DOCSLIB.ORG

The Philosophy of Technology in the Frame of Film Theory: Walter Benjamin’S Contribution

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Philosophy of Technology in the Frame of Film Theory: Walter Benjamin’S Contribution The Philosophy of Technology in the Frame of Film Theory: Walter Benjamin’s Contribution Dominique Chateau Many contemporary authors have been preoccupied by theoretical issues related to the context of media that has surrounded us since the beginning of the digital era, and because of which we will experience a period of transition that will last as long as digitization keeps developing and involving more and more aspects of our daily lives. However, what has already been changed and established provides a good basis for certain conjectures. One may wonder, for instance, if the new set of facts and ideas related to such technological transformations could possibly contribute in turn to the transformation of film theory and some of its key con- cepts. The persistence of cinema is indeed obvious: films are still being made as audiovisual works destined to entertain audiences, among other functions. It is nonetheless just as obvious that the digital revolution has had an important im- pact on this persistence. In the following, I will try to show how Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” can provide a serious ground of discussion for this issue, as it contains answers to a large number of questions raised by it. This does not mean that it would suffice to directly apply Benjamin’s propositions to the current situation. Indeed, those propositions have been regularly re-evaluated, not only with regard to their inter- nal logic, but also to their degree of relevance in the light of the different time periods in which they were reassessed. A collection of texts entitled The Work of Art in the Digital Age1 examines Benjamin’s arguments one by one and re-evaluates his propositions in the light of our digital modernity. I, for one, have given the aura concept a close examination, along with the argumentation from which it came.2 This led me to be more attentive to the concept of aestheticization and to realize that my opinion was not so much altered by the value of those previously studied arguments as it was by the viewpoint from which they had to be exam- ined. I then thought it would prove advantageous to abandon a strictly linear reading of“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” and rather 29 consider the text as a network of concepts, whose interrelations offered an ex- emplary– and by no means intangible– matrix, which could be used to interpret the consequences of the invention of cinema and the advent of the digital revolu- tion. This being said, I am fully aware that studying this text requires certain transpositions, which a simple analysis of its title might already reveal, as my topic is not so much“the work of art” as films in general. Nevertheless, it is significant that Benjamin, instead of limiting the scope of his study to artistic films, takes into account the birth of new art forms, or at least of new more or less artistic forms of production which appeared in the context of the democrati- zation of culture and its accessibility to the masses. Neither is my topic about “technological reproducibility”– if reduced to analogical processes, at least– but about digital technology, which still involves analogy at the same time as it is based on a generalized digital coding of visual and auditory signals, since the digital transmission of a signal does not prevent the latter from appearing on a screen and, as such, requires a visual transcoding system and, for the viewer, an analogical decoding process. Last of all, when considering“Benjamin’s text,” one must think of it as a pa- limpsest, and not a single finished work. Indeed, which specific text is one con- sidering exactly? One of the two existing German versions or their French coun- terpart? All the versions were written in 1935-1936 and present very slight variations– whether small lacunas or alternative formulations. For convenience’s sake, I will mainly be referring to the second version of the text– unpublished during the author’s lifetime– translated by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, as it appears in the collection of Benjamin’s texts published by Harvard University Press.3 I will also be quoting from Benjamin’s own version in French,“L’Œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée,” in the Gallimard edition en- riched with paralipomena and variations, from“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Andy Blunden’s translation of this French version4 and, at last, from the French translation, which presents the German version of the text in its most complete form.5 The Benjaminian Matrix Benjamin’s essay is one of those singular texts which give the impression of being written as one reads along. Hence the feeling of rediscovery one gets at each rereading, because of some previously unnoticed difficulty or brilliant new idea. To my eyes, weary from pouring over“The Work of Art...” so many times, this feeling is due to the fact that Benjamin’s text not only accumulates a large number of ideas, not only interlaces a great number of themes in a sometimes chaotic argumentation, but also superimposes and disseminates several types of reflection one seldom finds associated with one another. The Reader may feel somewhat discouraged by the first part of the text– presented as a Preface in 30 dominique chateau certain versions– which seems to set him/her on a dubious path leading to the