The Philosophy of Art

An Introduction

Theodore Gracyk

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745680910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ästhetik in der Philosophie

The Philosophy of Art is a highly accessible introduction to current key issues and debates in aesthetics and philosophy of art. Chapters on standard topics are balanced by topics of interest to today's students, including creativity, authenticity, cultural appropriation, and the distinction between popular and fine art. Other topics include emotive expression, pictorial representation, definitional strategies, and artistic value. Presupposing no prior knowledge of philosophy, Theodore Gracyk draws on three decades of teaching experience to provide a balanced and engaging overview, clear explanations, and many thought-provoking examples.

All chapters have a strong focus on current debates in the field, yet historical figures are not neglected. Major current theories are set beside key ideas from Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Marx, and Hegel. Chapters conclude with advice on further readings, and there are recommendations of films that will serve as a basis for further reflection and discussion. Key ideas are immediately accompanied by exercises that will test students' reactions and understanding. Many chapters call attention to ideology, prejudices, and common clichés that interfere with clear thinking.

Beautifully written and thoroughly comprehensive, The Philosophy of Art is the ideal resource for anyone who wants to explore recent developments in philosophical thinking about the arts. It is also provides the perfect starting point for anyone who wants to reflect on, and challenge, their own assumptions about the nature and value of art.

1 Meaning, Interpretation, and Picturing

Philosophy of art can be puzzling in many different ways. Unfortunately, these puzzles begin with the meanings of the most basic terminology. Offered without further qualification, “artist” refers to someone who produces visual art and “art” normally refers to visual art, the stuff that most people associate with art museums and art galleries. Some people refer to these objects as “fine art,” or even “Art with a capital A.” However, there is another standard use of these same words according to which Ludwig van Beethoven and William Shakespeare are great artists, and symphonies and tragedies are fine art, too. By including the performing and literary arts, we arrive at the broad category of the arts. Philosophy of art is interested in this very broad class of objects and activities. How broad is this class of objects? That issue is itself one of the most challenging issues in philosophy of art. Another puzzle or misunderstanding can arise from the way that some European languages and some legal contexts say “author” instead of “artist” when referring to someone who creates art. In this book, “author” will be restricted to poets, novelists, playwrights, and other literary artists. “Artist” will embrace anyone who creates any kind of art.

Philosophy of art tries to make sense of these broad general categories. However, philosophy of art should not be confused with art history, art criticism, or art appreciation. Generally, philosophy is less an exploration of things than an exploration of our shared conceptual frameworks for thinking about them. Applying this distinction, one philosophical task is to determine whether there is an underlying logic to what we include and exclude from the category of art. Are there criteria demarcating the line between what is art and what is not? For example, both photography and cinema were initially denied the status of art. Yet now there is very little resistance to the idea that at least some photographs and movies are works of art. At this early point in our investigation it makes no sense to try to decide why some photographs and movies might be art while others are not. We must leave that task to the later chapters that explore major criteria offered to distinguish art from non-art.

Until the twentieth century, most theorizing about art focused on pictures and literature. Because almost all pictures and literature were representational until the twentieth century, it was easy to over-generalize and adopt the thesis that fine art is necessarily representational. As a result, the absence of a clear representational function was sometimes offered as a reason why certain kinds of things cannot be art. Lack of representation was an important historical reason for saying that instrumental music is not art. At best, it might provide a very high level of entertainment. However, such arguments cut both ways. J. S. Bach, G. F. Handel, W. A. Mozart, Joseph Haydn, and Richard Wagner wrote considerable amounts of vocal music. These composers achieved clarity in representation by incorporating verbal texts. They stand in contrast to Beethoven, who made his name with instrumental music. Early nineteenth-century music lovers who regarded Beethoven as an artistic genius therefore assumed that his piano sonatas and symphonies must possess some element of representation, however mysterious the precise nature of that representation might sometimes be. It was obvious to Beethoven’s admirers that they should interpret his music – they should ask themselves what his various musical works are about – even if he seldom offered them explicit guidance through titles and other texts.

