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abstraction Artworks are abstract, we might accepts that the traditional definition of abstrac- think, when they do not represent: abstraction tion does apply to some paintings. The prob- is simply the absence of representation. After all, lem is that it does not apply to most of those we there is a natural contrast between abstract think of as abstract. and representational painting; and music, at We can flesh out the second difficulty by least in its “absolute” (i.e., abstract) form, does considering either abstract painting or music. not clearly represent at all. Absolute music, It is hardly plausible that these never make like abstract painting, expresses feelings and any reference to things beyond themselves. perhaps thoughts, but, we suppose, expression The idea that they express emotions and ideas and representation are different. is intended to concede as much, without rein- However, there are two difficulties with tak- troducing representation. But is it clear that ing this to capture the nature of abstraction. expression is not simply another form of repre- First, on closer inspection it excludes art that sentation? Of course, it differs from some kinds intuitively counts as abstract; and second, the of representing – from the depiction that con- definition is only as clear as the rather murky cerns Wollheim, for instance, or from describing notion of representation itself. things in language. But the notion of represen- To illustrate the first difficulty, consider tation is both highly general and resists easy Richard Wollheim’s argument (1987: ch. 2) analysis. Until we settle whether expression is that a good deal of abstract painting in fact itself representing, our definition of abstraction represents in the same way as painting of leaves us uncertain whether expressive absolute other kinds. In looking at a typical Kandinsky, music, for instance, counts as abstract or not. for instance, while I may not see in it everyday Of course, there is nothing in itself wrong objects such as men and buildings, I do see with a definition leaving boundaries vague. colored shapes arrayed in three-dimensional Many phenomena exhibit hinterlands where space. The red trapezium that breaks a long it is simply unclear whether they hold. The black line is seen as a red rectangle, tilted at problem is rather that defining abstraction as an angle to the viewer, and lying in front of a absence of representation leaves the limits of black strip. I am thus simultaneously aware of the latter unclear as those of the former, on our how marks are distributed on the canvas and intuitive understanding, are not. of rather different objects arranged in depth. The alternative is to see abstraction, not as Since for Wollheim pictorial representation the absence of representation, but as a mat- just is the deliberate generation of experiences ter of what is represented. Wollheim suggests with this twofold nature, he concludes that that what marks out the Kandinsky from more the Kandinsky represents shapes in three- traditional painting is that the latter is figur- dimensional space. And although the details of ative. Traditional works represent things of Wollheim’s argument invoke his views about readily identifiable kinds (dogs, houses, battles, pictorial representation, his conclusion has one-eyed giants), and individual members of independent appeal. Now, Wollheim does not those kinds (Louis XIV or Polyphemus). Much think every abstract painting can be treated abstract painting instead represents things in this way. Certain works of Mondrian and which themselves belong only to relatively Barnett Newman, he says, resist being seen as abstract kinds – red rectangles or black strips, other than simply marks on a canvas. Thus he for instance. In similar vein, Kendall L. Walton

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(1988) explores the idea that what marks Never far behind questions about the nature out abstract works is that what is represented of abstraction are questions concerning its value. or conveyed is purely general. While a novel may Abstraction is sometimes itself a source of value describe a specific locale and specific events (and not a mere accompaniment to other qual- that occur within it, abstract works (Walton’s ities that are valuable). Where abstract art is focus is music) convey, for instance, only the profound – in the greatest works of absolute general notion of struggle, or the dynamics music, or the masterpieces of abstract painting of an emotion. In the context of painting, a – the abstractness of the works is surely central natural relative of Walton’s thought lies in the to their achieving what they do. Something idea that abstraction should be understood as like this thought no doubt underpins the per- the product of abstracting from the specifics sistent tendency to valorize absolute music of visual phenomena. While a nineteenth- as the purest form of that art, and the attempts century Realist painter might have sought to made during the heyday of Abstract Expres- capture all the detail of some scene, his more sionism to do the same for it in relation to abstract successors seek instead to extract painting (Greenberg 1971). Yet it can seem from it the bare essentials of form and structure. puzzling how abstraction can be of value. How This idea is familiar from the work of Cézanne, can eschewing representing altogether, or for instance, in which buildings and natural limiting oneself to representing only what is features are stripped down to their basic geo- general, help produce art worth caring about? metry. But it also runs through a good deal of Where art is abstract in our second sense, later work, such as the drawings of Picasso (in there is no real difficulty in understanding how almost any of his periods). Abstraction in this that promotes value. Less abstract art captures sense need not mean abandoning the repre- the details of particular things, or of specific sentation of particulars – Picasso’s own portrait types: the precise features of a sitter’s face, per- of Françoise Gilot as a flower shows that what haps, or the character of a typical Victorian can be preserved is the form of an individual’s pickpocket. But why, apart from historical or look, abstracted from the details of her appear- psychological curiosity, should we care about ance. What it does necessarily involve is representations that capture such features? abandoning detail in favor of the basic form, The sitter is available to be studied for herself, structure, or gestalt. and the pickpocket probably never existed. Although it is perhaps not entirely clear What are either to me, and what does the quite what any of these suggestions involves, and painting or novel make of either that I could thus whether there are one or several proposals not make for myself? Surely one of the things here, it is clear that they all tend in the same to want from art is something more universal, direction. The result is a definition of abstrac- something to take away that can be found in tion that, in contrast to its predecessor, treats other instances of the types, and in life more gen- it as a matter of degree. It also opens up the erally. For that, however, what matters is the prospect of making sense of abstraction in arts, more general content of the artworks. That such as literature, in which it is unclear what might be present in nonabstract works – they would be left if representation were absent. may represent the general by representing the A full account of abstraction will need specific. It is also, however, certainly present in to deploy both definitions now before us. As works that are abstract in our second sense. Wollheim notes, some, if not many, paintings That leaves untouched, of course, works are abstract in virtue of not representing at that are abstract in the other sense, those that all; and perhaps there can be musical art that do not represent at all. Since abstraction here neither represents in any more straightfor- is conceived purely negatively, the prospects ward way nor expresses anything. (Some for understanding how it contributes to value indeed, have considered this to be the true mis- are limited. We may instead ask a related sion of absolute music.) So the first notion can- question: how can the work have value at all, not be dispensed with entirely. But, equally, given that it does not represent anything? we have seen good reason not to rely on it But puzzlement over that is only in place to alone. the extent that we understand how in general

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representation contributes to art’s value. Since (1970). His aphoristic style reaches a high point I doubt our understanding of that issue goes in the wide-ranging Minima Moralia (1951), deep, we should not rush to find it mysterious one of the great books of the postwar period. how art can be successful in representation’s Adorno’s primary aesthetic interest is in the absence. “autonomous” art that emerged from earlier functional contexts at the end of the eigh- See also drawing, painting, and printmaking; teenth century. This autonomy “was a function music and song; cognitive value of art; ex- of the bourgeois consciousness of freedom that pression; picture perception; representation. was itself bound up with the social structure” (1997: 225); thus art expressed the autonomy bibliography of the individual subject vis-à-vis society. Art’s Greenberg, Clement. 1971. Art and Culture. Boston: autonomy means a development of its own Beacon. structures of meaning, independent of direct Walton, Kendall L. 1988. “What is Abstract about reference to the social world; hence Adorno the Art of Music?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art suggests that the concept of art is strictly applic- Criticism, 46, 351–64. able only to music, since literature and painting Wollheim, Richard. 1987. Painting as an Art. London: Thames & Hudson. always include “an element of subject-matter transcending aesthetic confines, undissolved in robert hopkins the autonomy of form” (1974: 223). Paradoxic- ally, it is the very tendency toward the elabora- tion of its own formal nature that constitutes acquaintance principle see testimony in art’s social meaning. As the expression of a aesthetics subjectivity engaged dialectically with a social reality at once repressive of its desires and defining its conditions of existence, art repres- Adorno, Theodor W(iesengrund) (1903– ents the demand for freedom from repression. 1969) German philosopher; leading figure Its autonomy, its functionlessness, allow it to in the Frankfurt school of critical theory. Born stand as a critique of a society dedicated to the into a wealthy family in Frankfurt am Main, domination of nature in the interests of com- Adorno received his PhD in philosophy in that mercial profit, As an element of the modern city in 1924, but spent the following year in society to which it stands in this critical relation, Vienna studying composition with Alban Berg. aesthetic form is “sedimented” social content, While remaining involved in the music world, because “artistic labour is social labour” he taught philosophy at Frankfurt University (1997: 5, 236). Its history follows the pattern until Hitler’s advent to power drove him to of social development generally: that of the the US in 1938, where he joined the Frankfurt progressive mastery of nature by humankind, Institute for Social Research in exile, working described by Adorno (following Max Weber) in New York and southern California. He re- as a process of rationalization. Nature is re- turned to a professorship in Frankfurt in 1953, presented in music by what Adorno calls the and succeeded his close collaborator Max musical “material” confronting composers at any Horkheimer as director of the institute, also given time: sound as organized by historically reinstalled in that city, in 1964. His work, evolved musical form. The drive to control which greatly influenced the German student this material led first to the elaboration of the movement of the 1960s, has since the 1980s tonal system by the masters of Viennese classi- become an international touchstone for criticism, cism and then to the total control over the mater- especially in the visual arts. The majority of ial achieved by Schoenberg. With the second Adorno’s works are concerned with aesthetic Viennese school, no conventions force the com- questions. There are studies of Berg, Mahler, and poser “to acquiesce to traditionally universal Wagner; essays on literary and musical matters; principles. With the liberation of musical mater- an Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962); ial, there arose the possibility of mastering it and two central theoretical works: Philosophy technically . . . The composer has emancipated of Modern Music (1948) and Aesthetic Theory himself along with his sounds” (1973: 52).

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The emancipation achieved by modern art or of the relation between theme and harmony through its denial of earlier conventions in sonata form to the dialectic of individual and must be paid for. “In the process of pursuing its society, are too often “merely verbal analogies own inner logic, music is transformed more which have no basis in fact but owe their and more from something significant into origin and a semblance of plausibility to a gen- something obscure – even to itself” (1973: 19). erously ambivalent use of words like . . . ‘gen- From the artist’s point of view, “the progress in eral and particular’ ” (Dahlhaus 1987: 243). In technique that brought them ever greater free- addition, Adorno does not hesitate on occasion dom and independence of anything hetero- to subordinate matters of fact to his philosoph- geneous, has resulted in a kind of reification, ical purposes (see Dahlhaus 1970). His clearly technification of the inward as such” (1974: inadequate dismissal of Stravinsky and his 214). For the listener, music has lost its trans- inexpert and unsubtle treatment of popular parent meaningfulness and the satisfaction it music have also come under much (not un- once gave. To grasp its meaning – what Adorno appreciative) criticism. Nevertheless, his work calls its truth content – now requires, beyond remains important as an aesthetics of modern- “sensory listening,” aesthetic theory, which ism, both for its general program, the discovery alone makes possible “the conceptually mediated of social meanings in artistic form, and for its perception of the elements and their configura- many powerful observations and suggestions. tion which assures the social substance of great music” (1973: 130) – its resistance to the ideo- See also nineteenth- and twentieth-century logical demand that experience be depicted as continental aesthetics; art history; marxism the achievement of harmonious totality. and art. Art that does not confront society in this way is condemned by Adorno as regressive, both in bibliography the realm of high art, as with Stravinsky’s primitivism and neoclassicism, and in that of the Primary sources popular music mass produced by the “culture [1948] 1976. Philosophy of Modern Music. A. G. industry.” Both are adaptations to social real- Mitchell & W. V. Blomster (trans.). New York: ity: in the former by formally modeling the Continuum. [1951] 1974. Minima Moralia. E. F. N. Jephcott submission of the individual to social irra- (trans.). London: Verso. tionality, in the latter by accepting completely [1962] 1973. Introduction to the Sociology of Music. the consequences of the commodity form for E. B. Ashton (trans.). New York: Continuum. musical production. “Classical” music as a [1970] 1997. Aesthetic Theory. R. Hullot-Kentor whole is drawn into the system of commercial- (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota ization, as its presentation is adapted to a mass Press. listenership no longer capable of “structural 2002. Essays on Music. R. Leppert (ed.). Berkeley: listening” but able only to wait for the ap- University of California Press. pearance of beautiful melodies and exciting Secondary sources rhythms. In this, too, music bears a social Dahlhaus, Carl. 1970. “Soziologische Dechiffrierung meaning – that of the increasing domination of von Musik. Zu Theodor W. Adorno’s Wagnerkritik” individual experience by the needs of industrial [Sociological deciphering of music: on Theodor capitalism. Adorno’s critique of Wagner], International Review It follows from Adorno’s conception of of Music Aesthetics and Sociology, 1, 137–47. artworks as “concentrated social substance” Dahlhaus, Carl. 1987. Schoenberg and the New Music. that a critical aesthetics must seek social signi- D. Puffett & A. Clayton (trans.). Cambridge: Cam- ficance in the formal properties of individual bridge University Press. works. This is a difficult prescription to follow, Gendron, Bernard. 1986. “Theodor Adorno meets the Cadillacs.” In Studies in Entertainment. T. Modleski and Adorno’s studies of artworks are typically (ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, less persuasive than his theoretical generaliza- 18–36. tions. Attempts at combining formal analysis Mattick, Paul. 2007. “The Dialectic of Disappoint- with sociological decoding, such as the com- ment: Adorno and Art Criticism since the 1980s.” parison of serial technique to bureaucratization, In Value: Art: Politics. Criticism, Meaning and

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Interpretation after Postmodernism. J. Harris (ed.). must have no concern with the kind of object Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 347–66. he is viewing – that is, with the “concept” Paddison, Max. 1993. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. under which it falls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. There have been several significant vari- paul mattick ations on Kant’s theme. For Schopenhauer, too, the aesthetic attitude is marked by a withdrawal from our usual practical, willful engagement aesthetic attitude The question of what it with things. It is, once again, a type of con- is to adopt a distinctively aesthetic attitude to templation, but directed toward the Platonic objects is important in its own right, but also ideas or forms that lie behind “appearances.” In because of the role attributed to this attitude contemplating a building, I am indifferent to within wider issues. For example, the difficulties, its function, attending instead to the ideas intensified by developments in “modern art,” in of space, gravity, and so on. Edward Bullough defining the term “art” have prompted the characterized the aesthetic attitude in terms of attempt to characterize works of art as those “psychical distance.” On a fogbound ship, the toward which it is appropriate to adopt the aesthete distances himself from the fears and aesthetic attitude. Some philosophers have practical concerns of the crew, and concen- also tried to define the notions of aesthetic trates on the strange shapes and forms the fog properties, qualities, values, and experience in lends to things. Finally, a number of phenome- terms of aesthetic attitude. nologists, elaborating on Kant’s talk of “indif- Immanuel Kant was not the first person ference” to actual existence, have argued that to associate a distinctively aesthetic attitude the true object of the aesthetic attitude is not an with “disinterest.” (A similar association seems actual object in the world but an “intentional to have shaped Japanese aesthetic theory object,” existing only for the perceiver. Strictly, over many centuries: see Odin 2001.) But in therefore, there cannot be a single object toward modern Western aesthetics, it is Kant’s discus- which both aesthetic and nonaesthetic atti- sion that has had a decisive influence. Entirely tudes may be taken, for in the two cases differ- representative, therefore, is the definition of ent kinds of object are being considered. “the aesthetic attitude” as “disinterested and More dramatic are the implications many sympathetic attention to and contemplation of twentieth-century artists and critics have drawn any object of awareness whatever” (Stolnitz from Kant’s notion of “disinterest” for the proper 1960: 34–5). (Strictly speaking, Kant himself ambitions and functions of art. One of these did not employ “disinterest” to distinguish the is a marked “formalist” hostility to representa- aesthetic from the nonaesthetic, but to dis- tional art. In “pure” aesthetic experience, wrote tinguish, within the realm of what he called Clive Bell in 1914, a painting must be treated “the aesthetic,” judgments of beauty and sub- as if it “were not representative of anything” limity from those of mere pleasantness or (1947: 32). More generally, there should be no agreeableness.) concern for content and meaning since this Kant explains the “disinterested” attitude as would contradict the required indifference to one where the subject is “merely contemplative matters of existence and conceptualization. . . . indifferent as regards the existence of an A second implication drawn – also in the “for- object,” and focusing rather upon its “appear- malist” spirit – is that art should not aim to be ance” (Kant 1966: 43). This is intended to expressive of emotion. The proper response capture the insight that when viewing some- to art is not an emotional one but something thing “disinterestedly,” and so aesthetically, like Kant’s “restful contemplation.” Finally, will and desire are in abeyance. When so view- “disinterest” has been invoked to support the aes- ing an object, a person is unconcerned with its theticist or “art for art’s sake” estimation of practical utility, including its role as a source art. Since people are not viewing something as of intellectual or sensuous gratification. From this art if they are interested in further benefits to Kant draws some questionable conclusions. be derived from it, no justification is required for Not only, he says, is emotion a “hindrance” to art beyond the satisfaction aesthetic contem- “pure” appreciation of beauty but the subject plation yields.

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It is hard to judge how far Kant would attitude as “disinterested” indifference to its endorse such claims, since the bulk of his dis- objects’ actual existence and conceptual type cussion is about an aesthetic attitude toward remains implausible. The aesthetic satisfaction nature, not art. Extrapolation to a Kantian yielded when one looks at a cathedral may be theory of art is uncertain. (What, for example, due, in part, to a projected sense of its solidity, is the analogue in the case of painting to sus- the coolness of its stone, and the peace that pension of interest in a thing’s actual exis- obtains within. This enjoyment could not sur- tence? Indifference to the existence of the vive the discovery that the “cathedral” is a canvas and pigments? Or to that of whatever is cardboard facade used in the latest film about depicted?) Some of his remarks indicate that he Thomas à Becket, and so cannot be an enjoy- would not accept these alleged extensions of his ment that is “indifferent” to the building’s real idea. Thus, while he indeed insists that judg- existence. And while Kant may be consistent in ments of beauty should be “independent of concluding that my appreciation of a cathedral emotion,” the feeling of the sublime – itself an is “impure” to the extent that I am conceiving aesthetic one – is an “outflow of vital powers” of it as a cathedral, his conclusion betrays a pecu- and may be “regarded as emotion” (Kant liarly restricted notion of aesthetic appreci- 1966: 83). And, unlike the aestheticists, Kant ation. It is my aesthetic sensibility, as much as offers nonaesthetic justifications for aesthetic anything, that is offended by the staging of a experience. Most notably, it is “purposive in circus or bingo competition within the cathe- reference to the moral feeling,” since it “prepares dral’s walls, and this sensibility is not to be us to love disinterestedly” (Kant 1966: 108; abstracted from my consciousness of the build- see also Guyer 2005: esp. chs. 8–9.) ing’s spiritual purpose, of the prayers and acts The formalist and aestheticist programs are of worship it has housed. surely not entailed by the bare idea of “disin- Given such considerations, some philoso- terest.” That my concern with a painting must phers prefer to characterize the aesthetic attitude not be practical (pecuniary, say) nor a “con- and disinterest in terms of attention to an ceptual” one of classification (Pre-Raphaelite, object “for its own sake.” This would not carry say) cannot entail that paintings should eschew the same connotation of indifference to the representation. Nor can it entail that I should object’s existence, to the kind of thing it is, and suspend all inquiry into a painting’s “point” or to its representational and expressive features. content, representational or otherwise. Nor, But the notion of an interest in something except on the crude view that a painting only “for its own sake” has substance only by way of expresses something extraneous to it (like the contrast with other sorts of interest. So the first artist’s mood), is there any reason to proscribe problem will be to specify these other attitudes attention to its expressive features, including and interests. Now, while it is easy enough to those which are expressive of emotions. For exclude such obviously pragmatic interests as these features may be discerned as belonging, those in a painting’s monetary value and powers integrally, to the painting itself. of sexual arousal, there remain many nonin- Finally, the doctrine of “art for art’s sake” strumental attitudes toward things or people seems guilty of confusing two questions – that that are not aesthetic. I admire a person of high of the proper attitude toward a work of art, and moral caliber simply for what he or she is; the that of why it may be desirable for this attitude true scholar seeks knowledge for its own sake. to be taken. It is perfectly possible to answer the In some of these cases, it will be said, satis- second question by referring to the moral, psy- faction of the interest in question (moral, chological, or even religious benefits that may scholarly, or whatever) does not take the form accrue, while insisting that the aesthetic gaze of enjoyment, as it must in the case of aesthetic itself must not be motivated by such considera- interest. But if “enjoyment” is understood tions. It is only because it is “disinterested” narrowly, it is hardly obvious that aesthetic that, as Kant clearly saw, it can succeed in satisfaction should always be described as yielding these further benefits. enjoyment. I admire, but do not enjoy, Goya’s Even with these unwarranted extensions “black paintings.” If, however, “enjoyment” is blocked, the characterization of the aesthetic stretched to cover such instances, it is no

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longer clear that perception of moral quality As that final point indicates, much of the or the acquisition of new knowledge is not problem here has to do with the passivity often an experience of enjoyment. It might be more associated with the contemplative attitude. As promising, then, to employ a variety of criteria one author, echoing many others, puts it, the for distinguishing these other modes of interest contemplative spectator “is not concerned to in something “for its own sake” from the aes- analyze ...or to ask questions about [an object]” thetic one. For example, Dufrenne suggests (Stolnitz 1960: 38). But the justification for that the difference between love and aesthetic insisting that this is how spectators should appreciation is that “love requires a kind of approach works of art is unclear. Typically, union which is not needed by the aesthetic they come before works in an active spirit, object, because the latter . . . holds [the specta- replete with ambitions to analyze and ask tor] at a distance” (1973: 432). questions, to compare and put into context. More difficult, arguably, is to distinguish “In aesthetic appreciation,” Scruton writes, an aesthetic attitude toward, say, a lakeland “the object serves as a focal point on which scene from the simple and utterly familiar many different thoughts and feelings are experience of passing the time, idly and enjoy- brought to bear” (1974: 155). A person look- ably, looking about one, observing the clouds ing at Night Café in Arles is not looking for the and boats sailing by. This, too, is done for no answers to questions about human loneliness further reason, but for the mere sake of it, yet available from a sociological tome, but would “aesthetic” sounds too portentous a term for one dismiss as “nonaesthetic” a response to such a banal occupation. the painting like “Van Gogh shows what it is like A further and more radical challenge will to be lonely, even in the company of others”? question whether “disinterest” or interest in An appropriate comportment toward a something “for its own sake” is anyway the work of art requires a certain openness or right place from which to start in trying to receptivity toward it, but this point – the element characterize the aesthetic attitude. This challenge of truth in the idea of “disinterested” contem- might focus on the tendency of characterizations plation – cannot prohibit approaching a work like Kant’s and Stolnitz’s to assimilate the aes- with active interests, like that of learning how thetic attitude to contemplation. To begin with, it is to view the world a certain way or how a there are paradigm cases of contemplation work embodies the predilections of its creator’s – “navel-gazing,” say – which are not ones of times. What matters in such instances – and aesthetic appreciation. Second, while some what makes them instances of aesthetic appre- works of art, like Olivier Messiaen’s religious ciation, arguably – is the spectator’s readiness works, might reasonably be described as invi- to employ imagination in attempting to satisfy tations to contemplation, this would be a the interrogative interests with which he or strange description of, say, the finale of the she approaches the work. The painting does “Eroica” Symphony. So, at the very least, the not tell one about loneliness, nor does a statue contemplation deemed essential to the aes- depict the prejudices of its age. These, rather, thetic attitude must be contemplation in a very are matters an audience must imaginatively special sense. Third, it has been vigorously reconstruct from the canvas or stone before it. argued by Arnold Berleant (1991) that disin- To understand the aesthetic attitude in terested contemplation is rarely the form taken terms of a readiness for imagination is, to be sure, by aesthetic appreciation of nature. Here, rather, to move from one obscure notion to another. But the appreciator is typically participating in at least imagination incorporates that peculiar and interacting with the landscape, and it is blend of will and receptivity, that oscillation through this engagement, not despite it, that between an imposition of structure or meaning proper appreciation is possible. Berleant goes on and a readiness to be “taken over,” which is to argue that the disinterested contemplation characteristic of our best moments in the pres- model is a poor one even in the case of art. ence of art, or indeed of natural scenes. It may Typically, neither artworks nor natural scenes well be that only so much of aesthetic experi- are “objects” of detached contemplation, but ence can be understood in these terms. And then “occasions” for “active” engagement. the conclusion should be that it was mistaken