commonplace Marxist concept of the relationship between infrastructure and superstructure or, more simply put, of the relationship between culture– or art– and production. The reader may also be annoyed by the militant undertones which can be felt in the first pages– regarding the“revolutionary demands in the politics of art,”6 as opposed to those advocated by Fascism– and in the book’s final part– sometimes presented as an epilog– where, as an antidote to the aestheticization that Fascism is once again accused of, we find the proclama- tion:“Communism replies by politicizing art.” 7 It is obvious that such readers, judging the text in the light of their ideological prejudices– as they may well be antifascist and not necessarily Marxist– is liable to put down the book and read no further. That, however, would be a shame. Actually, any reader– whether ideologically biased or not– could be justified in feeling such discomfort: it is normal to see a divergence of opinion between one who looks at a glass as half-full and one who considers it half-empty, and it is above all the many difficulties contained in the first few pages that might be held responsible for the reader’s skepticism. The militant undertones we mentioned above accompany the first difficulty one comes across, as the book’s first theme – reproduction– is explored. The lateness of culture as compared to production is here mentioned in reference to the“capitalist mode of production” and the economic system of capitalism, which the“thesis defining the tendencies of the development of art under the present conditions of production”8 should be con- nected to. What is at stake here is no less than the renewal of art theory, a renew- al which Benjamin wields as an antifascist weapon. Epistemology and ideology thus merge in a way that may seem irrelevant to an upholder of epistemological neutrality, and superfluous to an antifascist activist. The reader who dislikes questions of ideology will of course be reassured once the preface is over, as the political theme of capitalist production makes way for the technological issue of reproduction. In fact, it is precisely such a shift that the same reader– a bit fussy on epistemological matters– might want to criticize. Instead of trying to carry out an autopsy of Benjamin’s text, one should endea- vor to do justice to its persistent dynamism and accept its countless shifts from one form of argumentation to another, inasmuch as they succeed in simulta- neously establishing the dialectic of the text on several planes: that of technology and media theory, of art and cinema, of the history of human production, of cultural history, and finally, that of politics, both as theory and praxis. And here is our matrix, so to speak... As far as politics is concerned, one should also bear in mind the dramatic context with which the author was confronted at the time, and remember the odd analogies that Horkheimer and Adorno, while living in exile in the United States, both noted between the situations in their host country and that in Germany: the analogy, for instance, between the radio broadcasting of concerts conducted by Toscanini and of the Führer’s speeches.9 Retrospec- the philosophy of technology in the frame of film theory 31 tively, it is in no way surprising to observe that Marx and Engels, when they prophesized an end to the division of labor and announced that“in a communist society, there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting among other activities,”10 gave us a foretaste of the current postmodern discourse which keeps harping on about the fusion of art in the realm of culture, the advent of which, paradoxically enough, is considered as a result of the development and triumph of our liberal-capitalist society! To the multidisciplinary matrix of the various intellectual modalities through which Benjamin’s thought progresses, there corresponds the matrix of the themes which he tackles with remarkable freedom and an intellectual luxuriance that probably explains the fascination that Benjamin still exerts over us.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Retrieving Kant's Aesthetics for Art Theory After
    8 Retrieving Kant’s Aesthetics for Art Theory After Greenberg Some Remarks on Arthur C. Danto and Thierry de Duve Diarmuid Costello The Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory In art theory since the early 1980s the discourse of aesthetics has been notable by its absence. Th is suggests that the majority of art theorists believe that the historical or conceptual limits of aesthetic theory have been breached by the internal development of art after modernism. But why would art theorists believe this? I n a n s w e r t o t h i s q u e s t i o n I s u g g e s t — I t a k e i t n o n c o n t r o v e r s i a l l y — t h a t the widespread marginalization of aesthetics in postmodern art theory may be attributed to the success of the art critic and theorist Clement Greenberg. In co- opting the discourse of (particularly Kantian) aesthetics to underwrite modernist theory, Greenberg mediated the art world’s sub- sequent rejection of both aesthetics in general and Immanuel Kant’s aes- thetics in par tic u lar. But one need only refl ect on the centrality for postmodern theory of anti- aesthetic fi gures like Marcel Duchamp or of movements (such as surrealism), marginalized in Greenberg’s account of “the best modern art,” to see that for all their antipathy to Greenberg, many postmodernist art theorists continue to operate with a broadly Greenbergian view of aesthetics—which is why, of course, they are forced to reject it.
