Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art

Darren Hudson Hick

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441194794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ästhetik in der Philosophie

Guiding readers through major problems, issues and debates in aesthetics, this is a bias-free introduction for students studying the philosophy of art for the first time. Each chapter of the book begins by considering a particular work of art - from contemporary conceptual art, through literature to TV soap operas - to help students understand and explore key philosophical discussions and ideas. Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art covers such topics as: definitions and the ontology of art; interpretation and intention; aesthetic properties and evaluation; emotion and the arts; art and morality; natural, environmental, and everyday aesthetics. Chapter summaries and outlines help to navigate the major topics covered, while annotated guides to further reading and 'unresolved questions' sections help to encourage and animate study and discussion beyond the text. For those seeking to master the subject this is the most complete introduction available.

1

Defining Art

Chapter Outline

I. Fountain (1917)

II. On definitions

III. Art as representation

IV. Art as form

V. Art as expression

VI. Art and aesthetic function

VII. On not defining art

VIII. Art and the artworld

IX. Art and art history

I. Fountain (1917)

In 1917, the newly formed Society of Independent Artists held its first annual exhibition in New York City. Founded only the year before as an association for avant-garde artists, the Society opened its exhibition to any artist able to pay the six-dollar fee. Among the Society’s founders and exhibition’s directors was French artist, Marcel Duchamp, only recently arrived from Paris, and perhaps best known at the time for his controversial painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912).

With the exhibition only days away, Duchamp had yet to create a work for the show. But while at lunch with friends, he hit upon an idea. Travelling across town to J. L. Mott Iron Works (a specialist in plumbing fixtures), Duchamp purchased his urinal, and returned to his studio. Duchamp’s first New York studio was a curious place: chessboards leaned against one wall; near another, a bicycle wheel had been secured upright to a wooden stool.

Overhead hung a snow shovel, and to the floor was nailed an ordinary coat rack. Duchamp’s newest purchase was not out of place in the studio.

Duchamp turned the urinal on its back, painted ‘R. Mutt 1917’ on its rim, and submitted it as ‘Fountain’ to the exhibition under the name of Richard Mutt. The Society’s board was at a loss. Was Fountain art? If so, was it indecent? Although the exhibition had been advertised as having no selection committee, effectively accepting any submission, they hadn’t predicted Fountain. After some debate, the board narrowly voted to remove Fountain from view, either hiding it from view behind a screen, or physically removing it from the show (reports vary).

Duchamp resigned from the Society, and the next month released the second issue of his self-published magazine, The Blind Man, with several pages devoted to Fountain and ‘The Richard Mutt Case’. Although not Duchamp’s first ‘ready-made’ artwork—the snow-shovel hanging from his studio ceiling was the first work he called a ‘ready-made’— Fountain is surely the best known, despite having been thrown out shortly after the exhibition (he has since made several reproductions). And although the piece could easily have been forgotten as something of a joke, thanks to the controversy surrounding the exhibition, Fountain would go on to become one of the best-known works of the twentieth century. Indeed, a 2004 survey of British art experts named it the most influential artwork in the history of modern art (Picasso’s first Cubist painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), took second place). But how could Fountain be art in the first place? Wasn’t it just a men’s room appliance?

II. On definitions

The issue of defining art is central to the project of contemporary aesthetics. Whether or not Fountain—or anything else—is art sounds like a simple question. After all, we know what art is, don’t we?

Our contemporary concept of art is actually a rather modern notion. Although ancient Greece had no shortage of paintings, sculptures and great works of architecture, the Greeks did not have our concept of art. What they had was the term ‘techně’, meaning skilful production. And while this did apply to sculptors, painters and architects, it also applied to carpenters, weavers and all manner of craftsmen. The Greeks simply had no word that distinguished what we call ‘art’ from what we would call ‘craft’. Our word ‘poetry’ comes from the Greek word ‘poiesis’, meaning any sort of production, and our word ‘music’ comes from the Greek ‘mousike’, meaning any activity associated with the Muses—the mythical spirits of inspiration—and applied generally to anyone who was educated. The Latin, ‘ars’, the direct source of our current ‘art’, similarly referred to skill generally, and when the term ‘artist’ first came into use in the Middle Ages, it did not distinguish between skilled sculptors and skilled textile-makers. It was not until the eighteenth century that the concept of ‘fine art’ comes into play, collecting together the Arts with a capital ‘A’ and distinguishing them from other areas of skill.

