes sense, it is difcult to characterize
with complete clarity and show that it does the work required of it. For exam-
ple, Abell (2005b) criticizes Hopkins explication of outline shape and his use of
it to explain depiction.
174
It is not essential for Hopkins that pictures actually resemble their objects in
outline shape, but that they are experienced as doing so. A plane surface that
resembles some object in outline shape, but is not experienced as doing so by
appropriate observers, does not depict that object. And a plane surface that
does not resemble some object in outline shape, but is experienced as doing so
by appropriate observers, can succeed in depicting that object. Many pictures,
and almost all pictures in certain styles, will in fact resemble their objects in
outline shape, and this resemblance will no doubt play a role in explaining the
experienced resemblance characteristic of pictorial experience. Indeed, this is
partly why John Hyman (2006) suggests that genuine resemblance in outline
shape, or what he calls occlusion shape, is the basis upon which an account
of depiction can build. Caricature and other pictorial styles that do not cleave
closely to replication of outline shape still manage to depict objects, however.
Such pictures are often experienced as resembling distorted versions of their
objects. So, a caricature of Barak Obama resembles an Obama with exaggerated
proportions in outline shape (Hopkins, 1998, pp. 947).
The recognition view has traded some objections with the experienced
resemblance view over the years. Lopes (2003) asks us to consider a situation
in which experiences of a picture are recognitionally similar to experiences
of some object, but in which one does not experience the picture as resem-
bling the object in outline shape. Assume further that this object was made
with the intention that it elicits such a recognitional response. We would be
tempted to call such an artifact a pictorial representation, even though it is
not experienced as resembling its object in outline shape. In addition, outline
shape is often a poor guide to how one should interpret a picture. A politi-
cian once complained of some public art that our ancestors did not have
rectangular heads. . . . the politician mistakenly believed rectilinear shapes
must misrepresent ovoid objects (Lopes, 2003, pp. 63940). Wollheim lines
up with Lopes on this point. His suggestion that it is incorrect to see a long-
necked Madonna in Parmigianinos portrait is directed at Hopkins stress on
the importance of outline shape (Wollheim, 2003b, p. 145). Katerina Bantinaki
(2008) agrees with Wollheim.
Hopkins has a compelling retort to these worries: outline shape constrains
the interpretation of pictures more signicantly than these objections acknowl-
edge (Hopkins, 1998, pp. 14758, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c). Parmigianinos Madonna
does seem to have a long neck, and this impression is not dispelled by knowl-
edge of the artists aims and the history of picture-making. Similarly, Lopes
imagined abstraction might very well depict subjects as square-headed, even if
it is not the artists intention to instill the belief that those subjects have square
heads. It is difcult not to interpret many Picassos as depicting oddly propor-
tioned subjects, even if that does not exhaust the interpretation of such pic-
tures (Hopkins, 1998, pp. 14758). These issues are important for demarcating
175
176
prop, but there is no a priori reason for thinking it is the only way. Indeed,
imagining ones seeing of a surface to be a seeing of something else does not
require recognizing the surface to be that object in any interesting sense of the
word. It would be nice if one could pry apart these two conditions, perhaps
even experimentally, and see whether one proposal is more or less plausible
than the other in light of such separation, but no one has done this. Similarly,
it might be that experiencing a surface as resembling objects in outline shape
makes it a good prop for such games, but one need not think this is generally
the case. Generally speaking, no one has worked out in detail how the pretense
proposal relates to the others mentioned above.
Structural accounts of depiction identify pictures in terms of syntactic and
semantic relations that they bear to one another. To be a picture is to be a
member of a representational system that has certain syntactic and semantic
features. Such accounts do not deny that pictures evoke special experiences,
or that experiences of pictures are related in interesting ways to experiences
of their contents. They do not deny that pictures are props. They just sug-
gest that these things are true of some or all of the representational systems
that have such a structure. Ideally, the structural facts in question will help
to explain features of pictorial experience and of aesthetic engagement with
pictures.
Nelson Goodman (1976) was the rst to propose a detailed structural account
of depiction. All pictures are members of relatively replete, syntactically dense,
and semantically dense representational systems. Repleteness concerns how
many features of a representation matter for it to be the representation that it is.
In a graph of temperature over time, for example, the shape of the line matters,
as does its position with respect to the vertical and horizontal axes. But the color
of the line, its thickness, and the background color, for example, are irrelevant
to the identity of the graph. That is to say, they are irrelevant to its syntactic and
semantic identity. By contrast, more properties are typically relevant to pic-
tures, including typically the color, shape, and even texture of each and every
region of their surfaces. Pictorial systems can themselves differ with respect
to repletenessblack and white photos are less replete than color photos, for
examplebut among representations, pictures are relatively replete.
Syntactic and semantic density are somewhat complicated. In a syntactically
dense system, there is no way to order the representations except such that
between each two there is a third. Consider a class of pictures in terms of the
shapes and shades of color that characterize their surfaces, and pick any two of
them. Goodmans claim is that regardless of your choice, you could always nd
a third picture that is intermediate between the two, in the sense that it is more
similar to each of those two than the two are to one another. This is not true of
language, for example. We could list all of the possible types of inscriptions,
and the ordering would not have to be dense.
177
Semantic density is just like syntactic density, but it is dened over the com-
pliance classes of picturestheir referentsnot their surface features. One
cannot order the set of things pictures can be about except in such a way that
between each two there is a third. Find two scenes one can depict, and one will
always be able to nd another scene more similar to each of the two than the two
are to one another. Combining syntactic and semantic density yields an analog
system of representation. (OthersLewis (1971) and Haugeland (1981)have
criticized this way of understanding analogicity.) Pictures are relatively replete,
analogue representations.
Goodman says little about the perception of pictures. His account does not
suggest that pictures are all visual. Nor does it distinguish many things we
ordinarily take to be pictures from many things we would usually regard as
non-pictorial representations. Peacocke (1987), for example, suggests taking
any colored plane and making the hue, brightness, and saturation of each
point correspond to some other quantity, say temperature, length, and den-
sity, of some other objects. Such an odd and difcult to decipher representa-
tion would be pictorial according to Goodmans view of things. Moreover,
Goodmans view insists that pictures are analog representations, which
is moderately implausible in this, digital age. Objections to Goodmans
approach are thus relatively easy to nd, and interestingly enough the
implausibility of his claims has led to a general abandonment of the struc-
tural approach. This reaction was perhaps a bit extreme (see Kulvicki, 2006a,
ch. 1, and 2006c).
Goodmans account isolates features of pictures that no other account was
even in a position to notice. It then suggests that the rest of an explanation of
depiction should be made by an investigation into our habits and practices that
have evolved over the centuries. This proposal is thus rather conventionalist.
The profoundly conventionalist aspects of Goodmans view obscure the sig-
nicant and distinctive non-conventional features he understood pictures to
have, however. Goodman understood pictures as being akin to language in
the following sense. While it is often arbitrary which word stands for which
thingdog could have meant catswe notice an impressive syntactic and
semantic regularity within language. Speakers of a language need not be cog-
nizant of this structure to use language, but that structure forms the bounds
within which the rather conventional aspects of language function. The same is
true of pictures, graphs, diagrams, and the like. By attending to structure, we
nd an impressive regularity in our practice that is not beholden merely to the
habits of beholders.
Goodman thought that his approach sheds light on our aesthetic apprecia-
tion of pictures and other kinds of things. Syntactic density, semantic den-
sity, and relative repleteness are symptoms of the aesthetic (1976, ch. 6;
178
1978, pp. 678). When something is syntactically dense, one can investigate
the object in an open-ended, indenitely ne-grained fashion, and never be
completely sure as to which syntactic object it is. The same is true of the
contents of representations in semantically dense systems. Such things can
hold ones attention precisely as one tries to gure out what they are and
what they are about. Repleteness only adds to the dimensions along which
such open-ended investigation can take place. For Goodman, the aesthetic
appeal of pictures is beholden in part to the fact that they have such theo-
retically recherch features. Its not explicit recognition of such features that
matters for the aesthetic appreciation of a painting, but the explication of
these features is supposed to help explain why such objects are so aestheti-
cally compelling.
Kulvicki (2006a) offers a structural account of depiction inspired by
Goodmans. One set of conditionsrelative syntactic sensitivity, semantic
richness, and a modied version of relative repleteness (Kulvicki, 2006a,
ch. 2)is meant to capture the intuitive force behind Goodmans density
and repleteness, while avoiding their least palatable consequences. In par-
ticular, these conditions do not insist that all pictures are analog representa-
tions and they avoid some technical problems with Goodmans version of
repleteness.
What sets my account most clearly apart from Goodmans is transparency
(2006a, ch. 3). Transparency is a rather difcult condition for a representa-
tional system to meet. In a transparent system, representations of representa-
tions within that system are syntactically identical to their objects. The most
straightforward example of this is when one makes a clear focused photograph
of another clear focused photo, head on and without remainder (i.e., without
including anything in the photo but the other photo). The result should be just
like its object with respect to the shapes and colors of the regions of its surface.
Things are, of course, a little more complicated than all of this suggests, but this
gives one the avor of the condition. Transparency narrows the class of repre-
sentational systems quite substantially and those that remain are quite plausibly
pictorial representations. This proposal thus does a better job of accommodat-
ing intuitions concerning what is pictorial than Goodmans does. In addition,
this proposal sheds some light on how representations within other modalities,
including tactile and auditory, can also be pictures, though this is a bit beside
the point in an entry on the visual arts!
With so many proposals for explaining depiction, one might get the sense
that a number of them are right, and that the proper approach to the area is
an account with many facets. This is precisely the suggestion made by Alberto
Voltolini (forthcoming), who offers a syncretist account of depiction that
draws on a number of features of the accounts described here.
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3. Pictorial Realism
The term realism has been used in a number of ways within the arts, and
a few of these notions help elucidate what makes visual art per se so aestheti-
cally interesting. In one sense, novels can be realistic in the way that paint-
ings can be (see Nochlin, 1972, for example), but there are varieties of realism
that seem peculiar to representational visual art. As Plato suggests (Republic,
Bk 10), we delight in imitation. Pictorial realism somehow involves comparing
what is depicted with the artifact that depicts it, or at least comparing expe-
riences of the former with experiences of the latter. Realism also tends to be
comparative in another sense. It tends to compare individual representations,
systems of representation, or styles of representation. A cubist still life is less
realistic than the typical Chardin. Cubism tends to be less realistic than genre
painting. Ordinary photographs are more realistic than sheye photos or color-
inverted photos. Individual representations can be compared with respect to
realism either when they are members of the same system or style, as when
one compares two color photographs, or when they are not, as when one com-
pares a color photograph to a cubist portrait. There might be different notions
of realism corresponding to the intra-systemic or intra-stylistic judgments, on
the one hand, and the intersystemic notions on the other. It would help to have
an account of representational systems and styles on hand, but that is a contro-
versial topic in its own right.
One obvious approach to realism is that pictures are realistic to the extent that
they resemble their objects. Pictures that really resemble their objects are very
realistic while those that only slightly resemble their objects are less so. This
claim can almost seem like a platitude, akin to the claim that pictures resemble
what they depict. In that sense, however, this claim is structurally useful but
substantively uninformative. All of the action will be in how one unpacks the
relevant notion of resemblance at work here. Presumably, the resemblance in
question will be the same as the notion involved in the theories of depiction in
the rst place. This fact foregrounds, rst, how an account of depiction is tied
up with an account of pictorial realism, even if one does not determine the
other. And second, it shows that there will be a tendency to regard realism as,
in a sense, a degree of depictiveness. Pictures that only slightly resemble their
objects are not very realistic, but they might also be only slightly pictorial if
resemblance is a central feature of pictorial representation.
Some pictures, like ordinary photographs, say a lot about their objects, while
some, like stick gures, say very little. How much a picture conveys about its
object is a decent candidate for being at least one dimension of pictorial realism.
The more informative a picture, the more realistic it is. To be a bit more specic,
the more informative a picture is, insofar as the things and qualities it depicts are
concerned, the more realistic it is. If depicting a certain quality or thing requires
180
resembling that thing, or even if it has the consequence that the picture will
seem to resemble that thing, then this proposal does justice to the platitude that
the more realistic a picture, the more it resembles what it depicts.
Flint Schier (1986, p. 176) suggested that such informativeness was one out
of two important aspects of pictorial realism, the other being accuracy. Dominic
Lopes (1995) has a subtler account according to which a system of depiction is
realistic to the extent that it provides information relevant to a certain context
in which such representations are being used. So if one needs to discern minute
spatial detail, then clear, focused photographs are the most realistic options.
If, however, one needs to discern certain features of objects that might be dif-
cult to discern amidst a fully detailed photograph, then some other kind of
illustration might be the most realistic in question. Lopes (2009) paper on lithic
illustration is a nice example of this at work. John Hyman (2004) suggests that
rather than the amount of information a picture carries, we should focus on the
range of questions one can ask of a pictures object, given the picture of it. Some
pictures support questions about the surface detail of objects, but not about
their relative locations or sizes, for example, while others support all such kinds
of question.
Catharine Abell (2007, V) nds fault with each of the foregoing proposals
and suggests that pictures are realistic to the extent that they provide relevant
information about how their objects would look were they to be seen. Her point
is that pictorial realism seems to involve what a picture says about objects
visual appearances. We can learn a lot from pictures, but not all of what we
can learn contributes to realism. She thinks that some notion of relevance is
important, as Lopes does, so that the uses to which pictures are put will affect
ones assessment of their realism. Abell also provides worthwhile objections
to both Schier and Lopes. Kulvicki (2006a; 2006b, ch. 11) independently made
a similar suggestion. Pictures are realistic to the extent that they are true to
our perceptual conceptions of the objects they depict. Perceptual conceptions are
conceptions involving how an object would seem perceptually. One difference
between Abell and me is that she takes realism to depend on truth to the objects
depicted while I suggest that it depends on truth to our perceptual conceptions
of such objects. This has consequences for how each of us deals with intersub-
jective disagreement concerning pictures realism. Abell appeals to differing
standards of relevance while I appeal to differing perceptual conceptions of
objects.
Once one has given an account of realism, one might still have to say some-
thing about irrealism. I suggest that we need to think of irrealism in positive
termsrepresenting some object in a way that conicts with our perceptual con-
ception of itrather than merely as a lack of realism. Abell has the resources
for making such a claim as well, though she doesnt notice that this complicates
judgments of pictorial realism. One picture can be both more realistic than and
181
more irrealistic than another. This fact about realism can help account both for
our aesthetic engagement with pictures and for the sense we have of realism
involving awareness of the picture as such as well as awareness of the depicted
scene. Sometimes, objects can be depicted as having features that t poorly with
our perceptual conceptions of them, even though they t quite well with our
perceptual conceptions of painted canvases. One reason pictorial realism seems
so aesthetically interesting is because it can, in that sense, encourage a com-
parison between and dual awareness of the painted canvas and depicted scene
(Kulvicki, 2006b, ch. 11).
As mentioned above, there is a sense in which judgments of pictorial realism
might track judgments of just how pictorial a representation is. Alon Chasid
(2007) presents just such an account, of what he calls content-free pictorial
realism. The main idea is that we distinguish pictures sometimes in terms of
how many of their surface features are relevant to them being the pictures that
they are. In Goodmans terms, some pictures are members of more replete
systems than others are. Line drawings, for example, often make no use of
color, and thus color plays no role in determining the contents of such draw-
ings. Some make use of chiaroscuro techniques while others do not. Color pho-
tographs are examples of highly realistic pictures in this sense because their
contents depend in some maximal sense on their surface features. This kind of
realism seems logically independent of the ones that depend on informative-
ness, which is what makes them content-free in Chasids sense.