    [Show full text]
  • Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception∗
    From: Pierre Bordieu The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature ©1984, Columbia University Press Part III: The Pure Gaze: Essays on Art, Chapter 8 Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception∗ PIERRE BOURDIEU 1 Any art perception involves a conscious or unconscious deciphering operation. 1.1 An act of deciphering unrecognized as such, immediate and adequate ‘comprehension’, is possible and effective only in the special case in which the cultural code which makes the act of deciphering possible is immediately and completely mastered by the observer (in the form of cultivated ability or inclination) and merges with the cultural code which has rendered the work perceived possible. Erwin Panofsky observes that in Rogier van der Weyden’s painting The Three Magi we immediately perceive the representation of an apparition’ that of a child in whom we recognize ‘the Infant Jesus’. How do we know that this is an apparition? The halo of golden rays surrounding the child would not in itself be sufficient proof, because it is also found in representations of the nativity in which the Infant Jesus is ‘real’. We come to this conclusion because the child is hovering in mid-air without visible support, and we do so although the representation would scarcely have been different had the child been sitting on a pillow (as in the case of the model which Rogier van der Weyden probably used). But one can think of hundreds of pictures in which human beings, animals or inanimate objects appear to be hovering in mid-air, contrary to the law of gravity, yet without giving the impression of being apparitions.
    [Show full text]
  • Rethinking Plato's Theory of Art: Aesthetics and the Timaeus
    Rethinking Plato’s Theory of Art: Aesthetics and the Timaeus Omid Tofighian Introduction The Timaeus presents a fascinating account of the cosmos. It includes a creation myth that introduces the figure known as the ‘Demiurge’, who, despite the fact that he is the cause of the sensible world, is reverently attributed with reason, and whose creation – the cosmos – is actually beautiful and good. In this dialogue Plato offers his readers a panorama of the universe. But just what are his intentions for this? Is his approach a precursor to the methods of natural science,1 or does the Timaeus fall under the category of theology? This paper will discuss Plato’s cosmological treatise and certain consequences that can be drawn, that is, how the methods used to analyse the origins and structure of the universe reveal a more existential attitude towards aesthetics. In the Timaeus Plato explores the complexities of mimesis and entertains the possibility that imitation could actually exhibit ideal qualities. These considerations have repercussions for the status of the material world in Plato’s cosmology, but they may also be extended to rethink his theory of art. I wish to analyse a number of salient themes in the Timaeus such as ontology, mythic symbols and the use of rhetoric. I will demonstrate how Plato’s view towards these themes in the Timaeus can be extrapolated to reassess his aesthetics. My critical analysis will provoke the question – ‘What evaluation of art would Plato have offered in accordance with the positions explicated in the Timaeus?’ Upon investigating a number of dialogues, searching specifically for references to art or representation, I realised that certain views I had thought to be exclusive to the Timaeus, or other late dialogues, also featured in works as early as the Ion.
    [Show full text]
  • Kant, Art, and Art History
    Kant, Art, and Art History Moments of Discipline mark a. cheetham University of Toronto published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011-4211, usa 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, vic 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon ´ 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org Mark A. Cheetham 2001 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2001 Printed in the United States of America Typeface Concorde 9.75/13 pt. System MagnaType [ag] A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Cheetham, Mark A. (Mark Arthur), 1954– Kant, Art, and Art History: moments of discipline / Mark A. Cheetham. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-521-80018-8 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804–Contributions in aesthetics. 2. Aesthetics, Modern. 3. Art–Philosophy. I. Title. b2799.A4 c48 2001 111′.85′092–dc21 00-063029 isbn 0 521 80018 8 hardback Contents Acknowledgments page ix 1 Introduction: Bo(a)rders 1 Why (Not) Kant? 7 Moments and Places of Discipline 11 Plasmatics 24 2 Place and Time: Kant in Rome, c. 1800 38 Kant in Rome 41 The Concurrency of Reception 45 The Politics of Beauty 52 3 The Genealogy of Authority: Kant and Art’s History in the Twentieth Century 67 “Immanent Meaning” and the Historicity of Art: 68 Panofsky and Kant Kant and Cubism Revisited 78 Clement Greenberg’s Strategic Formalism 87 4 The Sublime Is Now (Again): French Theory / International Art 101 Derrida’s Sublime 103 The Sublime Is Now (Again) 114 Scapes 124 The Limits of Pointing 130 Intimations of a Countersublime 136 vii contents 5 Kant’s Skull: Portraits and the Image of Philosophy, c.