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to look for a single phenomenon, the aesthetic Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1966 [1819/44]. The World attitude. This conclusion was reached by George as Will and Representation. E. J. F. Payne (trans.). Dickie (1974) in his well-known attacks on New York: Dover. “the myth of the aesthetic attitude.” Not only, Scruton, Roger. 1974. Art and Imagination: A Study he argued, is there no single state of mind one in the Philosophy of Mind. London: Routledge & must induce in oneself – through a feat of “psy- Kegan Paul. Stolnitz, Jerome. 1960. Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art chical distancing,” say – in order to appreciate Criticism. Boston: Riverside. things aesthetically, but it is impossible to understand where “disinterested” aesthetic david e. cooper attention differs from attention tout court. People who focus on, say, the cost of the paint- ing or the moral character of its painter are guilty aesthetic education My main aim in this of plain inattention to it, the work itself. essay is to clarify the concept of aesthetic edu- The implication to draw from Dickie’s criti- cation, rather than provide an overview of the cism is not, perhaps, that we should eschew all recent literature on this topic. (See Smith 1998 talk of aesthetic attitude. Something, after all, for an overview.) The concept refers to the distinguishes the kind of attention we try to theory, content, and practice of teaching and pay to paintings from the kind paid, for exam- learning related to issues of aesthetic value ple, to incoming shells by soldiers in a trench. and aesthetic experience. In educational discip- A more moderate implication would be that lines it is often used to cover a range of teach- we should content ourselves with describing a ing and learning practices that pertain to what motley of attitudes, united more by the range we might properly call art education. On the of objects or “occasions” – including, of course, other hand, within philosophical aesthetics, works of art – that tend to invite them than by education is largely seen to be an area of appli- a single, underlying state of mind. If we do so cation, particularly that of moral education, then the ambition, noted at the outset, of for philosophical aesthetics. in addition, within defining “art” in terms of a particular attitude the literature more generally, philosophical toward objects must be abandoned, for that aesthetics and philosophy of art are often con- would be a circular enterprise. flated. the point of clarifying the concept of aesthetic education then is to be able to say more See also aesthetic properties; aestheticism; clearly what it is, and how it serves toward an definition of “art”; dickie; imagination; kant. education that is not focused narrowly on the creation and appreciation of artworks in them- selves. its goal is to educate individuals toward bibliography the recognition and enhancement of the role Bell, Clive. 1947. Art. London: Chatto & Windus. that aesthetics can play in human wellbeing, a Berleant, Arnold. 1991. Art and Engagement. Philadel- role that aesthetics plays in all human activity phia: Temple University Press. Bullough, Edward. 1912. “ ‘Psychical Distance’ as a from cognition, through the development of Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” British institutions, to our engagement with natural Journal of Psychology, 5, 87–98. and built environments. this is not to exclude Dickie, George. 1974. Art and the Aesthetic. Ithaca: artworks but to recognize them instead as just Cornell University Press. one form of human activity that engages us Dufrenne, Mikel. 1973. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic aesthetically. Experience. A. Anderson (trans.). Evanston: North- There is a long history of the role of aesth- western University Press. etics in human development and citizenship Guyer, Paul. 2005. Values of Beauty: Historical education, as in Plato’s Symposium and The Essays in Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge Republic, and Aristotle’s Poetics, within the University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1966 [1790]. Critique of Judgment. Western philosophical tradition. Regardless of J. Bernard (trans.). New York: Hafner. whether these arguments defend an education Odin, Steve. 2001. Artistic Detachment in Japan and the in the arts, or argue against them, they rest on West: Psychic Distance in Comparative Aesthetics. the assumption that aesthetic education bears Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. a strong relationship to our emotional lives

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and moral and political development. Within particular is appreciated is a matter of taste, non-Western aesthetics, too, a connection and hence of culture and education. Much of between the arts and the moral and political our contemporary philosophical interest in realms is explicit. For example, drama, within environmental aesthetics could turn to Kant, the Indian tradition, as in the Greek, was a key with some profit, in thinking about aesthetic vehicle for the imparting of moral and political education and about human development and values. Not surprisingly, then, in these traditions wellbeing. Moreover, taking a Kantian view we see the early development of philosophical of aesthetics is invaluable in understanding aesthetics in the writings of Bratahari and formalism, and as Nick Zangwill (2001) so Aristotle. More recently, we see similar attempts persuasively argues, providing us with a sys- at linking aesthetics with ethics and moral tematic understanding of the relation between education, as, for example, Marcia M. Eaton’s aesthetic properties and experience. Above all, Aesthetics and the Good Life (1989). Jenefer taking a Kantian approach makes us aware of Robinson (1995), taking a more psychological the role that aesthetics, as human cognition, approach, has argued for an education of the plays in all human activity. This, too, is a rela- emotions through an engagement with the tively underdeveloped area within aesthetic arts that would facilitate moral education. education. While the cognitive value of the arts was Perhaps there is no single philosopher more addressed by the early philosophers, it is with important to aesthetic education than John Kant, building on Alexander Baumgarten, and Dewey. His Art as Experience, a book based on responding in part to David Hume, that we the William James Lectures that he delivered see the emergence of modern aesthetics. With at Harvard University in 1931, lays out the the development of modern aesthetics we see role that aesthetics plays in the development an increase in the interest of aesthetics as an of humans, as complex biological organisms, aspect of human cognition. This interest has adapted to their environment. grown considerably in significance with devel- Dewey had always stressed the importance opments in neuroscience (Zeki 2000). David of recognizing the significance and integrity of Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste” is a clas- all aspects of human experience. His repeated sic within aesthetic education but it remains complaint against the partiality and bias of the strongly rooted in art. For Hume, the question philosophical tradition expresses this theme. is how we can set a standard for judgments of Consistent with this theme, Dewey took account taste. For Kant, on the other hand, in making of qualitative immediacy in Experience and aesthetic judgments we make a determination Nature, and incorporated it into his view of the about human cognition rather than about developmental nature of experience. It is in the object itself. Aesthetic pleasure is our felt the enjoyment of the immediacy of an integra- awareness that the appearance of the object tion and harmonization of meanings, in the conforms to the most basic conditions of “consummatory phase” of experience that, in human cognition. Dewey’s view, the fruition of the readaptation Roughly the argument is that there are of the individual to her environment is realized. structures or categories of the mind that affect These central themes are enriched and what we perceive and construct what we deepened in Art as Experience, making it one of know. For example, in the case of vision “see- Dewey’s most significant works. Furthermore, ing” does not entail a passive reception of the roots of aesthetic experience lie, he argues, perceptual information. Rather, “seeing” is an in commonplace experience, in the consum- active process that brings our cognitive appa- matory experiences that are ubiquitous in the ratus and the visual signal together to con- course of human life. struct what we see. For Kant, aesthetics, the Like Kant, Dewey argues against the conceit cognitive organization of perceptual information, cherished by some art enthusiasts that aes- is fundamental to human animals. Hence, thetic enjoyment is the privileged endow- aesthetic experiences are not limited to those ment of the few. While Kant remains agnostic with refined sensibilities as Hume might have regarding the prescription of certain aesthetic it. Rather, they are available to all. What in experiences over others, Dewey thinks that it is

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precisely because humans are aesthetically who interprets the content of sense experience predisposed that certain experiences should simply in terms of the traditionally codified be valued over others, so that individuals do list of sense qualities. Such qualities are not not fill this need through less than worthy divorced from an individual’s history. Rather, artworks. While he does not offer any criteria they rely on our mental structures and con- as such for preferring some works or experiences tent gained through experiences. Unlike Kant, over others, drawing on his overall philosophy however, Dewey highlights the role of education it is safe to say that only those aesthetic ex- in building a content rich in meanings from past periences would be considered educative that experience. Culture is invaluable to the making foster more meaningful experiences. of such a fund of meanings. More importantly, for Dewey, an “experi- Ever concerned with the interrelationships ence” coalesces into an immediately enjoyed between the various domains of human activ- qualitative unity of meanings and values drawn ity and interest, Dewey ends Art as Experience from previous experience and present circum- with a chapter devoted to the social implications stances. Life itself takes on an aesthetic qual- of the arts. Because art has its roots in the con- ity and this is what Dewey calls having an summatory values experienced in the course experience. of human life, its values have an affinity to For Dewey, the creative work of the artist, commonplace values, an affinity that gives the broadly speaking, is not unique. It is a process arts a critical role in relation to prevailing that requires an intelligent use of materials, social conditions. Dewey’s specific target is the the imaginative development of possible solu- conditions of workers in industrialized society, tions to problems issuing in a reconstruction of conditions that force upon the worker the per- experience that affords immediate satisfaction. formance of repetitive tasks that are devoid of This process, found in the creative work of personal interest and afford no satisfaction in per- artists, is also to be found in all intelligent and sonal accomplishment. That is, assembly-line creative human activity. What distinguishes routines of work are impoverished aesthetic- artistic creation is the relative stress laid upon ally. Such impoverishment is not necessarily the immediate enjoyment of unified qualitat- tied to labor as such, as Dewey demonstrates ive complexity as the rationalizing aim of the with examples like that of riveters setting up a activity itself, and the ability of the artist to rhythm in catching and using hot rivets as achieve this aim by marshaling and refining they build a skyscraper. It is management that the massive resources of human life, mean- needs to be made aware – educated – toward the ings, and values. Although Dewey insisted role that aesthetics plays in all human activity that emotion is not the significant content of the in order to make it meaningful and worthwhile. work of art, he clearly understands it to be the Richard Shusterman (2008) has extended crucial tool of the artist’s creative activity. and deepened Dewey’s aesthetics through Dewey’s aesthetic theory requires educa- his theory of aesthetics related to the body – tion, both formal and informal, to build up “somaesthetics.” Furthermore, he has extended these resources that help create artworks, but the educational repertoire of artworks worthy requires aesthetic education in this sense to of producing meaningful experiences by in- appreciate them too. For Dewey, accounts of aes- cluding those we might typically not consider thetic appreciation that portray the artist as an worthwhile even though they carry meaning active creator and the audience as passive for vast segments of our society. In this he receiver are flawed. In his view, both the artist remains true to Dewey’s democratic commit- and audience are active in producing and ments. Arnold Berleant (1997) and Yuriko appreciating artworks that afford us aesthetic Saito (2007), on the other hand, have turned experience. their attention to the aesthetic dimensions of our It is commonplace to think that the senses play natural and built environments and to every- a key role in artistic creation and aesthetic day life. Dewey’s ubiquitous theory of aesth- appreciation. Dewey, like Kant, however, argues etics, like Kant’s cognitive theory, recognizes against the view, stemming historically from the role of aesthetics in all human activity and the sensationalistic empiricism of David Hume, not only in the making and appreciating of

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high art but also nonart like the environment implication holds because what he is claiming and the everyday. Aesthetic education in this is only that the object has certain qualities case might mean not only the enhancing of arranged in a given way. If the original judg- our awareness of this dimension of our activities ment is correct, it follows that anyone else and experiences but also serving more humbly, ought to judge in the same way. but not less importantly, as a reminder of its per- Simple objectivism has been subjected to vasive presence. several criticisms. Many have found it counter- intuitive that one can, in theory, decisively See also aesthetic properties; aesthetics of settle the beauty of an object by reference to the everyday; cognitive value of art; dewey; rules of composition alone. Whatever aesthetic hume; indian aesthetics; kant; morality and rule of composition is proposed, it is never art. self-contradictory to accept that the object unequivocally falls under the rule, yet deny bibliography that it is beautiful. Berleant, Arnold. 1997. Living in the Landscape: Second, the analysis leaves no intrinsic role Toward an Aesthetics of the Environment. Lawrence: for a spectator’s feelings in the determination of University of Kansas Press. beauty. Admittedly, a defender of the analysis Dewey, John. 2005 [1934]. Art as Experience. New can, and very probably will, allow that the York: Perigee. judgment is normally accompanied by a feeling Eaton, Marcia. 1989. Aesthetics and the Good Life. of pleasure or displeasure, but an object’s beauty Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press. exists quite independently of any spectator’s Robinson, Jenefer. 1995. “L’education Sentimentale,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 73, 212–26. feelings. Finally, the evaluative force of the Saito, Yuriko. 2007. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford: judgment is not adequately accounted for: one Oxford University Press. is not merely judging that the object possesses Shusterman, Richard. 2008. Body Consciousness: certain properties disposed in a given way, but A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. also that it merits attention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Ralph. 1998. “Education, Aesthetic.” In simple and sophisticated subjectivism Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. M. Kelly (ed.). Oxford: According to simple subjectivism, the correct- Oxford University Press, vol. ii, 93–6. ness of an aesthetic judgment is determined Zangwill, Nick. 2001. The Metaphysics of Beauty. by the pleasure or displeasure that perception Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zeki, Semir. 2000. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art of the object arouses in any given spectator. This and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. implies that if, under the same circumstances, one individual judges that an object is beauti- pradeep a. dhillon ful and another judges that it is not, they could never be contradicting each other. Yet it seems evident that at least sometimes they could be. aesthetic judgment There have been a Moreover, an aesthetic judgment is made on the huge number of attempts to understand the basis of our perception of features in the object. nature of aesthetic judgment. These are placed We are normally expected to show that the in two broad categories, and called here object- judgment rests on features that render our ivism and subjectivism. response a justifiable one. This is not consistent with the judgment depending only on feelings simple objectivism of pleasure or displeasure the perception of the According to a simple objectivism, the truth object occasions in any spectator. of an aesthetic judgment is wholly determined In the light of these and other criticisms, by whether certain qualities or relations exist subjectivists have usually accepted that the in the object. An important corollary of this aesthetic judgment cannot be a bare statement account is that when a spectator affirms that an of personal liking or disliking. A more sophist- object is, for instance, beautiful, his judgment icated subjectivist account was defended by must imply that everyone who judges the Hume, and most subsequent subjectivist theor- object aesthetically ought to find it beautiful. This ies have remained greatly indebted to it. The

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basic idea is often introduced by seeking to ness of such features. These features become draw an analogy between color judgments denominated the “beauties” or “blemishes” of and aesthetic judgments. Even those who con- objects, despite their existence being depen- strue an object’s color as nothing more than an dent on the sensibilities of discriminating occurrence in the observer’s mind allow that spectators. On this account, any defensible there are standards for assessing the appropri- aesthetic rules of composition will simply be ateness of particular color judgments. These empirical generalizations, based on the dis- standards depend on: (1) similar general prin- covery that features of a certain kind have ciples governing most people’s color percep- been found to please discriminating spectators tion, and our accepting that those within the in a variety of different objects. consensus who can make maximum discrimi- Sophisticated subjectivism incorporates many nations between colors have the best color of the properties that have been widely seen as vision; (2) widespread agreement among the central to aesthetic appreciation. It permits a maximum discriminators about the precise prominent role to reasoning and the comparison colors of given objects. Similarly, the sophisti- of cases in the justification of aesthetic judg- cated subjectivist urges, we should think of ments, at least in the finer arts; yet it gives to standards in art criticism as resting on: (1) the contemplative feelings of pleasure or displeasure same, or nearly the same, general principles the ultimate determining ground of the judg- governing most people’s aesthetic taste, and ment. And since any acknowledged general our acknowledging that those within this rules are only contingent, it can explain why it majority who are capable of experiencing the is never self-contradictory to admit that cer- fullest and most discriminating range of con- tain features fall under an accepted rule, while templative feelings have the most perfect taste; also denying that they are beautiful. Further- (2) a large measure of agreement among the more, it can account for why we place such a maximum discriminators about the precise value on aesthetic appreciation: the discrim- feelings that are produced by the particular inating feelings, on which judgments in the qualities and relations of objects. finer arts depend, are of an intrinsically satis- If the subjectivists are to make good this fying nature. Also they have a strong tendency analogy, they will need to defend the belief that (together with the analytical skill required for the majority of people are governed by similar their experience) to civilize a person’s attitude principles of taste. They attempt to do this by toward moral and intellectual matters. Since pointing to the long-running survival of certain both these consequences are highly desirable, admired works among diverse nations; and it is not surprising that aesthetic discrimination by arguing that most disagreements are due to should be considered an admirable quality and factors like prejudice or lack of suitable education. its objects worthy of appreciation. Even allowing that the analogy with colors On the other hand, a subjectivist cannot can survive the existence of aesthetic disagree- allow that an aesthetic judgment about any ment, it still fails to explain why we should talk given object claims the necessary agreement of of the beauties or blemishes of objects (the feel- everyone. At best, the aesthetic judgment can ings of pleasure/displeasure manifestly belong lay claim only to a contingent universality, or to the subjects judging). To meet this objection, near-universality, based on an empirical gener- the sophisticated subjectivist refers to those alization concerning the sensibilities of human features of objects, the awareness of which beings. To those of us whose sensibilities may causes the majority’s contemplative feelings happen to be governed by totally different prin- of pleasure or displeasure. He insists that ciples from the majority’s, the judgments of the capacity to notice intricate relationships discriminating spectators within that majority between the parts of a complex work of art or can have no logical force. natural object is, as a matter of fact, a causally necessary condition for the fullest experience of sophisticated objectivism the appropriate feelings. Accordingly, we learn This position, which was originally developed that in order to justify our responses as aesthetic by Kant, shares with simple objectivism the ones, they need to be grounded in the aware- view that the judgment of taste lays claim to

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the necessary agreement of everyone without each of us can only estimate beauty by means exception, but it shares with sophisticated sub- of his own individual feeling. jectivism the view that its determining ground Kant’s theory belongs in the objectivist must always be the feeling of contemplative camp because of his insistence that a well- pleasure or displeasure. Even if this is, so far founded aesthetic judgment ultimately rests on as it goes, a correct analysis of the aesthetic (unknown) principles that obtain independ- judgment, its appearance of having one’s cake ently of any spectator’s feelings. Arguably, his and eating it raises very acutely the question position rests on an unjustified metaphysical of whether application of the judgment can structure; relatedly, it relies on a narrow forma- ever be justified. list conception of beauty. Still, Kant’s analysis In Kant’s case, the justification is intimately raises a serious problem for the subjectivist, linked with his metaphysics. Two people can which is to account for the persisting con- only be perceiving the same object insofar as they tention that the aesthetic judgment claims possess the same faculties of understanding the necessary agreement of everyone without and imagination, operating identically in both exception. of them. The feeling of contemplative pleasure For the subjectivist, any inclination to claim or displeasure, by which we determine the aes- strict universality for the aesthetic judgment thetic judgment, also has to arise from the arises from explicable delusion: because the interlocking of these two faculties in an act of exercise of judgment, especially in the finer arts, perception. We correctly pronounce an object requires extensive knowledge and reflection, it to be beautiful if, and only if, in an act of purely is easy to be misled into thinking that the judg- reflective perception upon the relations holding ment depends wholly on factors belonging to among its formal features, we find – by means the mere perception of the object (especially of the ensuing feeling – that the imagination is since the feelings resulting from careful and permitted maximum freedom from the rule- practiced aesthetic reflection are frequently so governed constraints of the understanding. comparatively unobtrusive); and, under such On this account, it is impossible for two people a misapprehension, one will naturally take it that to be perceiving the same object, while the verdict claims strict universality. In reality, making different, equally well-grounded, aes- the most that can be claimed is a universality thetic judgments. It is impossible because covering all who, as a matter of fact, possess a we make a well-grounded aesthetic judgment similar sensibility. on the basis of a feeling that depends on an identical use of necessarily shared perceptual further developments faculties. (Differences in aesthetic judgment How convincing is the sophisticated subject- arise because people seldom reach a decision ivist’s position? On two counts, it has been solely by allowing the imagination its free play.) strenuously disputed. So although we decide upon an object’s First, it has been held that the spectator beauty on the basis of feeling, Kant thinks that must be the final authority on what aspects what we are thereby estimating is the extent to of an object ground his response. It is always which the object’s mere form or design gives the spectator himself, on the basis of his own scope to the imagination’s free play. But there experience of the aesthetic object, who must can be no discoverable general rules for estab- willingly authorize any suggestions from others lishing this, precisely because the imagination before they can be considered correct. Yet – is here maximally unconstrained by the faculty the argument runs – on the supposition that of rules (the understanding). Only if we had the connection between object and response access to the ground of all experience – the is a causal one, no authorization by the person supersensible world – would it be possible to concerned would be required. Second, it has been discover the principles governing the free play held that although the spectator is the final of the imagination; and, hence, to determine authority on the ground of his response, that prior to and independently of feeling the extent response can only be justified as an aesthetic one of an object’s beauty. Failing, as we do, to if the reasons for it appropriately fall under achieve this insight into the supersensible, aesthetic rules. Perhaps the rules themselves

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were first laid down because the features that sure or displeasure do, after all, carry a causal answered to them satisfied the sensibilities of implication, it would be implausible to hold influential people. Whatever their origins, only that any currently accepted aesthetic rules judgments in accord with these rules are well form an immovable framework that serves founded. They have become a constitutive to define the possible justifiable content of element in manifesting aesthetic appreciation. aesthetic judgments (as the second criticism Consequently, the connection between response of subjectivism contended). For suppose it is and object, insofar as the response is to be discovered that certain features of an object, thought of as genuinely aesthetic, cannot be although fully in accord with an accepted aes- merely contingent. If it were, one could identify thetic rule, are not the cause of the response of that response independently of knowing whether discriminating spectators, despite being picked its grounds were in accord with aesthetic out by them as its ground; and suppose, further, rules. What is crucial is that there exists a that other features which they also perceived fundamental framework of given rules, within were acting as the cause. Since it is implied which alone it is possible to talk of the making, that a spectator’s awareness of the properties defending, and criticizing of particular aes- named in an aesthetic explanation cause his thetic judgments. response, this discovery would force a change This dual attack on subjectivism, which in the rules, so that they did henceforth pick out derives from the work of Wittgenstein, evid- the object’s causally efficacious features. It fol- ently has affinities with Kant’s position. It lows that aesthetic rules are ultimately depend- defends the strict universality of the aesthetic ent on the sensibilities of human beings, in the judgment, and it affirms an internal, and not a very manner that the sophisticated subjectivist merely contingent, relation between the spec- maintains. tator’s perception of the object and his making The subjectivist has argued forcefully that, an aesthetic judgment. without a causal implication to aesthetic reason Despite its ingenuity, it is doubtful whether giving, there can be no conceivable case where the attack’s central claim – that the connection the assignment of aesthetic value would be between object and spectator’s response is justified. It turns out, therefore, that if the essentially noncontingent – should be conceded. objectivist tries to analyze the aesthetic judgment Admittedly, it does seem right to say that the without the causal implication, he will be in spectator must willingly authorize any suggestion grave danger of having to deny that its appli- as to the precise reason for his satisfaction or cation ever entails an evaluation. This is an dissatisfaction, before that suggestion can be con- absurd consequence. It raises, again, a difficulty sidered correct (as the first criticism of subject- that we encountered in connection with simple ivism contended). At the same time, it also seems objectivism: namely, whether an objectivist can right to say that any precise identification by him provide a comprehensible account of aesthetic of the ground of his feeling is subject to a famil- value. Unless such an account is forthcoming, iar form of causal falsification. no persuasive alternative to sophisticated sub- For example, we question whether certain jectivism appears to be available; and we shall features can be the real reason for a spectator’s just have to confess that there is an element of dissatisfaction with an object (even though delusion, a tendency to affirm a stricter uni- he identified them as such) if, on another, sim- versality than can be warranted, in our appli- ilar, occasion, their presence, though noted, cation of the aesthetic judgment. did not interfere with his pleasure. So whereas the spectator may be able to rule out suggestions See also aesthetic pleasure; beauty; hume; as to the reason for his response, he cannot kant; objectivity and realism in aesthetics; justifiably continue to affirm that such and such relativism; taste; theories of art; wittgen- features are the real reason for that response, if stein. it can be shown that his awareness of them formed an insignificant part of its cause. bibliography Once it is admitted that the features which Hume, David. 1985. “The Sceptic” (1742), “Of the figure as the real reason for a spectator’s plea- Delicacy of Taste and Passion” (1742), and “Of the

