Aesthetics Today

Stefan Majetschak, Anja Weiberg, Stefan Majetschak, Anja Weiberg

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110539615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ästhetik in der Philosophie

Aesthetics is no longer merely the philosophy of perception and the arts. Nelson Goodman, Arthur Danto and others have contributed to develop aesthetics from a field at the margins of philosophy to one permeating substantial areas of theoretical and practical philosophy. New approaches like environmental and ecological aesthetics widened the understanding of the aesthetics of nature. The contributions in this volume address the most important issues in contemporary aesthetics, many of them from a Wittgensteinian perspective.

The 39th International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium, organized by the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, was held at Kirchberg am Wechsel, Lower Austria, from August 7th to 13th 2016 and aimed at taking an inventory of important tendencies and positions in contemporary aesthetics. The volume includes a selection of the invited papers.

Aesthetics and the Theory of Arts

Karlheinz Lüdeking

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Art-Philosophy So Boring and Art-Criticism So Different, So Much More Appealing?

Abstract: This paper has two aims. First, it tries to justify the claim (already presupposed by the title) that today’s art-philosophy is boring because it has nothing useful to say about the problem of distinguishing artworks from other things. For more than sixty years we have witnessed that only two strategies have been used to cope with that problem: 1) the traditional attempt to give a definition of the concept of art and 2) the comparatively new endeavor to show how the concept can be applied without fixed criteria. Both strategies have constantly failed. Therefore, the second purpose of the paper is to outline a third possibility to determine the members of the class of artworks. It no longer presupposes that this can only be attained as a result of mental acts. It rather considers the constitution of the class of artworks as an outcome of a social process that involves countless individual acts of inclusion and exclusion.

The title of this paper is, obviously, a bit provocative and the claim it entails can certainly not count on widespread consent, particularly among philosophers specializing in the philosophy of art. Most of them, I guess, will assure us that today’s art-philosophy—the branch they themselves actually work in—is not at all boring, but very appealing. Actually, I would even admit that my verdict, in its generality, is a bit overstated because I cannot rule out the possibility that contemporary art-philosophy might have produced interesting results that I am not aware of. Therefore, I would—at least in this context—not at all mind to limit the scope of my thesis. I will stick to it, however, all the more stubbornly when it comes to the fundamental problem of all philosophy of art: the problem of distinguishing artworks from other things.

Today’s art-philosophy has proved to be unable to contribute something new and useful to the solution of this problem, and therefore it may, at least in this respect, rightly be called boring. A boring theory mostly consists of statements that are completely predictable or of arguments that are already well known, even though they might parade in the guise of some up-to-date vocabulary. In my opinion, this is actually the case with all the different proposals put forward during the last sixty years concerning the problem of distinguishing artworks from other things. And the reason why philosophy has never convincingly solved this problem is simply that philosophy is not competent for its solution. Today’s art-philosophy—that is the thesis of this paper—is not in a position to decide whether something is a work of art or not. It can only clarify the conditions of the possibility of such decisions, and if it aims for more, it will exceed the limits of its competence so that, consequently, it becomes irrelevant and boring. And this is precisely what we can observe today. Today’s art-philosophy is still dealing with a problem it is not qualified to deal with. It has not yet realized that it is not philosophy’s business to draw a distinction between artworks and other things.

Concerning the task of drawing this distinction, there are basically two different theoretical approaches that dominate today, and neither of them is particularly appealing.