Distinguishing the arts from other activities and products determines what it is we are looking to define, but it does not provide us with a definition. What is called a ‘real’ definition is meant to serve as an analytic tool for classifying and organizing our world. Ideally, a definition tells us how we do apply our concepts, and how we should do so in any case in the future. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is an artwork, and Michelangelo’s David is an artwork. The Society of Independent Artists had no problem here, but when it came to classifying Fountain, they were at a loss. Duchamp’s work challenged their notions of art, and so the problem fell to the philosophers. Ideally, a definition should supply a set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for classification. We might, for instance, define a ‘bachelor’ as an unmarried male of marriageable status. That a person is unmarried, that he is male and that he is of marriageable status are each necessary for his being a bachelor. Your sister might be unmarried and of marriageable status, but she is not a bachelor. Your 6-year-old nephew may be male and unmarried, but in our culture he is not of marriageable status, so he isn’t a bachelor either. Unless all of our conditions are met, our contender does not qualify, and so they are each necessary. But as soon as all of our conditions are met, the contender does qualify, and so they are jointly sufficient. The first challenge for any definition is for our set of conditions to match how we already use the concept at hand—how we divide up our world. Developing definitions can involve some bullet-biting, but the bullets shouldn’t be overly large. If our definition of ‘bachelor’ includes or excludes Catholic priests, we may have to slightly reconfigure how we conceptualize our world, but if it includes my married father, we will have a serious problem. Likewise, if our definition of ‘art’ includes all the products and activities of ordinary plumbers, or excludes the Mona Lisa, we will still have some work to do. Ideally, a definition of art should be such that it encompasses not only all of those things we call art—painting, sculpture, literature, music, film, dance and so on—but also any new forms of art that might develop in the future.

III. Art as representation

As the ancient Greeks did not have our concept of ‘art’, and as their way of organizing their activities and products diverged so much from ours, they certainly had no definition of art. However, as they studied what we would call the arts, they observed that many of them seemed essentially imitative: the painter imitated nature, the sculptor imitated the human form and the poet imitated man’s speech and actions. Plato condemned the arts for their imitation, and Aristotle praised them for the same, but lacking a general concept of art, neither set out imitation as a defining principle. It was not until the notion of ‘fine art’ developed in the eighteenth century that philosophers attempted to describe imitation or representation as an essential or necessary feature of art, and made the first moves towards a definition.

Although Immanuel Kant spends very little time on the notion of art, he makes perhaps the first attempt at defining it.¹ Unlike natural objects, Kant notes, works of art are artefacts—products of human intention and creation. And unlike scientific ones, artistic activities do not simply depend upon learned knowledge. As such, Kant distinguishes between art and technology. Kant puts fine art along with what he calls ‘agreeable art’ into the category of ‘aesthetic art’— representational art designed towards evoking a feeling of pleasure. Where agreeable art gives rise only to immediate pleasure, the pleasure of fine art comes from the ‘reflective power of judgement’. Today, we might make this sort of distinction between fine art and merely entertaining art. In the end, for Kant, fine art ‘is a way of presenting that is purposive on its own and that furthers [. . .] the culture of our mental powers to [facilitate] social communication’.² As such, while Kant does not formulate an explicit set of necessary and sufficient conditions, his view of art is that it is essentially representational, and that it has no function except to bring about reflective pleasure and to advance communication. So described, art is set apart from nature and from all manner of other human products and activities.