Despite the many complications, we must start somewhere. So let us begin with the intuition that ordinary, everyday usage of the term “art” refers to visual art. Here, then, are two obvious facts. First, visual art remains the paradigm of fine art. Second, photographs and films are like paintings and sculpture in that all of these are seen and looked at. Because the visual arts have played a central role in theorizing about art, we have good reasons to begin our philosophical inquiry into art and aesthetics by examining visual art. For the remainder of this chapter we will set aside literature and music in order to concentrate on visual representation. We will begin with pictures.

1.1 Visual representations and pictures

Just as the visual arts provide the traditional paradigm of fine art, pictures are the paradigm of visual art. But is this a legitimate basis for thinking about the nature of art?

As a provisional starting point, let us understand a picture to be a fixed, two-dimensional visual representation of the visual appearance of a three-dimensional object or arrangement of objects. It might seem redundant to say that pictures are visual representations of visual appearances, but this point distinguishes pictures from other two-dimensional surfaces that are visually marked to represent something non-visual. Examples include sheet music (where the marks on the musical staffvisually represent musical sounds) and ordinary writing (where the marks visually represent language). Or consider a map shown on television during election night news coverage, gradually filled in with different colors to show which party is winning in which area. Although the visual pattern of colors represents how districts and regions voted, votes are not visual objects. So the colors on the map do not picture what they represent. (Some philosophers prefer to say that they represent but do not depict.) Arguably, no element of a map counts as a picture. The same goes for a schematic diagram.

Here are some other kinds of visual representations that are not pictures:

• representational sculptures and models differ from pictures by incorporating the third spatial dimension.

• “moving pictures,” as films were once called, are something more than pictures. They employ a series of pictures in order to convey the dimension of time. Furthermore, they almost always have a soundtrack, and some are (relatively) three-dimensional in appearance.

• plays and other theatre productions are three-dimensional. Normally, they unfold in time and utilize sound.

It is important to locate pictures within this larger family of visual representation, because doing so focuses our attention on the unique manner in which pictures visually represent things beyond themselves. Starting at a very general classification and working our way down, we have the categories of communication, representation, visual representation, and pictorial depiction. If picturing is a unique method of visual communication, we must be careful not to assume that all other visual representation works in the same way.

On this approach, where should we locate the arts of painting and photography? Painting seems to be a species of picturing. Photographs are also pictures, for what strikes most of us as relevant about Dorothea Lange’s famous photograph Migrant Mother (1936) is also present in a painting such as Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Militia Company of Frans Banning Cocq, popularly known as Night Watch (1642). They both provide two-dimensional visual content in visually depicting how something looks. At the same time, these pictures are like all other representations in being communications that are subject to interpretation. Presented with a picture, it is reasonable to ask what it pictures – to determine its referent or “subject” – as well as to ask what it shows us about that referent. Who is the woman in Lange’s photograph, and where was she? When was it taken? What mis-fortune was she so evidently suffering, and what should we think about her situation? Similarly, who are all these people in Night Watch, and what are they doing (both individually and collectively)?

Let’s focus on the most basic requirement of communication, picking out a referent or subject. You might suppose that a picture achieves representational reference by visually imitating its referent. Among other things, Rembrandt’s Night Watch depicts Willem van Ruytenburch holding a spear. It is tempting to say that the painting accomplishes this function by copying or imitating, in paint, the visual appearance of van Ruytenburch, the visual appearance of a spear, and so on. And this common view has a prestigious pedigree: the earliest philosophers to discuss art, Plato (2004) and Aristotle (1997), assumed that “mimesis” (imitation) is the essential relationship. Defending theatre productions against Plato’s criticism that imitations are unhealthy distractions, Aristotle counters, This position on the psychological roots of representation is so intuitively appealing that it seems mere common sense, and early definitions of fine art simply took it for granted that art necessarily requires the production of simulations or likenesses. It is only relatively recently that philosophers have begun to challenge imitative or mimetic theories of visual representation.