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Standard of Taste” (1757). Repr. in Essays Moral, disinterested – that is, not grounded in the sub- Political and Literary. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics. ject’s personal desires, needs, or susceptibilities Kant, Immanuel. 1987 [1790]. “Introduction” and – it is distinguished (or so Kant believed) from “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.” In Critique of sensory pleasures such as those of a warm Judgment, W. Pluhar (trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett. bath or the taste of raspberry. In deriving from McDowell, John. 1983. “Aesthetic Value, Objectiv- an impression of purposiveness – an impression ity, and the Fabric of the World.” In Pleasure, Preference and Value. E. Schaper (ed.). Cambridge: which, in stimulating imagination and under- Cambridge University Press, 1–16. standing to an unaccustomed free play, directly Mackie, John L.1977. Ethics: Inventing Right and gives rise to the pleasure in question – aesthetic Wrong. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pleasure is shown to reside in forms or appear- Pears, David F. 1975. “Causes and Objects of ances per se, and not in an object’s real-world Some Feelings and Psychological Reactions.” In status or connections. Questions in the Philosophy of Mind. D. Pears (ed.). Different strands of this complex concep- London: Duckworth, 56–79. tion have been stressed by subsequent writers. Reid, Thomas. 1969 [1785]. “Of Taste.” In Essays on Schopenhauer agreed with Kant that the plea- the Intellectual Powers of Man. Cambridge, MA: sure in beholding an object aesthetically is a MIT Press. Ward, Andrew. 2006. “A Kantian or an Empiricist disinterested one, but claimed that its focus is Theory of Taste?” In Kant: The Three Critiques. not an object’s pure form as such in relation to Cambridge: Polity, 220–6. the cognitive faculties, but rather some meta- Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1996. Lectures and Conversa- physical idea inherent in an object which, in tions on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. drawing the subject’s attention, lifts him tem- C. Barrett (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. porarily out of the painful striving to which he, as a spatiotemporally bound individual bundle andrew ward of will, is ordinarily condemned. In a similar vein, Bullough proposed that such pleasure issues upon the subject’s metaphorically distancing aesthetic pleasure When is pleasure in any object of perception, in the sense of brack- an object properly denominated “aesthetic”? eting all of its life implications, thus putting the The characterization of aesthetic pleasure is subject’s practical self “out of gear” and clear- something that almost every theorist of the ing a space for rapt absorption. Others in the aesthetic has attempted. For such a character- twentieth century, such as Eliseo Vivas and ization to be accounted a success, it should Jerome Stolnitz, have emphasized the intrans- illuminate the relation between aesthetic plea- itivity of the mode of attention that yields sure and the taking of an aesthetic attitude to aesthetic pleasure, by which is meant its not works of art, and make intelligible how aes- going beyond the object but instead terminat- thetic pleasure can be taken in what are usu- ing on it. ally labeled nonaesthetic aspects of an item – for The formalist strand in Kant’s conception instance, its cognitive content, moral import, or has been taken up in different ways in the political message – without thereby turning twentieth century by Clive Bell, J. O. Urmson, into pleasure of a nonaesthetic sort. and Monroe C. Beardsley. Bell claimed that Before venturing my proposal, I review pleasurable aesthetic emotion is the result briefly some of the prominent suggestions solely of contemplation of an object’s significant that the tradition of aesthetic thought has form. It is unclear, however, whether Bell thrown up so far. In Kant’s influential treatment, had any intelligible, noncircular account to aesthetic pleasure is characterized as the by- give of when a form is significant, and so the cash product of a nonconceptual and disinterested value of Bell’s pronouncement seems to be just judging, whose focus is exclusively the formal that form, narrowly construed – that is, the purposiveness of the object judged. In being pure arrangement of elements in a medium – nonconceptual it is distinguished from plea- is the sole legitimate object of aesthetic experi- sure taken in an object as good, since such a ence. More liberally, Urmson has suggested judgment always presupposes a concept of that specifically aesthetic pleasure is pleasure the object as of some kind or other. In being deriving from a concern with appearances

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as such. On such a suggestion the aesthetic Especially if a characterization of aesthetic includes, but is not restricted to, the narrowly pleasure is to be adequate to our interest in art, formal. Relatedly, Beardsley has proposed that it will have to be roughly of the sort I have aesthetic pleasure be defined as pleasure taken sketched. Aesthetic pleasure is supposed to in either an object’s formal qualities (for in- be both individualizing and capable of being stance, balance, unity, tension) or its regional taken in an object’s cognitive and moral aspect, qualities – that is, gestalt qualities of character without becoming a fortiori purely cognitive or or expression which attach to structured wholes moral satisfaction. Now, it seems that what is (for instance, vivacity, serenity, gloominess, most distinctive about an artwork, and possibly grace). the only thing for which uniqueness might be That aesthetic pleasure derives from a wholly claimed, is not its artistic character or content nonconceptual engagement with an object, as per se, but the specific complex of the work’s Kant would have it, has not been as readily character and content with the particular per- accepted as some other parts of his theory. What ceptual substructure that supports it. So, inso- the balance of thought and feeling in aesthetic far as that is what is attended to, interest in an experience is or should be was a prominent object carries to what is maximally distinctive topic for critical discussion in the twentieth about it. And where a work has a prominent century. Roger Scruton, for instance, has urged intellectual or moral or political content, plea- that aesthetic experience and the satisfaction sure in this remains recognizably aesthetic inherent in it is necessarily permeated by when it results not so much from acquisition of thought or imagination – that such experience some portion of scientific knowledge or ethical always involves conceptions of objects, of their insight or political wisdom per se, but from features, under certain descriptions. An object appreciation of the manner in which these are not consciously construed in one fashion or embodied in and communicated by the work’s another cannot, for Scruton, be an object in specific elements and organization. which one is finding aesthetic, as opposed to Aesthetic satisfaction in Thomas Mann’s merely sensational or instinctive, satisfaction. Death in Venice, for instance, is to be derived from I propose the following characterization of aes- more than its beauty of language, the striking- thetic pleasure. Pleasure in an object is aesthetic ness of its images, or even the downward curve when it derives from apprehension of and reflection of its sad narrative; it is had as well in its moral on the object’s individual character and content, both mediation of life and art, and in its symbolism for itself and, at least in central cases, in relation of death and disintegration. But the satisfac- to the structural base on which such character tion is properly aesthetic in these latter cases and content rest. That is to say, to appreciate precisely when such symbolic or moral con- something aesthetically is characteristically tent is apprehended in and through the body to attend not only to its forms, qualities, and of the literary work itself – its sentences, para- meanings for their own sakes, but also to the graphs, and fictive events – and not as something way in which all those things emerge from the abstractable from it. Aesthetic pleasure in particular set of low-level perceptual features that Matisse’s The Red Studio is not exhausted in constitute the object on a nonaesthetic plane. delectation of its shapes, planes, and colors; We apprehend the character and content of it includes, for one thing, delight in the origin- items as anchored in and arising from the ality of Matisse’s handling of space. But such specific structure that constitutes it on a primary delight is inseparable from a conception of observational level. Content and character are what that handling amounts to, and how it is supervenient on such structure, and appreci- based in, or realized by, the particular choices ation of them, if properly aesthetic, involves of shape, plane, and color before one. awareness of that dependency. To appreciate an Aesthetic appreciation of art thus always object’s inherent properties aesthetically is to acknowledges the vehicle of the work as essen- experience them, minimally, as properties of tial, and never focuses merely on detachable the individual in question, but also typically as meanings or effects. It is a signal advantage of bound up with and inseparable from its basic the characterization outlined here that it ensures perceptual configuration. both that aesthetic pleasure is individualizing or

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work-centered, and that aesthetic pleasure can resulting from geological forces along with be taken in what are, on a traditional reckon- patterns of human use. ing, nonaesthetic aspects of a work, without Some theorists, such as Arthur C. Danto and thereby becoming nonaesthetic. Nelson Goodman, have stressed the great dif- How, though, are aesthetic pleasures dif- ference in kind between aesthetic response to ferentiated from sensory and from intellectual nature and to art, while other theorists, such ones? When is pleasure in a flavor, for exam- as Richard Wollheim and Anthony Savile, ple, aesthetic rather than merely sensory? It have even proposed that the aesthetic interest seems natural to suggest that what is required in art is logically prior to that in nature, the is some grasp of the flavor for the quality it is, latter being properly analyzed in terms of the perhaps in opposition to other flavors not then former. While recognizing that there may be present, and/or of the flavor as itself founded two species of aesthetic response here, I suspect on other discriminable qualities. To appreciate there is no priority either way. In any event, my the taste of raspberry aesthetically is to register concern has been only to characterize aes- not only the brute taste, but also, so to speak, thetic satisfaction in such a way as to cover both. its form – that is, its relation to other, simpler It is clear that aesthetic pleasure as charac- qualities in the taste, or to ones it contrasts terized so far in this article comprises more with in imagination. A purely sensory pleasure than pleasure in aesthetic qualities per se – in raspberry taste, insofar as this is possible, that is, those that Frank Sibley has famously would neither focus on the flavor for what it dis- identified – and, equally, more than pleasure tinctively is nor involve awareness of relation- in mere appearances. Of course, when one is ships and dependencies within the experience after aesthetic gratification one is interested in as a whole. On the other hand, as already appearances, but usually one is equally inter- remarked, since paradigm aesthetic pleasures ested in how, on a phenomenological plane, always involve an appreciation of contents-in- such appearances are generated; or, alterna- relation-to-vehicles-or-supports, then although tively, how aesthetic qualities emerge from necessarily involving thought of a kind, they do an object’s structure. Somewhat legislatively, not collapse automatically into pure intellectual I have sought a notion which would make pleasures, in which satisfaction is grounded aesthetic pleasure, where works of art are con- in the acquisition of knowledge or insight as cerned, something closer to pleasure proper to such, for themselves, independent of how they something as art – that is to say, art-appropriate are embodied or conveyed. pleasure. In this broader, art-conscious sense, Turning now to nature, how is aesthetic the relationship of substructure and super- pleasure in that related intelligibly to aesthetic structure in the total impression that an object pleasure in art? I suggest that, with nature as affords is necessarily of concern when an well as art, the pleasure is usually taken in its object is approached aesthetically. experienceable aspects, coupled with a vivid Of course we may still acknowledge, in a tra- awareness both of the interrelations of such ditional vein, a more basic notion of aesthetic aspects and of their groundedness in the object’s pleasure as pleasure taken in sensory or per- structure, history, or function. Aesthetic plea- ceptual properties as such, for example, colors, sure in natural objects, like aesthetic pleasure sounds, or shapes, immediately experienced in works of art, is typically a multilevel affair, (see Stecker 2005: 46–7). And indeed I framed involving reflection not only on appearances per my proposed characterization of aesthetic se, but on the constitution of such appearances pleasure earlier in this essay so as to allow for and the interaction between higher-order per- such cases at the margin, insisting only that in ceptions. The shapes, colors, and expressive- central instances of aesthetic pleasure, atten- nesses of natural objects are appreciated in tion must carry to relationships of dependence their complex relation to one another and to between higher-order and lower-order quali- the concepts under which we identify such ties as experienced. And in line with that more objects. For instance, a landscape scene might basic notion of aesthetic pleasure, appreciation provide aesthetic pleasure not solely in its in which awareness of relationships among appearance but in the recognition of this as experienced qualities at different levels was

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wholly absent might yet be accountable as aes- form – which means that Kant, in an oblique thetic, provided there is an element of focusing fashion, was right about aesthetic pleasure on such qualities for what they are, so as to pre- after all. vent such pleasure from collapsing into purely sensory pleasure. But we must not lose sight of See also aesthetic attitude; aesthetic judg- the fact that such appreciation, even if minimally ment; aesthetic properties; aesthetics of qualifiable as aesthetic, is simply too thin to the environment; bell; formalism; kant; do justice to art and nature appreciation as schopenhauer. such, and that it is two-level, and not one- level, appreciation that should be seen as the bibliography paradigm of aesthetic appreciation. Accord- Beardsley, Monroe C. 1982. The Aesthetic Point of ingly, it seems useful to have articulated a View. M. Wreen & D. Callen (eds.). Ithaca: Cornell notion of aesthetic pleasure sufficiently rich to University Press, chs. 1–3. respect the complex contents of its primary Bell, Clive. 1914. Art. London: Chatto & Windus. Budd, Malcolm. 1995. The Values of Art: Pictures, objects, art and nature. Poetry, and Music. London: Penguin. Two last points. First, in order to have a Bullough, Edward. 1912. “ ‘Physical Distance’ as a notion of aesthetic appreciation applicable to art- Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle,” works and natural phenomena alike, I invoked British Journal of Psychology, 5, 87–98. in my characterization none of the ingredients Goldman, Alan H. 1995. Aesthetic Value. Boulder: specific to the appreciation of art, such as con- Westview. cern with style, personality, intention, and Kant, Immanuel. 1987 [1790]. Critique of Judgment. design. The result is a notion that seems to fit W. Pluhar (trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett. what goes on when we regard a natural phe- Levinson, Jerrold. 1990. Music, Art, and Metaphysics. nomenon as more than just a source of sensa- Ithaca: Cornell University Press, chs. 6, 7. Levinson, Jerrold. 1996. The Pleasures of Aesthetics. tion, but without necessarily treating it as Ithaca: Cornell University Press, chs. 1, 2. artwork manqué. The aesthetic appreciation of Savile, Anthony. 1982. The Test of Time. Oxford: nature requires not only attention to manifest Oxford University Press. appearances but a concern with their percep- Schopenhauer, Arnold. 1966 [1819]. The World as tual and conceptual underpinnings. Will and Idea, book 3. E. F. J. Payne (trans.). New Second, my characterization has the virtue, York: Dover. ironically, of preserving a connection between Scruton, Roger. 1979. The Aesthetics of Architecture. the aesthetic and the formal in art, reminiscent Princeton: Princeton University Press. of Kant, but without reducing the aesthetic to Stecker, Robert. 2005. Aesthetics and the Philosophy the formal narrowly construed – for instance, of Art: An Introduction. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. as pattern in space or time. For in deriving Stolnitz, Jerome. 1960. Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art gratification from the unique manner in which Criticism. New York: Houghton-Mifflin. a work’s content and character, whatever they Urmson, J. O. 1957. “When is a Situation Aesthetic?” might comprise, are rooted in and emerge from Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 31, the work’s form sensu stricto – the particu- 75–92. lar arrangement of elements (colors, sounds, Vivas, Eliseo. 1959. “Contextualism Reconsidered,” words, movements, gestures) through which it Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 18, 222– conveys whatever else it does – one is focused 40. on something which could fairly well be Wollheim, Richard. 1980. Art and Its Objects. 2nd edn. described as formal, in a wide sense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pleasure in an artwork is aesthetic when, jerrold levinson whatever aspects of it are attended to, be they psychological or political or polemical, there is also attention to the relation between content aesthetic properties A definition or ana- and form – between what a work expresses or lysis of aesthetic properties may best be appro- signifies, and the means it uses to do so. This rela- ached by first listing those properties and types tion, which is the sine qua non of aesthetic plea- of properties that are typically thought to be sure in art, is quite obviously a kind of higher aesthetic when ascribed to works of art;

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1 pure value properties: being beautiful, sub- and realism in artworks as readily as they per- lime, ugly; ceive redness or squareness. It seems that they 2 formal qualities: being balanced, tightly must be more sensitive or knowledgeable to knit, graceful; see the former qualities; hence the suggestion 3 emotion properties: being sad, joyful, angry; that they require taste. But the traditional con- 4 behavioral properties: being bouncy, daring, cept of taste has suggested a special faculty sluggish; akin to moral intuition. Without some inde- 5 evocative qualities: being powerful, boring, pendent description of how the faculty is amusing; supposed to work, its existence is no more 6 representational qualities: being true-to- plausible in the one case than in the other. life, distorted, realistic; Furthermore, there are qualities in our list that 7 second-order perceptual properties: being do not require taste to be perceived (e.g., vivid- vivid or pure (said of colors or tones); ness in color). 8 historically related properties: being original, Those qualities that do seem to require taste bold, derivative. for their appreciation need not lead us to posit a special faculty. The apparent need for taste can This list, especially with its inclusion of (8), be explained, first, by the fact that many of the takes a broader view of aesthetic properties than qualities in question are complex relations. We the one traditionally adopted. The reasons for may require considerable exposure, or train- including such properties as originality or stale- ing, before we become capable of recognizing ness in the list are, first, that they contribute to such relations in works of art. Second, most of the value of artworks qua artworks and, second, the qualities mentioned in our list are at least that, despite not being directly perceived, they partly evaluative. To call an artwork daring, influence the ways knowledgeable viewers per- powerful, or vivid is to suggest a positive evalu- ceive or experience the works. ation of it. To call it sluggish, boring, or drab is Is there any common characteristic of these to suggest a negative evaluation. various properties by which they are all recog- Thus, ascription of these properties expresses nized as aesthetic qualities? Several proposals some set of aesthetic values. This fact points may seem promising, but may be dismissed to a plausible general criterion for identifying by counterexample. It might be thought that aesthetic properties: they are those that con- these are all perceptible properties of the works tribute to the aesthetic values of artworks (or, themselves. But not all the qualities listed above in some cases, to the aesthetic values of nat- can be perceived in the works themselves. One ural objects) (Beardsley 1973). It has also been could not perceive whether a representational plausibly suggested that aesthetic properties work was true to life without knowing the are those that make artifacts works of art, or that model or type of model represented; one could help to determine what kinds of artworks they not know that a work was original without are (Sparshott 1982: 478). These two criteria knowing the tradition. Aesthetic properties have may well be related if “work of art” is itself a also been called regional qualities (Beardsley partly evaluative concept in at least one of its 1973), qualities of complexes that emerge definitions, so that to call something a work of from qualities of their parts, but vividness of color art is to imply, for example, that it is worthy of and purity of tone are just qualities of single sustained perceptual attention. We might con- colors or tones. Many of the properties in the clude that works of art are objects created and above list – for example, the emotion and perceived for their aesthetic values, and that aes- behavior properties – are ascribed literally to thetic properties are those that contribute to such humans and perhaps only metaphorically values. In considering this analysis, we must to artworks. But this is not true of the formal not forget that there are negative evaluative or representational properties. properties on the list as well. If being ugly, bor- Another influential suggestion has been ing, distorted, or dull contribute to an object’s that aesthetic properties are those that require value, they normally contribute only to nega- taste to be perceived (Sibley 1959). Ordinary tive value (though not always, e.g., a work’s perceivers do not see sadness, balance, power, ugliness may contribute to its power or realism).

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There are also qualities, such as emotion qual- response in sensitive observers. Philosophers ities like sadness, that seem to be evaluatively have not always agreed that the objective side neutral. It will be argued below that such prop- of beauty cannot be specified. Perhaps the best- erties do contribute to aesthetic value, albeit known attempt to do so was that of Hutcheson more indirectly or less obviously than some of (1725), who held that it is always uniform- the others. ity amid variety. But all such attempts fall to If we restrict attention to the positively counterexamples, in this case ordered complex evaluative properties, it might seem that artists objects that do not appear beautiful. Although would intend to build as many as possible into B (from the above formula) is therefore un- their works, and that their works would be specified in the case of beauty, there will better the more such properties they have. But always be some properties – usually formal this idea is too simple, since many of these relations – in virtue of which an object is beau- properties do not blend well in particular con- tiful. Sometimes these more basic properties texts. In the case of both positive and negative will themselves be evaluative properties. For evaluative properties, it is part of the task of example, an artwork may be beautiful in critics to point them out and to justify their virtue of its grace or power. It may in turn be claims in this regard. powerful in virtue of its piercing pathos or Most of the qualities listed are both rela- graceful in virtue of its smooth lines. A prop- tional and (partly) evaluative. In principle, it erty such as grace, while still generally positively should be possible to analyze particular refer- evaluative, is more specific on its objective side. ences to such properties (although not the “Graceful” always refers to formal qualities property types themselves) into evaluative and that suggest smooth and effortless movements. descriptive components. A crucial question Graceful objects will nevertheless differ in their concerns the relation between these compon- particular formal properties. ents. The properties on our list differ among Ascriptions of more broadly evaluative and themselves in the degree to which they always less specifically objective properties, when include (in their instantiations) specific evalu- challenged, are always defended by appeal to less ative or descriptive aspects. broadly evaluative and more specifically objec- These distinctions can be brought out by tive properties. Ultimately, a critic or viewer analyses of the following form: “object O has aes- should defend evaluations by pointing to thetic property P” means “O is such as to elicit nonevaluative properties of the works in ques- response of kind R in ideal viewers of kind V tion. These will be formal, expressive, repre- in virtue of its more basic properties B.” If P is sentational, or historical properties of the work evaluative, then R will be positive or negative, (relations of the work to its tradition) that lack often involving pleasure or displeasure. V will evaluative dimensions in themselves. For ex- almost always include characteristics such as ample, while to say that a painting’s composi- being knowledgeable of the kind of artworks tion is balanced may be to evaluate it positively, to which O belongs, being unbiased or disin- to say that it is symmetrical is not evaluative; terested, and being sensitive enough to react to similarly for “poignant” and “sad” when pre- properties of type B. B may be more broadly dicated of musical works. Ultimately, appeal or narrowly specified. Although the evocative may be always to nonevaluative formal prop- qualities on the initial list most clearly involve erties, but this claim is more controversial. reactions of observers, this analysis views Sibley (1959) raised the question of how many of the other properties there as having aesthetic qualities relate to nonaesthetic prop- similar structure. Ascribing such properties erties, and he claimed that the latter are never to an object expresses a positive or negative sufficient conditions for the former. He did seem response, suggests that others ought to share the to allow for necessary conditions in claiming that response (ought to approximate to the ideal aesthetic properties could be “negatively con- viewer), and points to certain more or less dition governed.” His example was that objects specific objective properties of the object. with all pastel colors cannot be gaudy (a neces- Beauty, for example, is nonspecific on the sary condition for gaudiness is bright colors). objective side, but always elicits a pleasurable Sibley’s question whether aesthetic properties are