An account of depiction might show a connection between the content-free
kind of realism and the kind of realism that depends on informativeness and
accuracy, as the two platitudes concerning realism and depiction suggest. In
fact, independently of Chasid I suggested that these two kinds of realism are
related (Kulvicki, 2006b, pp. 2379), and that this relationship stems from my
account of depiction. Pictures, on my account, will tend to go into great detail
concerning visible features of their contents, and the complexity of a pictures
content is closely related to how replete it is. For this reason, pictures that are
rather uninformative tend to seem like peripheral and not central examples of
pictures. This way of doing things neatly ties together the two platitudes men-
tioned at the beginning of this section. Pictures resemble what they depict and
realistic pictures really resemble what they depict.
Nelson Goodman famously said that realistic representation, in brief,
depends not on imitation, or illusion, or information, but upon inculcation
(1976, p. 38). Goodmans idea was that the pictures we consider to be realistic
are the pictures that are produced within systems of representation with which
we are familiar. To say that something is a realistic representation is to sug-
gest that it represents things in a familiar way. Goodmanian realism is most
naturally thought of as characterizing systems, and only derivatively individ-
ual representations. Pictures in linear perspective, for example, are particularly
182
realistic because we have developed a well entrenched habit of using such rep-
resentations. Any given picture, interpreted as a member of such a system, will
therefore seem rather realistic.
Lopes (1995) points out that Goodmans view makes it difcult to explain
revelatory realism. Sometimes artistic practice results in pictures that are more
realistic than anything that had hitherto been seen. By hypothesis, such pictures
are new, and thus not the kinds of things we habitually use. Goodman needs to
explain how such a phenomenon could arise, or why there is no such phenom-
enon, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. For example, one popular
thing to say about Giotto, Lopes (1995) points out, is that he made paintings
that were breathtakingly realistic compared to those of his forebears who were
nevertheless habituated to the less realistic paintings that came before him.
Goodman seems to leave no room for this phenomenon.
Another worry about Goodmans view is that it is misleading. Goodman
thought that what seems to resemble another thing is a matter of habit. What
counts as a good illusion is a matter of habit, at least in large measure. So, imita-
tion and illusion are themselves practices beholden to habits. It makes sense to
ask, therefore, whether they play a role in realism. This would not contradict
the claim that realism is a matter of habit. Realism, for Goodman, depends on
our habits, but Goodman hasnt given an account of realism merely by claiming
that it depends on habits. He needs to say some more (Kulvicki, 2006a, p. 352;
2006b, pp. 2467).
183
1. Introduction
184
185
There are ongoing debates in philosophy about the nature of cinematic spe-
cicity and the conditions for cinematic art; however, these two issues are less
controversial than they once were.7
Another philosophically important feature of lm theory, and an admirable
one, is the emphasis it has placed on social and political questions, particularly
those relating to race, class, and gender. Such questions are among the most
important that academics address in any eld, and yet, too often they are mini-
mized and those interested in them, marginalized. This has not been the case
with lm studies.8
Much of the feminist research on lm has been done through the theoretical
framework of psychoanalysis. This is in large part due to the work of femi-
nist theorist Laura Mulvey, whose seminal 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema, helped to place feminist approaches to lm at the center
of lm studies and to highlight the social and political implications of spec-
tatorship, particularly those relevant to gender issues. Mulvey attempted to
uncover the sources of viewers pleasure in watching lms and to analyze its
implications. To do this, she complicated the account of spectatorial identica-
tion offered by apparatus theorists like Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz,
employing Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis from a feminist perspective
to reveal how lm fosters processes of identication that perpetuate oppressive
patriarchal ideals.
Mulvey identied a pattern in the cinematic conventions, including the nar-
ratives, of classical Hollywood lms, which comprised (1) the assumption of
a male spectator, (2) the establishment and coding of a male protagonist as an
active subject who controls the meaning of the narrative and of the female char-
acters by being the bearer of the look, and (3) the establishment and coding of
female characters as passive, weak objects of erotic desire, there to be looked
at by the male characters and the male spectators (1975). This pattern exempli-
es what has been termed the male gaze, a way of seeing, thinking about, and
acting in the world that takes women as passive, weak objects to be looked at
and controlled by male subjects (Devereaux, 1990).
Due to this pattern, according to Mulveys view, when a male spectator
watches a standard Hollywood lm, he identies with the male protagonist
who represents his ego-ideal. Through this identication with the active con-
trolling agent on screen, the spectator controls the unfolding of the narrative
events and takes pleasure in looking voyeuristically at the female characters or
fetishizing some part of their bodies. This gives him the feeling of omnipotence
and the pleasure associated with looking.
Mulveys analysis aimed to show that identication with male protagonists
exploits unconscious desires and capitalizes on institutionalized sexism to gen-
erate pleasure. If Mulvey is right, then certain forms of character engagement,
186
perhaps those that are most common, play an essential role in making lm an
instrument of oppressive ideological values.
Since the publication of her account of spectatorial identication, Mulveys
view has come under attack from all sides: feminist theory, psychoanalytic lm
theory, queer theory, and cognitive lm theory. Feminist and queer theorists
have charged that she exhibits covert heterosexism through her claim that the
assumed spectator is a straight male, and that she fails to address the female
spectator, the role of race in representation, and the position of transgender
spectators (Creed, 1998; Friedberg, 1990). Many have also taken issue with
Mulveys characterization of the relationship between spectators and charac-
ters as static and thus not subject to resistance or to subversive viewing prac-
tices.9 Finally, she is criticized for failing to explore alternative cinematic forms
and effects. However one evaluates Mulveys particular account of character
identication, her inuence within lm theory is undeniable.
3. Recent Developments
187
human beings and their attempts to repress its conditions and consequences.
He further argues that the study is held together by a Nietzschean vision of
human existence that moves from the conception of life as a devouring will
to power to a conception of what a ourishing human life might look like in a
certain kind of cosmos (2001, p. 47). In addition, Mulhall takes Alien and Blade
Runner to be explorations of the impact of technology on human forms of life;
he says that Heidegger would recognize the world of Blade Runner as an exem-
plication of the age of technology, which treats the natural world as nothing
more than a source of resources for human purposes (2001, p. 48).
In his analyses of these lms, Mulhall emphasizes not just narrative con-
tent but also various ways in which formal dimensions of the lms provoke
philosophical thoughts and responses that lead to philosophical reection. For
example, he argues that Blade Runner reveals the humanity of the replicants
(genetically manufactured beings) by evoking our sympathy and empathy as
the replicants are repeatedly shown being attacked by the lms human char-
acters. The replicants express their pain through their embodiment, just as we
would, and we cannot help but respond to these expressions as we perceive
them directly. Therefore, through our experience of watching the lm, we come
to understand that the replicants embodiment makes them human. There is
no soul or mind hidden behind the replicants human bodies; the bodies them-
selves are the source of humanity.
Thomas Wartenberg is another proponent of the lm as philosophy thesis,
though his version of the thesis is more moderate than Mulhalls. In his recent
book Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy, Wartenberg explores multiple ways
in which lm can philosophize, including by illustrating philosophical claims
in illuminating ways, making arguments through the presentation of thought
experiments, making arguments by presenting counterexamples, and advanc-
ing novel philosophical theses. Wartenberg contends that, because of lms
ability to philosophize in these ways, philosophy can be screened.
Two of Wartenbergs strongest arguments reveal how lms can function as
illustrations and how they can function as thought experiments. To make the
case that a lm can do philosophy by illustrating a previously articulated the-
ory, Wartenberg explores the notion of illustration. He begins with an analysis
of pictorial illustration and distinguishes between what he calls mere illus-
trations, which simply provide one way to imagine the ideas presented in a
text, and what he calls iconic illustrations, which are essential to understand-
ing a work and its ideas and thus are constitutive of the work. He offers John
Tunniels illustrations of Lewis Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland and
the illustrations that appear in birding books as examples of iconic illustrations.
Wartenberg does not go on to argue that lms function in the same way as these
iconic illustrations, for the goal of his argument is to reveal that illustrations can
188
be highly signicant and need not be subordinated to that of which they are
an illustration (2007, p. 44).
To show how this works, Wartenberg develops a persuasive analysis of
Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936), which he interprets as an insightful
exploration of Marxs theory of alienation and exploitation of workers in a capi-
talist society. One way in which it does this is by providing a specic interpreta-
tion of Marxs metaphor of a person being turned into a machine. Wartenberg
explains:
189
count (2006, p. 34). A problem with views like Mulhalls, according to Smith, is
that narratives are not arguments and so even though they may carry messages,
morals, and themes, they do not function as arguments. They do not put forth
premises and then reason to conclusions. If one takes philosophy to be based on
argument, then Mulhalls conclusion is in trouble.
What about more moderate claims, such as Wartenbergs, that lm can do
philosophy by presenting thought experiments? Smith challenges these as well
on the grounds that thought experiments serve different functions in narrative
ction lms than they do in philosophy. In philosophy the primary role of the
thought experiment is epistemic, but in narrative ction lms, its role is to aid
the artistic storytelling or to entertain. While Smith does not deny that thought
experiments can serve artistic functions in philosophy or epistemic ones in lm,
he points out that these two types of worknarrative ction lms and philoso-
phywill rank artistic and epistemic purposes differently (2006). He still wants
us to take narrative ction lms seriously, but as works of art rather than as
works of philosophy.
A key issue underlying Smiths view is his understanding of what counts
as philosophy and of what counts as narrative. Philosophy, Smith suggests,
requires argument, which is to say premises, patterns of inference, and con-
clusions. Narratives are not, strictly speaking, arguments, and Smith points
out that the precise relationship between narrative and argument remains
impressionistic and undertheorized (2006, p. 34). Moreover, Smith insists
that characterizing the complexity of typical narrative ction lms in terms
of philosophy is a mistake. Philosophy tends to be abstract and conceptual,
while narratives are concrete and are of sufcient complexity and indirection
that they resist restatement or paraphrasing in clear and unequivocal terms
(Smith, 2006, p. 40).
Paisley Livingston (2008, 2009) shares Smiths skepticism regarding the lm
as philosophy thesis, at least in its bold form. There are a number of problems
surrounding the notion of lm authorship, which is central to claims that lms
can do philosophy since often such claims are really stating that a lms author
is doing philosophy. Not everyone agrees that lms have authors since lm
is such a collaborative art form and sometimes a lm results from the work
of many different artists working independently of one another without any
common goals (2008, pp. 5934). For instance, in many cases where lms are
created by a director, writer, or producer without a great deal of power, studios
interfere with the lmmaking and signicantly inuence the nal product.
Livingston points out that even when there is a clear author of a lm, it will
often still be impossible to determine what sort of philosophizing the author
was doing or if she was doing any at all (2008, p. 594). Some advocates of the
lm as philosophy thesis have addressed this type of objection by talking about
philosophical theories or ideas that an author could have been acquainted
190
Another problem Livingston identies with claims that lms can do philoso-
phy is that many such claims rely on problematic views regarding the princi-
ples of interpretation (2008, p. 596). Interpretive projects can differ signicantly;
they can have different goals and different methodologies. An interpretation
can aim at explaining what an actual author actually meant or can attempt to
determine what an author could have meant. And some interpretations are
unconcerned with an authors intentions. An interpreter may use a lm in order
to illustrate or elaborate his own philosophical views such that his interpre-
tation functions not to reveal the meaning in a given lm but to advance or
communicate the signicance of the interpreters own philosophical theory or
position (2008, p. 596). With this type of interpretive project, which Livingston
characterizes as an imaginative as if interpretation, philosophers are free to
apply any philosophical theory or framework that they choose. But this under-
mines the claims that the interpretations is about the philosophizing of a lm-
maker (2008, p. 599).
What about interpretive projects that focus on an actual lmmakers phi-
losophizing, rather than some possible philosophizing? These projects will be
better able to support a thesis about a particular lm doing philosophy, but
they are subject to much stricter evidentiary constraints. But suppose, however,
that an interpreter has a great deal of evidence about a particular lmmakers
artistic and philosophical intentions. There may still be serious problems, if
Bruce Russell is right. Russell grants that ctional narratives may help guide
us toward counterexamples, but maintains that they cannot provide the type of
evidence necessary for advancing a philosophical theory (2006).
Livingston discusses another difculty with the lm as philosophy thesis
that is perhaps the most important one, despite its not having been accorded
much attention thus far. Interpreting lms as philosophy means analyzing and
evaluating them from the perspective of philosophy. This type of interpretive
project stands in stark contrast to appreciative interpretations, which concen-
trate on lm as an art form, not as a tool for proposing and arguing for philo-
sophical theses, presenting thought experiments, or helping guide us toward
or through counterexamples (2008). Murray Smiths point about the distinctive
goals of narrative ction lms and thought experiments touches on the same
issue. By treating lms as philosophy, we risk failing to understand them in the
191
way that they were intended, and distorting them in order to make them serve
a philosophical, rather than an artistic purpose. It may be possible to avoid
doing this if an interpreter attends to both the artistic and philosophical dimen-
sions of a lm, or perhaps we should just accept that lms can serve multiple
purposes and that interpretations need not take account of all of them.
A more general research trend in the study of lm that has helped shape the
trajectory of philosophy of lm is the rise of cognitive lm theory, or cognitiv-
ism, as it is often referred to in lm studies. Cognitive lm theory addresses
a variety of issues; one of the most philosophically important is the nature of
viewers experience, both because it is interesting in and of itself and because
understanding what spectators experience is a necessary rst step to answering
a series of related philosophically important questions, such as what the inu-
ence of lm is, how and why lm affects us, and how much control we have over
these effects. Many of the explorations of viewer experience in cognitive lm
theory have concentrated on viewers emotional and affective responses, and
the topic of viewer emotion is currently one of the most important within the
study of lm, and yet for decades it was of minor interest within lm studies.
In the 1970s and the 1980s, prior to the emergence of cognitive lm theory,
the prevailing theoretical approaches to viewer experience in lm theory were
based on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and various forms of Marxism.
Researchers employing these approaches typically analyzed viewers experi-
ence in terms of the concepts of pleasure, desire, and fantasy and made little
mention of the kinds of basic emotions at the center of the philosophy and psy-
chology of emotion (Plantinga and Smith, 1999; Plantinga, 2009a, 2009b).13
Film theorist David Bordwell and philosopher Nol Carroll, the pioneers of
cognitive lm theory, were both highly critical of this research due to their skep-
ticism regarding its theoretical underpinnings. They also had problems with its
methodology. Carroll attacked the tendency of these researchers to engage in
grand theorizing, his label for research that proceeds in a top-down fashion,
beginning with a theory such as Lacanian psychoanalysis and then using that
theory to characterize all aspects of lm and our experience of it.
As a response to grand theorizing, Carroll proposed an alternative meth-
odology, which he termed piece-meal theorizing; it came to be one of the
dening features of cognitive lm theory. Detailing this approach in his 1985
essay The Power of Movies, Carroll explained that piece-meal theorizing tar-
gets specic issues and problems and makes no attempt to construct compre-
hensive accounts of our experience of lm. He then raised several questions
about the power of lm that were characteristic of his new approach and which
192
remain the sorts of questions most often pursued today in mainstream philoso-
phy of lm. Why do lms elicit intense responses in so many viewers? How can
they do so cross-culturally? What sorts of psychological processes do lms acti-
vate? And how do lmmaking techniques factor into our experience of lm?