On the one hand there those who, like Arthur Danto, still feel obliged to devise an essentialist definition of art, in spite of the fact that no such definition has ever been generally accepted. All of them (Danto’s included) have been criticized, rejected and condemned by other thinkers, and with good reasons. Again and again it turned out that all attempts to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for calling something a work of art failed because they delimited the class of artworks in a way that did not comply with the actual classification at a given time. Whatever criteria were proposed, they all proved to be either too permissive or too restrictive; either they included objects not generally classified as artworks or they excluded commonly acknowledged works of art. In this situation there are only three possibilities to cope with the problem, and each of them leads into a dead-end. Initially, the only adequate reaction seems to be to admit that the criteria proposed have turned out to be incorrect and, consequently, to withdraw one’s definition. In order to avoid such a shameful move, it might, however, be tempting to re-define one’s criteria to make them less clear-cut and thus more capable to cover problematic or borderline cases. But such an effort can only lead to the inconvenience that the criteria will, in the end, become so elastic and so vague that it is no longer possible to decide where to apply them and where not to. Finally, there is the possibility of ruthlessly applying one’s own criteria regardless of the classifications of others. This implies, as already indicated, that certain objects commonly accepted as artworks will be expelled and objects that others would not count as artworks will be included. Such a definition, evidently, is no more than a private guideline or, at best, a narrow-minded prescription of how others should use the concept of art as well. It is, in any case, no faithful description of the way we actually use this concept.

Confronted with those (and several other) insufficiencies of essentialist definitions, a considerable number of philosophers turned to the idea that the concept of art cannot be defined at all. In their opinion, a definition of art is either not necessary because we are able to use the concept, although we cannot state the rules that govern its use, or a definition is rejected and declared detrimental since it, allegedly, prevents the creation of radically new works of art. Very soon, however, it became clear that these anti-definitional theories were also unable to explain how the concept of art is actually used.

The antagonism between these two camps—those who stick to the traditional endeavors to determine necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of the concept of art, and those who believe that the concept can just as well be used without rigid criteria—has dominated art-philosophy since the 1950s. And since then we are caught in an impasse.

The good news is (quite predictably) that there is a way out of this impasse and that (again quite predictably) it is Ludwig Wittgenstein who can show us how to proceed. So, let us look for a clue in his Philosophical Investigations, posthumously published in 1953. In paragraph 182, Wittgenstein discusses a few situations in which we are unsure about the criteria for using such seemingly simple expressions like “to fit,” “to be able” and “to understand.” This leads him to the following conclusion: “The game with these words, their employment in the linguistic intercourse that is carried on by their means, is more involved—the role of these words in our language other—than we are tempted to think.” In an appendix to the paragraph, that insight is, finally, transformed into the following methodological advice: “This role is what we need to understand in order to resolve philosophical paradoxes. And hence definitions usually fail to resolve them; and so, a fortiori does the assertion that a word is ‘indefinable’.”29

Today’s art-philosophy, unfortunately, never took this recommendation as seriously as it deserves, and because of that we are now doomed to watch the endless end-game of contemporary art-philosophy staged in the form of a depressing farce, a paralyzing combat between two parties in the grip of a constellation of complementary double-binded compulsions. On the one side, there are those who still scrupulously elaborate their definitions of art, although they are tacitly aware that these will be of no use at all. On the other side, there are those who ceaselessly declare definitions of art to be “impossible” although everyone knows that they are constantly created anew. Contemporary art-philosophy, thus, either keeps searching for useless definitions or denounces such efforts without offering something better. And this spectacle is not appealing, but almost a bit appalling, because over the years it should have dawned on everyone that “define or not define” can no longer be the question.

As a first step to abandon the dreadful circulus vitiosus, we must drop the presupposition that the concept of art must have a pre-established “intrinsic meaning” waiting to be discovered, like a Platonic “idea.” According to Wittgenstein we should not focus on the meaning, but on the use of a concept. We have to observe how people in their daily routine use expressions like “art,” “artwork” or “work of art,” we have to clarify the role those expressions play in “the game with these words,” we have to see how they are employed in our “linguistic intercourse.”

