Art History Versus Aesthetics

James Elkins, James Elkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135506995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In this unprecedented collection, over twenty of the world's most prominent thinkers on the subject including Arthur Danto, Stephen Melville, Wendy Steiner, Alexander Nehamas, and Jay Bernstein ponder the disconnect between these two disciplines. The volume has a radically innovative structure: it begins with introductions, and centres on an animated conversation among ten historians and aestheticians. That conversation was then sent to twenty scholars for commentary and their responses are very diverse: some are informal letters and others full essays with footnotes. Some think they have the answer in hand, and others raise yet more questions. The volume ends with two synoptic essays, one by a prominent aesthetician and the other by a literary critic.

This stimulating inaugural volume in the Routledge The Art Seminar series presents not one but many answers to the question; Does philosophy have anything to say to art history?

1

INTRODUCTION

THE BORDER OF THE AESTHETIC

Robert Gero

The border of the aesthetic is a contested space—a multiply defended zone of discourses occupied by theorists working within the disciplines of philosophy and art history. Theoretical maneuvers and countermaneuvers occur within the domain of each discipline. In both disciplines, theorists battle over the definition of the aesthetic. On one side, theorists claim that aesthetic encounters with artworks involve immediate, noninferential sensory responses that are refined by sustained contemplation alone and not by appeal to such extraphenomenal factors as facts about art theory, art practice, or art history. This is a subjectivist position that is usually framed as the view that aesthetic judgments are autonomous. On the other side, the claim is that theory and practice are logically implicated in aesthetic judgment because they are logically implicated in the artwork itself. This position makes possible a coherent basis for talk of “true” and “false” in aesthetic judgment and art criticism—or at least talk of “better” and “worse.” In general, theorists are divided by whether they count aesthetic encounters with artworks to be logically independent of their theoretical properties or necessarily constrained by them.

Since the eighteenth century, writers within philosophy have worked to reconcile these extremes. Alexander Baumgarten, who first introduced the term “aesthetics” in 1735, defined it as sensitive cognition.¹ In discussing poetry, he distinguished the category of sensitive discourse, with its suggestive flood of densely packed imagery and ideas, from the category of intellectual discourse, with its network of clear and distinct abstract ideas. David Hume, in 1757, argued that aesthetic responses were spontaneous, subjective states that could be informed by reason as well as sense. Hume supported this by appeal to the intrinsically reflective structure of the aesthetic response. The possibility of informed reflection was the ground on which Hume delineated true critics from pretend critics even though he continued to maintain that aesthetic judgments were subjective reports of feeling and lacked truth value. According to Hume, true critics of “the finer arts” must subject their aesthetic responses to training: they must be translocal, engaging with artworks of “different nations and ages” in order to make informed comparisons; they must be transpersonal, calibrating their responses to the point of view of the intended audience; and they must be analytical, using reason to judge how well the work realized its calculated ends or was “confined by rules of art, discovered to the author either by genius or by observation.”²

Since the beginning of the modernist period, the field of combat has been Kantian: in the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant introduced or developed most of the critical terms in play in modernist art analysis—beauty and the sublime, reflective judgment, the presence of an intellectual pleasure in aesthetic appreciation, the presence of a “free play” of cognitive and imaginative elements in aesthetic appreciation, the absence of determinate concepts in aesthetic judgment, the role of artworks as productive exemplars in art making, and the crucial, regulating function of the sensus communis in training artists, critics, and other art viewers. For this reason, all contemporary art theorists can be viewed as negotiating a position in relation to Kant. Consequently, a review of Kantian aesthetics will be a helpful aid in reading Section 3, “The Art Seminar.”

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant analyzed the formal structures of both aesthetic judgment and art making in terms of the “free play” of imagination and understanding. This is the “free play” of the beautiful where the imagination can endlessly play at forming and the understanding can endlessly play at describing. For Kant, artworks are an imaginative array of representations, “a multiplicity of partial representations,” what he calls “aesthetic ideas” that “strain” to approximate an objective presentation of a rational idea.³ Rational ideas are not determinate concepts but are ways of trying to think about, or somehow represent, what lies beyond human experience or what is mysterious and ineluctable within it. Aesthetic ideas are not determinate concepts either, nonetheless, as disciplined imaginative insights, they have cognitive content. Aesthetic appreciation is the entertaining of indeterminate and partial concepts that never coalesce into one privileged, conceptual “closure.” In Kant’s aesthetic, this rush of thought stimulates intellectual pleasure when it somehow satisfies the spectator in spite of resisting crystallization into a fixed or definite thought. In fact, Kant claims that the reason artworks can stimulate such enjoyable floods of thought is because that thought is not narrowly constrained within the boundary of a particular determinate concept. Aesthetic pleasure is the harmonic play of the understanding and the imagination as they work together to organize meanings.