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“condition governed” is equivalent to the ques- The examples just noted suggest two rea- tion whether there are principles governing sons why we cannot specify interesting prin- their ascription, a central question in aesth- ciples of aesthetic evaluation. First, aesthetic etics. We may ask it at the level Sibley does, the properties of parts of artworks are altered or relation between aesthetic and nonaesthetic transformed, often in unpredictable ways, properties, or we may ask how the more specific when juxtaposed with properties in other or less broadly evaluative aesthetic properties works. A curve that is graceful in one sculpture relate to the more broadly evaluative ones or to may be insipid in the context of another sculp- overall evaluations of works. ture. Second, there remain irreconcilable dif- Not only do there not appear to be necessary ferences in taste, even when we consider the or sufficient conditions at either level, but aesthetic judgments of only ideal critics. properties at one level do not always con- Aesthetic properties are response dependent – tribute in the same direction to properties at the relations between objective properties and next level. In regard to necessary conditions, responses of observers – and these responses are Sibley’s example fails. The art deco facades in relative to different tastes. That is why there is South Beach, Miami are pastel and gaudy. no supervenience across different critics, at Undoubtedly there are trivial necessary condi- least if we restrict the supervenience base to tions for many aesthetic properties: a tragic objective properties of works. poem must contain more than the single word Aesthetic properties have been identified “pussycat.” But it is much more difficult to here primarily as those that contribute to the think of nontrivial necessary conditions that aesthetic value of artworks (or, in some cases, could not be counterinstanced by a clever and natural objects), and as those that provide rea- original artist. sons for aesthetic judgments or evaluations. Regarding the relation of narrower evaluative Many of these properties are themselves evalu- properties to overall evaluations, properties ative, consisting in relations between objective that are normally positive, such as graceful- basic properties and evaluative responses of ness, are not always so. A graceful perform- observers. Others have been characterized here ance of The Rite of Spring might not be better for as nonevaluative properties that ultimately it, and arguably the graceful prose of The Last ground evaluations. It remains to explain of the Mohicans detracts from the excitement of briefly how and why these basic properties are the story. ultimate sources of aesthetic value. Something similar can be said of the relation Complex formal properties constitute princi- between nonaesthetic properties and aesthetic ples of order among the elements they structure. properties: again there are no principles gov- They enable perception and cognition to grasp erning this relation. The same objective formal such elements in larger wholes and to assign properties – for instance, gentle curves and them significance in terms of their places and pastel colors – that make one artwork graceful functions within such structures. This recogni- might make another insipid. The same har- tion of order, especially after being challenged monies that make one piece of music powerful by complexity, is pleasing to those faculties might make another strident. From the point of that seek it (although, as noted above, it is not view of a single critic, it would seem that evalu- always constitutive of beauty). Likewise, repre- ative aesthetic properties must supervene on sentational and expressive properties engage nonevaluative qualities of artworks; that is, the imagination and affective capacities in there can be no difference in evaluative prop- satisfying ways free of the costs and dangers erties without some differences in objective often associated with the latter in real life. Of qualities. This amounts to a constraint on significance too is the way that these distinct rational aesthetic judgment: given all the same aesthetic properties interact in the context of objective properties, evaluative judgment must artworks. Formal properties help to determine remain constant, at least for those with fully expressive, behavioral, and representational developed tastes. But the principle of super- qualities, which may in turn enter formal venience fails when we compare judgments structures at higher levels, and so on. Since across equally competent or even ideal critics. elements within works are grasped in terms of

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their contributions to aesthetic properties and aestheticism The doctrine that art should to such complex interactions among them, this be valued for itself alone and not for any pur- makes for an intensely meaningful and rich ex- pose or function it may happen to serve, and perience of these elements as they are perceived. thus opposed to all instrumentalist theories At best, complexes of aesthetic properties in of art. Historically, the idea of art for art’s sake artworks can so engage all our cognitive and is associated with the cult of beauty, which affective capacities as to seem to be distinct had its roots in Kantian aesthetics and the worlds, intentionally designed to challenge Romantic movement, although its potential and satisfy these uniquely human capacities application is wider than that. or faculties. Basic aesthetic properties create The phrase l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) value ultimately by contributing to the con- first became current in France in the first half stitution of such alternative worlds in which we of the nineteenth century as the rallying cry can become fully and fulfillingly engaged. of the aesthetic movement, and was associated with such names as Théophile Gautier and See also aesthetic attitude; aesthetic judg- Baudelaire, and later with Flaubert. The doctrine ment; aesthetic pleasure; beardsley; beauty; became fashionable in England in the second half definition of “art”; expression; formal- of the nineteenth century under the influence ism; representation; senses and art; sibley; first of Walter Pater and later of such luminar- taste. ies as Oscar Wilde, Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, and A. J. Symons (author of The Quest for Corvo), bibliography among others. The movement is famously Aagaard-Mogensen, Lars. 1983. “Aesthetic satirized in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Qualities.” In Essays on Aesthetics. J. Fisher (ed.). Patience, where Wilde appears under the guise Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 21–34. of the poet Bunthorne. In its earliest and most Beardsley, Monroe C. 1973. “What is an Aesthetic uncompromising form, the doctrine asserts not Quality?” Theoria, 39, 50–70. merely that a work of art should be judged Beardsley, Monroe C. 1974. “The Descriptivist only on its internal aesthetic properties, but Account of Aesthetic Attributions,” Revue that any extraneous purpose or function it may Internationale de Philosophie, 28, 336–52. happen to serve must be counted a serious Budd, Malcolm. 1999. “Aesthetic Judgments, defect. Thus, in the preface to his novel Made- Aesthetic Principles and Aesthetic Properties,” European Journal of Philosophy, 7, 295–311. moiselle de Maupin, Gautier argues that “noth- De Clercq, Rafael. 2002. “The Concept of an ing is truly beautiful except that which can Aesthetic Property,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art serve for nothing; whatever is useful is ugly.” Criticism, 60, 167–76. This was in part a reaction to the utilitarian and Goldman, Alan H. 1995. Aesthetic Value. Boulder: materialistic values of the new industrial age. Westview. It can clearly be seen to be an overreaction – to Hutcheson, Francis. 1971 [1725]. An Inquiry into the quote Harold Osborne: Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. New York: Garland. As we survey the art work of the past from the Isenberg, Arnold. 1949. “Critical Communication,” earliest cave art onwards we find that, various as Philosophical Review, 58, 330–44. their uses were, by and large all works of art were Levinson, Jerrold. 2006. Contemplating Art. Oxford: made for a use ...They were essentially utensils Oxford University Press. in the same sort of sense as a suit of armour, a Mitias, Michael (ed.). 1988. Aesthetic Quality and horse’s harness or objects of domestic service are Aesthetic Experience. Amsterdam: Rodopi. utensils, though the purpose they served was not Sibley, Frank. 1959. “A Contemporary Theory of necessarily a material one. (1968: 13) Aesthetic Qualities: Aesthetic Concepts,” Philo- The very idea of “the fine arts,” arts such as sophical Review, 68, 421–50. painting, poetry, music, sculpture, and ballet, in Sparshott, Francis. 1982. The Theory of the Arts. which the aesthetic properties are thought to be Princeton: Princeton University Press. more important than the utilitarian ones, was Stecker, Robert. 2005. Aesthetics and the Philosophy largely an eighteenth-century innovation. By of Art. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, ch. 4. Gautier’s criterion, beauty in its purest form alan h. goldman simply did not exist in art prior to the eighteenth

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century. A far more sensible line is that taken though I don’t believe that only art matters, by André Malraux, who has argued that by I do believe in art for art’s sake” (1951: 104). viewing the art of all times, all places, all cul- Since the aesthetic movement owed much of tures as pure aesthetic objects, divorced from its inspiration to Kant’s powerfully formalistic their original purposes and functions, we have theory in the Critique of Judgment, it is perhaps in effect entered into “an entirely new rela- not surprising that the two doctrines should be tionship with the work of art,” where “the so closely associated. work of art has no other function than to be a A major drawback to a strict formalist work of art.” We have, he says, created for approach is that while the form/content dis- ourselves “a museum without walls” (Malraux tinction is clear enough within the narrow 1974). confines of Kant’s aesthetics, it has a tendency Clearly, to accept this contextless approach to to break down when applied across the board, art as a perfectly legitimate and even desirable especially when applied to the literary arts. one, is to adhere to one of the main tenets of the For instance, if expression in art is treated as an art for art’s sake doctrine. The central core of internal property and not defined in terms of truth in this doctrine can be summarized in self-expression or audience reaction, then no the following way: aesthetic values depend on distinction can usefully be drawn between properties which are internal to the work of art the particular feeling being expressed and the on account of which it is valued for its own sake. manner of its expression. Nevertheless, as In other words, aesthetic merit, thus narrowly Scruton has observed, “aesthetic expression is defined, is a type of final value but clearly dis- always a value: a work that has expression tinguishable from all other final values such as cannot be a total failure” (1974: 213). Other knowledge for its own sake, the love of God, and nonformal aesthetic properties might include doing one’s duty. As the philosopher Victor brilliance of color, sweetness of sound, texture Cousin said, “we must have religion for religion’s and felicity of language. sake, morality for morality’s sake, as with art This leads to the question of whether the for art’s sake . . . the beautiful cannot be the way self-sufficiency of works of art, on which the to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what doctrine of aestheticism depends, is in any way is holy; it leads only to itself” (Cousin 1854). undermined by the presence of affective prop- It is, then, a necessary condition of a work’s erties – properties that express or reflect human being valued for its own sake that it be valued response, such as those that render works of art on account of its intrinsic properties and not moving, exciting, interesting, amusing, enjoy- on its relationship to anything external, such as able. Clearly, these properties are not internal nature, moral and political systems, audience in the required sense. The attitude of the aes- response, and so on. We deem the internal thete, typified by Oscar Wilde, is to regard their properties of a work to be aesthetic not because presence as aesthetically harmful, because “all they belong to a distinct class, like the class art is quite useless” and has no business with of color concepts, but because of the way such external effects. As long as a thing affects they contribute to or detract from its value. us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, Properties commonly identified as aesthetic or appeals strongly to our sympathies, then it include beauty, elegance, grace, daintiness, is outside the proper sphere of art. sweetness of sound, balance, design, unity, However, it is a mistake to treat the affective harmony, expressiveness, depth, movement, response to art as a specific state of mind that texture, and atmosphere. Not all such proper- is produced by the object but that might be ties could accurately be described as formal produced in other ways – as, for example, a properties – expressiveness, for example. This is relaxed frame of mind might be produced important, because most of those who espouse by tranquilizers, meditation, or by reading the doctrine of art for art’s sake do so on the basis escapist literature. For the very identity of the of some sort of formalistic theory. Take, for affective response depends on the identity of example, E. M. Forster: “Works of art, in my opin- the intentional object, and cannot be indepen- ion, are the only objects in the material universe dently described. Thus it would be mislead- to possess internal order, and that is why, ing to say that the purpose of a work of art is

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to interest, amuse, or please, because to find it in and for themselves, that would in itself place interesting, amusing, or pleasing on account of us under a moral obligation to preserve them. its internal properties is, in effect, to value it for Whatever its other defects, the art for art’s its own sake. It is, after all, the work itself that sake approach is surely too restrictive. The aes- is interesting, amusing, or pleasing, and not thetic standpoint is not the only possible stand- the state of mind produced by it. point from which one can approach a work of A related problem that more particularly art, as is shown by the wide diversity of theor- concerns the aestheticist is how to justify the ies about the nature and purpose of art, all treatment of aesthetic values, not only as final illuminating different aspects. To understand values, but as ultimate values alongside truth a work of art adequately, one may need to con- and goodness. Some in the aesthetic move- sider it from more than one aspect. For exam- ment, of whom Walter Pater is a prime exam- ple, if one were to view a piece of medieval ple, see aesthetic values as actually overriding stained glass from a narrowly aesthetic stand- all other values, even moral ones. For Pater, point, one would be unable to appreciate it the aesthetic quest is the highest way of life a as a religious work of art. To refuse to take man can follow. The possibility of such a “philo- account of that aspect, on the grounds that it sophy of life” was anticipated and attacked is aesthetically irrelevant, would be to diminish by Søren Kierkegaard in his Either/Or (1843). rather than to enrich one’s appreciation, and Under the influence of Pater, Wilde’s humor would be a kind of aesthetic puritanism. is sometimes aimed at subverting morality and elevating what may be broadly termed aes- See also aesthetic attitude; aesthetic proper- thetic values, as when he says that “people will ties; beauty; cognitive value of art; formal- only give up war when they consider it to be ism; function of art; kant; morality and art; vulgar instead of wicked,” or, again, that it is ontological contextualism; religion and art; better to be beautiful than to be good. Such wilde. remarks may sound flippant, but anyone who acknowledges the supremacy of aesthetic bibliography values is bound to take them seriously. Not Beardsley, Monroe C. 1958. Aesthetics: Problems in surprisingly, few have been prepared to defend the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Harcourt such an extravagant position, which is usually Brace. stigmatized as decadent. Bradley, A. C. 1909. “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake.” In Oxford Lectures on Poetry. London: Macmillan, Even if one adopts the less extreme position 3–36. of treating aesthetic values as taking their Cousin, Victor. 1854. Lectures on the True, the place alongside other ultimate values rather Beautiful and the Good. O. W. Wright (trans.). New than overriding them, one encounters dif- York: D. Appleton. ficulties. What grounds the claims of aesthetic Ellman, Richard. 1987. Oscar Wilde. Harmonds- values to occupy such a position? It is not worth: Penguin. enough to say, as Harold Osborne (1968: 202) Forster, E. M. 1951. “Art for Art’s Sake.” In Two Cheers does, that aesthetic activity is a self-rewarding for Democracy. New York: Harcourt Brace, 88–95. and therefore self-justifying activity, because Gautier, T. 1981 [1835]. Mademoiselle de Maupin. many self-rewarding activities, like smoking J. Richardson (trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Johnson, R. V. 1969. Aestheticism. London: Methuen. and billiards, are relatively trivial. The high Malraux, André 1974 [1952]. The Voices of Silence. seriousness of aesthetic value could perhaps be S. Gilbert (trans.). London: Paladin. established in two stages: first, by showing that Osborne, Harold. 1968. Aesthetics and Art Theory. aesthetic preferences are not merely private London: Longman. and personal but may be correct and incorrect; Pater, Walter. 1873. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and second, by linking them, if only indirectly, and Poetry. London: Macmillan. to overriding moral values or some more gen- Scruton, Roger. 1974. Art and Imagination. London: eral notion of the “good life.” The second move Methuen. would run counter to the spirit of aestheticism. Wilde, Oscar. 1983. Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. However, if the aestheticists are right to claim V. Holland (ed.). London: Collins. that aesthetic values are ultimately important david whewell

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aesthetics see african a.; amerindian a.; much aesthetic theory was being developed, chinese a.; evolution, art, and a.; feminist the literal sense of taste was the chief point of a.; feminist standpoint a.; indian a.; islamic both comparison and contrast for analyzing a.; japanese a.; objectivity and realism in a.; aesthetic taste. As Kant put it, literal taste is pragmatist a.; race and a.; testimony in a. merely subjective, whereas aesthetic taste is both subjective and universal. With the aesthetic status of food so in ques- aesthetics of food and drink Philosoph- tion, the issue of its standing as an art form ical attention to food and drink is a relatively was more or less moot. Moreover, eating is a recent but burgeoning scholarly enterprise necessity for life, and its practical importance that manifests striking revaluations of what may seem to eclipse any claims for food as art, were previously derogated as merely bodily especially as a “fine art” whose chief purpose experiences. The sources for these changes is aesthetic contemplation. Nonetheless, in the are multiple, including reexamination of the nineteenth century an enthusiastic group of senses in cognition, feminist critiques of the European writers promoted fine dining for its concept of rationality, artistic challenges to aesthetic importance and gastronomy as an fine art traditions, and revisions of the para- art form, taking as their models the new aesthetic meters of the aesthetic – all of which converge theories (Gigante 2005). Their efforts were in attention to embodiment. little noted by philosophy at the time, although they are now gaining retrospective interest. historical background The traditional exclusion of eating and drink- taste and taste qualities ing from the purview of philosophy has ancient If eating preferences are indeed solely dependent and enduring roots. Though a multimodal on individual inclination and taste qualities sensuous experience, eating chiefly and cen- admit of no standard, then it would be difficult trally engages the “bodily” senses of taste to defend a robust account of the aesthetics of and smell, which are considered cognitively food. However, there is no reason to conclude limited compared to the distance senses of that the relative “subjectivity” of taste – under- vision and hearing because they provide re- stood as the complete taste experience that latively little information about the world includes smell and touch (and often vision around (Korsmeyer 1999: ch. 1). (The role of and even hearing) – entails either idiosyncratic touch – the third bodily sense – is somewhat privacy or the absence of standards for excel- ambiguous because it coordinates with vision.) lence. By means of taste one discerns properties The bodily senses are the sources of consider- that are otherwise inaccessible. Hume made able pleasure, but their brand of enjoyment is this point long ago in his essay “Of the often dismissed as merely physical gratification Standard of Taste” (1757) when he introduced that poses risky distractions and temptations. his controversial example of a wine-tasting In fact, food, drink, and sex provide the typical contest to illustrate what he called delicacy of exemplars of pleasures that should be gov- taste – the ability to perceive fine qualities of erned or avoided. Philosophers from Plato to objects. Contemporary philosophers have further Hegel have observed that physical enjoyment investigated the complexities of subjectivity should be set aside in preference for the mental to vindicate both an “objective” standing for and spiritual pleasures of true beauty. tastes and the aesthetic significance of eating and In addition, food and drink have not been con- drinking. sidered good candidates for aesthetic attention Tastes are undeniably subjective in that because of the way taste qualities are usually they need to be directly experienced by a per- understood. The saying “There’s no disputing ceiving subject. This fact appears particularly about taste” sums up the philosophical neglect troublesome for taste because its causal triggers of qualities that appear to be mere matters of per- cannot be easily identified externally in the sonal preference, different for each individual, way that visual qualities can (although recent and not important enough to demand stand- studies in taste chemistry have greatly illumin- ards. Indeed, in the eighteenth century when so ated the determinants of flavors). In contrast to

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the “higher” senses of vision and hearing, the accounts of food inasmuch as there is a objects of taste are never distant; they are lit- widespread assumption that when eating is erally inside one. Nonetheless, taste registers worthy of aesthetic attention, it qualifies as qualities of food and drink that as a rule fine, gourmet dining rather than the mere normal perceivers are all disposed to detect. satisfaction of appetite. (Indeed, eating when In other words, the degree to which taste appetite is not acute was for the nineteenth- experience is subjective is consistent with the century gastronomers mentioned above the claim that tastes are also of their substances gustatory equivalent of disinterested con- (Sweeney 1999, 2007; Machamer 2007; templation (Gigante 2005).) Nonetheless, the Smith 2007a; Bender 2008; Shaffer 2007). If inclusion of eating and drinking in the pur- there were no objective pole to tasting, there view of aesthetic activities still represents an would be no possibility of developing discrimi- important modification of the old standard of nating taste, which entails that there is some- disinterestedness for aesthetic pleasure and an thing out there to discriminate. The possibility inclusion of bodily experiences in aesthetic of developing expert taste is one dimension of practice (Sibley 2001; Brady 2005; Burnham the aesthetic potency of food and drink, one that & Skilleås 2008). perhaps has been most recognized with wine (Smith 2007b; Allhoff 2008). food, drink, and art The character of taste qualities extends to While the aesthetic dimension of eating and include a cognitive dimension to flavors that is drinking is a point of agreement among those often overlooked. Tastes themselves are only who theorize on the subject, the standing of food fully comprehended when the identity of the sub- as an art form remains unsettled. Difference stance and its place in culture are in evidence, on this question pivots around the concept of and this opens the door for claims that tastes art and whether or not the values of food and themselves impart meaning – meaning that drink are sufficiently similar to the values of manifests the pervasive and complex roles that (other) art forms. Most disagreement centers eating practices play in ceremonies, rituals, on whether culinary art has claims to be con- and everyday habits (Heldke 2003). When one sidered a fine art, for its qualifications as an attends to the meanings that foods carry, the applied art are evident. parameters of aesthetic attention widen to There are at least two questions that need to include place of origin and modes of production be addressed here: Can we approach food and and preparation. Though at first such matters drink in the same appreciative manner as we may appear aesthetically extrinsic, they enter approach fine arts such as music or painting? into what might be considered the style of And, is it appropriate to consider foods in the food and drink and their cultural properties. category of artworks? To the first question That is, flavor is not just analogous to artistic there is a fair degree of assent, for demonstra- “form”; it suggests “content” as well. What is bly one can appreciate the sequence of tastes of more, certain concepts central to art, such as a meal or the notes of wine with an attention authenticity, are equally relevant to judging and discernment that is parallel to the attention food and drink, for taste qualities concern the and discernment required to listen sensitively to identity of the sapid substance and how it was a concert performance (Sweeney 1999; Bach made (Jacquette 2007; Gale 2008). 2007). Frequently the comparisons chosen are Directing aesthetic attention to food has from the performance arts, for neither a per- several implications for the concept of the formance nor a meal endures for more than a aesthetic itself, for it erases the traditional dis- short time (Monroe 2007). How far the com- tinction between aesthetic and sensuous plea- parison can be sustained is more disputed, sures. The satisfaction of appetite was for years although absent the tradition that emphasizes the paradigmatic “interested” pleasure, and fine art, foods are more readily accommodated aesthetic pleasure was considered “disinter- within the concept of art (Saito 2007). ested’ – free from the self-directed concerns Up until this point the tacit assumption has that limit judgments to personal relevance. been that the measure of success in gustatory Some of these values linger in aesthetic aesthetics is discriminating pleasure. However,

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pleasure alone, no matter how sophisticated, Allhoff, Fritz & Monroe, Dave (eds.). 2007. Food and is a limited achievement, especially in com- Philosophy. Malden: Blackwell. parison to the wider scope of values sought Bach, Kent. 2007. “Knowledge, Wine, and Taste.” In in art. Attention to aesthetic savoring suits Questions of Taste. Barry C. Smith (ed.). Oxford: approaches familiar from Dewey that accen- Signal Books, 21–40. tuate experience (Kuehn 2007). Concepts of Bender, John W. 2008. “What the Wine Critic Tells Us.” In Wine and Philosophy. Fritz Allhoff (ed.). art that emphasize their meanings may seem to Malden: Blackwell, 125–36. preclude food and drink, which are widely Brady, Emily. 2005. “Sniffing and Savoring.” In The held to exhibit a paucity of message or expres- Aesthetics of Everyday Life. A. Light & J. Smith sion (Telfer 1996; Sibley 2001). However, as (eds.). New York: Columbia University Press, mentioned above, a full investigation of taste 177–93. qualities extends to the meanings of flavors Burnham, Douglas & Skilleås, Ole Martin. 2008. in history and society, which in turn connect “You’ll Never Drink Alone.” In Wine and to the significant roles that food and drink play Philosophy. Fritz Allhoff (ed.). Malden: Blackwell, in ceremony, hospitality, and daily practice. 157–71. Whether or not one categorizes food as art, its Gale, George. 2008. “Who Cares If You Like It.” In Wine and Philosophy. Fritz Allhoff (ed.). Malden: aesthetic qualities include its cultural signific- Blackwell, 172–85. ance and the meanings it conveys. Gigante, Denise. 2005. Taste: A Literary History. Not only does the aesthetic exercise of the New Haven: Yale University Press. proximal senses draw attention to embodi- Hales, Steven D. (ed.). 2007. Beer and Philosophy. ment, but our bodies themselves are palpably Malden: Blackwell. changed by eating and drinking – and by Heldke, Lisa. 2003. Exotic Hungers. New York: deprivation and excess. The aspect of food that Routledge. involves growth, change, and death is fore- Jacquette, Dale. 2007. “Thirst for Authenticity.” In grounded by some contemporary artists who Beer and Philosophy. Steven D. Hales (ed.). Malden: include foodstuffs or other transient sub- Blackwell, 15–30. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 1999. Making Sense of Taste. stances in their work. Artists who make use of Ithaca: Cornell University Press. foods often exploit the meanings implicit in Kuehn, Glenn. 2005. “How Can Food be Art?” decay and putrefaction, in counterpoint to the In The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. A. Light & emphasis on savoring that is more commonly J. Smith (eds.). New York: Columbia University explored in the philosophical aesthetics of Press,194–212. food. The fact that eating is a physical activity Lintott, Sheila. 2007. “Sublime Hunger.” In Food with perilous borders – including fasting and and Philosophy. Fritz Allhoff & Dave Monroe (eds.). starvation, not to mention the destruction of Malden: Blackwell, 58–70. sentient creatures that are eaten – can give it Machamer, Peter. 2007. “How to Properly Dispute a profundity and risk that some argue bears com- Taste.” In Beer and Philosophy. Steven D. Hales (ed.). Malden: Blackwell, 52–64. parison with the sublime (Korsmeyer 1999’; Monroe, Dave. 2007. “Can Food be Art?” In Food and Weiss 2002; Lintott, 2007). Eating sustains Philosophy. Fritz Allhoff & Dave Monroe (eds.). life and vitalizes community, but at the same Malden: Blackwell, 133–44. time awareness of mortality adds depth to Saito, Yuriko. 2007. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford: the aesthetic dimensions of food and drink, Oxford University Press. and philosophic reflection on these elements Shaffer, Michael. 2007. “Taste, Gastronomic Exper- amplifies comparisons with artworks with pro- tise, and Objectivity.” In Food and Philosophy. Fritz found and difficult import. Allhoff & Dave Monroe (eds.). Malden: Blackwell, 73–87. aesthetic attitude; aesthetic proper- Sibley, Frank. 2001. “Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics.” See also In Approaches to Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford Univer- ties; aesthetics of the everyday; japanese sity Press, 207–55. aesthetics; taste. Smith, Barry C. 2007a. “The Objectivity of Taste and Tasting.” In Questions of Taste. Barry C. Smith bibliography (ed.). Oxford: Signal Books, 41–73. Allhoff, Fritz (ed.). 2008. Wine and Philosophy. Smith, Barry C. (ed.). 2007b. Questions of Taste. Malden: Blackwell. Oxford: Signal Books.