To imitate is, even from childhood, part of man’s nature (and man is different from the other animals in that he is extremely imitative and makes his first steps in learning through imitation); and so is the pleasure we all take in copies of things – as we can tell from experience, for there are things that we find painful to look at in real life – misshapen animals, for example, or corpses – and yet we take pleasure in looking at the most accurate images of them… .The reason for this is that learning is a very great pleasure. (Aristotle 1997: 57)

Exercise: Does Aristotle’s hypothesis about the natural pleasure of imitation explain our continuing interest in old paintings, such as Rembrandt’s Night Watch, where we have no preexisting reason to be interested in the people and events depicted? If so, how do you explain the boredom that typically arises when viewing someone else’s vacation photos?

If philosophy teaches us anything, it warns us not be too hasty when we generalize. Night Watch is a picture, but do all paintings fall into the category of pictures? (Is painting necessarily a pictorial art?) Art has an interesting history of resisting our expectations. Long-standing assumptions were disrupted early in the twentieth century when Wassily Kandinsky produced a series of paintings that art historians regard as the first genuinely abstract paintings. He denied that the meaning of his visual “improvisations” and “compositions” derives from the representation of the appearance of material objects (Kandinsky 1977: 57). Other painters followed him, as did sculptors. In a very short time, art critics and audiences became familiar with the possibility that a visual artwork might not function as a picture – that is, it might not provide a visual likeness of something beyond itself. Picturing no longer looked to be a good candidate for grasping the essence of art, visual or otherwise. As we proceed, it is important to remember that our exploration of the nature of picturing cannot be expected to provide a complete account of artistic meaning. Furthermore, we will see that the rise of photography and cinema generates additional questions about the basic nature of both visual representation and picturing.

1.2 Theories of picturing

Despite the rise of abstract art, picturing remains an important practice in the fine arts – most visitors to art museums prefer pictures to abstractions, and abstract cinema has never attracted much of a following. What, then, are pictures, and why do they interest people? These questions have generated much discussion, which can be broadly summarized in terms of two competing positions:

• visual resemblance is essential to pictorial representation, making it in some degree independent of symbolic conventions.

• all denotation is established by symbolic conventions, including cases of pictorial representation.

This section explains what these claims involve and how they differ. The significance of the disagreement rests on a standard philosophical distinction between denotation and predication. This distinction is a more precise way to capture our earlier contrast between what is pictured and what is shown about it.

Here are some basic ideas and terminology. Suppose I am walking my dog in the park and I cross paths with someone from the school where I teach. My co-worker is walking with a child. I recall that she told me that she has no children. We stop to talk but she does not introduce the child, so I ask, “And who is this?” Suppose she answers, “This is Pamela.” What have I learned? Not much. In learning the child’s name, I have learned how to refer to that child. In philosophical terminology, I now have a name. A name is a word that denotes. Although we did not use the term “denotation” in section 1.1, we discussed the idea. Denotation is a symbol’s capacity to pick out a particular referent or subject, singling it out from among all the other things in the world. Thanks to our exchange, “Pamela” can now replace my context-sensitive denoting term, “this.” I can now refer to Pamela without describing her. However, that is not the information I was seeking. I wanted to know about the nature of their relationship. I wanted help with the general descriptive category that captured the situation – I was asking for predication, rather than denotation. I was hoping for a complex communication that would clarify the state of affairs, such as, “This is Pamela, my niece.”

As used here, complex does not mean that the communication is complicated or lengthy. Instead, it indicates that the communication combines the dual functions of denoting and predicating. In the sentence “Wassily Kandinsky is a painter,” the name “Wassily Kandinsky” denotes the subject (in this case, a particular historical individual). The remainder of the sentence predicates the property of being a painter, something that holds for an unknown number of individuals. This level of complexity is regarded as the minimum level required for generating communications that are either accurate and inaccurate, or true and false. “Wassily Kandinsky was born in Helsinki” is false, because that historical individual was born in Moscow, not Helsinki.