During the same year that Carrolls essay was published, David Bordwells
book Narration in Fiction Film was released. As the rst book to take an explic-
itly cognitive approach to traditional questions in aesthetics, it represented a
watershed. Bordwell combined research in narratology and cognitive science
to argue that predictable patterns found in lm narration were designed to acti-
vate certain perceptual and inferential mechanisms that had already been iden-
tied in cognitive psychology. He explained that narration mobilizes reasoning
shortcuts like prototype thinking, and primacy and recency effects. According
to Bordwell, in most cases spectators are best understood as information seek-
ers who frame their expectations of what will happen, conceptualize on-screen
events in terms of larger frameworks, and apply schemas derived from both
ordinary knowledge and standard cinematic traditions (1985).14
Due to the work of Carroll and Bordwell in the 1980s and their continued
development of their interdisciplinary framework, cognitive lm theory grew
considerably in the 1990s and today is a well-established theoretical perspec-
tive. It is a minority view in lm studies, but this is not the case in analytic phi-
losophy, where, arguably, it is one of the dominant frameworks for studying
lm. Today, most cognitive lm theorists share some or all of the same operat-
ing assumptions, and theoretical and methodological commitments. Perhaps
most important is their naturalistic orientation; cognitive lm theorists typically
draw on and incorporate research in cognitive psychology, social, and devel-
opmental psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience, as well as work in phi-
losophy of mind and philosophical aesthetics, much of which shares the same
naturalistic orientation. Underlying this naturalistic orientation is the assump-
tion that our cognitive and perceptual experiences while viewing lm closely
resemble our cognitive and perceptual experiences in everyday life, which is to
say that our experience of lm is based on our natural perceptual processes and
our ordinary capacities for making inferences and judgments. Not surprisingly,
then, most cognitive lm theorists attempt to construct explanations grounded
in or consistent with the current empirical understanding of the mind.
In a recent post to his blog, Bordwell details several more specic features
characteristic of cognitive lm theory (2009b). He contrasts the primary goals
of cognitive lm theory with those of both psychoanalytic lm theory and
cultural studies. While researchers in the latter two groups tend to produce
interpretations of lms, those in cognitive lm theory focus on functional and
causal explanations, many of which concern features of viewer experience that
are cross-cultural. Most cognitivists accept the ndings of empirical science
that show that, in spite of the fact that culture exerts inuence over us, we still
193
possess certain innate tendencies and propensities. These innate processes play
a major role in our experience of lm (Bordwell, 2009a, 2009b).15
194
critics have claimed and that it simply needs the type of clarication his model
provides. Second, it is the term ordinary lmgoers most often use to describe
their experience, and most lmgoers report that a lm either fails or succeeds
depending on whether or not it encourages identication with its characters.
Gaut wants to avoid creating a new technical vocabulary to explain character
engagement, which he thinks most viewers already understand fairly well.
Murray Smith acknowledges that something like a process of identication
occurs when we watch lms, but argues that we need a more precise set of
concepts to capture the complexity of spectators engagement with characters
(1995). Smith presents a model of character engagement that he labels the struc-
ture of sympathy; it comprises three distinct but related levels of engagement
and thus allows for multiple types of character-spectator experience. Smith uti-
lizes Richard Wollheims distinction between central and acentral imagining.
Central imagining refers to imaging a situation from the inside, that is, from
a particular point of view. Acentral imagining, however, refers to imagining
that some situation is occurring but without doing so from within the situation.
Standard accounts of character engagement, such as Gauts, emphasize cen-
tral imagining, but Smith disagrees and argues that acentral imagination plays
the more important role in character engagement and that all three levels of
engagement that make up the structure of sympathy are more associated with
acentral imagining.
What are the three levels of sympathetic engagement? Smith labels them rec-
ognition, alignment, and allegiance. Through recognition, spectators experience
characters as individuated and as continuous human agents. Alignment refers
to the ways in which a lm narrative communicates information, giving view-
ers access to characters thoughts, feelings, and actions. Allegiance is Smiths
term for the process by which lm creates sympathies for or against characters,
and it is this concept that comes closest to the ordinary use of the term identi-
cation. Smith also discusses empathic processes, but they are separate from the
structure of sympathy and can work either within it or against it.
According to Smiths model, most viewers experience plural identication
while viewing a lm, sometimes engaging with a character on one level but not
another, sometimes engaging with a character at different levels throughout
a lm, and sometimes engaging with different characters at different levels.
For example, in the opening sequence of Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), we are
briey alignedperceptuallywith the shark, as it looks up from deep in the
water at the legs of a young woman. In spite of our alignment with the shark,
we dont experience allegiance to it; we dont begin to root for it or hope it
enjoys attacking its victim. In this case, we see what the shark sees without feel-
ing what it feels or wanting what it wants.
While Smith highlights the importance of sympathy in character engage-
ment, many others prefer to emphasize empathy, a psychological process that
195
has become increasingly important since the 1990s because of its signicance
for multiple domains of human experience, its role in important debates in phi-
losophy and psychology, and the discovery of mirror neurons.16 Mirror neu-
rons are a special class of neurons that re both when one performs a certain
type of action and when one simply observes another individual performing
the action.17
It is in part due to the discovery of mirror neurons that, in philosophy,
psychology, and cognitive science, empathy is increasingly being viewed as
a principal way in which we emotionally engage with one anothers experi-
ences in our ordinary lives. This view, along with features of the lm view-
ing experience, have led a number of theorists studying narratives to conclude
that when we emotionally engage with characters, we do soat least some of
the timethrough empathy (see, for example, Feagin, 1996; Neill, 1996; Currie,
2004; Coplan, 2004, 2009).
Although empathy accounts of character engagement resemble identica-
tion accounts such as Gauts, they have certain advantages over identication
accounts. Empathy is a psychological process that has been and continues to
be studied by empirical scientists. This enables theorists to draw on concrete
empirical ndings and to revise and rene their accounts as more is learned. To
be clear, I am not suggesting that all philosophical or aesthetic problems can be
solved by empirical data but rather that, when possible, it is useful for research-
ers to learn from and sometimes incorporate empirical ndings. By the same
token, empirical scientists stand to gain by bringing research in the humanities
to bear on their projects.
A signicant way that philosophers can contribute to research programs in a
variety of disciplines is through the clarication of central concepts. Conceptual
clarication would certainly benet research on or involving the concept of
empathy, as there currently exist numerous competing conceptualizations of
empathy that refer to distinct psychological processes that differ in function,
phenomenology, and effect18 (Coplan, 2011a, 2011b; Coplan and Goldie 2011;
Battaly, 2011; Batson, 2009; Eisenberg, 2000). Elsewhere, I argue that a more
precise conceptualization of empathy is needed for the concept to do any useful
explanatory work (Coplan, 2011a, 2011b). I conceptualize empathy as a complex
imaginative process through which one simulates a target individuals situated
psychological states, including the individuals relevant beliefs, emotions, and
desires, by imaginatively experiencing the individuals experiences from his or
her point of view, while simultaneously maintaining self-other differentiation.
My account of empathy emphasizes the role of self-other differentiation
and makes it a necessary condition for empathy. In many cases, the pres-
ence of self-other differentiation is what clearly distinguishes empathy from
processes that resemble it but during which it is possible for the boundaries
between an observer and a target individual to break down. In such cases,
196
197
are not part of the imaginative project of empathy (Coplan, 2004, pp. 1479,
2011a, 2011b).
6. Mirroring Responses
198
7. Conclusion
Notes
1. It should be noted that the philosophy of lm is a rich and diverse area of study
that includes research from numerous theoretical traditions. My discussion in this
chapter is in no way comprehensive and neglects much of this research, especially
that done in the Continental tradition by important gures such as Thedor Adorno,
Alain Badiou, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Max Horkheimer, Douglas Kellner,
Vivian Sobchak, and Slavoj Zizek.
2. Roger Scruton (1983) has famously defended this view more recently.
3. Cook (1996, pp. 16980) and Bordwell (2005, 2009b).
4. There are numerous alternative arguments for the view that lm can be art. For
recent discussions of this topic, see Stecker (2009), Carroll (2008), Smith (2001),
Thomson-Jones (2008), and Gaut (2003).
5. Carroll, 2006, p. 161.
6. Carroll, 2008, pp. 3552.
7. For recent discussions of these two issues, see Gaut (2010) and Carroll (2008,
pp. 579).
8. See, for example, Kaplan (1997), Diawara (1988), Dyer (1997), Haskell (1974), Ryan
and Kellner (1997), Flory (2008), Curran and Donelan (2009), and essays in Kaplan
(2000), Diawara (1993), and Erens (1991).
9. See, for example, Friedberg (1990) and Smith (1995).
199
10. Elsewhere in the book, Wartenberg argues that all that is necessary for an interpreta-
tion of a lm to be prima facie plausible is that its possible that a lmmaker could
have been familiar with the philosophical ideas being attributed to the lm. This
does not mean that the lmmaker has to have been familiar with the philosophical
text itself but only that its possible that the lmmaker could have been acquainted
with the issues the relevant philosophical theory raises, which can become part of
the culture at large. Regarding Modern Times in particular, Wartenberg explains
in a footnote that due to the publication of some of Marxs work, its possible that
Chaplin would have been familiar with the ideas. An even stronger argument in
favor of thinking that Chaplin could have been familiar with Marxs view of capital-
ism and its effect on workers is the fact that Chaplin was good friends with several
socialists and a supporter of Russia.
11. See, for example, essays in Grau (2005) and Irwin (2002, 2005).
12. See note 7 above. The issue of lm authorship has been much debated by philoso-
phers. See, for example, Gaut (1997), Carroll (2008), Meskin (2009), Livingston (1997),
and Sarris (2005).
13. Overviews of psychoanalytically based research in lm studies can be found in
Creed (1998) and Allen (2009). See, also, Creed (1993), and essays in Kaplan (1990),
and Bergstrom (1999).
14. See, also, Bordwell (2009a).
15. For an overview of cognitive lm theory and its development, see Bordwell (1996,
2009a, 2009b), and Buckland (2007). For in-depth discussions of cognitive lm theory
and the differences between cognitive lm theory and psychoanalytic (or screen)
theory, see Bordwell and Carroll (1996), Allen and Smith (1997), Carroll (1992, 1996a,
1996b), Plantinga and Smith (1997), Smith (1995), and Plantinga (2009a).
16. See Eisenberg and Strayer (1987), Wisp (1987), Batson (2009), and Coplan and Goldie
(2011) for discussions of the varied uses of empathy and its relevance to philosophy,
psychology, and neuroscience.
17. For more on mirror neurons, see discussions in Iacoboni (2008) and Rizzolatti and
Sinigaglia (2008), and essays in Braten (2007), Stamenov and Gallese (2002), and
Pineda (2009).
18. Coplan (2011a, 2011b), Battaly (2011), Batson (2009), and Eisenberg (2000).
19. The phenomenon that psychologists refer to as personal distress or contagious
distress is one example of the type of psychological fusion Im describing. For
more on how personal distress differs from empathy, see Toi and Batson (1982),
Batson et al. (1983), Batson et al. (1987), Eisenberg et al. (1988), Eisenberg et al. (1989),
Eisenberg and Eggum (2009), Singer and Lamm (2009), and Coplan (2011a, 2011b).
20. I discuss this issue in greater depth, along with other issues regarding the nature of
empathy, elsewhere (Coplan, 2011a, 2011b).
21. Jenefer Robinson (2005) and Stephen Davies (2011), for example, have both discussed
mirroring (or contagion) responses to music, which can occur in response to lm
music and which share much in common with other types of mirroring responses to
lm. Both Robinson and Davies also contrast responses that result from mirroring
and those that are more cognitive.
22. For a useful discussion of startle, its automatic and involuntary nature, and its rel-
evance for understanding the way emotion works, see Robinson (1995). For more on
non-cognitive affects in general, see Robinson (2005), Prinz (2004, 2007), and Coplan
(2011a, 2011b). On non-cognitive affective responses to lm, see Choi (2003), Carroll
(2003), Coplan (2006, 2009), and Plantinga (2009b).
200
1. Introduction
201
correction (4), and the metaphysics of reconstruction (5). The rst three
issues have been selected because they are fundamental, because they bring
out some of architectures distinctive features, and because they can be
expected to be found interesting by philosophers and non-philosophers alike.
The fourth issue is less likely to be found interesting outside philosophy, but
it is representative of recent discussions in the analytic philosophy of archi-
tecture. Those interested in the unselected topicsfor example, the ways in
which buildings can mean somethingare referred to other survey articles
and books, in particular, to Scruton (1979), Haldane (1998), Graham (2005),
and Winters (2005, 2007).
2. Design
In general, buildings are designed before they are built. The distinction between
design and construction is most clear in contemporary Western society, where
building plans have to receive formal approval before they can be carried out.
However, there can be design where there is no physical plan or even a prior
mental conception of what the result should look like. The process of design
need not precede the process of construction, and in actual cases often overlaps
it to a considerable extent. If such overlap raises philosophical questions, then
these are better dealt with in metaphysics or in action theory than in the philos-
ophy of architecture. In the latter domain, the philosophical question of interest
is: what do people do when they design a building? In other words, what does
the act of designing a building consist in?
According to Roger Scruton (1979), designing a building is essentially
a form of practical deliberation, that is, a matter of nding out what to do.1
Consequently, it involves what philosophers call practical reason. To under-
stand why Scrutons is a philosophically signicant answer to the question it is
necessary to contrast it with an alternative one. The view expressed by the alter-
native answer has probably never been held in a pure form, but it is attractive
to the extent that one conceives of architecture as engineering. On this view,
designing a building is trying to nd a solution to an optimization problem.2
An optimization problem is a computational problem that is solved by nding
a best solution in a larger set of possible solutions, where best means that
the value of a certain function is maximized. Clearly, if this view is correct, then
designing involves not practical but theoretical reason.
To understand why Scruton objects to such a rationalistic picture of design,
it is necessary to grasp what it implies. Let us therefore look, rst, at what solv-
ing an optimization problem generally amounts to. Next, we can evaluate the
idea that designing a building is such a form of problem-solving.
202
In general, solving an optimization problem takes four steps (see, for exam-
ple, Papalambros and Wilde, 2000, pp. 1112):
203
3. Style
204
205
not expected to take a position in the debate between historicists and vernacu-
larists concerning the desirability of modern architecture. However, differences
about what ought to be the case sometimes reduce to differences about what
is the case. In other words, it is possible that one of the parties in the debate is
negligent about a certain descriptive fact, and that this negligence explains his
or her position. If this is the case, then it may certainly be expected from a phi-
losopher to bring this out.
According to Scruton, the historicist misses out on the fact that one can only
form a conception of the spirit of an age, if indeed there is such a thing, when
one has progressed far enough into that age or even entered a new age:
But such spurious determinism loses its force, just as soon as we realize
that the style of an age is not a critical datum, not something that can be
identied in advance of the individual intentions of individual architects.
Historicism has no real method whereby to associate works of a given
period with its ruling spirit. All it can do is to reect on their association
after the event, and try to derive, from a critical understanding of individual
buildings, a suitable formula with which to summarize their worth. It follows
that it can say nothing in advance of observation, and set no dogmatic limit
either to the architects choice of style or to his expressive aim. (1979, p. 55;
italics in original)
Hence, if historicism is true, then the correct answer to the question, In what
style to build? is beyond the ken of those who have to act on the answer. This
is paradoxical, because it implies that we cannot knowingly do the right thing
in architecture. To be sure, this objection only helps to undermine historicism in
so far as it is a theory of what an architect ought to do. In principle, the histori-
cist could retreat to a somewhat weaker position, and claim that the spirit of the
age sets the norm by which we are to judge architecture in retrospect. However,
if this were to become her position, then it would be tting to ask why express-
ing the spirit of the age is such a big deal: why is it regarded as a necessary
condition for architectural success? As Scruton writes, [n]othing . . . stands
in the way of the suggestion that a work might succeed, just occasionally, in
expressing something other than its historical reality, and derive its success
from that (p. 54). Moreover, a methodological concern can be raised about the
way historicists have actually appealed to the spirit of the age in looking back at
the architecture of a certain period (pp. 556). Their selection of age-appropriate
works often seems arbitrary or to betray a bias in favor of a particular style. In
this connection, Scruton mentions the classicist architect Edwin Lutyens, who
was ignored by Giedion in his highly inuential Space, Time and Architecture
(rst published in 1941).