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Sweeney, Kevin W. 1999. “Alice’s Discriminating This aspect of our experience of the environ- Palate,” Philosophy and Literature, 23, 17–31. mental object of appreciation is intensified by the Sweeney, Kevin. 2007. “Can a Soup be Beautiful?” unruly nature of the object itself. The object of In Food and Philosophy. Fritz Allhoff & Dave Monroe appreciation is not the more or less discrete, (eds.). Malden: Blackwell, 117–32. stable, and self-contained object of traditional art. Telfer, Elizabeth. 1996. Food for Thought. London: It is rather an environment; consequently, not Routledge. Weiss, Allen S. 2002. Feast and Folly. Albany: State only does it change as we move within it, it also University of New York Press. changes of its own accord. Environments are constantly in motion, in both the short and the carolyn korsmeyer long term. Even if we remain motionless, the wind brushes our face and the clouds pass before our eyes; and, with time, changes con- aesthetics of the environment Much of tinue seemingly without limit: night falls, days our aesthetic appreciation is not limited to pass, seasons come and go. Moreover, envir- art, but rather is directed toward the world at onments not only move through time, they large. Moreover, we appreciate not only pristine extend through space, and again seemingly nature – sunsets and mountains – but also our without limit. There are no predetermined more mundane surroundings: the solitude of boundaries for our environment; as we move, a neighborhood park on a rainy evening, the it moves with us and changes, but it does not chaos of a bustling morning marketplace, end; indeed, it continues unending in every the view from the road. Thus, there is a place direction. In other words, the environmental for the notion of environmental aesthetics, object of appreciation does not come to us for in such cases – in our appreciation of the “preselected” and “framed” as do traditional world at large – our aesthetic appreciation artistic objects, neither in time as a drama or a often encompasses our total surroundings: musical composition, nor in space as a painting our environment. Environments may be large or a sculpture. or small, more or less natural, mundane or These differences between environments exotic, but in every case it is central that it is and traditional artistic objects relate to an an environment that we appreciate. This fact even deeper dissimilarity between the two. The signals several important dimensions of such latter, works of art, are the products of artists. appreciation, which in turn contribute to the The artist is quintessentially a designer who central issues of environmental aesthetics. creates a work by embodying a design in an These dimensions follow from the deline- object. Works of art are thus tied to their ation of the field of inquiry. The “object” of designers not only causally but conceptually; appreciation, the “aesthetic object,” is our what a work is and what it means has much environment, our own surroundings, and to do with its designer and its design. However, thus we are in a sense immersed in the object environments are paradigmatically not the of appreciation. This fact has the following products of designers. In the typical case, both ramifications. We are in that which we appre- designer and human design are lacking. Rather, ciate, and that which we appreciate is also environments come about “naturally”; they that from which we appreciate. If we move, we change, they grow, they develop either by nat- move within the object of our appreciation and ural processes or by means of human agency, thereby change our relationship to it and at but even in the latter case only rarely are they the same time change the object itself. More- the result of a designer explicitly embodying over, as our surroundings, the object impinges a design. Thus, the typical environmental upon all our senses. As we reside in it or move object of appreciation is unruly in yet another through it, we can see it, hear it, feel it, smell way: neither its nature nor its meaning is it, and perhaps even taste it. In brief, the expe- determined by a designer and a design. rience of the environmental object of appreci- The upshot is that in our aesthetic appreci- ation from which aesthetic appreciation must ation of the world at large we are initially be fashioned is intimate, total, and somewhat confronted by – indeed, intimately and totally engulfing. engulfed in – something that forces itself upon

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all our senses, is limited neither in time nor in resources to draw on in our appreciation of space, and is constrained concerning neither its environments, especially the object of appreci- nature nor its meaning. We are immersed in a ation itself, but also the appreciator and the potential object of appreciation, and our task knowledge that the latter has of the former. is to achieve some aesthetic appreciation of Thus, in the aesthetic appreciation of an envi- that object. Moreover, the appreciation must be ronment, these elements can play roles similar fashioned anew, without the aid of frames, the to those played in the aesthetic appreciation of guidance of designs, or the direction of designers. traditional art by the designer and the design. Thus, in our aesthetic appreciation of the world In appreciating the world at large, we typically at large we must begin with the most basic fulfill some of the roles of a designer and yet let of questions, those of exactly what and how to the world provide us with its own “design.” aesthetically appreciate. These questions raise Thus, when confronted by an environment, the main issues of environmental aesthetics, we select the ways that are relevant to its essentially issues concerning what resources, appreciation and set the frames that limit it in if any, are available for answering them. time and space. Moreover, as designers cre- Concerning the questions of what and how atively interact with that which they design, we to aesthetically appreciate in an environment, likewise creatively interact with an environ- there are two main lines of thought. One, which ment in light of our knowledge of it. In this way is sometimes characterized as subjectivist or an environment itself, by its nature, provides its perhaps even as skeptical, holds that, since in own “design” and can bring us to appreciate the appreciation of environments we seem- it “as what it is” and “on its own terms.” In short, ingly lack the resources normally involved in the the environment offers the necessary guidance aesthetic appreciation of art, these questions in terms of which we, the appreciators, by our cannot be properly answered. That is to say selecting and framing, can answer the questions that since we lack resources such as frames, of what and how to appreciate – and thereby designs, and designers, and the guidance they fashion our initial and somewhat chaotic expe- provide, the aesthetic appreciation of environ- rience of an environment into genuine aes- ments, unlike the appreciation of art, cannot thetic appreciation – appreciation that is both be judged to be either appropriate or inappro- appropriate and serious. priate. Moreover, even if it could be so judged, As is typical with disputes in aesthetics it would remain, in comparison with that of between subjectivist or skeptical positions art, at best free and fanciful – or at worst and more objectivist ones, the burden of proof superficial and shallow as opposed to serious and falls on the latter. Thus, it is important for deep. An even more skeptical line suggests the objectivist account to be elaborated and that perhaps the appreciation of environments supported by examples. The basic idea of the is not genuine aesthetic appreciation at all. objectivist position is that our appreciation is Concerning the world at large, as opposed to guided by the nature of the object of appreci- works of art, the closest we can come to appro- ation. Thus, knowledge of the object’s nature, of priate aesthetic appreciation is simply to give our- its genesis, type, and properties, is essential for selves over to being immersed, to respond as we serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation. For will, and to enjoy what we can. In contrast to example, in appropriately appreciating a natu- the aesthetic appreciation of art, the aesthetic ral environment such as an alpine meadow appreciation of environments is marked by it is useful to know, for instance, that it has devel- openness and freedom. And whether or not oped under constraints imposed by the climate the resultant experience is appropriate in some of high altitude, and that diminutive size in sense or even really aesthetic in any sense is not flora is an adaptation to such constraints. of much consequence. This knowledge can guide our appreciation A second line of thought concerning the of the environment so that, for example, we questions of what to aesthetically appreciate avoid imposing inappropriately large frames, in an environment and how to do so is fre- which may cause us to simply overlook minia- quently characterized as objectivist or cognitivist. ture wild flowers. In such a case, we will It argues that there are in fact important neither appreciatively note their wonderful

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adjustment to their situation nor attune our Carlson, Allen. 2000. Aesthetics and the Environment: senses to their subtle fragrance, texture, and The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture. hue. Similarly, in appropriately appreciating London: Routledge. human-altered environments such as those Carlson, Allen. 2007. “Environmental Aesthetics.” In of modern agriculture, it is helpful to know The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. E. N. Zalta about the functional utility of cultivating huge (ed.). Available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ environmental-aesthetics/ fields devoted to single crops. Such knowledge Carlson, Allen & Berleant, Arnold (eds.). 2004. The encourages us to enlarge and adjust our frames, Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Peterborough: our senses, and even our attitudes, so as to Broadview. more appreciatively accommodate the expansive Carlson, Allen & Lintott, Sheila (eds.). 2008. Nature, uniform landscapes that are the inevitable Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to result of such farming practices. Duty. New York: Columbia University Press. The basic assumption of environmental Kemal, Salim & Gaskell, Ivan (eds.). 1993. Landscape, aesthetics is that every environment – natural, Natural Beauty, and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge rural, or urban, large or small, ordinary or University Press. extraordinary – offers much to see, to hear, to Sepänmaa, Yrjö. 1993. The Beauty of Environment: A General Model for Environmental Aesthetics. 2nd feel, much to aesthetically appreciate. The dif- edn. Denton: Environmental Ethics Books. ferent environments of the world at large are as aesthetically rich and rewarding as are allen carlson works of art. However, it also must be recognized that special problems are posed for aesthetic appreciation by the very nature of environ- aesthetics of the everyday The discipline of ments, by the fact that they are our own sur- aesthetics has tended, especially for the twen- roundings, that they are unruly and chaotic tieth century, to focus on encounters with the objects of appreciation, and that we are plunged fine arts and, to a lesser extent, with nature. into them without appreciative guidelines. Both Much attention has been devoted to the projects the subjectivist and the objectivist approaches of defining art and establishing its ontology, recognize the problems and the potential and accounts of aesthetic experience and aes- involved in the aesthetic appreciation of envi- thetic properties have been derived primarily ronments. The main difference is that while from considerations related to Western art- the latter attempts to ground an appropriate aes- works. In the last few decades, though, there has thetic appreciation for different environments been a movement away from the narrowly art- in our knowledge of their particular natures, oriented approach and toward recognition of the the former simply invites us to enjoy them all continuity between experiences of fine art and as freely and as fully as we can and will. In the experiences from other domains of life. This last analysis, perhaps both alternatives should movement has given rise to an emerging sub- be pursued. discipline often known as “everyday aesthetics” or “the aesthetics of the everyday.” Theorists in See also aesthetic attitude; aesthetics of the the aesthetics of the everyday typically claim that everyday; artifact, art as; evolution, art, and objects and activities not essentially connected aesthetics. to art or nature can have aesthetic properties and/or that they can give rise to significant bibliography aesthetic experiences. Aesthetic analysis, then, Berleant, Arnold. 1992. The Aesthetics of Environ- is appropriately extended to virtually all areas ment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. of life. Berleant, Arnold & Carlson, Allen (eds.). 2007. The John Dewey’s (1934) Art as Experience has had Aesthetics of Human Environments. Peterborough: a great influence on contemporary work in Broadview. Brady, Emily. 2003. Aesthetics of the Natural everyday aesthetics. Dewey suggested that the Environment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University experiences of aesthetic exaltation associated Press. with art can be traced back to processes that Budd, Malcolm. 2002. The Aesthetic Appreciation of predate art and, indeed, that both humans and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. other animals partake in. Aesthetic experience,

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according to Dewey, is on a continuum with person, an attitude which, he suggests, is quite the deep feelings of fulfillment that arise naturally taken toward the objects of ordinary from interacting with the environment to life as well. The traditional division of the satisfy one’s needs. What distinguishes aes- senses into “higher” and “lower,” and the thetic experiences from nonaesthetic aspects of associated suggestion that aesthetic experi- experience, he claims, is not that they involve ence must be exclusively the province of the response to a particular set of objects, as many former, has been challenged as arbitrary, aesthetic traditionalists would claim, but that with the result that ordinary activities involv- they exhibit qualitative unity as well as a sense ing taste and smell (Korsmeyer 1999; Brady of closure or consummation. These qualities 2005: ch. 10) or touch (Shusterman 2000: can belong even to simple experiences like that chs. 7, 10) have been rendered eligible for aes- of lifting a stone, as long as it is done with thetic consideration. sufficient attention (1934: 44). Dewey’s view is The sharp distinction between the fine arts thus highly amenable to the application of aes- and other domains of life has also been chal- thetic concepts throughout everyday life. lenged by the observation that art emerges out Despite its significant expansion of the terri- of, and is in many contexts integrated with, tory of the aesthetic, Dewey’s view has been everyday practices. Crispin Sartwell (1995) criticized as too restrictive by some aestheti- and Yuriko Saito (2007) observe that, particu- cians of the everyday. Mindful of contem- larly in non-Western cultures, works of art porary developments, they observe that many and aesthetically oriented design objects are objects in the fine arts lack unity and closure or often made to enhance everyday life. David give rise to experiences that are “disjointed, Novitz (1992) notes the implausibility of seeing severed, and jarring” (Novitz 1992: 9), but are popular art forms as segregated from everyday nonetheless counted as aesthetic by traditional life: works of television and pop music often art-oriented theories. Indeed, their fragmented take the mundane as their subject matter, and nature may be precisely what gives them their their consumption is integrated with the ordin- distinctive aesthetic qualities (Irvin 2008). It ary activities of life. Moreover, recent develop- cannot, then, be a necessary condition for an ments within the Western fine arts have experience’s being aesthetic that it exhibit arguably brought art and life closer together, as unity or closure. This conclusion is in line with ordinary objects have been exhibited in gallery recent developments in accounts of aesthetic settings and ordinary sounds have been integ- experience, which no longer tend to claim that rated into avant-garde musical compositions. an experience must be positive in valence or These techniques seem to invite us to apply to must have a particular qualitative character everyday objects and events the same aesthetic to count as aesthetic. regard traditionally reserved for artworks. Though particular aspects of Dewey’s account While much of the defense of everyday aes- may be criticized, the Deweyan strategy of thetics has grown out of observations related deflating traditional distinctions between the to art, another important force has been the fine arts and other domains of life has remained burgeoning of environmental aesthetics. While central to the aesthetics of the everyday. Some taking its initial impetus from the Kantian theorists have observed that the aesthetic phe- interest in the sublime, environmental aesth- nomena invoked in traditional discussions of art etics has evolved to include consideration of a are also present in other domains of life such wide variety of environments and phenomena. as sport, sex, and everyday decision-making An interest in natural science has moved some (Kupfer 1983). Moreover, aestheticians have environmental aestheticians to acknowledge increasingly rejected the Kantian notion that the difficulty of drawing a principled distinc- the aesthetic attitude involves holding oneself tion between the natural and the nonnatural: distant from the object of contemplation and since humans are animals, and their artifacts, remaining indifferent to any nonartistic func- behaviors, and environments arise in large tions it may serve. Arnold Berleant (1991) part out of evolved capacities, the natural and argues that the proper attitude toward art- nonnatural seem to be best thought of as lying works is one of deep engagement of the whole along a continuum rather than on opposite

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sides of a sharp divide. If an aesthetic regard can artifacts that serve a variety of everyday func- properly be cast on natural objects and envir- tions (1995: 9). onments, then there is no obvious reason not Attempts to demonstrate the theoretical to extend it further. More generally, the atten- interest of everyday aesthetics bring out a tion to environments, rather than isolated methodological tension that inheres in the dis- objects, has led to the recognition of a mode of cipline. On the one hand, in order to demonstrate aesthetic experience that is complex, immer- that it really is a subdiscipline of aesthetics, the sive, and multisensory, and thus readily appli- aesthetics of the everyday must demonstrate cable to everyday life. that, at some level, it is fundamentally con- Once the barriers separating everyday life cerned with the same concepts and phenomena from art and nature have been broken down, that have preoccupied mainstream aesthetics. a positive case remains to be made for the This is why so much of the discipline has been interest of applying aesthetic concepts to ordi- concerned to break down barriers between art nary objects and phenomena. The interest is and other domains of life. On the other hand, claimed to be both practical and theoretical. though, if it is to be of interest, everyday aes- From a practical perspective, the claim is often thetics must show that it has a distinctive made that a serious interest in the aesthetics contribution to make to aesthetics by virtue of the everyday promises a richer life, as we of introducing a distinctive subject matter, attend to satisfactions that are readily avail- methodology, or set of aesthetic concepts. This able but that we may not have tended to notice tension continues to animate the discipline: or take advantage of. Indeed, Shusterman aestheticians of the everyday continually refer (2000: ch. 10) suggests that everyday aesthet- back to and demonstrate connections to tradi- ics should include practical training in bodywork tional aesthetic objects, properties, and experi- and related disciplines, precisely to secure the ences, even while suggesting that mainstream benefit of a more satisfying life. The aesthetics aesthetics has been too restrictive in its treat- of the everyday also has moral implications. ment of them. Kupfer argues that “the aesthetic dimensions in The breadth of content and approach advo- everyday life are . . . instrumental in develop- cated within the aesthetics of the everyday ing people into more deliberate, autonomous leaves the discipline vulnerable to two objections. community members” (1983: 3). Irvin (2008) First, one might suspect that it renders the argues that aesthetic satisfactions in everyday notion of the aesthetic so broad as to be mean- life can be harnessed to support moral beha- ingless. If aesthetic experience can happen at any vior. And as Sartwell (1995) points out, in time, can take anything as its object, and need many cultural and, especially, spiritual traditions have no particular qualitative feel, is there the moral and the aesthetic are seamlessly really any distinction between the aesthetic integrated within everyday life. aspects of experience and its other aspects? From a theoretical perspective, it has been sug- Such a concern is presumably what motivated gested that the aesthetics of the everyday is of Dewey to require qualitative unity and closure: special interest because everyday phenomena these criteria ensure that not every possible may require aesthetic insights and concepts experience will fall into the category of the aes- distinct from those needed to account for art and thetic, and thus secure the nontriviality of the nature (Saito 2007: 5). Many of the aesthetic concept. If such requirements are rejected, it properties exhibited by everyday phenomena, for appears that any experience may qualify as instance, may be different from those derived aesthetic just by virtue of having a qualitative from a prominently art-oriented aesthetics feel. This is a conclusion that aesthetic tradi- (Leddy 1995). At the same time, the aesthetics tionalists are likely to find unpalatable, even as of the everyday may be used as a source of aestheticians of the everyday may welcome it. insights about the nature of art: Sartwell sug- Second, since everyday aesthetics tends to gests, based on observations about the continuity emphasize aesthetic experiences and objects between art and everyday life in many cul- that are not exalted in character, one may tures, that art should be redefined as “skilled wonder if it really warrants our attention. and devoted making” that may eventuate in Would it not ultimately be more rewarding to

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focus on great artworks and the natural sublime, African aesthetics Art is a universal human which promise more significant edification? phenomenon. It is the expression of the com- The aesthetician of the everyday may reply pulsive innate human tendency toward cre- that the aesthetic pleasures of everyday life are ativity. It is one of the main engagements and worth acknowledging because they are available accomplishments of human beings that dis- to everyone, even those who lack access to art tinguishes humans from other beings, as the and untouched nature. Moreover, even if the tex- means by which humans are capable of focus- ture of everyday life is such as to yield aesthetic ing consciousness to achieve and express their satisfactions that are relatively subtle, con- perception, comprehension, apprehension, an- tinual awareness of these satisfactions may offer notation, demarcation, appreciation, and docu- a payoff in quality of life that is very much mentation of their peculiar lived realities. It is worth having. in this regard that it is meaningful to speak of African art, while being mindful of the het- See also aesthetic attitude; aesthetic proper- erogeneity of the natural habitats, languages, ties; aesthetics of food and drink; aesthetics ethnicities, and cultures of the many African peo- of the environment; dewey; evolution, art, ples, as there are some common African cultural and aesthetics; japanese aesthetics; popular affinities and identities that have been manifested art. over many millennia. African art encompasses visual and nonvisual, bibliography tangible and nontangible elements, such that vir- Berleant, Arnold. 1991. Art and Engagement. tually every aspect of living constitutes a verit- Philadelphia: Temple University Press. able domain for art. It can be conjectured that Brady, Emily. 2005. “Sniffing and Savoring: The the two tropes that facilitate the understanding Aesthetics of Smells and Tastes.” In The Aesthetics of African aesthetics are beauty and pleasant- of Everyday Life. A. Light & J. M. Smith (eds.). New ness. Beauty and pleasantness make the object York: Columbia University Press, 177–193. of art and the process or act of creating worthy Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: art special, distinguishing art from nonart Perigee. objects, because the latter are not deliberately Irvin, Sherri. 2008. “The Pervasiveness of the made by humans to be artistic. Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 48, 29–44. At the time of their production, most art Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 1999. Making Sense of Taste: objects often reflect a multiplicity of intention, Food and Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University purpose, utility, and appreciation. These may be Press. masked by the search that pervades contem- Kupfer, Joseph H. 1983. Experience as Art: Aesthetics porary consumerist consciousness for the net in Everyday Life. Albany: State University of New financial worth of art objects, with the result that York Press. their value is misplaced. In most cases, the Leddy, Thomas. 1995. “Everyday Surface Aesthetic makers of African art, in its indigenous setting, Qualities: ‘Neat,’ ‘Messy,’ ‘Clean,’ ‘Dirty’,” Journal set no monetary value on their effort, not of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53, 259–68. because they do not understand that they are Light, Andrew & Smith, Jonathan M. (eds.). 2005. The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. New York: Columbia incurring costs in the production or because they University Press. cannot put a value on the effort they have put Novitz, David. 1992. The Boundaries of Art. into the production, but more importantly Philadelphia: Temple University Press. because they understand that the beauty and Saito, Yuriko. 2007. Everyday Aesthetics. New York: pleasantness of what is produced, the truth Oxford University Press. and meaning it purveys, and the sentiment Sartwell, Crispin. 1995. The Art of Living: Aesthetics and social consciousness invested in it, are of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions. Albany: beyond financial quantification. In this regard, State University of New York Press. the art object is a gift to the person who has com- Shusterman, Richard. 2000. Pragmatist Aesthetics: missioned it, as well as to the society in which Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. 2nd edn. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. it is produced, reflecting and enriching that society’s moral, social, spiritual, and other sherri irvin values. The society collectively owns the art