    [Show full text]
  • Kant Expressive Theory Music
    Kant’s Expressive Theory of Music Samantha Matherne Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2014, pre-print) Abstract: Several prominent philosophers of art (e.g., Kivy, Dahlhaus, Schueller) have worried whether Kant has a coherent theory of music on account of two perceived tensions in his view. First, there appears to be a conflict between his formalist and expressive commitments. Second (and even worse), Kant defends seemingly contradictory claims about music being beautiful and merely agreeable, i.e., not beautiful. Against these critics, I show that Kant has a consistent view of music that reconciles these tensions. I argue that, for Kant, music can be experienced as either agreeable or beautiful depending upon the attitude we take towards it. Though we might be tempted to think he argues that we experience music as agreeable when we attend to its expressive qualities and as beautiful when we attend to its formal properties, I demonstrate that he actually claims that we are able to judge music as beautiful only if we are sensitive to the expression of emotion through musical form. With this revised understanding of Kant’s theory of music in place, I conclude by sketching a Kantian solution to a central problem in the philosophy of music: given that music is not sentient, how can it express emotion? §1. Introduction As philosophers like Peter Kivy and Stephen Davies have emphasized, one of the central issues in the philosophy of music is the problem of expression.1 Frequently when we hear a piece of instrumental music, we describe it as expressing an emotion, e.g., Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ symphony sounds triumphant or Chopin’s Étude in E Major (Op.
    [Show full text]
  • Final Thesis
    A DEFENSE OF AESTHETIC ANTIESSENTIALISM: MORRIS WEITZ AND THE POSSIBLITY OF DEFINING ‘ART’ _____________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University _____________________________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Art History _____________________________ By Jordan Mills Pleasant June, 2010 ii This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of Philosophy ___________________________ Dr. Arthur Zucker Chair, Department of Philosophy Thesis Advisor ___________________________ Dr. Scott Carson Honors Tutorial College, Director of Studies Philosophy ___________________________ Jeremy Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College iii This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of Art History ___________________________ Dr. Jennie Klein Chair, Department of Art History Thesis Advisor ___________________________ Dr. Jennie Klein Honors Tutorial College, Director of Studies Art History ___________________________ Jeremy Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College iv Dedicated to Professor Arthur Zucker, without whom this work would have been impossible. v Table Of Contents Thesis Approval Pages Page ii Introduction: A Brief History of the Role of Definitions in Art Page 1 Chapter I: Morris Weitz’s “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” Page 8 Chapter II: Lewis K. Zerby’s “A Reconsideration of the Role of the Theory in Aesthetics. A Reply to Morris Weitz”
    [Show full text]
  • Religion and the Arts in America
    Religion and the Arts in America CAMILLE PAGLIA At this moment in America, religion and pol- itics are at a flash point. Conservative Christians deplore the left-wing bias of the mainstream media and the saturation of popular culture by sex and violence and are promoting strate- gies such as faith-based home-schooling to protect children from the chaotic moral relativism of a secular society. Liberals in turn condemn the meddling by Christian fundamentalists in politics, notably in regard to abortion and gay civil rights or the Mideast, where biblical assumptions, it is claimed, have shaped us policy. There is vicious mutual recrimination, with believers caricatured as paranoid, apocalyptic crusaders who view America’s global mission as divinely inspired, while lib- erals are portrayed as narcissistic hedonists and godless elit- ists, relics of the unpatriotic, permissive 1960s. A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts. While leading conservative voices defend the tradi- tional Anglo-American literary canon, which has been under challenge and in flux for forty years, American conservatives on the whole, outside of the New Criterion magazine, have shown little interest in the arts, except to promulgate a didac- tic theory of art as moral improvement that was discarded with the Victorian era at the birth of modernism. Liberals, on the other hand, have been too content with the high visibility of the arts in metropolitan centers, which comprise only a fraction of America. Furthermore, liberals have been compla- cent about the viability of secular humanism as a sustaining A lecture delivered on 6 February 2007 as the 2007 Cornerstone Arts Lecture at Colorado College.