The view of art as essentially imitative or representational is perhaps not surprising given that up to the eighteenth century, with the possible exception of instrumental music, most art was centrally representational in nature (and arguments have been made that instrumental music imitates the form of the human voice, emotion or movement). However, as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, a new technology would have an enormous effect on the arts. In the 1820s and ’30s, a number of inventors worked to develop camera photography, in particular Louis Daguerre, creator of the daguerreotype photographic process. Where a painted portrait would take days, weeks or months to complete, an early daguerreotype could be completed in minutes. Advances in technology quickly reduced this time to seconds. Painting was also prohibitively expensive compared with photography, which could be afforded by the working class. With the swift advances in technology, its sweeping popularization and its ability to perfectly capture minute details, photography’s effect on the business of portrait painting was immediate. Landscape painting felt similar pressures. As a result, painters began to explore the other possibilities of their art.³

Where art’s representational elements once largely served to distinguish it from other human activities and products, the popularization of photography inspired artists to pursue new directions. French painter Claude Monet turned the tables on photography by insisting that a painting is, after all, ultimately a canvas covered in pigments, and that we should not be trying to look through it, but at it.⁴ Monet helped to found Impressionism, a painting style characterized by its visible brush strokes, its emphasis on light and its attempts to portray movement. Following the Impressionists in the late nineteenth century were the Post-Impressionists, a loose collection of painters variously inspired by the Impressionists.⁵ Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec alternatively produced textured paintings and lithograph posters consisting of outlined, flatly coloured figures. Georges Seurat introduced the technique of Pointillism, replacing brushstrokes with countless dots of colour. And perhaps the most celebrated of the Post-Impressionists, Paul Cézanne, worked (as one art historian has put it) to transform paint into ‘a visible structure’.⁶ In an effort both to capture the new directions in art as a result of photography, and in part to keep photography itself—seen largely as a technological and not artistic endeavour—from falling into the category of fine art, philosophers began to pursue the project of defining art with new vigour.⁷

IV. Art as form

Although it is perhaps difficult to imagine today, the work of the Post-Impressionists brought about a split among critics as well as the public at large. While one side praised the innovation of the new movements in art, the other flatly refused to recognize what they saw as art. Particularly enamoured of Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists was Clive Bell, who produced the most well-known formalist theory of art.⁸ Bell argues in his 1913 book, simply titled Art, that Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists represented a return to the ‘first-principles’ of art. Although, like most of the painters that had come before them, the Post-Impressionists produced portraits, landscapes and still-life paintings, what set them apart was a focus on the painting as an image, rather than as a representation per se. As a result, Bell says, Cézanne and his contemporaries were able to create works that gave rise to a certain peculiar feeling in their viewers. Bell called this feeling the ‘aesthetic emotion’. It is not the artwork-as-representation that provokes the aesthetic emotion, Bell argues, but rather the lines and colours that make up the artwork itself. Essentially, Bell contends, art is a matter of form, not of content. However, simply stipulating that art is form would not do as a definition. First, every visible thing has form: a blender has form, a goldfish has form, your hand has form. These are not art. Second, not every form gives rise to that peculiar feeling that Bell calls aesthetic emotion. Rather, Bell contends, what gives rise to the aesthetic emotion—and what sets art apart from other things—is ‘significant form’. So art is something with significant form, and significant form is that which brings about the aesthetic emotion.

Bell is clear that he is only discussing painting, the art form with which he is most familiar. It is not that he thinks there is nothing analogous to significant form, say, in music—it is just that he is not particularly sensitive to music’s forms. We might further look to extend Bell’s theory to something like significant form in dance, literature and other art forms. That a work has significant form is no guarantee, Bell says, that you will be sensitive to it, and if you are not sufficiently sensitive, it will not provoke in you the aesthetic emotion. However, a good critic might be able to guide you to seeing significant form you had previously overlooked. When you are made aware of the significant form, says Bell, you will receive the aesthetic emotion, and so recognize it as a work of art. It is the artist’s job to combine forms so that they will move us, and insofar as he succeeds, he has made art. Representation, Bell suggests, is at ...