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object, as much as does its individual “owner”; to those who form the intended target of that hence the unusual reticence with which most critique, in order that the point be properly Africans sell art objects. driven home without alienation or disruption of Some of the areas in which art is manifested, communal existence. showing the twin consciousness of beauty and In Africa, art is the epitome of the culture and pleasantness, are in (1) the architecture of civilization of society, representing the human used or inhabited space; (2) the dress, appear- capacity to enjoy the sublime aspects of life, ance, deportment, and adornment of persons regardless of the wider situation, without for various occasions and vocations; (3) the leading to a rich/poor divide in cultural con- content of speech and the manner of speak- sciousness. In fact, most African art functions ing as befits the audience and occasion; (4) seamlessly, because it transcends artificial divi- decorations that emphasize and enhance the sions to present itself to every member of soci- beauty and pleasantness of homes, spaces, and ety. To this end, it is clear that some artistic the wider world; (5) the capacity to appreciate expressions record the skepticism of the critical art in nature – such as when animal, tree, members of society, those who take issue with river, rock, celestial appearance, and behavior their society’s epistemological, metaphysical, become narratives underlining an architec- moral, religious, political, and scientific beliefs, tonic of beauty and pleasure, leading to forma- its received knowledge. These individuals often tion of cosmologies, cosmogonies, ontologies, find ingenious ways of expressing their alter- metonyms, metaphors, and mythologies; (6) native views without failing to entertain, regard- the humble display of the performer’s skill and less of how arcane the views may seem at the talent; (7) efforts to observe the highest pro- time. They may even record their defiance of and fessional and moral standards in whatever is nonconformity to the orthodox and popular done to capture and enrich truth; (8) the dis- positions embraced by the majority in various play of good habits and respectful mannerisms ways, making art not only a means of cele- in private and public spaces; (9) the care taken brating the patterns of cooperation of members to ensure the maintenance of equilibrium and of society, but also a medium of protest. For moderation in the various modes of being of example, among the Yoruba certain ways in the living, the dead, and the unborn; (10) the which men wear their caps and women tie maintenance of proper and edifying relationships their headgear clearly signal a protest against within and outside families; and (11) efforts the norm, reflecting their view that in society toward the development of future generations certain wrongs need redressing. Yoruba artists and filial bonding with family members and also question conformity through stories, prac- society. tical jokes, songs, sculpture, bodily adornment, There are three elements that contribute hairstyle, dress, and music (using both the to African aesthetics. First, there is the skill, language and music itself and their choice dexterity, and consciousness and other mental of instruments to make the point), and even faculties involved in the production of true silence, generated at appropriate moments in artistic forms of life. Second, there is the final out- conversation and theatrical performance. come of the effort, the extent to which it meets Essentially, art is an integral part of the con- the remit that impelled it in terms of finesse, truth science of any society. The way its practitio- of representation, orientation, and integration. ners carry out their trade will help to determine Third, there is the moral or ethical element of the epistemological engineering and reengin- art – how far it is morally edifying, truthful, and eering that the social fabric must undergo acceptable, or denigrating and unacceptable; continuously. Even when there is borrowing how far it conduces to the interests of society from others, this has to be done with as much as a whole in affirming and promoting har- faithfulness and honesty as possible, recogniz- mony and cultural progress. Any art that is ing the debt (perhaps with tongue in cheek), and skeptically oriented and infused with cynicism, acknowledging the reason for the borrowing. as in carefully choreographed and intelligently Thus there is a tendency to speak of the ori- orchestrated critiques of power and wealth, ginal artwork by comparing it with copies; even has to be not only beautiful but pleasant, even where there are no observable distinctions

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between them, the original is preferred and maintained, emulated, and perpetuated. This attracts a higher accolade. constitutes a regulatory code of conduct, for There is also often a clear distinction between leaders and their followers that covers all aspects artworks and mere tools. One may have to use of life, from dress, eating, and forms of greeting, a very “ugly” tool to perform a task, and may to games and work ethics, political leadership, feel repelled every time one uses it, but if it relaxation, and festivals. It extends to what is the best tool, or the only one available or most can be exhibited in private and public space, how suited for the job at hand, one is foolhardy and where they can be exhibited, and so on. to worry about taste, instead of being clear- In many African societies, the art of chil- sighted about the effectiveness and efficiency drearing is suffused with person-affirming of the tool in the performance of the task at and individuality-developing literature, songs, hand, as no further consideration is relevant. dance, paintings, and other cultural parapher- This is not far from the Yoruba understanding nalia. Also, while the other-regarding aspect of of the difference between beauty in character social existence is emphasized, the need for the and physical beauty: the wise Yoruba man or individual to acknowledge himself or herself woman recommends that one should marry as a individual, and as a person, with a name, not for physical beauty but for its ethical form a destiny, a calling, etc., is instilled in the child and beauty in behavior, for it can be said that from the beginning, such that, while he or she “The lady may be beautiful in looks, but spoil shares a common human destiny of being and her beauty with bad character.” But in the of responsibility for the survival of the species, absence of the combination of physical beauty his or her ability to make a difference is never and beauty of character, it is better to marry disregarded or compromised. someone who is not (so) beautiful but who is There is a clear relationship between art and known to have been properly brought up by his morality, as the different arts are educational or her parents and acknowledged to have good media for the training of the young in society. character (i.e., an omoluabi, a well-cultured, In this regard, there is room for academic dis- highly respectful, and morally upright person). course to the extent that it will lead to an Whenever comparisons are made in Yoruba informed decision as to the proper course of culture, acuity of observation is emphasized. action. This is important because bad art can Language itself embodies this search for subtle have deleterious effects: (1) people can be points of comparison, and there is a general insis- deceived by it into false complacency, similar tence that the meaning of any comparative to what happens when religion becomes the claim be clear, as a corollary of the more gen- opium of the people; (2) it can be responsible for eral requirement that the young be given clear creating unfounded euphoria, especially in instruction in the virtues. In all instances of com- untutored and uncultured minds; (3) it can parison in Yoruba culture, for example, acuity misrepresent reality; and (4) it can lead people of observation is emphasized. It is important to to have false impressions of their capabilities, note that there is a combination of an epi- similar to what happens when people relate stemic discernment that has led to a noting to their environment under the influence of and incorporation of comparative ideas into drugs. In these ways, such art destroys psychic the corpus of language, and to insistence both harmony rather than reinforcing it, and stirs up on understanding the meaning of the message wrong emotions and false beliefs, thus confus- and on the clarity with which the young are ing rather than clarifying reality. instructed in the virtues. We should remember that the workings of art Order and responsibility are important within a culture involve the appreciation of and unavoidable requisites of all aspects of more than artworks alone; it is equally import- civilized life in any society and any attempt to ant to recognize that every artist loves applause. compromise on them always involves a great African artists, in all walks of life, are appreci- human, cultural, and material cost to society. ated within their various societies. For, as Consequently, the arts to which children and these societies often recognize, praise begets other members of society are exposed should further excellence, while failure to appreciate can reflect the values that are worthy to be developed, stymie creativity, if not totally destroy it.

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See also art history. For the purposes here, I shall focus on three ethnographic examples. They are the Kuna, bibliography the Zuni, and the Navajo. I discuss each in turn. Bewaji, J. A. I. 2003. Beauty and Culture: Perspectives I explore the general by way of the particular. in Black Aesthetics. Ibadan, Nigeria: Spectrum Books. In conclusion, I discuss issues of the appropri- Layton, Robert. 1991. The Anthropology of Art. 2nd ation of Amerindian aesthetic practices. edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. john ayotunde (tunde) isola bewaji kuna aesthetics The Kuna, who live along the Atlantic coastal region of primarily Panama and Colombia as Amerindian aesthetics Franz Boas’s well as in Panama City, are traditionally agri- (1927: 183–298) monumental Primitive Art culturalists, who practice slash and burn agri- devotes 115 pages to a discussion of north culture in the coastal jungles. Their aesthetic Pacific coast artistic styles. Boas, as was his practices have been most ably described by Joel method, was largely descriptive in his analysis Sherzer (1983, 1990). of Native American aesthetic practices. For Perhaps the most famous example of Kuna example, he writes: “Two styles may be distin- aesthetic practices are the molas. Molas are guished: the man’s style expressed in the art of multicolored appliqué blouses that were tradi- wood carving and painting and their derivations; tionally made and worn by Kuna women. A and the woman’s style which finds expression woman made her own mola. The molas were in weaving, basketry, and embroidery. The quintessential emblems of Kuna-ness. More two styles are fundamentally distinct. The recently, molas have been sold to tourists and former is symbolic, the latter formal. The sym- collectors. The organizing principle of mola bolic art has a certain degree of realism and design is that of repetition with variation. Molas is full of meaning. The formal art has, at most, are often based on three themes: (1) geometri- pattern names and no especially marked signi- cal designs; (2) representations of Kuna life; ficance” (1927: 183). For Boas, the under- and (3) representations of the Western world standing of patterns was the beginning of an (copied from magazines). Molas are filled. understanding of Native American aesthetics. Empty space is to be avoided. The molas are not Amerindian aesthetics were not, however, representations of Kuna “ancestors, mythical limited to visual arts, but also included verbal beings or scenes, or good or bad spirits of arts (song, story, chant, etc.) as well as dance. a supernatural nature” (Sherzer & Sherzer Since Boas’s early work, anthropologists have 1976: 32). They are decorative emblems of been engaged in documenting and understand- Kuna-ness, but they are not supernatural in ing Amerindian aesthetic practices. These nature. Nor for that matter are they meant to investigations have been variously termed eth- be interpreted. noaesthetics (B. Tedlock 1986), ethnopoetics This aesthetic differs in some substantial (Hymes 1981; D. Tedlock 1983), and ethno- ways from the verbal art of the Kuna. Among musicology (McAllester 1954). Such appro- the Kuna, the use of the paradigmatic litany of aches have striven to understand what makes objects in chants creates lists of the known. For various social practices “beautiful.” The focus example, in the “Way of the Hot Pepper” (a Kuna here is on aesthetic practices and the ways chant) the kinds of peppers known to the Kuna that such practices are given value as aesthetic- are listed through parallelism, that is, repetition ally pleasing. In each case, the question of what with variation. The “Way of the Hot Pepper” is and is not considered beautiful becomes an then is a statement of Kuna ecology via paral- ethnographic question, as does the very ques- lelism. In going through the various paradig- tion of what it means to say something is matic relationships, the Way is lengthened. “beautiful.” What ethnographers have found This is also a part of Kuna aesthetic practices. is that Amerindian peoples often have well- Long chants, as well as verbal proclivity, are con- thought-out theories of beauty. sidered aesthetically pleasing. Silence, on the In a short piece it is impossible to cover all of other hand, is something to be avoided. Chants Amerindian aesthetics and aesthetic practices. can be performed either in public at the central

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congress house or in private, when addressed forms, and colors” (1986: 190). Songs, as well, to the spirits. In the public congress there is also can be considered tso’ya, when they are newly much meta-talk about chants. A Kuna chief composed, “rich in allegorical meaning . . . gives a speech in the central gathering house, sung clearly, and when the basically diatonic and that speech is then interpreted and trans- melody has a stepped construction beginning low lated by a ratified interpreter. Kuna chants and and ending high” (1986: 191). speeches are given in esoteric and metaphoric On the other hand, “attanni is a quality of language. The esoteric and metaphoric lan- the shaggy, dark, matted hair and costumes guages are considered aesthetically pleasing of ogres, and of crudely naturalistic designs aspects of the chants. They are meant to be painted on kiva walls as well as on certain interpreted. Curing chants, done in private, types of ceremonial pottery. In auditory cul- are not interpreted. ture, the attanni aesthetic occurs in traditional The Kuna, then, have two poles on a con- songs of the medicine societies . . . which have tinuum of aesthetic practice. On the one hand, relatively simple texts and melodies totally they have the molas, which are seen as beau- lacking in chromaticism” (1986: 193). Things tiful, but are not meant to be interpreted. On the that are tso’ya can be shared. Much of the other hand, they have chants and speeches artistic expressions, the kachina designs sold given in the central congress house, which are by Zuni artisans, are understood as tso’ya also beautiful, but which must be interpreted. and are, therefore, shareable. The kachina are The organization of both the molas and chants sacred and tso’ya and hence shareable. On the is based on the principle of parallelism. Both other hand, War God images are attanni and attempt to fill emptiness, either with images or because they are dangerous they are not with sounds. Finally, both the chants and the shareable. Understanding Zuni aesthetics allows molas are understood as the products of creative one to understand that not all sacred items are individuals. treated identically, nor are they categorized by Zunis identically (B. Tedlock 1995). zuni aesthetics The Zuni predominately live at Zuni Pueblo and navajo aesthetics the surrounding area in western New Mexico. Much has been written concerning Navajo The Zuni language, which is still actively spo- aesthetics (see McAllester 1954; Witherspoon ken, is a language isolate. This has led some 1977; Witherspoon & Peterson 1995). amateur scholars to wild speculations con- The Navajo were traditionally a Southern cerning the origins of the Zuni, but all that it Athabaskan-speaking people who resided in really means is that the Zuni language cannot what is now the American southwest. Today, be directly connected with other languages Navajos (or Diné) live on the Navajo Nation, a based on the methodology of historical linguistics. reservation that covers portions of Arizona, Zuni aesthetic practices have been described New Mexico, and Utah, as well as in urban most usefully by Barbara Tedlock (1984, 1986, areas throughout the United States. Navajo 1995) and Dennis Tedlock (1972, 1983). Zuni is still spoken by nearly 120,000 Navajos. have two broad ethnoaesthetic categories, Younger Navajos, though, are no longer learn- tso’ya and attanni. For purposes here, we can ing the language at a rate that will guarantee gloss – though these are in no way adequate its continued use. translations – tso’ya as “beautiful” and attanni David McAllester summed up Navajo aes- as “dangerous.” These categories cross mul- thetics as “beauty is that which does some- tiple domains, genres, and media. As Barbara thing” (1954: 72). The Navajo are famous Tedlock explains: “In the visual world of the cul- for their elaborate and complex chantway cer- tural world, tso’ya describes flower bouquets, emonies (Matthews 1995). Such chantways as jewelry, pottery, beadwork, the costumes of the Enemyway, Blessingway, and Nightway Zuni Olla Maidens, kachina dance costumes, the can last many nights and work either as a arrangement of kachinas in dance line, and curative or a prophylactic. HózhZ (“beauty, the interior decoration of Sha’lako houses, all harmony, good”) and nizhóni (“it is good, it of which display a great variety of textures, is beautiful”) are often used by Navajos to

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describe things that are beautiful. The Navajo expressive culture is most aesthetically pleas- are also known for their weavings and for their ing when it allows listeners to engage in ima- silver work. ginative coordination. Silence is also valued. Chantways are marked by long complex Speech is understood as considered action and chants and by the use of drypaintings or sand- speaking should be done in a careful and paintings. Sandpaintings are used immediately thoughtful manner. There is a link between after they have been completed in a ritual set- aesthetic practices and traditional Navajo reli- ting. The patient is placed on the sandpainting gious views. One of the things that beauty does almost immediately after the sandpainting has is to heal and to protect. been completed and the sandpainting is One feature of Navajo verbal art is that it destroyed. This lack of reification of the sand- is localized. That is, stories begin at named painting as an enduring artistic piece had been locales and events take place at named and one of the hallmarks of Navajo aesthetics. This knowable locations. Place names are often is a focus on the process and not on the prod- considered aesthetically pleasing uses of lan- uct. With changes in economics that have guage. Such place names are often descriptive been conditioned by incorporation into a capi- and are also associated with the ancestors who talist economy that objectifies and trades in originally named those places. I am reminded commodities, sandpaintings are now being of a November afternoon in 2000, when a done by Navajos to be sold to tourists and col- Navajo friend, his elderly maternal aunt, and I lectors. Weavings too, in theory never com- stood out at the crest of a ridge on the Navajo pleted, are also now sold as objects of trade and Nation near where both my friend and his commerce. Many weavers leave a flaw in the aunt had grown up. We were talking about rug’s border, a gap. This aesthetic, that no place names. The aunt had asked if I knew the design is ever truly complete, keeps the rug as name for the place we were. I had offered the a process, and not as a product. conventional term for what I thought was the In chants, weavings, and sandpaintings, place. She corrected me: “That’s what people call repetition and repetition with variation often it now.” She paused. “But it’s T’iis ‘ii’áí’.” “Tree mark their forms. The use of repetition and of line,” offered my friend. She went on to explain repetition with variation of formulaic expres- how there used to be a series of trees along the sions is often considered aesthetically pleasing. ridge, but that the trees were gone now. The Repetition in fours or twos is common and beauty of the place name came partly from its appreciated as aesthetically pleasing. The brevity and descriptiveness, but it also came sandpaintings are often a series of figures or from an association with the words of her designs that repeat and vary. In principle, they elders, and finally there was also the ability, often reflect complementary concepts. Male through an association with her elders and and female are frequently put into comple- due to its descriptiveness, to recall an earlier time. mentary dialogue. The sacred mountains and Aesthetically pleasing uses of language “give an sacred directions are often presented in a for- imagination to the listener” as one Navajo mulaic manner. However, while repetition consultant told me. As the language shifts and parallelism are important components of from Navajo to English, such aesthetic practices Navajo chantways, they are not enough. A are also lost. chant must be aesthetically pleasing as well Much contemporary written Navajo poetry (Field & Blackhorse Jr. 2002). Deities respond has links with the oral traditions (Webster to chants because of aesthetic considerations. 2006) and shares their rhetorical and poetic Onomatopoeia is common in chantways as devices. Parallelism is found in Navajo chant- well as in songs, place names, and contempor- ways and can be evoked in written poetry as ary poetry. Such sound symbolism is aesthet- well. Interpretation is not highly valued, but ically pleasing because it allows a listener to reflection is. A good poem, as it was explained imagine a particular moment. Through sound to me, is one that makes someone think or symbolism one can imagine the moment in reflect. Nor are chantways or, for that matter, which the event occurred because one can contemporary poetry, considered to be the imagine the sounds of the moment. Navajo sole invention of a creative individual. Rather

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chantways are considered – given the vagaries Field, Margaret & Blackhorse, Taft, Jr. 2002. “The Dual of life – to be exact repetitions of prior chants. Role of Metonymy in Navajo Prayer,” Anthro- While the individual is important, this import- pological Linguistics, 44(3), 217–230. ance is mitigated by acknowledgment of the Hill, Jonathan. 1993. Keepers of the Sacred Chants. words of those who have come before. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Hymes, Dell. 1981. In Vain I Tried to Tell You. conclusion Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McAllester, David. 1954. Enemy Way Music: A Study Amerindian aesthetics are not identical across of Social and Esthetic Values as seen in Navajo Music. groups or across genres and media. Kuna and Cambridge, MA: Papers of the Peabody Museum of the Navajo both value speaking and find displays American Archaeology and Ethnology, 41(3). of repetition with variation to be aesthetically Matthews, Washington. 1995. The Night Chant. Salt pleasing. Yet Kuna fill the world with sounds, Lake City: University of Utah Press. while Navajos appreciate silence. Not every Samuels, David. 2004. Putting a Song on Top of It. aesthetic practice that Amerindians engage in Tucson: University of Arizona Press. is sacred or religious. The Kuna mola is an aes- Sherzer, Dina & Sherzer, Joel. 1976. thetic practice that is considered beautiful but “Mormaknamaloe: The Cuna Mola.” In Ritual and Symbol in Native Central America. P. Young & is not meant for sacred reflection. Zuni War J. Howe (eds.). Portland: University of Oregon, Gods, on the other hand, are sacred and attanni 21–42. “dangerous,” and they cannot be removed Sherzer, Joel. 1983. Kuna Ways of Speaking. Austin: from Zuni control. Images of kachinas, on the University of Texas Press. other hand, are tso’ya “beautiful” and can be Sherzer, Joel. 1990. Verbal Art in San Blas. shared and, for that matter, sold by Zuni arti- Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. sans. Understanding Amerindian aesthetic Tedlock, Barbara. 1984. “The Beautiful and the systems can go a long way in aiding under- Dangerous: Zuni Ritual and Cosmology as an standing of what is and is not meant to be Aesthetic System,” Conjunctions, 6, 246–65. shared cross-culturally. As the Navajos have Tedlock, Barbara. 1986. “Crossing the Sensory Domains in Native American Aesthetics.” In learned with sandpaintings and the Kuna with Explorations in Ethnomusicology. C. Frisbie (ed.). molas, aesthetic practices can be adapted by Detroit: Information Coordinators, 187–98. degrees for Western consumerism. The problem Tedlock, Barbara. 1995. “Aesthetics and Politics: Zuni of misrecognizing every Amerindian aesthetic War God Repatriation and Kachina Representa- practice as “spiritual” continues, however, as tion.” In Looking High and Low. B. J. Bright (ed.). does the appropriation of aesthetic practices as Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 151–72. well. These problems will continue as long as Tedlock, Dennis. 1972. Finding the Center. New Amerindians occupy a “spiritual other” place in York: Dial Press. the Western imagination. Tedlock, Dennis. 1983. The Spoken Word and the The aim here has been to suggest something Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. of the variety of Amerindian aesthetics, not to Webster, Anthony. 2006. “ ‘Alk’idyy’ My’ii Jooldlosh, summarize an entire hemisphere’s aesthetic Jiní: Poetic Devices in Navajo Oral and Written practices. In the list of further reading below, I Poetry,” Anthropological Linguistics, 48(3), 233–65. suggest contemporary ethnographic accounts of Witherspoon, Gary. 1977. Language and Art in the the aesthetic practices from North and South Navajo Universe. Ann Arbor: University of America. The list is eclectic, but I hope that it Michigan Press. allows for a motivated rambling through the Witherspoon, Gary & Peterson, Glen. 1995. Dynamic contemporary literature. Symmetry and Holistic Asymmetry: In Navajo and Western Art and Cosmology. New York: Peter Lang. See also authenticity and art; cultural anthony k. webster appropriation. bibliography Basso, Ellen. 1985. A Musical View of the Universe. Aquinas, Thomas (1225–1274) Italian Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dominican friar whose philosophy and theology Boas, Franz. 1927. Primitive Art. Cambridge, MA: (“Thomism”) have decisively shaped Catholic Harvard University Press. thought. Born into an aristocratic Italian family,

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Aquinas disappointed his relatives by failing 1–2, q. 54, a. 1: “Beauty is the compatibility of to enter the affluent Benedictine order, instead parts in accordance with the nature of a thing”). becoming a friar of the newly founded Domin- Before commenting on these ideas, it will ican Order of Preachers. Under the tutelage of be as well to introduce another of Aquinas’s St. Albert the Great in Cologne, he began to study interesting claims. This is the suggestion that Aristotle and later became a major figure at beauty is a transcendental quality identical in an the University of Paris and at the papal court. entity to that thing’s being, its unity, its goodness, He died on his way to the Council of Lyons; and and its truth. Moreover, according to Aquinas, in 1323 he was canonized. it is part of what it is to be a transcendental qual- Aquinas is generally regarded as the great- ity that everything possesses it. Thus, “There is est of the medieval philosophers. This estimate nothing which does not share in goodness and is hard to fault when one takes account of the beauty, for according to its form each thing is scale and variety of his intellectual achieve- both good and beautiful” (De divinis nominibus ments, for he was the first medieval thinker to c.IV, lectio 5). work out at length the new synthesis between The key to understanding what otherwise Catholicism and philosophy. He believed in the appear obscure remarks is Aquinas’s notion of idea of cumulative philosophical and religious form – more precisely, substantial form (forma wisdom, and sought to integrate Neoplatonist, rei), that which makes a thing what it is, con- Augustinian, and Anselmian ideas, as well as stitutes its principle of organization and (in Aristotelian ones, with scripture, patristic teach- the case of something animate) of life. Carbon, ing, and evolving Catholic doctrine. cars, and cats all have organizing forms – He was a prodigious writer on a multitude of chemical, mechanical, and biological, respec- topics. With a few exceptions (such as Jacques tively. The form of a thing gives it existence, and Maritain and Armand Maurer), however, inasmuch as its being is an object of value for philosophers inspired by Aquinas have had it or for others it has goodness. Equally, when that little to say about aesthetics. This reflects the existence is affirmed in the mind of a thinker the character of his own writings, for while he thing has truth, and when it is viewed as an offers remarks on the nature of beauty and of object of contemplation it takes on the charac- art-making, he has no treatises or extensive ter of beauty. In speaking of goodness and theory on these subjects. All the same, it is pos- beauty (as of being and truth), therefore, one is sible to extract from his work ideas of enduring not speaking of intrinsically different properties interest for philosophical aesthetics. but of one and the same quality considered in The two most important sources of these relation to different concerns. In contemporary ideas are brief remarks in his Commentary on philosophical language the difference is one of the Divine Names (De divinis nominibus) and sense or “intension” and not of reference or in the Summa theologiae. In the first of these “extension.” he observes that something is not beautiful In short, beauty is only ascribable in the because we like it, but that our liking for it is context of actual or potential contemplation due to its beauty (c.IV, lectio 10), having ear- of the form of a thing. This introduces an ele- lier remarked that anyone who depicts a thing ment of subjectivity but relates it directly to does so for the sake of making something an objective ground, the nature of the object beautiful; and that each thing is beautiful to the being contemplated. The earlier analysis of extent that it manifests its proper form (c.IV, beauty now emerges as an account of the nec- lectio 5). In the Summa, this notion of manifest essary conditions under which the meeting of form occurs implicitly within the famous an object and a subject gives rise to aesthetic Thomist analysis of beauty: “Three things are experience. The thing in question must be required for beauty. First, integrity or perfection possessed of the elements or aspects apt to [integritas sive perfectio], for what is defective something having the relevant form or nature is thereby ugly; second, proper proportion or (integritas), these elements must be properly consonance [proportio sive consonantia]; and related to one another (proportio), and these third, clarity [claritas]” (Summa theologiae 1, states must be manifest when the entity is question 39, article 8; see also Summa theologiae perceived or contemplated (claritas).