For Kant, such a free play is possible only if the artwork is a dynamic mechanism operating according to a kind of complex internal logic that both invites and eludes interpretation. Kant claimed that artists can isolate and extract this mechanism from another artist’s artwork and either directly appropriate it or rework it in their own artworks. For Kant, no worked structure is an artwork unless it creates and maintains the free play necessary for a purely intellectual or cognitive enjoyment. Consequently, art production necessarily involves the invention of works that have sufficient complexity and sufficient openness to stimulate a rich train of thought, a set of plausible readings that must always remain indefinite.

Kant’s work has been appropriated to advance differing accounts of the aesthetic. Some define the aesthetic as the experiencing of a sensible object of any sort—natural or artifactual—when it is framed as an irreducibly singular event, disconnected from any determinate purpose, function, or art-historical situation. On this account, the aesthetic is tied to the perceptual: every perceptual object could be viewed aesthetically, for example, an aerial night bombing or a makeshift memorial shrine, but not every artwork. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), for example, would be included in the scope of the aesthetic; but not Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964) or Paul McCarthy’s Bossy Burger (1991).

This narrowed bracketing of the aesthetic is the application to art of the disciplinary project of the Enlightenment—what Jürgen Habermas calls “the project of modernity … to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic.”⁴

The autonomy of art has been variously viewed. It has been mourned as “aesthetic alienation”: “the experience of art as aesthetical is the experience of art as having lost or been deprived of its power to speak the truth ... modernity is the site of beauty bereaved.”⁵ A cultural position or set of concerns, later organized under the term “anti-aesthetic,” emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and attacked the aesthetic as the mark of art. They attempted to “change the object itself,” “the very nature of art,” and “the object of criticism”:

“Anti-aesthetic” also signals that the very notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas, is in question here: the idea that aesthetic experience exists apart, without “purpose,” all but beyond history, or that art can now effect a world at once (inter)subjective, concrete and universal—a symbolic totality. … More locally, “anti-aesthetic” also signals a practice, cross-disciplinary in nature, that is sensitive to cultural forms engaged in a politic ... or rooted in a vernacular—that is, to forms that deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm.⁶

J. M. Bernstein notes that theories of art that view artworks as historical constructions, “attempt[ing] to interrogate art historically,”⁷ necessarily understand artworks “in non-aesthetic terms.”⁸ On the other hand, the aesthetic has been valued as a subversive zone of experiencing because it is not compromised by the instrumentality of political and economic negotiations. Theodor Adorno sees art or the “aesthetic mode of conduct” as “a reservoir of critique … because it alone can block the repressive authority—instrumental rationality (perfected under capitalism)”:⁹

Aesthetic experience becomes living experience only by way of its object, in that instant in which artworks themselves become animate under its gaze. ... Through contemplative immersion the immanent processual quality of the work is set free. ... This immanent dynamic is, in a sense, a higher-order element of what artworks are. If anywhere, then it is here that aesthetic experience resembles sexual experience, indeed its culmination.¹⁰

Many writers practicing or avoiding philosophical aesthetics share this sense-based interpretation of the aesthetic. Arthur Danto has claimed that Warhol’s Brillo Box is an anomalous artwork that exposes the basic theoretical dimension of art and forces the abandonment of the aesthetic theory of art. According to Danto, Brillo Box refutes the theoretical claim that the only significant properties of an artwork are aesthetic properties that supervene on the sense-based properties of the work. He claims “aesthetic considerations have no essential application to … art produced from the late 1960s on”:¹¹

For me, the interesting feature of the Brillo Box was that it appropriated the philosophical question of the relationship between art and reality and incorporated it into the Brillo Box and in effect asks why, if it is art, the boxes of Brillo in the supermarket, which differ from it in no interesting perceptual way, are not. At the very least the Brillo Box made plain that one cannot any longer think of distinguishing art from reality on perceptual grounds, for these grounds have been cut away. … What makes the one art may be something quite invisible, perhaps how it arrived in the world and what someone intended it to be.¹²

For Danto, when an artwork can have significant nonperceptual properties, art is revealed as nonaesthetic. For this reason, he concludes that the project of interpreting and appreciating art cannot be confined by the terms of the aesthetic.

In contrast, the aesthetic has been defined as referring exclusively to the experiencing of an object when framed as an artwork. On this account, every artwork, even one possessing insignificant or no perceptual qualities is aesthetic, while most perceptually discriminated objects are not. Thierry de Duve shares this reading of the aesthetic:

The sentence “here is some art” produces a case of art, but it is not a case of theory; it is a case of feeling. The experience is not repeatable, which is to say, experimental; it is singular, which is to say aesthetic.¹³

Other theorists in this group have redrawn the boundary of the aesthetic far beyond the liminal border of the perceptual. Stephen Davies counts as aesthetic all the complex semanti...