    [Show full text]
  • Morris Weitz Aili W
    University of Dayton eCommons Philosophy Faculty Publications Department of Philosophy 2014 Morris Weitz Aili W. Bresnahan University of Dayton, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.udayton.edu/phl_fac_pub Part of the History of Philosophy Commons eCommons Citation Bresnahan, Aili W., "Morris Weitz" (2014). Philosophy Faculty Publications. 4. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/phl_fac_pub/4 This Encyclopedia Entry is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Philosophy at eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Word Count: 2,494 [Main body text: 1,189; Bibliography: 1,305] Weitz, Morris (1916-1981), American philosopher of aesthetics who focused primarily on ontology, interpretation, and literary criticism. Weitz’ Initial Theory of Art. Morris Weitz’ initial theory of art was provided in his book, Philosophy of the Arts (Weitz 1950). Here Weitz calls his theory of art “empirical” and “organic,” and he defined “art” as “an organic complex or integration of expressive elements embodied in a sensuous medium” (51). By “empirical” he means that his theory answers to the evidence provided by actual works of art. “Organic,” for Weitz, means that each element is to be considered in relation to the others in a living and not merely mechanical way. Weitz also has a broad understanding of “expressive,” which refers to an artistic property that functions as a semiotic sign, either of a specific emotional feeling, an emotional quality, or another sign of an emotional feature.
    [Show full text]
  • TERRY SMITH, FAHA, CIHA, Is Andrew W. Mellon Professor Of
    TERRY SMITH at the Garage Museum of Art, Moscow, 2015. Photo: Denis Sinyakov. Courtesy of Terry Smith. ERRY SMITH, FAHA, CIHA, is Art and Director of the Power Institute, Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Concep‑ Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, tualism (Durham: Duke University Press, TContemporary Art History and University of Sydney. In the 1970s he was 2017), and Art to Come: Histories of Con‑ Theory in the Department of the His- a member of the Art & Language group temporary Art (Durham: Duke University tory of Art and Architecture at the (New York) and a founder of Union Me- Press, 2019). He is editor of many others University of Pittsburgh, and Profes- dia Services (Sydney). He is the author including Antinomies of Art and Culture: sor in the Division of Philosophy, Art, of a number of books, notably Making Modernity, postmodernity and contem‑ and Critical Thought at the European the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in poraneity (with Nancy Condee and Ok- Graduate School. He is also Lecturer at America (University of Chicago Press, wui Enwezor, Duke University Press, Large in the Curatorial Program of the 1993); Transformations in Australian Art 2008). A foundation Board member of School of Visual Arts, New York. In 2010 (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002); The the Museum of Contemporary Art, Syd- he was named the Australia Council Vis- Architecture of Aftermath (University ney, he is currently a Board member of ual Arts Laureate, and won the Mather of Chicago Press, 2006), What is Con‑ the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Award for art criticism conferred by the temporary Art? (University of Chicago and of the Biennial Foundation, New College Art Association (USA).