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This interpretation suggests parallels with Tatarkiewicz, Wladyslaw. 1970. History of Aesthetics, Kantian aesthetics. For Aquinas is claiming vol. ii: Medieval Aesthetics. C. Barrett (ed.). The that the experience of beauty arises directly as Hague: Mouton. a type of intellectual satisfaction taken in the con- john haldane templation of elements apt for cognition, when one’s present interest in them is neither prac- tical nor scientific. Where Aquinas differs from Aristotle (384–322 bce) Greek philosopher Kant, however, is in regarding the contem- and scientist of immense, enduring influence. plated forms as being structural elements of a After studying in Plato’s Academy he founded mind-independent reality. On which, if either, his own school, the Lyceum. Often regarded as of these philosophers this difference reflects the first philosopher to admit the autonomous greater credit is a matter beyond discussion character of aesthetic activity and experience, here. It should be clear, however, that Aquinas in direct reaction against supposed Platonic has interesting ideas to offer to those who hope moralism. But the full picture is more complex to integrate an account of beauty and aes- than this. Aristotle’s statement in Poetics 25 that thetic experience within a broadly realist epi- “correct standards in poetry are not the same stemology and metaphysics. as in politics or any other art” asserts a kind of aesthetic independence for individual art forms. See also medieval and renaissance aesthetics; But his description of tragedy as “mimesis [i.e., beauty; kant. representation] of actions and life” (Poetics 6) signals a fundamental link between experience bibliography of art and experience of life in general. The framework of Aristotle’s thinking in this Primary sources area (see Poetics, ch. 1) is a classification of cer- 1963–75. Summa theologiae. 60 vols. Oxford and tain activities as mimetic, that is representational London: Blackfriars with Eyre & Spottiswoode. cum expressive forms of image-making. Each of 1969. De divinis nominibus [Commentary on the these counts for him as a technê, a specialized Divine Names]: selected translations from this expertise subject to conscious, rational control. and other relevant works are to be found in The group in question includes poetry, painting, The Pocket Aquinas. V. Bourke (ed. & trans.). New York: Washington Square. (Also in Wladyslaw sculpture, dance, and even music. The latter Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, vol. ii. The is mimetic for Aristotle, as it was for many Hague: Mouton, 1970, 257–63.) Greeks, in virtue of embodying what he calls tonal and rhythmic “likenesses” (or correlates) Secondary sources of “movements of the soul” (Politics 8.5). It Barrett, Cyril. 1963. “The Aesthetics of St Thomas is important, however, to distinguish two Re-examined,” Philosophical Studies (Ireland), 12, Aristotelian principles of mimesis that are 107–24. often confused. Mimetic representation, as in Bredin, Hugh & Santoro-Brienza, Liberato. 2000. Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Edinburgh: poetry, involves imaginative simulation of Edinburgh University Press. aspects of reality. But the principle that “all art Eco, Umberto. 1988. The Aesthetics of Thomas is mimesis of nature” (misleadingly translated Aquinas. H. Bredin (trans.). Cambridge, MA: as “all art imitates nature”: “all art follows Harvard University Press. the pattern of nature” would be better) is of a Kovach, Francis J. 1961. Die Ästhetik des Thomas von different order: it applies to the production of Aquin. Berlin: de Gruyter. all kinds of artifacts and posits a parallelism Maritain, J. 1974. Art and Scholasticism. J. W. Evans of teleology, but without conscious imitation, (trans.). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame between human craftsmanship and what Press. Aristotle sees as the purposive shaping of form Maurer, A. 1983. About Beauty. Houston: Center for Thomistic Studies. into matter by nature. This second principle Phelan, G. 1967. “The Concept of Beauty in St (found at, e.g., Physics 2.2, 2.8) must encom- Thomas Aquinas.” In G. Phelan: Selected Papers. pass the musico-poetic and figurative arts as well, A. Kirn (ed.). Toronto: Pontifical Institute of but Aristotle never appeals to it in his discus- Mediaeval Studies, 155–80. sions of them.

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Aristotle’s conception of mimetic representa- of the “actions and life” (Poetics 6) the poem tion is seen most fully in his treatment of depicts. Chapter 9’s remarks about “univer- tragedy (with subordinate treatment of epic) in sals” follow directly from the discussion of the Poetics. By analyzing the genre’s qualitative unity: unity, probability, and the universals constituents (plot, character, etc.), Aristotle built into a poetic structure of action are mutu- works out a normative view of the dynamic ally reinforcing elements in a theory of poetry relationship between a tragic action, in which that endows artistic images with a coherent human lives are exposed to major suffering sense of human meaning. Whether this theory through the fallibility (hamartia: “error” or entails a rationalization of “the tragic” remains “fault”) of the agents, and the audience’s a challenging question about Aristotle’s agenda defining emotional response (“pity and fear”). in the Poetics. Although recognizing that tragedy is a highly Form and content are intertwined in stylized, elevated art form, Aristotle believes Aristotle’s account of aesthetic objects; and his that it deals with possible events (esp. ch. 9), conception of aesthetic experience possesses events that audiences can understand and matching features. Poetics 4 (cf. Rhetoric 1.11) judge in ways continuous with those they use gives a cognitive grounding to the pleasure to interpret life outside the theater. The Poetics that arises from contemplation of mimetic repeatedly underlines this point by appealing to works: the viewer seeks to understand and rea- criteria of “necessity and/or probability,” crite- son out each element in an image or poem. ria which call both for “internal” consistency in Politics 8.5, discussing music but widening the the terms of the represented world, and for the point, confirms this: “habituation to feeling intelligibility of that world by the standards of pain and pleasure in the case of likenesses [i.e., the audience’s beliefs about reality as a whole. mimesis] is close to being so disposed towards But Aristotle goes further. In Poetics 9 he the truth.” Aesthetic responses are not sui states: “Poetry is more philosophical and more generis but correlated with larger structures of serious than history, for it speaks more of uni- experience. That correlation allows, however, for versals, while history speaks of particulars.” important variations. Poetics 4 registers the Aristotle does not mean by this that poetry pleasure taken in the depiction of objects that offers abstractions or schematic types of people would be found painful in life; this, implicitly, and events. What he appears to mean is that suc- is pertinent to tragedy. “Art” can transform, as cessful poetic plots differ from the contingency well as capturing the underlying principles of ordinary life (individual lives are not artisti- of, “life.” cally unified, he stresses: Poetics 8). They have Aristotle’s model of aesthetic pleasure a purer, more coherent intelligibility; universals remains, even so, resistant to any strong version are, as it were, woven into their dramatic of aestheticism: it combines the cognitive and fabric. The achievement of such intelligibility the affective. He describes the pleasure of is undoubtedly connected, in Aristotle’s think- tragedy as “that which comes from pity and fear ing, with the principle of artistic unity. “Just as through mimesis’ (Poetics 14). Grasping the in the other mimetic arts ..., so the plot- embodied universals of a poetic representation structure of tragedy . . . should be a represen- is not a matter of abstract comprehension; it tation of a unitary and complete action” involves sensitive absorption in the world of (Poetics 8). the play and carries with it an intensely emo- Aristotle’s notion of unity is not strictly tional reaction to the imagined characters formalist in character. All order and beauty and events. Plato had feared that such experi- depend on the nature and function of the ence could subvert reason by its “bewitching” objects in which they are realized (Politics 7.4). power over the emotions; Aristotle believes Unity in mimetic art is the meaningful organ- that good mimetic art elicits responses in ization of the representational content of a which reason and emotion are integrated. poem or other work; the criteria of wholeness While Aristotle diverges from the more and completeness which Poetics 7 sets out, uncompromising of Plato’s attempts to subject with the formula of “beginning, middle and aesthetic standards to a unified framework of end,” cannot be detached from the significance ethical and metaphysical value, he does not

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aim to establish an outright autonomy for art history What a history requires is a nar- mimetic art. He allows it considerable freedom rative framework relating what comes earlier to of scope (on a scale that runs from realism to what happens later. A culture could have art, idealism: see the start of Poetics 25) and denies and even a concept of art, without having any that artistic standards can simply be equated conception of art history. That culture might with those of morality or politics in general. But make art, and theorize about that activity, he nonetheless regards both the making and the without thinking that its art had a history. reception of poetry, painting, and music as spe- Writing a history of art requires thinking of its cial forms of engaged contemplation (theôria) development as having a historical structure. through which the human need to understand The first extended history of European art the world finds one kind of fulfillment. appears in an odd place, book 35 of Pliny’s Natural History, between the discussion of See also aesthetics in antiquity; catharsis; medicinal drugs in book 34 and the description plato. of stones in book 36. As modern commentators (Kris & Kurz 1979) have observed, the anecdotes bibliography that Pliny presents about various Greek painters recur frequently in accounts of Renaissance Primary sources artists. Pliny’s history of naturalistic art is told 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle. 2 vols. J. Barnes (ed.). Princeton: Princeton University in terms of progress. Early, later, latest is good, Press. better, best: such is the story of the development 1995. Aristotle Poetics. S. Halliwell (trans.). of naturalism. Vasari’s history of art of the Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Italian Renaissance from the time of Cimabue and Giotto to his own era, two and a half cen- Secondary sources turies later, employs a similar framework. In Andersen, Ø. & Haarberg, J. (ed.). 2001. Making Sense of Aristotle: Essays in Poetics. London: such a history, once image-making begins, it Duckworth. continues, this model suggests, until the tradi- Halliwell, Stephen. 1998. Aristotle’s Poetics. 2nd tion dies. edn. London: Duckworth. In one way, beginnings and endings have a Nussbaum, Martha C. 1986. The Fragility of certain symmetry. Whatever art comes before Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and the beginning, like what comes after the end Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University of the tradition, is not part of the history of art. Press. In another way, however, endings raise special Rorty, A. O. (ed.). 1992. Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics. problems. Vasari explains in 1550 that he Princeton: Princeton University Press. judges each artist relative to the standards of that stephen halliwell man’s time: “Although Giotto was admirable in his own day, I do not know what we should say of him or the other ancients if they had lived art see artifact, a. as; authenticity and a.; in the time of Michelangelo” (1963: iv. 291). cognitive science and a.; cognitive value of Insofar as the claim of his account is that a.; conceptual a.; definition of “a.”; erotic a. Michelangelo is an absolutely great artist, a and obscenity; evolution, a., and aesthetics; figure whose work sums up the whole tradition, function of a.; marxism and a.; mass a.; it is very hard to see what could come next. At morality and a.; performance a.; popular a.; earlier times, of course, great artists had suc- psychoanalysis and a.; religion and a.; science cessors, but given Vasari’s narrative framework and a.; senses and a.; technology and a.; the- one has difficulty in imagining Michelangelo’s ories of a.; truth in a.; universals in a. successors. Once the cycle is started, it is hard to see how it can conclude, except in decay which, after art and experience see senses and art some interval, may be followed by a rebirth of the tradition. Vasari’s working assumption is that the cycle of development in antiquity, as “art for art’s sake” see aestheticism described by Pliny, repeats in his own time.

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That repetition is possible only because Dutch struggle against Spanish rule, the feats medieval art marks a break in the tradition, a of their maritime empire, and their pleasure in gap between the development of illusionism communal festivities are all expressed in their in antiquity and the rebirth of that artistic tra- art. A history of the art of any culture might be dition in the Renaissance. A modern historian written in this way. The Japanese and the of technology might think that indefinite pro- Africans can also express themselves in their art. gress is possible; when employing Pliny’s and One consequence of Hegel’s approach is to Vasari’s organic model, such a view of history suggest that each culture must have its own is hard to imagine. independent artistic ideals. Wölfflin develops Here we encounter an important conceptual this idea. The classical and the baroque “are like complication, the development of which began two languages, in which everything can be with Winckelmann’s Reflections on the Imitation said, although each has its strength in a differ- of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture of ent direction” (1908: 12). Wölfflin’s history 1755. Winckelmann both discusses the tradi- employs a formalist approach, explaining the tion that concerns him most deeply, the story development of art as a self-contained process of Greek sculpture, and explains its relation- without much reference to the larger culture. ship to art of the Renaissance. In some ways, Another development of Hegelian art history he admits, the modern artists are better: “In the occurs in the diverse approaches of art histor- science of perspective modern painters are ians who focus on the social history of art. As clearly superior . . . Various subjects . . . have Hegel sees Dutch art as expressing the charac- likewise been raised to a higher degree of per- teristic political, religious, and social concerns fection in modern times, for example, land- of that culture, so these historians treat each cul- scapes and animal species” (1987: 59). ture as capable of expressing its own values Gombrich has argued that “rather than in its art. Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art . . . it is Both the formalist approaches and these Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics . . . which should social histories can describe the art of very be regarded as the founding document of the diverse cultures. So, for example, American modern study of art . . . they contain the first Abstract Expressionist painting of the 1940s attempt ever made to survey and systematize can be understood formally as developing the the entire history of art” (1984: 51). While flattened space found earlier in Cubism, and Winckelmann’s account remains focused on in the early modernist art of Cézanne and Greek art, it is Hegel who provides a way of Monet (Greenberg 1961). But it may also be linking art of antiquity to painting of the explained as an expression of post-World War Renaissance. For Hegel, it should be added, II American culture. The formalist finds sim- what constitutes “the entire history of art” is ilarities between artists whose work looks defined by the concerns of early nineteenth- different. Thus in Wölfflin’s account, not only century European scholarship. He did not Rembrandt and Rubens, but also Vermeer and know much about Chinese and Indian art; he Bernini, must be linked under the rubric does not discuss Japanese painting or African “baroque.” If the danger of formalism is the sculpture. need to appeal to such a fiction of a “period Unlike Pliny, Vasari, and Winckelmann, style,” the problem of a social history of art is Hegel does not focus on the history of the that it may link art with the general society development of illusionistic painting and in all too facile a fashion. These problems with sculpture within one culture. He explains how both formalist and social histories become the art of quite different cultures is part of more pressing as we approach the present. It is one continuous story, a universal history of difficult enough to identify the common fea- art. Insofar as each culture possesses its own val- tures of the work of Bernini, Pietro da Cortona, ues, it too may express them in its art. The goal Borromini, and all the other artists working in of art history is to identify the relationship Rome in the era of the baroque. But when we between a culture and its art. Thus, to under- look at the culture of New York during the stand Dutch art of the Golden Age, “we must 1940s, to speak of that as the era of American ask about Dutch history” (Hegel 1975: 169). The Abstract Expressionism really is problematic.

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We must connect work of quite diverse The development of art history by A. Riegl, painters by reference to a period style; we must Wölfflin, and E. Panofsky out of the legacy of exclude from the account painters working in Hegel (Podro 1982) requires pruning that the- other styles; and we need to explain how ory of Hegel’s metaphysics. For the modern art American philosophy and the larger culture historian to say that a culture expresses itself in are related to that art. its art is only a manner of speaking, not a the- Recognizing that both formalist and social ory to be taken literally. Modern art historians histories of art must thus employ fictions is work within the general framework estab- only to acknowledge that they, like any history, lished by these founding fathers of their discip- have to use such devices in order to tell a story line, collecting information about artists and (Carrier 1991). It is important to recognize periods not yet intensively studied by the pre- connections between the literary structures of cursors, yet without abandoning this historical art histories and those employed by creative framework itself. But when now we collect writers. When Vasari treats the collective cre- in our museums not only Greek and Italian ation of artists from Cimabue to Michelangelo Renaissance art, the Dutch painting that Hegel as akin to an organism which is born, develops discusses, and the baroque works Wölfflin to maturity, and dies, he is only using an deals with, but also Chinese and Japanese analogy. Vasari’s analogy has an important painting, Hindu sculpture, African artifacts, influence on how he thinks about art history. weaving and other decorative work from An organism must die, but there is, in prin- many cultures, and modernist and postmod- ciple, no reason why an artistic tradition may ernist art, then the claim that it is possible to not continue indefinitely. write a general history of art seems increas- Any story must be selective. The art historian, ingly questionable. Insofar as a history is a like the creative writer, chooses to describe story in which all of these artworks are to be those events that he can fit into a plausible set within one narrative framework, the claim narrative. But in one essential way, literature that there can be some general interpretative and history are different. The stories of the framework adequate to all art now seems novelist seek merely to be convincing; the highly problematic (Elkins 2002). narrative of the art historian aims for truth. Until relatively recently, the best-known Wölfflin wants to understand how Raphael’s English-language survey histories have focused High Renaissance classicism anticipates the on the story of Western art. Chinese scrolls, baroque, although Raphael could not think of Hindu sculpture, and Islamic decorations make his art in that way; Greenberg seeks to grasp only cameo appearances. And while there are the relationship between Cubism and Abstract elaborate specialist histories of art in China, Expressionism, although the Cubists could not India, and the Islamic world, and also in Africa imagine that later movement. and the other cultures without writing, as yet Can we both exercise our modern sensibility this material is not integrated into these general and simultaneously be aware that the artist histories. But it starts to become apparent that whose work we study saw it differently? When, we need a world art history (Onians 2004; for example, we see a Rubens crucifixion, may Elkins 2007). We need it because we have to we apply to it “some concepts derived from do justice to art from all cultures, and also psycho-analysis – some such notions as the because of the legitimate political demands release of aggression with the displacement of raised within our multicultural societies. How guilt” (Podro 1982: 214), which, though alien is it possible, then, to develop narratives that take to Rubens’s culture, express in our vocabulary account of art from all cultures without impos- how his contemporaries saw that work? These ing a bias based on the traditional studies of questions are unanswerable. Any translation European art (Carrier 2008)? Answering this of Christian ideas into a psychoanalytic vocab- question is the central concern facing the pro- ulary will be controversial. The best we can fession right now. do is both understand Rubens’s culture in its own terms, and interpret it as best we can in our See also medieval and renaissance aesthetics; modern vocabulary. african aesthetics; chinese aesthetics;

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gadamer; gombrich; hegel; indian aesthet- created; for example, a poem or a theory are ics; islamic aesthetics; modernism and post- humanly created and hence are nonphysical modernism; tradition. artifacts. Why, then, have philosophers of art become bibliography concerned in recent times with the question of Carrier, David. 1991. Principles of Art History whether artifactuality is or is not a necessary Writing. University Park: Pennsylvania State condition for being art? One reason has its University Press. origins in certain developments within the Carrier, David. 2008. A World Art History. Univer- philosophy of language: namely, Ludwig sity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Wittgenstein’s view about how certain words Elkins, James. 2002. Stories of Art. New York: Routledge. apply to their objects. These words apply, Elkins, James (ed.). 2007. Is Art History Global? New Wittgenstein maintains, in virtue of “family York: Routledge. resemblances” among the objects to which Gombrich, E. H. 1984. “ ‘The Father of Art History’: they apply, rather than in virtue of the objects A Reading of the Lectures on Aesthetics of G. W. possessing properties that satisfy necessary F. Hegel (1770–1831).” In Tributes: Interpreters of and sufficient conditions. Our Cultural Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell University Paul Ziff (1953), Morris Weitz (1956), and Press, 51–69. William Kennick (1958) were the first to Greenberg, Clement. 1961. Art and Culture. Boston: attempt to apply this linguistic thesis to the Beacon. philosophy of art. These three and subse- Hegel, G. W. F. 1975 [1835–8]. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. T. M. Knox (trans.). Oxford: quently other philosophers claimed that “art” Clarendon. (or “work of art”) does not have any necessary Kris, Ernst & Kurz, Otto. 1979 [1934]. Legend, Myth, and sufficient conditions that must be satisfied and Magic in the Image of the Artist. A. Laing in order for something to be a member of the & L. M. Newman (trans.). New Haven: Yale class of works of art. Rather, they maintain University Press. that the members of the class of works of art Onians, J. (ed). 2004. Atlas of World Art. London: belong to that class in virtue of the “family Laurence King. resemblances” that obtain among the mem- ce Pliny. 1968 [77 ]. Natural History. 10 vols. bers. Thus, work of art A is a member of the class H. Rackham (trans.). London: Heinemann, vol. ix. of artworks because it shares a property with Podro, Michael. 1982. The Critical Historians of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press. work of art B, and work of art B is a member Vasari, Giorgio. 1963 [1550]. The Lives of the of the class because it shares a property with Painters, Sculptors and Architects. A. B. Hinds work of art C, and so on. Work of art A and work (trans.). London: Dent. of art Z, however, may not share any property Winckelmann, J. J. 1987 [1755]. Reflections on the and do not need to. Although work A and Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture. work Z do not share any property, they are E. Heyer & R. C. Norton (trans.). La Salle: Open related to one another through the property- Court. sharing of other members of the class of works Wölfflin, Heinrich. n.d. [1908]. Principles of Art of art. Every member of the class of works of art History. M. Hottinger (trans.). New York: Dover. will share a property with at least one other work david carrier (and probably many more), but a given pair of works need not share any property. If the members of the class of works of art do not artifact, art as Until recently, everyone had need to share any property, then they do not assumed without question that art is artifactual need to share the property of artifactuality. – that is, that a work of art is a humanly cre- And, in fact, these philosophers claim that ated object. Traditional philosophers of art there are works of art that are not artifacts, these attempted to defend their claims that art is nonartifacts having become works of art by expressive, symbolic, or of some other nature, sharing a property with a prior established but it never occurred to them to defend their work of art. Weitz, for example, claims that a common view that art is artifactual. An object piece of driftwood can become a work of art need not be physical in order to be humanly when someone notices its resemblance to some