206
207
does not regard strict obedience to the grammar of a (vernacular) style as such
a precondition. The rules of the grammar need not be respected at all times.
However, they have to be respected on a sufcient number of occasions so that
a meaningful, rule-guided order can emerge, which is a precondition of suc-
cessful law-breaking. Second, and related to the rst qualication, Scruton is not
recommending a mechanical application of rules. In line with his account of archi-
tectural design, he argues that a tting deployment of stylistic elements always
requires an aesthetic sense and a sense of the appropriate, even where rules
are followed. However, such senses can be educated, and in rule-governed prac-
tices an underdeveloped sense will do less harm than where no rules exist.
Assuming that Scrutons diagnosis is correct, one naturally wonders whether
there could be an architecture that is modern in outlook and whose success does
not depend on genius or artistic talent. In particular, the question arises whether
modern architecture might be enriched, not just with a grammar, but with a
grammar that opens up a vast range of interesting, adaptable possibilities that
can be explored by anyone endowed with a minimum of aesthetic sensibility
and practical reason. It seems difcult to reason about this question in an a pri-
ori manner. Perhaps the future will bear out that the answer is yes. In the mean-
time, the question is what policy to adopt as an architect, an urban planner, or a
client. Assuming that Scruton is right, should one, at least temporarily, refrain
from working in the modern style? No such radical policy is really called for.
The most reasonable policy, it seems to me, is to let ones choice of style depend
on the neighborhood: roughly speaking, where modern architecture is clearly
dominant, the modern style is preferential; where traditional architecture is
clearly dominant, traditional architecture is preferential. This policy has been
called true pluralism by architect and theoretician Lon Krier, who opposes
it to the false pluralism of the hotchpotch city or town we are all familiar
with (the city center of Brussels being just one tragic example). As an individual
architect it may be difcult to adopt this policy, but larger rms have already
adopted it to great success. Robert A. M. Stern and Hammond Beeby Rupert
Ainge Architects are probably the best-known examples.
Of course, true pluralism does not add a grammar to modern architecture, so
failures in this style would continue to occur even if the segregation policy were
adopted. However, the failures would no longer result from a clash of styles,
and older neighborhoods would no longer be forced to be the victims of them.
4. Optical Correction
Whether modern or classical, a building has visual parts: parts that we can
distinguish visually and which we can experience either as well proportioned
208
209
5. Reconstruction
Buildings are capable of surviving many and profound changes, from a mere
repainting of their walls through adaptive reuse to the addition and demol-
ishing of major structural parts. Philosophers like to take such possibilities to
the extreme in order to discover metaphysical truths, for example about cri-
teria of identity. What is interesting about the case of architecture is that the
extreme cases are not just found in thought experiments. The history and cur-
rent practice of architecture offer a wealth of examples where the identity of a
building becomes questionable in light of the changes it has undergone. Robert
Wicks (1994) considers one type of case: the case where a building is demol-
ished and then, later, rebuilt on the basis of the original plans, but using dif-
ferent materials. A clear instance is the Goethe House in Frankfurt, which was
faithfully reconstructed after its destruction in World War II. Common sense
seems to hesitate between calling such reconstructions authentic and calling
them replicas of the original building. According to Wicks, the hesitation is to
be explained by the fact that we have two ways of conceiving of the architec-
tural work:
The above considerations together indicate that we can variously judge the
authenticity of architectural refabrications by applying criteria of identity
from either the realms of painting and sculpture or from the realm of music.
In the former case, the architectural refabrication emerges as an unauthentic
copy or replica; in the latter case, it emerges as authentic re-instantiation (or
resurrection) of the architectural work. (1994, p. 165)
In other words, we can either identify the architectural work with a concrete
object, a particular building, in which case only one building can be called
authentic; or we can identify it with an abstract object, a type of building, in
which case many buildings can be called authentic (as instances of that type).
However, note that, in the second case, the instances of an architectural work
are different buildings, so that resurrection is a slightly inappropriate term
to relate one instance to another. A genuine case of resurrection would be a
case where one and the same concrete objectfor example, a buildingcomes
into existence again. In metaphysics, this possibility, if it is one, is known as
intermittent existence. Some authors accept it as a genuine possibility, oth-
ers do not. But Wicks ignores it altogether. Instead, he seeks evidence for the
view that architectural works might be compared to musical works, which are
abstract objects. In particular, he compares construction workers to musical
performers, building plans to musical scores, and, nally, architectural works
to musical works. The basis of the comparison, however, seems weak. For
210
Wicks, the fact that we often choose to restore buildings to their original state
suggests that the architectural work resides in a certain look or appearance,
so that, when this look or appearance is recreated, the work is again instanti-
ated (p. 168). Of course, as Wicks realizes, the conclusion does not follow logi-
cally. What is more, the cited fact about restoration is not even good evidence
for the conclusion. To see this, consider, rst, that we adopt exactly the same
restoration policy in the case of (important or signicant) paintings and sculp-
tures, which, according to Wicks, are not abstract objects; second, that we have
an alternative, and more straightforward, explanation of why we adopt such
a restoration policy with regard to objects that are considered to be of artistic
or historical value. The explanation is that we aim to return to such objects
their original appearance because that is how they were intended to be viewed,
understood, and judged.10 Moreover, it goes without saying that the original
state of a work of art is often superior to the state it is in when questions about
its restoration arise.
The above considerations do not contradict the fact that architectural plans
are like musical scores in that they determine an abstract structure. But this
is still far from saying that the architectural work is to be identied with this
structure. As has just been pointed out, Wicks has not given us good reasons
for making the identication. Moreover, there is evidence that the identication
would be mistaken, at least in the vast majority of cases. For the names we asso-
ciate with architectural works (e.g., the Seagram Building or the Panthon)
refer to concrete buildings, not to abstract designs. In this respect, architecture
is unlike music, where the well-known names (e.g., Beethovens Fifth) refer to
abstract works rather than to particular performances of these works.
Wicks is not the only philosopher who has drawn startling conclusions from
the possibility (and practice) of rebuilding. In a recent article, Lopes (2007) con-
siders the case of a Japanese sanctuary building on the site of Ise Jingu. The
building has been rebuilt almost every 20 years since the eighth century. As in
the case envisaged by Wicks, the materials used for the rebuilding are differ-
ent from the ones that constituted the original building. Moreover, the rebuild-
ing does not take place exactly on the spot, but on some adjacent vacant lot.
According to Lopes, this practice presents a problem for the standard, Western
ontology of architecture, which identies buildings with material objects. The
reason is that, if the sanctuary is a material object, then it is a different object
every 20 years:
Ise Jingu [i.e., the sanctuary] is made of parts that were joined together no
more than twenty years ago. Although it sits next to the spot where a different
building stood, it is not the survivor of that building. The reason is that no
building survives the simultaneous replacement of all its parts. Indeed, there
211
was a time when both buildings stood side-by-side, and a material object
cannot stand beside itself. (Lopes, 2007, p. 81)
6. Conclusion
This chapter has dealt with four issues in the philosophy of architecture:
design, style, optical correction, and reconstruction. As noted in the introduc-
tion, at least the rst three issues are fundamental, which explains why they
also bear on issues that have not been explicitly addressed, such as the experi-
ence, understanding, and evaluation of architecture. For example, if Scruton is
right about architectural design, then a buildings design is to be experienced
as the outcome of a practical deliberation process rather than an optimization
procedure, although optimization may of course be involved in the process.
Similarly, if Scruton is right about architectural style, then the chances of suc-
cess of the deliberative process will be determined to a considerable extent by
what style gets chosen. Finally, if my own suggestion concerning architectural
212
proportion is correct, then the evaluation of a building will have to take into
account both real and apparent proportions.
However that may be, the selection of the issues was certainly not based
on their being hotly debated in the literature. The reason is that the philoso-
phy of architecture has been a somewhat dormant discipline over the past two
decades, compared to, for example, the philosophy of music. It is difcult to
predict whether this will change any time soon, but there are signs of a grow-
ing interest in art forms that do not enjoy the status of, say, music and litera-
ture, either because they are relatively new (lm, comics, digital art) or because
they are applied (architecture, fashion, and design). Moreover, some of the
issues that traditionally belonged to the philosophy of architecture can now be
retrieved in the emerging eld of environmental aesthetics, which does not
just concern itself with the natural environment but also, according to one of
its advocates, with cityscapes, neighbourhoods, amusement parks, shopping
centres . . ., our ofces, our living spaces (Carlson, 2005, p. 551).
Notes
213
9. The proportions of a building are right if, and only if, they contribute to the overall
aesthetic and/or architectural value of the building.
10. Evidently, the suggested explanation only captures why we choose to restore objects
of high artistic or historical value to their original state. In the other cases, there is
usually no reason why we should care about how the object was intended to be
viewed, understood, and judged. But this limitation is not a shortcoming: insigni-
cant buildings are rarely restored. They are repaired or refurbished, but with no
special regard for how they once looked.
214
1. Introduction
Although it may seem obvious that there are essential differences between
works of high art and works of popular art, a clear distinction is very hard
to draw. Indeed it is so difcult that we might be tempted to think that there
is no real difference after all, at least not any intrinsic difference. Before we
consider the skeptical position, we should consider a few ways in which one
might try to mark the divide. I will consider three options: popularity, prot,
and entertainment.
215
216
the production of high art has nothing to do with money, whereas, popular art
has everything to do with making money.
The second candidate certainly tracks a widely shared view that popular art
is a purely commercial enterprise. But the suggestion that an eye toward prot
is sufcient to make a work an instance of popular art is far too crude. To return
to the previous example, one should not forget that Mozart worked as a court
composer. He produced dozens of works on commission. Similarly, the history
of Western portrait painting is largely one of work-for-pay. The suggestion that
any considerations of prot make a work one of popular art has the absurd con-
sequence that most of what we think of as high art is in fact popular art. Hence,
the prot motive will not work as a plausible criterion of popular art either.
In reply, the defender of the prot motive distinction might try to rene the
view. The difference cannot be drawn by a miniscule amount of for-prot consid-
erations, but when the prot motive is primary, or perhaps just prominent, then
the work is one of popular art. The revised suggestion holds that high art can be
produced with prot in mind, but if prot is a signicant motivating factor, then
the work is one of popular art. Unfortunately, this fuzzy revision fares no bet-
ter. If Mozart was primarily concerned with paying his bills when we composed
The Clemency of Titus, this would not make the opera an instance of popular
art. Primary or incidental, it does not matter. The strength of the prot motive
does not help make the distinction between high art and popular art.
Once again, the defender of the prot motive distinction might make a rene-
ment. Merely being concerned with making money from a work is not enough
to make a work an instance of popular art. This is clear. But when considera-
tions of prot enter into decisions of how the artwork should be made, when
artistic choices are governed by prot considerations, then the work is one of
popular art. Mozart may have composed The Clemency of Titus in order to
put food on the table, but this had nothing to do with his aesthetic choices. Sure,
one must compose a work to t an occasion, or produce a painting that will t
in a normal size room, but apart from such generic considerations, the aesthetic
choices in the production of high art are not made with an eye toward prot.
When they are, the defender of the rened prot distinction holds, the work is
an instance of popular art.
This revised version of the prot distinction fares better, but like its pred-
ecessors it too has fatal problems. For starters, it is hopelessly nave. The dis-
tinction reects a silly romantic ideal of the starving artist working to create
a genuine expression of his or her passion. But few artworks are created in
urries of uncompromising expressivity. Put aside these teenage fantasies and
consider portrait painters once again: a successful portrait painter must atter
her patron, else she will quickly go out of business. Surely a portrait painter
must make some important aesthetic considerations with an eye toward getting
217
paid. The patron must look dignied and attractive. But aesthetically relevant
for-prot considerations could not make Leonardo da Vincis Mona Lisa a work
of popular art. In view of these difculties, it is safe to conclude that there is no
clean distinction to be found here; we will have to nd another way to mark the
divide between popular and high art.
The preceding discussion of the problems with the prot motive distinction
suggests yet a third way to draw the contrast. Rather than the prot motive
cutting a sharp divide, perhaps we can appeal to a related goal: entertainment.
Popular art seeks to entertain. High art does more. The defender of the enter-
tainment distinction cannot say that merely intending to entertain makes a
work one of popular art. This is too crude. It would be ridiculous to suggest
that Shakespeare did not intend to entertain his audiences with A Midsummer
Nights Dream. So the claim has to be that high art does more than merely
entertain. Works of high art are also about matters of importance. For instance,
A Midsummer Nights Dream is not merely entertaining; it also contains pro-
found reections on the nature of romantic love. Works of popular art do noth-
ing more than merely entertain.
Once again, this distinction fails to mark the desired division. It is too per-
missive. It allows far too much into the category of high art. Indisputable works
of popular art, such as the screwball comedies of the 1930s, contain profound
reections on romantic love (Cavell, 1981). Bringing up Baby (Hawks, 1932)
is not a mere vehicle of entertainment, whatever that might mean. Nor are pop-
ular television shows, such as Mad Men (ABC). But Hollywood comedies
and ABC miniseries are popular art if anything is.
The entertainment criterion is also too restrictive. It rules out absolute
musicmusic without words. Although absolute music can be profoundly
moving, profoundly sad, or profoundly uplifting, it cannot be profound. Pure
non-linguistic sonic structures cannot be about anything. And a work cannot
be profound unless it is about something. Hence, absolute music can do little
more than provide aesthetic experiences.3 But works that merely afford aesthetic
experience are mere vehicles of entertainment, albeit of an aesthetic sort. Hence,
the entertainment criterion entails an absurdityit suggests that absolute music
is popular art. Since this is clearly false, we should reject the criterion.
Further, the criterion gets the distinction backwards. The majority of popu-
lar music is in the form of song, which contain words. Not just random words,
songs often tell small stories. Hence, any given popular love song is likely to
provide more commentary on the nature of love than the entire tradition of
symphonic music.
Sad songs do not try to entertain audiences, if by entertain we mean provide
an enjoyable experience. No, sad songs can be emotionally devastating, a far
cry from entertainment (Smuts, 2010). Hence, sad pop songs would be excluded
and absolute music would be included in the category popular art according
218
to the third way of drawing the distinction. But that gets things backwards. The
entertainment criterion appears to offer no help at all.
Difculties such as these have lead some to think that there is no clear way
to differentiate between high art and popular art based on intrinsic features of
the works. Instead, the difference between high art and popular art must come
from outside.4 What is the most likely candidate? Consider the audiences: Who
goes to the symphony? Who goes to avant-garde dance performances? It is not
Joe the Plumber; it is the educated and the well-to-do. Accordingly, one might
argue that the distinction is merely marked by social class.5 Works of popular
art are those enjoyed by the masses, whereas high art is that which is enjoyed
by the upper classes. There is no intrinsic difference between the two kinds of
art, only an extrinsic class association.6
Although the suggestion that there is no intrinsic difference between popular
art and high art is prima facie plausible, it runs into two serious problems. The rst
problem for any class-based distinction is that artistic tastes do not cleanly track
economic and social class. For instance, in America there appears to be nearly uni-
versal preference for popular art. Perhaps only the well-to-do can afford tickets to
the opera, but among this class only a few prefer opera to other forms of popular
music. George Bush, for instance, preferred country to classical music.