Following this advice, we will soon notice that people who are professionally concerned with artworks actually use words like “artwork” rather seldom, at least not as often as we might expect. Museum-directors, for example, do not choose the items for their next exhibition by declaring “This is a work of art, and that is also a work of art,” instead they say “Okay” or “That doesn’t fit” or “That’s boring,” and these expressions, we have to realize, are in most cases not meant to describe states of affairs. They are rather used to determine what is right and what is wrong. Their context is that of practical decision, not of theoretical cognition. When, in this context, something is declared to be an artwork, the ascription of the word “artwork” usually does not have the purpose to state a given fact, but to produce a new fact. Calling something a work of art quite often has the power of a “speech-act”—a verbal utterance strong enough to generate a new state of affairs. Calling something a work of art can make it a work of art.

The power involved in such cases does not, of course, reside in the words being uttered, nor in the practice of uttering them, nor in the person who utters them. The amazing capacity to alter the world by pronouncing certain words need not be traced back to sorcery, witchcraft or magic. It is made possible by something utterly factual and even empirically measurable, and that is the potency of an institution. The efficiency of speech-acts always depends on the fact that they are part of a social system that regulates the behavior of all those involved. Seen in this perspective, distinguishing artworks from other things is no longer a question of recognizing things for what they are (as with natural kinds, say: larks in contrast to nightingales). It rather turns out to be a question of transfiguring things by conferring them a special status. In this case, an artwork is not an artwork because of its inherent properties, it is an artwork because a certain prestigious status has been bestowed upon it—just as a professor is a professor because he has gone through the institutional procedure required to reach this position, whereas his personal qualifications (intelligence, not being boring etc.) are only pre-conditions.

Before we continue with this—so to speak, structural—analysis it is advisable to supplement it with a short—historical—survey showing that the range of things eligible for receiving the status of an artwork has drastically changed and extremely expanded during the last two-hundred years. At the beginning of the French Revolution it was still quite easy to recognize artworks for what they were. Compared with today, the class of artworks was a small, isolated and self-sufficient set consisting mostly of paintings on wood or canvas, marble sculptures, drawings on colored paper, and not very much else. Then, in the early twentieth century, a vast variety of new things were admitted, which would not have been considered possible candidates before: paintings, for example, with strange compositions lacking any resemblance to something in the real world, sculptures tinkered from the cheapest materials or genuine junk, even ordinary household-goods available at department-stores. Today, finally, the situation has become so extreme that nothing at all seems to be left in the real world that might not, under suitable conditions, become a member of the art-world. That means that everything whatsoever is already a potential work of art. Nothing is per se excluded.

Accordingly, in a museum of contemporary art we must always expect the unexpected. We will be exposed to all sorts of delightful or painful or awkward (or boring) experiences that, one or two decades ago, no one would have dared to impose on the audience. We might be confronted with living animals, or people who want us to sing a song, or discuss the consequences of climate change; we might be urged to find our way through dark and narrow spaces; we might be blinded by bright light; we might hear screaming voices or sounds recorded in the desert; we might be tormented by disgusting smells or exhilarated by computer-generated films showing things no one has ever seen before; and at some point we will very likely arrive in a room without having the faintest idea whether there is an artwork within those four white-washed walls and where it might be. It is just this: the enormous proliferation of occasions for unusual experiences and the manifold possibilities to indulge in an adventurous pastime that makes today’s art-museums so different and so appealing for ever-increasing numbers of visitors.

Having, by this little survey, entered the terrain of concrete facts, it seems convenient for me to add a bit more real world material to my hitherto rather abstract reasoning. First, I remind the reader of the conference from which the present paper originated. It was the thirty-ninth International Wittgenstein Symposium that took place from August 7 till August 13, 2016, in the small Austrian town of Kirchberg am Wechsel. Its topic was Aesthetics Today. Contemporary Approaches to the Aesthetics of Nature and of Art. For reasons that will soon become apparent, I want to relate this event with another one of another order: an exhibition that was shown exactly sixty years earlier, from August 9 till September 9, 1956, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London under the title This is Tomorrow.

The British artist Richard Hamilton designed a poster for this exhibition that also served as its ca...