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sculpture and says, “That driftwood is a lovely have been interested in theorizing about. piece of sculpture.” Driftwood, sunsets, and Traditional philosophers of art have sought to other nonartifacts can become works of art in discover the essential nature of a particular this way. Thus, according to Ziff, Kennick, class of human artifacts, and even if the mem- Weitz, and company, the traditional assumption bers of this class of objects do not have any other that every work of art is an artifact is shown interesting property or properties in common, to be false. they are all artifacts. Artifactuality is built There are several difficulties with this way into the philosophy of art because philosophers of conceiving of art. First, if resembling a prior have always been interested in theorizing established work of art is the basic way that about a set of objects that are produced by something becomes a work of art, it is going to human creativity. The fact that another class be virtually impossible to keep everything from of objects can be generated by means of resem- becoming a work of art, for everything resem- blance to the members of the class of artifactual bles everything else in some way. Second, “the art provides no reason to divert philosophers of new view” gives the impression that sharing a art from their traditional task. property with, or resembling, a prior estab- There is another reason to challenge the lished work of art is the only way that something artifactuality of art that is quite different from can become a work of art. If, however, every those based on a Wittgensteinian conception of work of art had to become art by resembling a language. How are philosophers of art to deal prior established work of art, then an infinite with things such as the urinal that Duchamp regress of works receding into the past would entered in that now famous art show under the be generated and no work of art could ever title Fountain? The urinal is an artifact of the have come into being. Some other way of plumbing trade, but is Fountain Duchamp’s becoming a work of art would be required to artistic artifact? Driftwood and urinals are the block the regress, and the only plausible way materials of a class of artworks that can be would be that the regress-blocking work or called “found art.” In some instances the mate- works came into being as a result of an artifact’s rial basis of a work is already an artifact when being created. Thus, this new view requires found (the urinal), in others it is not (the drift- two distinct and different kinds of art – art as wood), but in both cases, something further is conceived of by Ziff, Weitz, and Kennick, done by the artist in addition to finding the which may be called “resemblance art,” and item. The most minimal thing that could be what may be called “artifactual art.” done is presenting the item as art to an artworld Artifactual art has a temporal priority. Of audience by showing it in some manner or course, it is not just that artifactual art is other. Assume that this (possibly along with required to block the regress. Even given the some other conditions that may well be present) new way of conceiving of art, much of the art is sufficient to make these items artworks. Is it that has been created has come into being as sufficient to make these items artifacts? In the artifactual art. Thus, artifactual art, with its case of the urinal, since it is already an artifact, one necessary condition (artifactuality), forms we can assume that the artwork it becomes an unacknowledged basis or core of the new con- is also one. But what about the driftwood? ception of art. The two kinds of art required by This seems at best a borderline or minimal case the new conception have two very different of artifactuality, if it is a case of artifactuality bases: the one derives from acts of human cre- at all. ativity and the other from acts of noticing sim- There are at least two other kinds of art- ilarities. This striking difference suggests that it works that might be regarded as good candidates is the members of the class of artifactual art that for being nonartifactual artworks: some works we have in mind when we speak literally of that are ontologically abstract and some con- works of art, and that the other class of objects ceptual works. Ontologically abstract artworks is a metaphorical derivative. are not those that are nonrepresentational but Suppose, however, that both classes are liter- are those that have more than one instance or ally art. This just means that it is and always occurrence. Musical works are instanced in their was the class of artifactual art that philosophers performances, novels in their copies. There

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are some who claim that even ontologically 123–4). Dipert’s and Davies’s definition of abstract works are artifacts, since they are artifact seem, at first sight rather similar. They humanly created entities (such as Levinson both involve reference to modifying something 1980; Thomasson 1999). However, there are or other. Dipert, however, requires that a gen- others who deny this (such as Kivy 1993; uine artifact has to communicate something, Dodd 2000). They claim that musical works, for viz., that it is a thing made for some specific use. example, are abstract sound structures that Davies has no such requirement. Davies claims exist eternally and hence are discovered, not cre- that artifacts must result from the manipula- ated. Some even deny that abstract objects can tion of a material object and are themselves be created (Dodd 2000). If this view is right, material objects. Dipert does not claim this. musical works are not artifacts. Of course, this He thinks some actions are artifacts. It is not is a conditional claim. It depends on the cor- clear whether he thinks there are also abstract rectness of a controversial and highly con- artifacts. tested view about the ontology of art. So we do For someone who agrees with Davies’s not yet have an unchallenged example of understanding of “artifact,” or who decides clearly nonartifactual art. to adopt this conception for more pragmatic Some conceptual artworks provide another set reasons such as greater precision, the issue of of possible examples. Consider the famous whether all artworks are artifacts becomes piece by Robert Barry entitled or specified by: All crystal clear. Even if all artworks are humanly the things I know but of which I am not at the created, they are not all artifacts. moment thinking – 1:36 pm, June 15, 1969. It is not clear just what this piece consists in. Is it See also conceptual art; definition of “art.” the very beliefs referred to by the specification? The set of beliefs is not an artifact. Is it the bibliography act of referring to those beliefs or the inscrip- Davies, Stephen. 1991. Definitions of Art. Ithaca: tion or utterance of the words? Would any of Cornell University Press. these be more plausible candidates for being Dickie, George. 1984. The Art Circle. New York: an artifact? Haven. From the first sentence of this entry, it has Dipert, Randall R. 1993. Artifacts, Art Works, and been assumed that an artifact is anything that Agency. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Dodd, Julian. 2000. “Musical Works as Eternal is humanly created. Nor have we been very Types,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 40, 424–40. careful to define the extension of the humanly Kennick, William E. 1958. “Does Traditional created. Does it include things we do, as well as Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?” Mind, 67, 317–34. the products deliberately made in the course Kivy, Peter. 1993. The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays our doings? In any case, we have looked for in the Philosophy of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge counterexamples to the claim that artworks University Press. are necessarily artifacts in things that are not Levinson, Jerrold. 1980. “What a Musical Work Is,” humanly created, such as driftwood, abstract Journal of Philosophy, 77, 5–28. structures, beliefs, or concepts. Levinson, Jerrold. 2006. “Artworks as Artifacts.” Some argue, however, that “artifact” has a In Contemplating Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 26–37. much more narrowly circumscribed meaning. Thomasson, Amie. 1999. Fiction and Metaphysics. According to Randall Dipert, an artifact is Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. something intentionally modified to serve as a Thomasson, Amie. 2007. “Artifacts and Human means to an end whose modified properties Concepts.” In Creations of the Mind. E. Margolis & were intended by their maker to be recognized S. Laurence (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University as having been altered for that, or some other, Press, 52–73. use (1993: 29–30). Stephen Davies claims Weitz, Morris. 1956. “The Role of Theory in that an artifact in the primary sense is something Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, modified by work, which, he thinks, implies 15, 27–35. that it is an object that is manufactured via the Ziff, Paul. 1953. “The Task of Defining a Work of Art,” Philosophical Review, 62, 58–78. direct manipulation of a material item that preexists the creation of the artifact (1991: george dickie & robert stecker

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“artworld” “artworld” A term that has both a philo- conditional on circumstances that obtain in a sophical and an ordinary meaning. Philoso- special artworld. Several late twentieth-century phically, the idea of an “artworld” serves as a theorists, notably Arthur C. Danto and George device for analyzing “art” and the “aesthetic.” Dickie, develop this thought by arguing that Artworld theory makes these concepts the objects qualify as art in virtue of being the products of certain social practices so specialized subject of practices characteristic of a special that persons engaged in them appear to be world exclusive to art. operating in an autonomous world. In the ver- In brief, the contemporary philosophical nacular, the “artworld” is the actual society conception of the artworld locates what is of persons whose interactions affect the valu- definitive of art in the application of some set of ation of works of art. What these meanings practices, whether these be activities which have in common is an understanding of art treat art organizationally, historically, or the- as being the consequence of institutionalized oretically. To hypothesize an artworld is to activities. explain that objects qualify as art by being That art should be thought of as situated in “institutionalized’ – that is, by operating or a special world of its own is a notion of some- being operated on within a definitive institutional what recent fabrication, and one quite alien framework. to antiquity’s robust idea of art as central to prac- But the relevant institutions need not con- tical human life. Plato and Aristotle located stitute an all-encompassing world that embraces artistic activity and appreciative experience all the kinds of human activities. So such ques- among practices meant to promote the goals tions as whether the artworld is democratic or of cognition and conduct. But, subsequently, elitist are not automatically relevant; they are at least two lines of thought converged to drive germane only where there is reason to con- art from this central location. strue artworld systems as political. On the one The first was triggered by Plato’s reasons hand, it seems parochial for philosophers to for doubting how effectively art can realize posit unique aesthetic practices when so wide vital practical functions. In response, art’s a range of explanations of institutionalized apologists have tended to isolate it from every- phenomena is available in the work of other dis- day activities or experiences as a stratagem for ciplines. The more thoroughly the artworld is defending its value. They typically define art (or conceived in terms of principles which operate the appropriate experience of it) as autonomous, also in the world of practical life, the more arguing that art characteristically induces misguided seems the drive to separate these unique ways of feeling or thinking, or is the pro- worlds. On the other hand, to operationalize the duct of a unique kind of activity, or is at least artworld in social scientific terms is to accept a unique product of ordinary activities. The reductionism. result is to construe art as independent of prac- In the vernacular, to speak of the artworld is tical contexts, and aesthetic value as irreduc- to refer to networks of persons engaged either ible. This strategy blunts Plato’s complaints vocationally or avocationally in activities that by removing art from the constraints usually affect the buying and selling of art. But to re- associated with cognition and conduct, but it also cognize the power of such persons by no means threatens art’s place in the everyday world. solves the problem of whether their actions A second line of thought which makes the determine, or are determined by, aesthetic or notion of situating art in an environment of other values. This brings us finally to the ques- its own attractive is fuelled by a widespread tion of whether the conception of the artworld skepticism about finding an essential property is simply another relativizing notion. internal to all artworks. If there is no such To what kinds of systematized circum- property, then whatever warrants the identi- stances is the identification of objects as art fication of some objects as art must be found in to be tied, and may these encompass, or must the contexts in which these objects are situated. they exclude, systems that also are constitutive But if to recognize something as art is also to of the practical world? Are the art systems accept it as independent of contexts occasioned of different times and places frameworks to by the everyday world, its being art must be be thought of as begetting separate worlds?

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Fragmenting aesthetic contexts in this way authenticity and art Works of art stand in makes it hard to explain the undoubted ease multiple complex relationships to their origin- with which cultures adopt and appreciate ating contexts. Some of these relationships each other’s art. Or are the divergent systems are grouped together as matters of authentic- to be incorporated into one complex artworld ity and inauthenticity. Broadly understood, a scheme so as to account for art’s demonstrable work of art possesses authenticity when it is ability to diffuse transculturally and transhis- “true” to its authorial and/or cultural origins by torically? If this latter alternative is the case, then reflecting beliefs and values held by its creator how are we to decide which systems’ values and/or creator’s community. However, different are to be marginalized? Thus, the most vexing eras, artforms, and critical traditions emphasize disagreements about the interpretation and distinct relationships between art and its socio- evaluation of art reappear, unresolved, within historical origins, so prominent species of artworld theory. authenticity display considerable variety. Attempts to define art as the product of Individual and cultural authenticities are the artworld, which is characterized as an associated with competing artistic values. informally structured institution, are contro- Cultural authenticity generally requires con- versial in ways already indicated. But the idea formity with established cultural norms. In that identifying and appreciating artworks contrast, authorial or individual authenticity involves seeing them in relation to art practices requires some degree of originality and there- and traditions that they continue, develop, or fore tends to involve departure from estab- rebel against – which was always an import- lished norms. Evaluating literary texts for ant strand in the accounts of the artworld authenticity relative to authorial intentions, proposed by both Danto and Dickie – is now we can ask which edition of James Joyce’s widely accepted by philosophers of art and Ulysses is most faithful to his intentions. plays an important role in theories of art inter- Viewing Ulysses relative to contemporaneous pretation and of the ontology of artworks. cultural practices, its radical innovations are more authentically modernist than Irish. As See also aristotle; danto; definition of this example suggests, the same work can be “art”; dickie; function of art; interpreta- authentic relative to one classification and tion; ontology of artworks; plato. inauthentic relative to another. Three important uses of “authentic” fall out- bibliography side the scope of this entry. The first involves Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “The Artworld,” Journal of inauthenticity due to forgery. The second Philosophy, 61, 571–84. involves the degree to which works remain Danto, Arthur C. 1981. The Transfiguration of the intact following restoration. The third derives Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- from functional accounts of art, where sity Press. authentic art advances art’s proper ends and Dickie, George. 1974. Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. Ithaca: Cornell University inauthentic art does not. This broad category is Press. emphasized in Continental philosophy and Dickie, George. 1984. The Art Circle: A Theory of Art. plays a prominent role in, for instance, writings New York: Haven. of Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno. Silvers, Anita. 1976. “The Artworld Discarded,” Questions about artistic authenticity seem Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 34, 441– to have arisen when philosophers and artists 54. began to question eighteenth-century expecta- Silvers, Anita. 1989. “Once upon a Time in the tions about artistic beauty (Trilling 1971: 92– Artworld.” In Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology. 100). As art came to be valued as a vehicle for G. Dickie, R. Sclafani, & R. Roblin (eds.). New self-exploration, standards of beauty came to be York: St. Martin’s, 183–95. regarded as cultural impositions that restricted anita silvers self-fulfillment and expression. A poem or paint- ing achieved expressive authenticity by chal- lenging prevailing taste. By the end of the attitude, aesthetic see aesthetic attitude nineteenth century, it was commonly thought

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that authenticity was diluted by any concessions play the correct notes but fail to realize the made for the sake of commercial viability. composer’s expressive goals? If musical works Thus, to experience “authentic” Beethoven we are pure sound structures, then such questions turn to his late string quartets, which baffled are trivialized, because expressive authenticity his contemporaries, rather than to Twenty-Five in performance is unrelated to the work’s iden- Scottish Songs (Op. 108), his piano arrange- tity and provenance. Alternatively, if we con- ments of existing folk songs undertaken for strue authenticity as a matter of the work’s commercial profit. However, this tradition pri- essential relationship to its origins, then the oritizes authenticity relative to self-expression variety of questions that are posed about – a standard that applies to Beethoven’s music authentic musical performance suggests a but not, for example, to bronze statutes of corresponding variety in the historically con- Buddha produced in seventeenth-century Tibet, tingent properties that belong to various musi- which are authentic or not relative to established cal works. Let us explore three of these issues. iconography. Applied to “traditional” and First, a sound structure can be performed non-Western art, the opposition of commerce with different timbres, as when the same and authenticity introduces questionable piece is played on a harpsichord and then on assumptions about cultural purity and cul- a piano. Many composers constrain timbre tural change (Shiner 1994). The opposition of choice by specifying instrumentation. So we do commerce and authenticity is also challenged not think that a string quartet receives an by the fact that multiple issues about expressive authentic performance if the four string parts authenticity arise within the commercial mar- are performed with a tuba, a kazoo, and two ketplace of popular culture, as evidenced by tin whistles. However, a simplistic adherence blues music (Rudinow 1994). to composer-specified instrumentation can The performing arts highlight additional generate its own sonic inauthenticity. Because issues of authenticity as issues of work authen- Mozart wrote for valve-less horns, the use of ticity are supplemented by questions about modern horns for performances of his horn performance authenticity. Debates about the concertos yields horn lines that are audibly possibility and desirability of authentic per- different from those that Mozart expected to formance of “early” and “period” music have be derived from his scores. The violin parts become an especially rich arena for explor- of these concertos also sound different (and ing the tensions between different modes of louder, altering the balance of instruments) authenticity. Different performances of the when played with modern synthetic strings in same work can be evaluated as more or less place of historically correct animal-gut strings. authentic by reference to distinct goals and So are performances of Mozart’s horn con- performing styles of different performers, which certos more authentic when performed on can, in turn, be evaluated by reference to (and valve-less horns and gut-strung violins? Since conflict with) goals indicated or presupposed he wrote with those sounds in mind, it would by the work’s composer. Hence, the ideal of seem so. Yet he did not specify these expecta- authentic self-expression puts a performer’s tions. We surmise what Mozart expected the expressive authenticity at cross-purposes with audience to hear by determining what was the goal of authentically rendering all the available to him. Hence, we must consult his- work’s contemporaneous properties (Kivy torical practices in order to combine explicit 1995:138–42). instructions (e.g., a musical score) with con- These issues have also enriched discussion of temporaneous performance conventions in the ontology of art. For example, an intuitively order to achieve authentic realization of a simple ontology of the performing arts regards composer’s music (Davies 2001: 103–7). works as structural types. On this model, per- It does not follow that authenticity is fully formances occur in order to make these types achieved through sonic authenticity, i.e., by pro- accessible to audiences. However, different ducing the sounds that the composer would expressive and aesthetic properties are present anticipate hearing under the best circum- in different performances of a common type. Is stances. Many opera arias in the soprano and a musical performance authentic if the musicians alto range in Italian opera seria were composed

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for male castrati. In the nineteenth century, instrumentation specified. Bach’s idea of massed moral qualms led audiences to reject this per- musical forces was puny by our standards, so formance practice. The music can be transposed realizing Bach’s intentions requires rearranging for tenors, or sung at pitch by male counter- his music (Kivy 1995: 53). However, in the tenors or by female singers, though none of these same way that a work composed for strings reproduces the combination of power and high yields a different, derivative work when played pitch for which castrati were renowned. More on a mellotron or on wind instruments, it can recently, electronic manipulation has been be argued that sacrificing explicit instructions used to duplicate a castrato’s unique combina- (e.g., the score) in light of an interpretation of tion of range, timbre, and volume. Although overall intentions results in a substitution of a sonically authentic, this electronically created derivative musical work (Davies 2001: 223–4). sonic facsimile is rejected as too inauthentic Additional complications arise when we for actual opera performance. It obliterates emphasize that music is a performing art. the performance art that made the best castrati Consider the performer’s role when perform- singers into international stars. Human per- ing the “Appassionata” piano sonata. Pianists formance, even if not sonically faithful to what engage in a skilled activity and Beethoven wrote the castrato could achieve, is still regarded as piano sonatas that exploit and sometimes more desirable than sonic mimicry. challenge that skill. In a word, his sonatas are Second, a musical sound structure is always meant to provide occasions of musicianship. interpreted by its realization in a performance Hence, authentic performances require per- style. For example, eighteenth-century violinists formers who employ and display the proper appear to have used vibrato quite sparingly. technical skill, which in turn requires the right In the twentieth century, continuous vibrato sort of instrument, if not the make and model became fashionable. Haydn’s violin concertos that Beethoven had available. Pianists are ulti- can be played with continuous vibrato or with mately the best judges of the proper balance of very little, but either approach will present innovation and conservatism when perform- audiences with the notes and structures that are ing those works (Godlovitch 1998: 61–78). actually stipulated in Haydn’s scores. Hence, per- Third, recognizing that musical works are formance technique introduces another facet more than mere sound structures invites to authenticity. extended debate about which other composer- Although it might seem obvious that a per- intended features of performances are equally formance always has greater authenticity by relevant. For example, J.S. Bach intended that virtue of utilizing contemporaneous perform- particular religious cantatas be performed in a ance practices with instruments of the intended Lutheran church on specific Sundays of the type and from the composer’s era, there are liturgical year. Given his clear intentions, a competing considerations. It is tempting to say Friday performance of “Wachet Auf” in a con- that historically appropriate instrumentation cert hall cannot be authentic. One response is is authentic because it reflects the composer’s that most music is multifunctional. Secular intentions. However, it is easy to find examples presentations are authentic whenever a com- of composers who recognized the deficiencies position is meant to be “an object of interest in of the available instruments. It is unlikely that its own right” (Davies 2001: 216). Because Beethoven desired that the “Appassionata” Bach intended this function for all of his music, piano sonata (Op. 57) should only be played on our secular performances are authentic in one fortepianos of the sort available to him in of the ways sanctioned by his intentions. A 1807, whose strings broke when he played its parallel argument can be made about modern most tumultuous passages. Hence, some per- museum displays of religious “art,” such as formances might be more authentic by virtue altarpieces and Byzantine icons. of being performed as the composer would However, the concept of aesthetic autonomy have wanted them had later instruments is foreign to many artistic traditions. Although been available. Extending this line of thought, secular performances of Bach’s religious cantatas authenticity of aesthetic or expressive effect can be defended on the grounds that he might demand radical departures from the intended them to be judged for their aesthetic

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merit, the same intention does not equally result of these cultural interactions (Shiner guide all indigenous and traditional “art” 1994). Yet works rejected as inauthentic may (Shiner 1994). Many cultural artifacts are site scrupulously adhere to the originating cul- and event specific. Despite their significant aes- ture’s own standards of creativity and author- thetic value, reproducing or preserving them ship (Coleman 2005). violates cultural tradition. Their public or “aesthetic” display may be prohibited. Hence, See also music and song; adorno; amerindian cultural exportation of ceremonial objects aesthetics; conservation and restoration; often renders them inauthentic. In other cases, cultural appropriation; forgery; notations; the process that makes such “art” available for ontological contextualism; originality; aesthetic appreciation introduces new values and performance. practices into the originating culture, reducing cultural authenticity. bibliography For example, Navajo sandpaintings are cre- Bicknell, Jeanette. 2005. “Just a Song? Exploring the ated as part of a healing ritual. These colorful, Aesthetics of Popular Song Performance,” Journal crushed rock designs are destroyed at the end of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63, 261–70. of the ceremony. Navajo tradition prohibits their Coleman, Elizabeth Burns. 2005. Aboriginal Art, preservation or fixed replication. Although Identity and Appropriation. Aldershot: Ashgate. these ceremonial artifacts are aesthetically Davies, Stephen. 2001. Musical Works and Perform- ances. Oxford: Clarendon. complex and rewarding, they are not produced Dutton, Denis. 1979. “Artistic Crimes,” British as works of art. Hence, a sandpainting pro- Journal of Aesthetics, 19, 302–41. duced for display or sale is inherently in- Godlovitch, Stan. 1998. Musical Performance: A authentic with respect to Navajo tradition. Philosophical Study. London: Routledge. Respecting this tradition, Navajos who create Kivy, Peter. 1995. Authenticities: Philosophical sandpaintings for nonritual display will inten- Reflections on Musical Performance. Ithaca: Cornell tionally alter them from their “authentic,” rit- University Press. ual-specific counterparts. These “inauthentic,” Rudinow, Joel. 1994. “Race, Ethnicity, Expressive fixed-form sandpaintings can be evaluated for Authenticity: Can White People Sing the Blues?” authenticity by regarding them as displays of tra- Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52, 127–37. Shiner, Larry. 1994. “ ‘Primitive Fakes,’ ‘Tourist ditional Navajo symbolism and design principles. Art,’ and the Ideology of Authenticity,” Journal of However, many collectors and art dealers Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52, 225–34. believe that stylistic authenticity is insufficient. Shiner, Larry. 2003. “Western and Non-Western Authenticity requires “traditional” intentions. Concepts of Art: Universality and Authenticity.” Seeking authentic indigenous art, they reject the In Art and Essence. S. Davies & A. Sukla (eds.). very artifacts that the Navajo produce as Westport: Praeger, 143–56. works of art, namely, artifacts created to be Trilling, Lionel. 1971. Sincerity and Authenticity. objects of aesthetic appreciation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 81–105. Paradoxically, cultural changes introduced Young, James O. 1988. “The Concept of Authentic to accommodate foreign expectations and Performance,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 28, 228–38. exploitation are challenged as inauthentic whenever the artists evolve new practices as a theodore gracyk

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