The second problem is more serious. If there is only an extrinsic class-based
distinction, how is it that members of the relevant classes can pick out the
appropriate works? Without any intrinsic differences, it is something of a mys-
tery how we can classify various works into the appropriate categories. There
must be some intrinsic differences, else the works could not be sorted by the
appropriate social classes. The class associations must be dependent on some
intrinsic differences, not the other way around.
I have been discussing popular art as if it were synonymous with low art,
contrasting it with high art. But perhaps the most illuminating contrast is
not with high art, but with avant-garde art. Rather than attempting to account
for all of what falls under the crude concept of popular art, some argue that it
is more instructive to think of a subspecies of the popular, a species that has
become increasingly prominent in the last century, that of mass art. Prior to the
twentieth century, the question of interest was what differentiated folk art from
high art. Folk art includes various crafts as well as local traditions of music and
dance. But with the rise of mass communication technologies, folk art has been
eclipsed by music on the radio, lms in theaters, and shows on television. Local
traditions have been replaced by works enjoyed across nations and the globe
works with mass appeal.
219
Accordingly, Nol Carroll argues that the bulk of contemporary popular art
is what he calls mass art (1998). He argues that many TV shows, lms, songs,
comic books, video games, and other kinds of popular art share a couple of
important features. First, they are mass-produced and can be delivered to mul-
tiple reception sites simultaneously. Second, they are designed so that they will
be readily comprehensible to the largest number of people possible. They are
mass-produced for the masses. Hence, we should call them mass art, in a
non-pejorative, purely descriptive sense.
The second feature of mass art, that it be designed for near universal acces-
sibility, is most important. It helps mark a clear distinction between popular art
and avant-garde art. Audiences require very little training in order to understand
Transformers or to appreciate Michael Jacksons Thriller. However, the same
cannot be said of avant-garde painting, dance, music, or lm. The avant-garde
targets an audience of those well versed in the contemporary theoretical land-
scape and knowledgeable about the history of art. As we saw earlier, those who
deny that there are intrinsic differences between popular art and avant-garde art
have difculty explaining how we can effectively sort works into the proper cat-
egory. But the defender of mass art has a clear explanation: we can effectively sort
works of mass art from avant-garde works by assessing their accessibility.
The accessibility condition draws a nice distinction between avant-garde art
and mass art. And it tracks what seemed right about the popular in popular
art. Mass art is designed so that it can be popular. This feature of mass art has
important implications. Most importantly, it places restrictions on mass art-
ists. Radical formal experimentation will be impossible if the work must be
widely accessible. This explains, for instance, why classical continuity editing
is ubiquitous among popular lms worldwide.7 Since it takes very little training
to understand eye-line matches we would expect to nd popular lmmakers
using the editing pattern. And we do.
One worry about this characterization of mass art is that it misdescribes
much of what we nd on television, the radio, and in movie theaters. Whether
the second criterion is apt depends on what exactly one means by accessible.
Popular music and television programs are not produced for undifferentiated
masses. No, they are targeted to particular audiences, to particular demograph-
ics. The worry for the second criterion is that much mass art is accessible in
some ways, but not others. It is true that we should not expect to nd atonal
music in the top 40 charts. But many works of popular art are inaccessible in
other, less radical ways. Although it does not require much tutoring, Heavy
Metal music is largely emotionally inaccessible to those who prefer easy listen-
ing. Even the humor in television programs designed for niche demographics
is largely inaccessible to those outside.
Hence, the worry is that the second criterion of mass art excludes much
of what should be included. If Heavy Metal is not designed for maximum
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accessibility, then it is not mass art. If so, then the concept of mass art encom-
passes little of the domain of popular art. Since we are looking for a concept that
can account for the bulk of popular art, we will have to look elsewhere.
The defender of the second criterion of mass art has a plausible defense:
restrict the notion of accessibility. Clearly the fans of easy listening can under-
stand what emotions Heavy Metal music is designed to elicit. They can com-
prehend the music. They just do not like it. However, even if we accept a more
restricted notion of accessibility, a related worry arises. Mere accessibility is not
enough for success. To be successful, people need to like the work. The problem
is that tastes vary. Popular music, movies, and television shows are designed
to appeal to particular demographics. Sure, there are globally successful action
movies such as Avatar (Cameron, 2009). And stories of love, loss, and redemp-
tion are universal. But there is also a great deal of popular art that has far more
limited appeal. One does not tell a love story, but a particular love story set in a
particular place with particular people. Much supernatural horror, for instance,
does not have appeal outside of the relevant religious group.
Perhaps this does not so much as count as an objection to the characteriza-
tion of mass art, as much as it is an extension to the view. The need for a work
to be comprehensible to untutored audiences has great explanatory power. It
does a good job of accounting for the commonality of core structural features
of popular art. But when it comes to the particular content, we often need to
take into account the demographic designs. Much of what we call popular art
is not designed to appeal to the largest number of people possible. This fact has
important implications for philosophical arguments concerning the aesthetic
and political nature of mass art.
Although we can draw a clear distinction between mass art and avant-garde
art, it is not so clear if there is a principled way to demarcate popular art from
high art. Further, it is not entirely clear that such a distinction is helpful for
any theoretical or practical purposes. What purpose does it server to classify
a genre, such as melodrama, or an art form, such as that of video games, as
belonging to popular art? What do we know about any particular work when
we learn that it is an instance of popular art? What does this imply about its
nature? It seems very little. It appears that we would be better off nding new
ways to talk about art. The label art cinema might be crude and largely unin-
formative, but the label popular art certainly is.
Why is so much popular art bad? In the preceding discussion of the nature of
popular art, I used the lms of Michael Bay as examples. The problem is that
he makes what any self-respecting critic would say are awful movies. By any
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credible standard of taste, Bad Boys and Transformers are terrible. They
may have done well at the box ofce, but they fall short of any artistic value.
These are not isolated examples. When one looks around at the array of popular
art, one nds a nearly endless array of dreck. Just turn on the radio or TV. What
do you nd? Bad music and bad shows. Certainly there must be some explana-
tion. It must have to do with the nature of popular art.
In what follows, I will consider the two most important arguments against
the aesthetic value of popular art: (1) the argument from the appeal to the low-
est common denominator, and (2) the argument from entertainment.8 Both of
these arguments proceed from assumptions about the nature of popular art.
They are philosophical arguments. They hold that the very nature of popular
art makes it inferior to high art and the avant-garde.
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Earlier we considered a few unsuccessful ways that one might try to make a
clean distinction between popular art and high art. One of the more plausible
attempts concerns the goals of popular art. Unlike high art and unlike the avant-
garde, popular art seeks to entertain. As noted above, this distinction is far too
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224
4. Conclusion
It is likely the case that most of what we consider high art may be better than the
bulk of popular art, but this is not a result of the nature of popular art. Rather it
is a product of how something becomes high art. Much of what now falls into
the category of high art, such as Shakespeares plays, was the popular art of
the day. Our category of high art is more honoric than classicatory. That is,
it includes what has been deemed excellent. The high art that we nd collected
225
in literary anthologies and gathered into museums are typically works of rec-
ognized excellence. The popular often becomes canonized through the test of
time. Hence, it is plausible that what differentiates the popular from high art is
simply recognized excellence.
Contemporary artists working in art forms and genres closely tied to a his-
tory of recognized excellence tend to be classied as high art. But as we have
seen, no clear, principled distinction can be made that will track common classi-
catory practice, not popularity, prot, or entertainment. Further, pretheoreti-
cal practice seems to be based on a series of mistakes concerning the putative
purity of high art.
The distinction between high and popular art is a hodgepodge of tradition
and prejudice. However, a more precise distinction can be drawn between
mass art and avant-garde art. This distinction does some productive theoretical
work. It can, for instance, account for the commonality of structural features
that make narratives accessible. But based on a mere classication, we can con-
clude next to nothing about the aesthetic value of a work of art.
In closing, one thing more needs to be said in defense of mass art. It is not
fair to merely highlight all the bad mass art and to pretend that there is a spe-
cial problem concerning the dearth of excellence. Mass art is not alone here; it
is not as if most avant-garde art is artistically valuable. Take a walk through
any random art gallery. I suspect that most of what you see will be simplistic,
derivative work. Does this have to do with the nature of the avant-garde, or is
there a more general explanation? I suspect that what we might nd at work
is Sturgeons Law: ninety percent of everything is crud. Since we are sur-
rounded by mass art, we see a lot more awful mass art than avant-garde art. But
that gives us no reason to think that popular art is necessarily or even typically
inferior to the avant-garde.
Notes
1. There are many other important questions in the literature on popular art that cannot
be addressed here. For instance: Is there anything politically liberating about popular
art? Are video games art? What is interactivity? Are comics art? What is the work of
rock music? How do works of popular art engage the emotions? How can we evalu-
ate works of popular art on moral and ideological grounds? Is popular art essentially
politically repressive? By far the best introduction to the area is Carroll (1998).
2. Greenberg (1986) prefers kitsch. McDonald (1957) proposes mass art. Carroll
(1998) adopts McDonalds label, but in a non-pejorative sense. I discuss Carrolls sug-
gestion in the next section.
3. For further defense of this claim, see Kivy (1990, ch. 10 and 2003).
4. Novitz (1992) and Levine (1988) provide alternate accounts of the distinction.
5. This style of eliminativism can be found in Bourdieu (1984).
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227
The past 50 years have witnessed the rise of a new branch of philosophical aes-
thetics: environmental aesthetics. This new eld of study has emerged largely
in reaction to aesthetics traditional focus on the arts, and has important con-
nections with another burgeoning eld, the aesthetics of nature. Environmental
aestheticians have sought to catalogue and characterize a wide range of aesthetic
objects and experiences lying beyond the canonical realm of the arts. They have
also offered novel conceptions of important theoretical concepts within aesthet-
ics, including the notion of aesthetic appreciation itself.
Surely the most striking feature of contemporary environmental aesthetics is
its almost limitless scope. Philosophical works exploring architecture, domestic
spaces, sports, recycling, eating, gardening, walking, and even sexual activity
can all be placed within the discipline. In fact, it seems as if only imagination
limits the extension of this list, given the very nature of environmental aesthet-
ics itself. For, though it might seem odd to think of human activities such as
sports and eating as a part of the environment, environmental aestheticians
often construe environment in an extremely broad sense that includes more
or less everything except art. Allen Carlson, for instance, glosses the environ-
ment as our total surroundings (1992, p. 142). Along similar lines, Arnold
Berleant asserts that any human context in which an aesthetic aspect is signi-
cant is an aesthetic environment (1998, p. 118). Since anything at all, including
human activities, can be said to belong to our total surroundings, in some sense,
or to belong to a context with aesthetic aspects, these conceptions of environ-
ment provide a rationale for the view that environmental aesthetics embraces
the study of the aesthetic signicance of almost everything other than art
(Carlson, 2007). This view is now widespread, as is shown by the diversity of
topics covered in recent collections of papers in the eld (Berleant and Carlson,
2007; Light and Smith, 2005; Berleant 2002; von Bonsdorff and Haapala, 1999).
In the rst part of this essay, I review recent work in the eld of environmental
aesthetics, understood in this broad sense, identifying some common themes
and tracing some connections to the aesthetics of nature.
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229
(Rolston, 1998) and the wetland (Callicott, 2003; Rolston, 2000). That the recent
renaissance in nature aesthetics should have this focus is not surprising, given
that it occurred at just the time that the notion of environment was gaining
currency in the wider culture, both as a source of anxiety over issues such as
pollution and chemical use, and as a subject of intense scientic study.
The inuence of the concept of environment can also be seen in the fact that
recent debates in nature aesthetics have been dominated by two issues: the role
of knowledge in aesthetic appreciation and the ethical dimensions of aestheti-
cally appreciating the natural environment (for a more detailed discussion of
these issues, see Parsons, 2007; for a more general survey of work in nature
aesthetics see the introduction to Carlson and Berleant, 2004). The former issue
has taken shape against the background of cultural accounts of the appreciation
of art. These accounts, which continue to dominate thinking about art appre-
ciation, hold that knowledge concerning artworks, in particular knowledge of
their genre and content, plays an essential role in appropriate appreciation (for
classic examples of cultural accounts, see Dickie, 1984; Danto, 1981; Walton,
1970). Some philosophers have argued that, in the appreciation of the natu-
ral environment, scientic knowledge about the natural environment plays an
analogous role (Carlson, 2000; see also Matthews, 2002; Parsons, 2002; Eaton,
1998). In contrast, others have downplayed the role of scientic understand-
ing in the aesthetic appreciation of nature, emphasizing instead imagination
(Brady, 2003), emotion (Carroll, 2001, 1993), or a quasi-religious experience of
transcendence (Godlovitch, 1994).
Moral or ethical issues have also been an important focus of recent discussion,
with some arguing that ethical considerations play an important role in deter-
mining the principles that guide the aesthetic appreciation of nature. Yuriko
Saito, for instance, objects to certain traditional forms of landscape apprecia-
tion, such as picturesque and associationist approaches, on the grounds that
they embody an overly anthropocentric perspective. On these approaches,
nature is treated either merely as a scenic backdrop or as a sort of stimulus
for evoking emotions and ideas situated within a cultural narrative (as when a
particular plain excites thoughts of the glory of a military victory that occurred
there). Saito suggests that moral considerations behoove us to take nature on
its own terms instead, appreciating it in light of narratives that give it a central
role (1998b). Other philosophers have explored the inuence of the aesthetic
on ethical issues involving the environment. For instance, some have assessed
the feasibility of arguing that natures aesthetic value can be a good reason for
preserving it from development or destruction (Hettinger, 2008; Parsons, 2008a;
Hettinger, 2005; Loftis, 2003; Thompson, 1995; Hargrove, 1989).
These two major preoccupations in recent work in the aesthetics of nature,
the role of knowledge and the relation between the moral and the aesthetic,
intertwine in discussions of the view that virgin nature, unlike art or the built
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231
attention has been given to the impact of different ways of moving through the
rural landscape: by highway, for instance (Andrews, 2007; Sepnmaa, 2005).
Environmental aestheticians have also extended the concept of environment
to urban or built spaces. Architecture has always fallen within the purview of
modern aesthetics, based on its status as one of the ne arts (Kristeller, 1998),
even if it has received relatively little attention from philosophers of art (for
overviews of philosophical work on architecture specically see de Clerq (this
volume); Winters, 2007; Graham, 2003). Environmental aestheticians have
expanded on this inquiry to consider not only the appreciation of buildings, but
our aesthetic experiences of the larger array of elements, such as bridges, roads,
and sidewalks, that combine with buildings to constitute the built environment.
Some have offered general approaches to the aesthetics of built environments
(Parsons, 2008b; von Bonsdorff, 2002; Carlson, 2001; Berleant, 1986). Others
address more specic issues, such as the experience of different ways of mov-
ing through urban environments (Ryynanen, 2005; Macauley, 2000), and the
multisensory character of the built environment (Sepnmaa, 2007). Other stud-
ies focus on quintessentially modern vernacular spaces, from Disney World
(Berleant, 1997) to shopping malls (Brottman, 2005), and some take up spaces
that t uneasily with the very notion of a built environment, such as junk-
yards (Leddy, 2008; Carlson, 1976).
Another particular kind of built environment, the garden, has also attracted
interest. Here the connections between environmental aesthetics and the aesthet-
ics of nature are particularly prominent, with the precise relationship between
gardens and nature coming in for philosophical scrutiny (see Parsons, 2008a;
Cooper, 2006; Ross, 2006, 1999, 1998). Studies in this area have also focused on
the relationship of gardens and garden appreciation to art (Cooper, 2006; Ross,
2006, 1999, 1998; Carlson, 1997; Miller, 1993; Leddy, 1988) and on the peculiarly
unnatural character of Japanese gardens (Carlson, 1997; Heyd, 2002).