    [Show full text]
  • Art and Thingness, Part I: Breton's Ball and Duchamp's Carrot
    In modern art, the increasing resemblance of art objects to everyday objects raised the threat of eroding of any real difference between works of art and other things. Barnett Newman railed against both Duchamp’s readymades and “Bauhaus screwdriver designers” who were elevated to the ranks of artists by the Museum of 01/09 Modern Art’s doctrine of “Good Design.”1 The danger for art was the same in both cases: the dissolving of the dividing line between works of art and everyday objects. Just as ancient art proper should never be confused with the craft of “women basket weavers,” modern art should never be confused with a screwdriver or urinal.2 In the 1960s, Clement Greenberg would also Sven Lütticken worry that a blank sheet of paper or a table would become readable as art, that the boundary between artworks and “arbitrary objects” was Art and eroding.3 While not evincing any Modernist anxieties about readymades, Paul Chan’s recent Thingness, Part assertion that “a work of art is both more and less than a thing” shows renewed concerns I: Breton’s Ball regarding such an assimilation – in a context marked, until quite recently, by an unprecedented market boom in which works of and Duchamp’s art seemed to be situated in a continuum of luxury goods spanning from Prada bags to luxury Carrot yachts.4 ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊBut what does it mean to say that an artwork is both more and less than a thing? The notion of the thing is prominent in contemporary theory, and one might say that the thing has emerged as something that is both more and less t o r than an object.
    [Show full text]
  • Concept, Sensation, Intensity: Deleuze's Theory of Art and Cinema
    Sociology and Anthropology 5(9): 792-797, 2017 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/sa.2017.050911 Concept, Sensation, Intensity: Deleuze's Theory of Art and Cinema Paolo Bertetto Department of Art History and Performing Arts, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy Copyright©2017 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License Abstract In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze & Guattari After all, Deleuze’s theory of cinema is itself unusual in its consider art as a bloc of sensations, composed of percepts, features, as it is more concerned with the doing of cinema, affects and images. Such notions are also crucial to the with its operativeness, and less with its being. The understanding of Deleuze’s idea of cinema, as elaborated background of this history seems to be the idea of poiein, by the philosopher in his two books Cinema 1. The considered as the main substratum, the explicit and implicit Movement-Image and Cinema; 2. The Time-Image, and axis around which it revolves. What matters, for Deleuze, is further investigated in other essays and interviews. In not to look only at the being of cinema, at its einai, but also, Deleuze’s theory, concepts and sensations are forms of and most of all, to its doing, to what cinema produces. How intensity, and they are flows, rather than firm configurations. would it after all be possible to actually distinguish the being And cinema is, in an exemplary way, a flow of images, a from the doing? Only an essentialist theory could continuous variation of intensity.
    [Show full text]
  • New Work for Aesthetic Theory Of
    REMODELING AESTHETIC THEORY: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN AESTHETIC EXPERT CHRISTY MAG UIDHIR & CAMERON BUCKNER For the most part, the Aesthetic Theory of Art—any theory of art claiming that the aesthetic is a descriptively necessary feature of art—has been repudiated, especially in light of what are now considered traditional counterexamples. We argue that the Aesthetic Theory of Art can instead be far more plausibly recast by abandoning aesthetic-feature possession by the artwork for a claim about aesthetic-concept possession by the artist. This move productively re-frames and re-energizes the debate surrounding the relationship between art and the aesthetic. That is, we claim Aesthetic Theory so re-framed suggests that the aesthetic might have a central and substantial explanatory role to play within both traditional philosophical enquiries as well as recent and more empirical enquiries into the psychological and cognitive aspects of art and its practice. Finally, we discuss the directions this new work might take—by tying art theory to investigations of the distinctive sensorimotor capacities of expert artists, their specialized aesthetic conceptual schemata, and the ways these distinctive capacities and schemata contribute to the production of artworks. INTRODUCTION The aesthetic has fallen on hard art-theoretic times. Theories according to which possession of some distinctively aesthetic feature is substantively necessary for something’s being an artwork (Aesthetic Theories of Art), though once privileged, now are standardly considered to be more or less art- theoretically bankrupt. To be sure, aesthetic features still figure to varying degrees in philosophical enquiry into art and its associated relata.1 However, scant few think that such features must figure substantively in what it is to be art; even those who assign aesthetic features some purportedly essential role end up unloading the bulk of the explanatory burden onto the non-aesthetic features.2 Our own assessment of the Aesthetic Theory of Art in what follows is no different.
    [Show full text]