So what does all of this terminology have to do with picturing? Ordinarily, pictures are complex communications involving the appearance of a two-dimensional surface. They are a species of representation. As explained in section 1.1, they differ from other representations in depicting their subject matter. In the present context, the important point is that we normally treat pictures as a species of complex communication. As such, a picture can be evaluated for accuracy. For example, Vincent Van Gogh’s Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe (1889) shows a man with a bandaged right ear. Van Gogh had cut off a portion of his left ear the previous month. The inaccuracy of the painting is explained by the fact that Van Gogh painted himself as he appeared in a mirror. Since the painting gives a false impression of which ear was mutilated, pictorial depiction is like language in its capacity to combine denotation and predication.

The central philosophical dispute about picturing emphasizes the question of whether the perceptual specifics of an image play an indispensable role in the complex representation. If the look of the picture captures a state of affairs, the work will succeed in pictorially denoting and pictorially predicating. A picture’s accuracy (or inaccuracy) will depend on its visual accuracy.

Against this view, conventionalists maintain that pictures operate just like our ordinary verbal language. Like ordinary sentences, pictures are arbitrarily connected to their meanings. The sentence “Wassily Kandinsky is a painter” can be written on a page or said aloud. Either way, it refers to that one person and predicates something of him. While a competent English speaker might think it is simply obvious that the sentence means what it does, it is important to recognize that success in interpreting and understanding it depends on an acquired competency in a particular language. Furthermore, our “language” is actually several different symbol-systems. The sentence can be communicated either aurally or visually. Rendered into Braille, the mode of access is tactile. Thus, the perceptual presentation of “Wassily Kandinsky is a painter” plays no special role in its communication of the relevant information. There is no change of meaning when we change the medium of delivery. More radically, the choice of language is arbitrary. We can translate the sentence into another language, again preserving all of the information: “Wassily Kandinsky ist ein Maler.” Rendered into German, only the denoting phrase remains the same. English speakers who hear or see it in German have no basis for recognizing that it says something about Kandinsky’s profession. Linguistic competence is system-specific.

You are probably tempted to say that the situation is different with pictorial representation. Unlike reading Braille and understanding German, competence in picture interpretation is not an acquired competency. Success in recognizing pictorial depiction involves the same perceptual ability that lets you see and recognize ordinary objects. Pictures denote by showing. Aside from some very specialized cases, there is no “picture competency” along the lines of language competency. Very small children can follow the story in a picture book far in advance of learning to read words. And a small child who can visually recognize a dog will also recognize that same thing in a reasonably clear picture. Conversely, by learning to recognize a dog in a picture, a child acquires the ability to recognize dogs, because a competently rendered picture of a dog shows what a dog looks like. Let us return to Willem van Ruytenburch, one of the subjects of Night Watch. How does it represent him, and not some-one else? The obvious answer is that it pictures him by showing what he looks like, and it accomplishes this by imitating his appearance. Anyone who could recognize him by looking at him should be able to pick him out in the painting, and if the painting is a good likeness, his historical contemporaries could have learned to recognize him by studying the painting.

Exercise: What is the purpose of placing photographs on passports and driver’s licenses? Is this practice essentially different from providing a detailed verbal description?

Against the seeming common sense that pictures involve some degree of imitated appearance, a number of influential philosophers contend that pictorial depiction must depend on more than our innate perceptual capacities. These conventionalists insist that our grasp of denotation and predication always depends on acquired competence in a symbolic system. Rembrandt’s painting of van Ruytenburch refers to him the same way that the words “Willem van Ruytenburch” do: they are established by conventional association within a language system. The same point holds for predication. Rembrandt put a spear into van Ruytenburch’s hand by using paint in conformity with established conventions of depiction. The same information can be communicated verbally, by saying “Willem van Ruytenburch has a spear in his hand.” In much the way that a detailed verbal description is regarded as highly realistic, the conventionalist thinks that a visual representation is thought to be more realistic – and so is easily confused with perceptual imitation – when it is in a familiar style and contains a significant amount of information about the details of the represented situation. In other words, we regard pictures as realistic when they are dense with information. Nonetheless, conventionalists deny that this sense of realism is based on visual likeness.

It’s one thing to hold a view. It’s another to offer reasons i...