In addition to these public or commercial areas, environmental aesthetics
has also explored the aesthetic dimensions of domestic settings, such as the
special emphasis placed on aesthetic qualities related to neatness and clean-
ness (Leddy, 1997, 1995). Attention has also been directed at particular objects
and practices situated in these settings, rather than the settings themselves.
Increasingly, a focus of attention is everyday artifacts, such as dishes, furni-
ture, clothing, and tools (Saito, 2007a), along with practices, such as recycling
(McCracken, 2005) and cleaning (Melchionne, 1998), that involve them. An
interest in Japanese aesthetics, which places much importance on vernacular
architecture and design, and on the aesthetic dimensions of everyday life,
has been an important inuence on much of this work (see, for example, Saito,
2007a, 2007b, 1999; Sandrisser, 1998). The aesthetics of everyday artifacts has
also been approached, from a somewhat different perspective, in light of the
functionality of those artifacts (Parsons and Carlson, 2008; Davies, 2006).
232
The above studies take as their focus something that is primarily visual and
physical, such as a setting or some object in it. But some recent work in envi-
ronmental aesthetics pushes beyond the realm of discrete physical objects to
investigate the aesthetic dimensions of the lower senses and bodily experi-
ences. Food, gustatory taste, and the act of eating have been examined philo-
sophically (Saito, 2007a; Korsmeyer, 1999) as have smells (Brady, 2005; Kuehn,
2005). Bodily sensations, including proprioception, our awareness of our own
bodily movements, have also been considered from the aesthetic point of view
(Irvin, 2008b; Montero, 2006).
Moving from inward and subject-oriented experiences to more obviously
public ones, environmental aesthetics has also explored social relations and
events. Some have argued that there are important aesthetic elements to rela-
tionships of love and friendship, and even to political relationships (Berleant,
2005). This line of thought draws upon a long tradition in German philosophy
of discussion of the aesthetic state (Chytry, 1989). Particular political events,
such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, have been considered (Aretoulakis,
2008). Sporting events have been discussed, particularly in relation to their sta-
tus as art (Welsh, 2005). In the realm of personal, as opposed to political and
social, relations, the connection between aesthetic and sexual experience has
also been explored (Shusterman, 2006; Berleant, 1964). Surprisingly, however,
the one issue that, arguably, dominates the aesthetics of social life, personal
appearance, continues to receive relatively little attention within philosophical
aesthetics (for brief treatments see Saito, 2007a; Gould, 2005; Zangwill, 2003;
Novitz, 2001; see also the essays in Brand, 2000).
Finally, environmental aesthetics brushes up against the traditional subject
matter of aesthetic theory in recent discussions of environmental art (Parsons,
2008a; Brady, 2007; Brook, 2007; Lintott, 2007; Ross, 1993; Carlson, 1986). This
genre is typied by works such as Michael Heizers Double Negative (196970),
a gigantic cut in a desert mesa, Andy Goldsworthys ephemeral sculptures
crafted from natural ice blocks in their original locations, and Christos wrap-
ping of natural landscapes in synthetic materials. Environmental art is distin-
guished from art in general by the existence of an essential connection between
the work and its location. Unlike more traditional instances of painting or
sculpture, these works cannot be appreciated, or even apprehended, apart from
their physical surroundings. In these discussions, environmental aestheticians
have focused on the moral and ethical issues that arise when art is introduced
into these non-gallery contexts.
This work on environmental art manifests an important feature of much
recent work in environmental aesthetics: its normative character. Although
studies in this eld are usually concerned, to some extent, with describing
aesthetic responses to aspects of the environment, they also often argue that
certain responses are more correct or appropriate than others. Importantly,
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234
in contrast, eagerly explore the similarities of non-art to art, arguing that envi-
ronmental aesthetics can make at least some use of the traditional principles
and concepts of mainstream aesthetic theory (see, for example, Leddy, 1988).
A third important characteristic of contemporary work in environmental
aesthetics is its interdisciplinary and eclectic nature. While philosophers spe-
cializing in aesthetics are important contributors, studies in the eld are also
pursued by writers with diverse backgrounds, including landscape architects,
urban theorists, cultural theorists, geographers, and environmental philoso-
phers. Work in environmental aesthetics has also drawn upon a wide variety of
intellectual schools and traditions, with ideas from Continental philosophers,
such as Heidegger, and Pragmatists, particularly John Dewey, being especially
inuential. The eld also has close connections with the eld of comparative
aesthetics (Higgins, 2003), most strikingly through its emphasis on Japanese
aesthetics, and to the eld of everyday aesthetics. In fact, in recent years it has
become increasingly difcult to distinguish environmental aesthetics, under-
stood as the aesthetics of our total surroundings, from everyday aesthetics,
which is also often understood as analyzing the possibility of aesthetic experi-
ence of non-art objects and events (Sartwell, 2003, p. 761).
Given this, one might conclude that the concept of environment is so generic
and all-encompassing that the label environmental aesthetics lacks theo-
retical bite. On this line of thought, whether the aesthetics of non-art is called
environmental or everyday ultimately makes no difference. But, while
environment is frequently used in this extremely inclusive fashion, this is not
always the case. In the remainder of this essay, I explore a narrower conception
of the environment that is also found in discussions of environmental aesthet-
ics. On this view, describing the aesthetics of non-art as environmental is not
a move without implications: on the contrary, doing so introduces some sub-
stantive theoretical assumptions about the objects under study.
235
Traditionally, the concept of the aesthetic, and its ancestor the beautiful, have
been associated primarily and paradigmatically with the senses of hearing and
vision (for two classic examples, see Prall (1929) and Santayana (1896)). This
view, of course, accords perfectly with the view that the object of aesthetic expe-
rience is a traditional work of ne art: a visual object, such as a painted canvas
or a sculpture, or an auditory one, such as a musical performance. A shift to
viewing the environment as the object of appreciation, however, generates a
tension with this view of the aesthetic. Sparshott argued this point as follows:
If environmental aspects are background aspects, eye and ear lose part
of their privilege. Smells may be more evocative, have more to do with
our sense of the very place we are at, than sights. Touch also becomes
important: the way oors and railings meet foot and hand. Taste perhaps
not so much, save for the acids of city smog. Our proprioceptive senses
might seem to be irrelevant, as directed on the inside rather than the
environment out-side, but they are not; it is the arrangement of space
around us that determines our inward ease in climbing stairs and ramps
and in walking freely. (1972, p. 21)
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The aesthetic impact made upon us by, say, a tree, is part-determined by the
context we include in our view of it. A tree growing on a steep hill slope,
bent far over by the winds, may strike us as tenacious, grim, strained. But
from a greater distance, when the view includes numerous similar trees on
the hillside, the striking thing may be a delightful, stippled, patterned slope,
with quite different emotional qualityquixotic or cheery. So with any
aesthetic quality in nature; it is always provisional, correctable by reference
to a different, perhaps wider context, or to a narrower one realized in greater
detail. (1966, p. 292)
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238
Perhaps the most striking conclusion that might be drawn from the conception
of environment as background setting is that the aesthetic appreciation of the
environment as such is impossible. The problem here is adumbrated again by
Sparshott, who notes a tension between the notion of the environment as that
which is not noticed, but background, and the notion of the aesthetic. The aes-
thetic is traditionally taken to involve some kind of focused attention on some-
thing, such that the object of our appreciation is foregrounded, or stands out
in our consciousness. But the environment, qua environment, is precisely that
which fails to stand out, that which is background. Perhaps, Sparshott muses,
aestheticians . . . necessarily fail to think environmentally. Under their gaze the
environment crystallizes into an aesthetic object (1972, p. 14). If it does, then it
is not appreciated as environment, but as an instance of a contrasting category,
such as object or event. On this line of thought, the very idea of environ-
mental aesthetics turns out to be a paradoxical one.
Those who take up this issue have responded in one of two ways. Some,
like Allen Carlson, accept that the idea of appreciating the environment as such
is paradoxical, but insist that this does not entail that the aesthetic apprecia-
tion of the environment is paradoxical (1979a). When we aesthetically appre-
ciate the environment, we foreground it, rendering it non-environment, as it
were (at least temporarily). But all that really matters is that we are able to aes-
thetically appreciate that which, in the normal course of things, constitutes our
background setting. This response takes us back to the broader conception of
environment as our total surroundings: environmental aesthetics becomes the
appreciation of the various non-art things that constitute our total surround-
ings, though not the appreciation of those surroundings as such.
In contrast, other philosophers insist that the paradox can be dissolved by
rejecting the premise that aesthetic appreciation necessarily involves focusing
attention on, or in some way foregrounding, that which we appreciate. Thus
Haapala suggests that we should simply become more aware of the pleasur-
able aspects of the everyday without making them objects of aesthetic apprecia-
tion in the traditional sense. Perhaps we could give new meaning to the phrase
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the aesthetics (or the art) of living, that is, to value the particulars of the every-
day (2005, p. 52). Saito, taking a similar line, asserts that
Sparshotts attitude toward his own paradox seems to have been similar.
Perhaps if we dont look very hard [at our environment], he writes, it wont
crystallize. One can have amenity in ones surroundings without going to live
in an art gallery, and among objects for a subject will be some which affect him
without inviting him to concentrate his attention (1972, p. 14).
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241
1. Introduction
242
Nol Carroll, in Art and Globalization, Then and Now, has made an impor-
tant contribution to the discussion about the relationship between aesthetics
and the larger global art and aesthetics market (both what is considered and
sold as art, as well as what gets serious consideration by philosophers and art
critics). Carroll notes that, in our age of so-called globalization, we are not as
evenly connected as the term global might indicate. He notes, for example,
that sub-Saharan Africa is not at all connected (economically, culturally, or
digitally) with much of the rest of the First World. Thus, globalization might
be an appropriate term when applied to the enhanced form of capitalism that
dominates economic thinking, but it is not sufcient to describe what is actually
happening today in the global artworld.
Carroll suggests that the current situation in the artworld is transnational but
not global if by global we mean to refer to something homogenous in every
corner of the world (2007, p. 136). A transnational artworld includes cultural
hybrids, cross-cultural inuences, and other cultural access to all kinds of art-
works (dance, visual art, digital media, cuisine, lm, and even craft) that previ-
ously had less inuence and availability for a variety of reasons. A transnational
artworld includes as artists those who might not otherwise be considered art-
ists (craftsmen and other workers who do not enjoy status on an international
art scene). Carroll suggests that
what we are witnessing now differs from the past insofar as what we see
emerging is something like a single, integrated, cosmopolitan institution
of art, organized transnationally in such a way that the participants, from
wherever they hail, share converging or overlapping traditions and practices
at the same time that they exhibit and distribute their art in internationally
coordinated venues. (2007, p. 136)
Thus his contribution to this topic explains how art and artists inuence each
other in ways they had not done previouslyin ways they had not wanted to
do, were not able to do, or did not have the cross-cultural exposure to gain the
prerequisite insight and understanding to do. Through improved communica-
tion and travel, many of us have regular exposure and access to artistic tradi-
tions we did not have access to before. Carroll explains that what seems to be
changing in the present historical moment is that a unied artworld with shared
language games and traditions appears to be emerging across the globe (2007,
p. 141). Thus, it seems that we are expanding artistically and aesthetically in
subtle ways that were not possible earlier.
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3. Standpoint Epistemology
Standpoint epistemology takes seriously the idea that where you stand affects
what you see. More particularly, people who come from differing life-circum-
stances see, interpret, and understand the world differently. To the extent that
membership in a certain group (e.g., women, people of color, and other margin-
alized groups) molds ones life-circumstances, that group identity constitutes a
standpoint from which one understands aspects of reality that are harder (impos-
sible, some might claim) to see from other standpoints. Standpoint epistemol-
ogy rose to prominence within feminist thought in the mid-1970s to early 1980s
(Harding, 2006, p. 82). Political philosopher Nancy Hartsock (1983), sociologist
Dorothy Smith (1987), and sociologist of science Hilary Rose (1983) independ-
ently came to similar insights about the way in which knowledge is always
socially situated (Harding, 2003, p. 7). Their work collectively led to a large
244
body of thought over the subsequent decades, and has had ripple effects in many
other disciplines. For example, liberation philosophy and theology, (feminist)
re-readings of the philosophical canon, aesthetics, and ethics have all beneted
from the work of these early feminist standpoint epistemologists. Most impor-
tantly, standpoint epistemology has called into question not only the idealization
of the omniscient, rational knower, but the very possibility of such a knower.
The claim of standpoint epistemology, that reality looks different when viewed
from different standpoints, can be rendered in either a weak or strong version.
The weak version acknowledges that different standpoints yield different kinds
of knowledge and suggests that one should attempt to enrich ones knowledge
by investigating more and varied standpoints. This version avoids a claim that
makes some uncomfortable, namely, the claim to privileged knowledge that
the strong version of standpoint epistemology will make, but it has difculty
avoiding epistemological relativism: if a situation looks different depending on
the perspective from which it is seen, how do we determine which is the right,
or best, perspective from which to view itassuming that there is a best or
objectively superior standpoint? If knowledge is determined, at least to some
extent, by our epistemological perspective, if reality looks different from differ-
ent perspectives, how can we determine what is really the case?
The strong version of standpoint epistemology suggests that certain stand-
points are epistemologically superior in that they yield better (more accurate or
more useful) knowledge: the standpoints of the marginalized. That which can
be seen from these standpoints is not only not seen from other standpoints, but
is actively hidden by the standpoints of the powerful. This version of standpoint
epistemology recognizes a relationship between power and knowledge: the dis-
tribution of power in society affects what is accepted as known. The powerful
have many ways of inuencing daily discourse: control over and access to the
media; inuence on research agendas, curricula at universities, and think tanks,
and so on. As skilled propagandists have long known, a lie repeated often and
loudly enough is eventually seen by most people to be true; the powerful have
far more means to repeat it often, loudly, and over long periods of time. Within
a skewed distribution of power, the standpoint of the powerful comes to count
as objective knowledge (Harding, 1997, p. 382). Giving privileged attention
to the perspective of the marginalized, then, brings forth knowledge that the
powerful either do not know or are actively hiding. Insofar as the marginalized
live daily the problems caused by the marginalizing effects of society (includ-
ing the epistemological tyranny of the majority), they can see the problems the
powerful overlook or hide. The experience of the marginalized can, thus, pro-
vide alternative research agendas for the problems that need to be addressed if
society is to become more just (cf. Harding, 1993, p. 62).
Before proceeding with a look at how standpoint epistemology has affected
other disciplines, let us pause to address one common misunderstanding of
245
standpoint epistemology. The claim that (at least some aspects of) reality can
be seen more accurately from the margins does not mean that whatever the
marginalized hold to be true is indeed true. Rather, it means that we advance
toward the truth: (1) by acknowledging the existence of the margins, that is, of
a reality that is ugly, unjust, and that calls into question the legitimacy of the
status quo; and (2) by recognizing that viewing the center from the margins
casts the former in a different light, highlighting truths that the center does not
want acknowledged.
In the past few decades, numerous disciplines beyond feminist philosophy
have provided examples of the stronger claim. Revisionist history, liberation
theology, and liberation philosophy, for instance, have all advanced the idea
that a more accurate view of reality is obtained from the standpoint of the mar-
ginalized. For the purpose of comparison, we will briey consider how the
claims of standpoint epistemology play out in the discipline of history.
4. Revisionist History
z Claims about human progress are empty without (1) knowing the costs
incurred, in suffering and lost opportunities, to create the situation we
246
have today, and (2) making the case that what we have today is worth
those costs. The costs are best seen from the perspective of those who have
suffered them, that is, the oppressed.1
z We study history so that the wrongs of the past will not be repeated.
Historical wrongs are thrown into sharp relief when viewed from the per-
spective of the oppressed, because oppression by its nature is a wrong,
and the oppressed are those who have been wronged.
z Reviewing the heroic deeds of heroes from the narratives of the past
allows other heroes to emerge. When we no longer celebrate the deeds of
those acting in the interest of power exclusively, the deeds of those also
acting from a concern for humanity can also be seen. Those who seek to
build a better, more just, more humane world must learn the lessons of
those acting from a concern for humanity.
z The traditional way of telling history assumes that the nation is homo-
geneous and that one can tell its story by focusing on its leaders. This
assumption is false. Zinn notes that [n]ations are not communities and
never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of
a family, conceals erce conicts of interest (pp. 910). The nation is a
collection of disparate communities with different, competing, even con-
tradictory interests, and this complexity is lost if one focuses solely on
the leaders. History as the story of the leaders is the obliteration of all
perspectives except those of the powerful.
z A genuine respect for the core values of democracy and equality demands
that the story be told from the perspective of all the people, not only from
the perspective of those who hold power, and thus demands that we pay
attention to perspectives that are being covered up.
Zinn claims that the perspective of the oppressed is a privileged perspective from
which to see history more accurately; an indispensable aspect of the truth about
what happened in the past is discovered from the perspective of the oppressed.
Zinn is not just giving us the other half of a story we already know. When the
victims perspectives are known, the traditional version of history, which tends
to celebrate the achievements of the victors, morphs from a tale of heroism into
one of, at best, unfortunate acts that in the end, after much hand-wringing, were
worth it.2 Traditional historical accounts, written from the perspective of the
powerful, cannot simply be combined with the victims perspectives to yield a
homogenous whole, because the former changes, and ultimately grows very thin,
in the stark light of the latter. The upshot of Zinns philosophy of history is that
adopting the standpoint of the oppressed in telling history enables us to know
valuable things that would otherwise be lost, knowledge that is not only not pos-
sible from the perspective of the powerful but is more important and more valu-
able than the knowledge available from the perspective of the powerful.
247
5. Marginalization
248
perspective of the marginalized, there is no doubt that heathens were not only
being baptized, they were also being murdered, raped, and enslaved by self-
designated Christians; the so-called barbarians were not being civilized,
they were being murdered, raped, and enslaved by the self-designated civi-
lized. The power of the standpoint of the marginalized to highlight these his-
torical facts, to show the other side of the coin of history, is a power that a global
standpoint aesthetics can tap into.
A society is marginalized to the extent that it cannot exercise agency over its
economy, its political decisions, and its culture. The global margins, then, are
those societies who lack the power:
In sum, the marginalized are the poor and powerless. The question of what global
standpoint aesthetics might look like must be inclusive of their perspective. The
promise of a standpoint epistemology is that more of reality can be known when
we take into account the hidden parts that can only be seen from the standpoint
of the marginalized. A global standpoint aesthetics will be aware of this and use
it to disclose the reality of marginalization hidden by the powerful center.
249
however, can have meaning, and he argues that although matters of taste cannot
be said to be either true or false, they can be more or less effectively defended
or justied. Second, Hume expands on the qualities that make ones assess-
ment of taste more justied, that is, what makes one a true judge. Qualities
of a true judge are delicacy of imagination, practice in making judgments, the
ability to make comparisons, good sense, and a mind free from prejudicehe
is disinterested or impartial. It is the last of these qualications that has had the
largest philosophical impact on the history of aesthetics and has given Hume
a permanent place in aesthetic standpoint theory. Although Kant, Hume, and
Hutcheson all used the term, Humes notion of disinterestedness seems to have
had the longest lasting impact in terms of our ideal stance to take toward art-
works. Hume suggested that this disinterested stance, looking at the formal
aspects of a work, in a rational way,3 would provide the most judgment-like
assessment of a work of art. Assessments of works of art could not be true judg-
ments, even though they aimed to be judgments and were to be considered
more or less accurate. Humes arguments provided aestheticians and art critics
a starting point to argue that aesthetic judgments could be more or less vali-
dated and that the true, disinterested judge is a form of an idealized knower.
Humes main argument in reference to disinterestedness is that some judg-
ments and some perspectives are superior, and more accurate, than others.
Even though he denies that beauty can be a property of objects, he still suggests
that making aesthetic judgments can be a meaningful practice. Although there
had been some suggestions that disinterestedness need not be the ideal stance
toward works of art, it was really not until the twentieth century that one could
see that disinterestedness was really an inappropriate approach to much of the
art then being produced, including conceptual art, feminist, outsider, installa-
tion, political art, and even much of the art produced by other culturestribal
African masks seem to be a perennial favorite example of artworks that seem to
lose much of their value when placed behind glass in a museum.4
Peg Brand (1998) has suggested that a fuller approach to political and/or
feminist art would be one where the viewer learns to toggle back and forth
between what she calls Interested Attention (IA) and Disinterested Attention
(DA; the abbreviations are Brands). In the face of feminist critics who have
sought to dismantle the notion of this ideal, rational observer and apprecia-
tor of art (which has also been largely constructed as masculine-as-rational/
disinterested and feminine-as-emotional/interested), Brand suggests that disin-
terestedness can still serve as an appropriate and useful mode of experiencing
art. It must, however, be used in conjunction with what Brand calls the feminist
antithesis of male disinterestedness. Viewing an artwork interestedly allows
one to engage emotionally with the work, to be bothered by its political charge,
or to take an interest that is self-conscious and self-directed (Brand, 1998,
p. 162).5 Brand suggests we commit a kind of gender treason, dened as the
250
1. Social location systematically shapes how art is made, and how both art
and nature are understood, appreciated, and evaluated.
2. Taste is normative: judgments of taste admit of degrees of success and
competence, and correct judgments of taste have legitimate claims on
others.
3. Standpoints can be aesthetically privileged in certain crucial respects
(2009, p. 272).
These are three of the most relevant things we want to focus on as well,
with an appeal specically to the marginalized. The disinterested notion of
Humes taste and his true judge is difcult to defend when one can make
an argument that there is not really one ideal perspective from which to
appreciate art. As Eaton argues, bringing the marginalized perspectives into
251
What then, does a global standpoint aesthetic provide that previous approaches
have neglected? First, we believe that Carrolls claim that the world has made
some genuine progress toward a transnational, though not necessarily global
artworld, is an accurate observation, but that the shared language games and
traditions which he puts forth as characteristic of this emerging artworld do
not get at the profound insights that art from the global margins makes avail-
able. Art that is informed by the perspectives of the marginalized discloses
insights that are not available elsewhere.
Second, Humes claim that objective viewpoints are to be aimed for and are
superior to perspectival views is antithetical both to feminist standpoint episte-
mology and now to global standpoint aesthetics. Just as the former has found
ways to avoid the problem of relativism, so too will the latter have to be on
guard against relativism. But the insights of the artist whose creativity grows
out of having an interest in the margins have a genuine, important, and indeed
indispensable contribution to make.
Third, global standpoint aesthetics needs to consider both the weak ver-
sion of feminist standpoint epistemology and the strong version. At the weak
252
end, art from the perspective of the marginalized discloses insights not oth-
erwise available, and the viewer who considers such art will have her world-
view enriched. At the strong end, art from the margins discloses information
and insights that are not available from other standpoints. Such art arrives as
an annunciatory revelation that can present a more human, humane, and
humanizing way of seeing because it reveals an overlooked, ignored, dehu-
manized, and dehumanizing aspect of human existence. There is, thus, a kind
of natural afnity between the artist and the standpoint of the marginalized.
Indeed, the vibrancy and life of marginalized art is that it discloses what others
might missart from the margins does precisely this. The artist is frequently
herself a member of the economically marginalized, having been called to a
vocation that values something else more than money.8 This kind of artist is
in a potentially powerful revelatory positionher talent and insight as an
artist enable her to communicate something about the margin she occupies.
Standpoint aesthetics recognizes that art, by its nature, tries to show the unseen
and that art that speaks to its age shows the contours of the age, its margins.
In the age of globalization a standpoint aesthetics values art that values, high-
lights, discloses the global margins.
If we adopt a post-Hegelian stance that recognizes the historical grounding
of value, we can suggest as conclusion that a global standpoint aesthetics that
recognizes a marginal privilege is perhaps the relevant aesthetic for our time: a
globalizing world of oppressed margins.
We end, then, by suggesting some topics in need of further research in the
development of a global standpoint aesthetics. First, it would be instructive
to examine directly a body of art that consciously tried to side with the mar-
ginalizedfor example, the Harlem Renaissance, socialist realism, some of the
standardly considered womens art, grafti, many of the craft items made in
rural cultures, and even outsider art. One might investigate the extent to which
they succeeded or failed in disclosing insights from the margins, as well as
the extent to which they succeeded or failed as art and, thus, failed to disclose
anything. How might global standpoint aesthetics be rened so as to promote
these successes and avoid these mistakes? Second, one might consider more
closely the institutional aspects of the artworld (museums, galleries, publishers,
and art schools) and the extent to which they can or should make a preferen-
tial option for the marginalized. The question of power is inextricably part of
standpoint aesthetics. The institutions of the artworld may need to actively opt
in favor of art from the perspective of the marginalized, for this will not hap-
pen automatically.9 Finally, we have drawn attention to the knowledge of reality
disclosed by art from the margins. Further inquiry is needed into the way art
from the margins challenges not just the truth claims of the center, but their
aesthetic claims as well.
253
Notes
1. Once the costs are recognized, there is a difcult question to confront: if genocide and,
later, slavery are not too heavy a price to pay for progress, what would be? This topic
is explored further in Gandolfo (2009).
2. Once again, the costs would have to be tallied and then justied in order for the claim
it was worth it to have any meaning.
3. Laura Mulvey, among others, has made the argument that general notion of disin-
terested attention is structured in a particularly masculine way. See Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1975).
4. See, for instance, Anthony Appiahs book In My Fathers House (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992). He includes a chapter detailing the decision making proc-
ess that a group of cocurators went through to chose African art for an exhibit at
the Center for African Art in New York called Perspectives: Angles on African Art. He
discusses a photograph called Yoruba Man with a Bicycle as being controversial since it
is neotraditional (p. 140) (read postmodern) when really what people were looking
for were precolonial views on art. Our prejudicial vision of what African art should
be precludes the presentation of something modern or Western.
5. See also Nol Carroll (2000) Art and the Domain of the Aesthetic, British Journal of
Aesthetics, 40 (2), pp. 191208, and Robert Stecker (2001) Only Jerome: A Reply to
Nol Carroll, British Journal of Aesthetics, 41 (1), pp. 7680. Carroll especially deals
directly with engaging politically with an artwork.
6. An analogy might be made here between our task of developing the boundaries of
global standpoint aesthetics and the difculties that have been found in developing a
proper appreciation of nature. Allen Carlson, for example, in Aesthetic Appreciation
of the Natural Environment (in Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, eds, Arguing About Art:
Contemporary Philosophical Debates, 3rd edn. New York: Routledge, 2008) proposes a
number of different kinds of models of art appreciation that might or might not be
helpful in appreciating nature. He ultimately suggests a new model to appreciate
nature that does not work for appreciating works of visual art.
7. The seminal essays on the moral luck debate are Bernard Williams, Moral Luck
and Thomas Nagel, Moral Luck, both in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
Supplementary Volumes, 50 (1976), pp. 11535 and 13751, respectively. See also
B. Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). On epis-
temic luck, see Duncan Pritchard, Epistemic Luck (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005); on aesthetic luck, see Anna Christina Ribeiro, Aesthetic Luck (manuscript in
preparation).
8. To be clear, this point here refers to all artists. The vocation (as such) of art values
beauty, and the communication of insights through the beautiful handling of com-
municative media, more than money. This is not to suggest that artists cannot make
money from their art; only that art cannot be produced by those whose primary
motive is to make money.
9. There is a parallel here between the preferential option for the poor that is found in
liberation theology and the aesthetic option in favor of art from the perspective of the
marginalized that is being advocated.
254
Anyone who sets out to write an essay about new directions in aesthetics faces
some hard choices. One option that comes to mind is to attempt a reasonably
comprehensive and standard survey of highly salient trends in the recent lit-
erature. Such a piece could turn out to be informative to those few outsiders to
the eld who might happen to read it, but is unlikely to be of any great interest
to anyone who has been following the literature and has already noticed those
trends that could be identied in an uncontroversial survey, such as the fact
that a lot of important recent work focuses on questions pertaining to art and
ethics, or the fact that there has been a surge in the areas of environmental and
everyday aesthetics. A short survey of obvious trends is, however, doomed
to superciality given the enormous scope of the topic. What is more, any entry
conceived of along the lines of a grand survey is likely to prove redundant given
that a variety of truly excellent companions, guides, handbooks, and encyclo-
pedias are already available, both on and off line, as a result of the publishers
massive investment in the commissioning of introductory and reference works
over the past two decades.
The one salient alternative to attempting a sweeping descriptive survey,
which is to settle on writing something more selective, argumentative, and
evaluativesomething that even experts could nd unexpected and inform-
ativealso has its dangers. Such an essays inclusions, exclusions, and judg-
ments are likely to be thought tendentious or entirely wrongheaded by many
aestheticians. After all, one philosophers exciting new avenue of enquiry is
often another philosophers hopeless cul-de-sac. For example, while many
people working in aesthetics think of cognitive science as an exciting cluster
of interrelated elds having many promising implications for aesthetics, oth-
ers see no real payoffs in the computational metaphors and talk of semantic
information-processing, and show little interest in papers in this vein. Similar
worries can be raised with regard to many other more or less recent trends one
might care to go into, such as the steady ow of books on lm theory inspired
by the late metaphysics of Gilles Deleuze, the new strategy of having recourse
to experimental methods, comparative aesthetics, evolutionary approaches, the
255
256
which more and more philosophers making arguments about general topics in
aesthetics successfully ground, or at least illustrate, their claims with impres-
sively detailed and well-researched descriptions of aptly chosen specic cases.
This trend in philosophical aesthetics is contrasted, at least in my imagination,
to an earlier situation in which philosophers writing about art, taste, and so on
seemed satised to make do with evocations of threadbare examples.
As Elisabeth Schellekens argues in this volume, some of the core issues
in aesthetics (such as the issues raised by de gustibus) are inextricably bound
up with the most difcult ontological and epistemological problems, so there
should be no question here of recommending a trend whereby aesthetics is
divorced from the results of ongoing debates over fundamental issues in meta-
physics and other core areas of philosophy. Yet, aesthetics is a large and com-
plex area of enquiry, and with regard to at least some of its topics, successful
research does not require solutions to fundamental topics in metaphysics. For
a development of this point with regard to the ontology of music, see Andrew
Kania (2008), who writes about the state of the art with regard to both funda-
mental and higher level issues in musical ontology. More generally, it can be
observed that some aestheticians are not directly concerned with fundamen-
tal metaphysical topics, and are effectively doing criticism and critical theory
related to one or more of what is sometimes called the aesthetic disciplines
(literary studies, art history, visual studies, drama and lm studies, etc.). At
times they outdo the coverage model specialists at what used to be their own
game (that is, the niche left open when many of them completely abandoned
issues in aesthetics to pursue identity politics and cultural studies).
* * *
I turn now to consider some issues raised by one more specic direction in
which I have taken an interest, namely, a trend or subeld that is generally
labeled by its proponents as everyday aesthetics. The basic idea of attending to
the aesthetic dimensions of popular culture and everyday activities and objects
is, of course, neither new nor recent. Limiting our attention rather drastically to
book-length works in English published in the last quarter of the twentieth cen-
tury, a few forerunners that readily come to mind include Joseph Kupfer (1983),
David Novitz (1992), Crispin Sartwell (1995), and Carolyn Korsmeyer (1999).
Yet this is not to deny the signicance or interest of more recent developments,
such as philosophers (e.g., Smith, 2007; Hales, 2007) writing insightfully about
the appreciation of wine and beer, thereby following up on the more general
avenue of enquiry argued for by Korsmeyers ground-breaking book.
Unless it is a misnomer, the body of work labeled everyday aesthetics is a
matter of philosophical discourses the subject of which is the aesthetic experi-
ence or aesthetic appreciation of familiar and common items. Such a characteri-
zation of the subeld, however, raises the question: familiar and commonplace
257
for whom? For example, most Danish kitchens have a simple type of tin opener
(one with no moving parts) the likes of which many people from the rest of the
world have never seen and do not know how to use.1 Do these objects, which
are wholly unfamiliar items for some people, fall within the purview of the
discipline of everyday aesthetics? Presumably many people in that eld would
be inclined to say yes, the assumption being that these objects are part of the
everyday lives of a signicant population, and that the question of their aes-
thetic value is worth raising (I say more on this below). Yuriko Saito, for exam-
ple, does not hesitate to include a discussion of common Japanese packaging
practices in her (2007) treatise on everyday aesthetics, it being perfectly obvious
that the exquisite design of even familiar paper packaging in Japan is anything
but commonplace to most non-Japanese.
That some category of items is familiar to the members of some group of
people would seem necessary for its inclusion in the object domain of everyday
aesthetics, but what are the sufciency conditions? In an essay on the nature of
everyday aesthetics, Tom Leddy lists some topics belonging squarely within
everyday aesthetics: the home, the daily commute, the workplace, the shop-
ping center, and places of amusement, and he adds that, The issues that gen-
erally come up have to do with personal appearance, ordinary housing design,
interior decoration, workplace aesthetics, sexual experience, appliance design,
cooking, gardening, hobbies, play, appreciation of childrens art projects, and
other similar matters (2005, p. 3). Leddy acknowledges that these and the
other objects of everyday aesthetics form a loose category, but he is far from
thinking it all-inclusive. In many cases, even though something is both aestheti-
cally signicant and familiar to a group of people, it still should not be taken as
a topic in everyday aesthetics. One of his examples of a topic that falls outside
everyday aesthetics involves musicians who practice and play just about every
day. For such people, music is quite literally a part of everyday life, yet Leddy
considers that since music is one of the ne arts, its aesthetic analysis does not
belong within everyday aesthetics. How, then, is that subeld to be delimited?
Leddy writes that everyday aesthetics covers all aesthetic experiences that are
not already included in well-established domains of aesthetic theorizing.
What is thereby positioned outside everyday aesthetics, he suggests, includes
issues connected closely with the ne arts, the natural environment, math-
ematics, science, and religion.
Adopting this proposed denition of everyday aesthetics could have some
unwanted consequences. What should be said when a topic that once belonged
to everyday aesthetics, thus dened, becomes part of a well-established dis-
course in aesthetics? For example, should the discourse in philosophical aes-
thetics on the aesthetics of food and drink become a well-established topic (and
arguably it has already done so), it would thereby fall outside the eld of every-
day aesthetics. The very success of everyday aesthetics as a branch of aesthetic
258
enquiry would, then, eventually lead to the continuous expulsion of its own
topics and results from this subeld. A better way to work with Leddys key
insight is to anchor the intended contrast category of well-established topics
more securely. Heres one way to do this. It is important to remember that one
of the most basic motivations behind investigations in everyday aesthetics is
the desire to explore the aesthetic value of phenomena that were overlooked as
a result of an emphasis on the ne arts and certain aspects of the natural envi-
ronment (those deemed sufciently pictorial or dramatic to correspond to
prominent eighteenth-century ideas about the beautiful, the picturesque, and
the sublimeor what Saito (1997, 2007) usefully labels scenic natural items).
On the assumption that this motivation behind everyday aesthetics is accepted,
as I think it should be, it can be maintained that this subeld of aesthetics should
accordingly embrace the aesthetic experience or aesthetic appreciation of things
familiar or everyday, but not the aesthetics of the ne arts and scenic nature.
Questions about the scope and purpose of everyday aesthetics remain. Most
of the people who advocate everyday aesthetics and provide descriptions and
assessments of the aesthetic value of familiar items have joined the chorus
challenging the classical legacy whereby only vision and hearing were recog-
nized as properly aesthetic senses (see Korsmeyer, 1999). Contemporary eve-
ryday aestheticians tend to take aisthesis broadly and champion all ve senses,
as well as the role of beliefs and the imagination in aesthetic experience. There
remains, however, some disagreement as to whether purely visual properties
appreciated through disengaged, passive contemplation merit inclusion in the
new eld of everyday aesthetics, one thought being that this sort of thing was
central to old-fashioned aesthetic doctrine (Berleant, 1997). If the sphere of eve-
ryday aesthetics is to be contrasted boldly to that of aesthetics more generally,
ought not an emphasis be placed on modes of appreciative engagement that
surpass visual contemplation? Leddy (2005, pp. 45) resists this conclusion
and contends that there have been valuable interactions between the aesthetics
of the ne arts, nature, and everyday life. For example, many still-life pictures
help viewers attend to the aesthetic rewards of familiar, overlooked items in
the everyday world (cf. Bryson, 1990); similarly, the everyday aesthetician can
take a page from arts book and engage in visual contemplation of imaginar-
ily framed non-artistic situations. I side with Leddy here. More generally, it
seems unwarranted to describe everyday aesthetics as a radical breach with
a wrongheaded monolith labeled traditional aesthetics. Saito, for example,
nds some of Archibald Alisons ideas about the context-bound emergence
of aesthetic qualities congenial to her own approach to aesthetic experience
(Saito, 2007, pp. 1212).
As I mentioned earlier, several prominent gures writing about everyday
aesthetics have discussed what they themselves label as a basic tension in
the eld. This set of philosophical concerns arises roughly as follows. Assume,
259
at least for the sake of the argument, that philosophers who contribute to eve-
ryday aesthetics attempt to describe and assess the aesthetic experiences occa-
sioned by familiar everyday objects, activities, and scenes. Assume as well that
aesthetic experience only takes place above some threshold of awareness. If
some music is perceived, yet the subject remains totally unaware of hearing this
music, the auditory experience does not cross the threshold into the domain of
aesthetic experience, even if the experience does satisfy behavioral and moti-
vational conditions on what should be recognized as perceptual uptake in the
absence of awareness (Dretske, 2006). Assume as well that in everyday life,
perceptual input of what is wholly commonplace and familiar often fails to
be the object of a mode of awareness crossing the threshold in question. For
example, the subject has seen the view along the road on the daily commute
a thousand times before and is not inclined to pay much attention to it; in any
case, she is too busy contending with the hectic trafc to attend to the complex
ow of sights, sounds, and smells along the way. It follows from these assump-
tions that this person had no aesthetic experience of the environment on this
commute. Enter the everyday aesthetician, who attends carefully to the envi-
ronment along this same stretch of the road and has an aesthetic experience. In
light of this aesthetic experience, the everyday aesthetician reclassies this part
of the world as falling within the sphere of everyday aesthetics; the aesthetician
thereby practices and preaches a renewed, aesthetically oriented attention to
this environment.
The worry that arises here is that although the philosophical operation has
been successful, the very object of everyday aesthetics has somehow van-
ished or been vitiated as a result. The philosopher has described his or her own
experience, not what was actually experienced as commonplace and familiar
by the commuter. In Saitos words, the philosopher has rendered the ordinary
extraordinary (2007, p. 245). With reference to aesthetic attitude theorists who
believe that anything can be appreciated under the aesthetic attitude, Leddy
similarly worries that, Such a position dissolves the distinction between eve-
ryday aesthetics and every other form of aesthetics (2005, p. 17). Yet, as far
as Leddy is concerned, the source of the problem is not just aesthetic attitude
theory: any attempt to increase the aesthetic intensity of our ordinary every-
day life-experiences will tend to push those experiences in the direction of the
extraordinary. One can only conclude that there is a tension within the very
concept of the aesthetics of everyday life (2005, p. 18).
Saito addresses herself to this sort of worry in the conclusion to her book. In
an effort to characterize what she also describes as a tension in the discourse
of everyday aesthetics, she introduces a distinction between normative and
descriptive goals of everyday aesthetics. In its normative moment, a key aim of
everyday aesthetics is to enjoin us to become more aware of the aesthetic dimen-
sion of familiar environments. This is not a matter of aestheticizing the negative,
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
To sum up, I hope that the worry raised about a fundamental tension in
everyday aesthetics has been laid to rest. That does not mean, of course, that
there are no outstanding difculties. Saito is right to say that it is a challenge to
know when we should suspend or supplement the primary project of everyday
aesthetics, namely, the description of properly aesthetic experiences, by attend-
ing instead to related practical experiences and assessments of familiar things.
This is a problem for aesthetics and philosophy more generally, a problem that
has deeper roots in the difculty of knowing how to live a good life. It has to
do, for example, with the difculty of balancing competing types of ends, as
well as present and future payoffs. When some item is of acute practical impor-
tance for the members of some group, it may be incongruous or inappropriate
to linger over an intrinsically valued experience obtained through a bracketing
or neglect of these prudential or moral concerns. In some cases there is no use
enjoining people to attend primarily to the intrinsic valences of their experiences
of some kind of item, either because the upshot would be practically disastrous
for them, or because there are no intrinsically rewarding gems to be uncovered
in this manner. Yet often it is a good idea to follow the everyday aesthetician in
an exploration of the neglected aesthetic powers of familiar things.
Note
1. Anna Christina Ribeiro informs me that most Brazilians are familiar with a similar,
simple kind of opener.
267
Notes on Selection
271
272
273
First Century CE
Second Century CE
Third Century CE
274
Fourth Century CE
Fifth Century CE
Sixth Century CE
Seventh Century CE
Eighth Century CE
In the eighth century, Byzantine Emperor Leo III begins the iconoclast
movement, and the controversy over heretical art spurs substantial discussion
on the nature of art lasting well into the eleventh century. Throughout
275
the medieval period, concerns with art tend to remain intertwined with
religion.
Ninth Century CE
Eleventh Century CE
Twelfth Century CE
276
Thirteenth Century CE
277
Fourteenth Century CE
Fifteenth Century CE
278
Sixteenth Century CE
279
280
Seventeenth Century CE
281
282
Eighteenth Century CE
283
284
285
Nineteenth Century CE
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
Journals
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Established in 1942 by the American Society for Aesthetics and published quar-
terly, JAAC is the rst and remains one of the leading specialist journals in
aesthetics. Taking a broad approach to the arts, and publishing research articles
not only by philosophers but also by artists and academics in related elds,
the journal regularly features symposia, special issues, and extensive book
reviews.
298
disciplines. Published twice a year since its creation in 2008, ASAGE offers
the unique feature of allowing online commentary and discussion about
each published article.
299
and Experience: Perspectives from East and West (2005); and Art and Social
Change (2009)with all material freely available online.
Journal of Philosophy
Although publishing papers on aesthetics only infrequently, the monthly gener-
alist Journal of Philosophy (founded in 1904) has published many inuential works
in aesthetics, including Arthur Dantos The Artworld, Jerrold Levinsons
What a Musical Work Is, and Kendall Waltons Fearing Fictions.
Mind
In addition to the occasional aesthetics article and critical notice, the generalist
philosophy journal Mind publishes a great many in-depth reviews of recently
published major works in aesthetics, with both the texts and reviews written by
leading aestheticians.
Philosophical Review
While rarely publishing aesthetics papers today, the quarterly general jour-
nal Philosophical Review has published several very inuential papers on
300
Poetics
Focused on empirical research in the arts and culture, Poetics regularly includes
research reports from sociological, psychological, economic, and other diverse
viewpoints, as well as theoretical articles on the arts. Founded in 1971 and pub-
lished quarterly, the journal regularly features special topical issues.
301
each year, Res also features publication of historical textual and iconographic
materials of interest to art historian and theorists.
Print Resources
302
Online Resources
303
Dating back to 2007, the archive includes extensive video and audio les of inter-
views, lectures, and research seminars undertaken by the Aesthetics Research
Group in the University of Kents Department of History and Philosophy of
Art.
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305
306
307
Chapter 2
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309
Chapter 3
310
311
Chapter 4
312
313
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Chapter 6
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Chapter 7
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Chapter 8
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Chapter 15
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341
Chapter 17
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Chapter 18
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
Livingston, P. 1337, 141nn. 31, 32, 3440, seminal approaches of Hume and
187, 18991, 200n. 12 Kant 1617
Loftis, R. J. 230 subject-oriented approach 1617
Lomazzo 209 truth objection 289
Longinus 4 Metz, C. 186
Lopes, D. M. 9, 435, 60, 1736, 181, 183, Michelangelo 57, 59, 216
21112 Miller, G. 123
Luntley, M. 118 Miller, M. 232
Lutyens, E. 206 mirror neurons 196
lyric poetry 1278 see also poetry, Mitrovic, B. 209
philosophy of Modern Times (Charles Chaplin) 189,
origins of 128 200n. 10
in sense of an art 1 The Modulor (Le Corbusier) 201
Molino, J. 123
Macauley, D. 232 Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci) 59,
Macdonald, M. 71n. 6 71n. 13
Mackie, J. L. 105 Montero, B. 166, 233, 237
Mallon, R. 53n. 41 Moore, G. E. 105
Marcus, R. B. 71n. 11 Moore, R. 240
Margolis, J. 20, 634, 72n. 20 moral value of art 99100
Mark, K. 66 Mosley, A. 120
mass art 21921 Mothersill, M. 92, 231
Matheson, C. 72n. 31 Mozart 21517
Matravers, D. 52n. 3, 75, 95, 114, 207 Mulhall, S. 1878, 190
The Matrix 189 Mulvey, L. 1867, 254n. 3
Matthews, P. 230 Mnsterberg, H. 185
McCraken, J. 232 music 1, 57, 12, 21, 31, 65, 79, 82, 84, 103,
McDonald, D. 222 144, 1579, 2578, 260, 263
McFee, G. 157, 166 analytical philosophy of 11316
Meditations on Poetry 7 animal 1223
Melchionne, K. 232 as a biological capacity in
Meskin, A. 456, 478, 52n. 5, humans 1212
53nn. 21, 35 connection with morality 11820
metaphysics 32, 845, 87, 90, 92, 95, 112, Darwins views 1268
159, 202, 210, 2557 in emotional terms 11314
methodology of aesthetics 1519 evolution of 1234
aesthetic properties or aspects 16 improvisational 115
artworks as objects of aesthetic Kivys view 114
appreciation 18 Levinsons view 11415
data for 1719 ontology of 11516
denition schema 1718 origins of 126
descriptive vs normative 204 Schopenhauers discussion of 112
intuitions and 2933 understanding and appreciation
methodological question 1516 of 11618
object-oriented approach 1619 musical cognition 118
philosophical aesthetics 345 The Musical Representation: Meaning,
pragmatic constraints 27 Ontology, and Emotion 117
reective equilibrium 249 musical vocalization 127
regards for nature 18 The Music of Our Lives 119
351
352
353
354
Winters, E. 202, 232 Zangwill, N. 234, 26, 91, 93, 97n. 32, 102,
Wittgenstein, L. 7, 112, 141n. 30 233
Wollheim, R. 11, 18, 58, 71n. 6, 1723, 175, Zatorre, R. J. 118, 120
195 Zeppelin, L. 120
Wolterstorff, N. 11, 119 Zinn, H. 2467, 251
Woodruff, P. 154n. 23
355