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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirAbstract: It has become increasingly common for philosophers to make use of the concept of artistic value, and, further, to distinguish artistic value from aesthetic value. In a recent paper, 'The Myth of (Non-Aesthetic) Artistic Value', Dominic Lopes takes issue with this, presenting a kind of corrective to current philosophical practice regarding the use of the concept of artistic value. Here I am concerned to defend current practice against Lopes's attack. I argue that there is some unclarity as to what aspect of this practice Lopes is objecting to, and I distinguish three kinds of objection that he could be read as making. I argue that none of these is adequately supported by Lopes's arguments, and that the corresponding three aspects of current philosophical practice are on firmer footing than Lopes's paper suggests. A new, plausible characterisation of artistic value will emerge from this discussion.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirIntroduction: Public art is an oxymoron according to the standards of modernist art and aesthetic theory. Modern philosophical aesthetics focuses almost exclusively on subjective experience and a commodified work of art. Art is taken to be the product of an individual and autonomous act of expression, and its appreciation is, likewise, a private act of contemplation. By contrast, as a public phenomenon, art must entail the artist's self-negation and deference to a collective community. It is interesting to observe that the recognized art of nearly all cultures, including that of the western European tradition prior to the late Renaissance, embraces just such a collective model, indulging the differences among individuals as variant manifestations of a common spirit. The celebrated treasures of Greece and Rome, as well as the Christian works of the Middle Ages and the age of the fresco that succeeded them, do not exalt the private vision of individual artists so much as they bespeak the shared values and convictions of cultural communities, and are accordingly to be found in those edifices and open places where people regularly gather to commemorate those same values and convictions. Privacy was for centuries a privative concept, demarcating the dissociated and limited experience of persons cut off from and below the level of full social humanity.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirPublisher's Note: Kathleen Higgins argues that the arguments that Plato used to defend the ethical value of music are still applicable today. Music encourages ethically valuable attitudes and behavior, provides practice in skills that are valuable in ethical life, and symbolizes ethical ideals
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Added by: Quentin Pharr and Clotilde TorregrossaPublisher’s Note: In Art on My Mind, bell hooks, a leading cultural critic, responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting, and criticizing art and aesthetics in an art world increasingly concerned with identity politics. Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.
Comment (from this Blueprint): How we "consume" and why we "consume" certain aesthetic objects, as well as value them, is under critical scrutiny in this selection from hooks. She is particularly worried about conceptions and the consumption of what is beautiful when both are heavily influenced by negative social environments, such as pre-established standards based on classist, sexist, or racist power structures. She is also concerned with pointing out that, when we abide by certain power structures in what we consider beautiful objects and worthy of consumption, we often miss out on a great deal of beautiful things which are right before our eyes in everyday circumstances. In light of her discussion, we would do well to think about what might be influencing our conceptions of what is beautiful and how and why we consume beauty as we do.
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Added by: Hans MaesSummary: Focuses on the modernist literary portrait in general and on Wilde's novel in particular. Also contains multiple references to painted portraits. Argues that queer modernist portraits concentrate on dynamic aspects of style and personality, presenting both the sitter's style and personality and the personality of the artist who renders her. Explores how style becomes another vehicle where a dangerous homosociality can be reduced into a manifestation of the merely particular (and vice versa).
Comment: Useful in discussing portraiture, as well as depiction and representation in general.
Artworks to use with this text:
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Cleverly framed as a story about a portrait within a portrait, and written by Wilde in part to demonstrate to his artistic nemesis James McNeil Whistler the superiority of writing to painting, Dorian serves to illustrate the central thesis of Hovey's study. Interweaves reflections on Wilde's personal style, his style as an author, the style of the painter and of the painting, the style of the characters in the book, and queer modernist style in general.
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Added by: Meilin ChinnSummary: The controversial essay in which Xi Kang offered a distinct counterargument to the orthodox Confucian view that music contains and transfers emotions between musicians and listeners. Xi Kang crafts a series of arguments against the presence of emotions and images in music and contends that the widespread belief to the contrary leads to the misuse of music for political and moral agendas.
Comment: This text is best used in a course on aesthetics (especially philosophy of music) and/or Chinese philosophy. A basic understanding of Daoism is helpful.
Related reading:
- Essay on Music. Ruan Ji. In Reed Andrew Criddle's "Rectifying Lasciviousness through Mystical Learning: An Exposition and Translation of Ruan Ji’s Essay on Music." Asian Music 38(2), 2007.
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Added by: Björn Freter, Contributed by: Rebekah HumphreysAbstract:
This interdisciplinary chapter provides a literary reading and philosophical analyses of issues surrounding the depiction of women and of nonhuman animals in a subgenre of contemporary crime narratives – what this chapter terms ‘killing floor’ crime fiction. This is achieved through a focus on the function of the tattoo, ‘markings’ in a broad sense (both metaphorically and physically) and the gendered elements of animal representations in crime fiction. Through an analysis of the significance of marking skin, the chapter links the exploitation and objectification of the bodies of women and of nonhuman animals. In doing so, it compares the use of animals in modern-day killing floor practices and the position of women in contemporary crime fiction. Through forcible marking and scarification, this chapter raises pertinent interrelated ethical issues concerning the perceptions of women, their societal status and the commercial use of nonhuman animals.
Comment: Discusses links between the portrayal of animals of women in detective crime fiction, and relates to the work of Carol Adams and applies to modern-day practices that exploit animals.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirIntroduction: There are two sorts of descriptions, or accounts, that we can give of works of art or of anything else that makes up our world of relatively stable objects. I can describe a painting, a chair, a mountain, or a man in terms of colors, shapes, spatial relation of parts, and so on. I can also describe the same four objects by talking about the dynamic ten sions of the first, or its lack of visual balance; the grace and elegance of the second; the gloominess or majesty of the third; and the trimness or gawkiness of the fourth. The first sort of description, or account, may answer a wide variety of general purposes, central among them that of identifying particular objects. A museum curator might so describe a painting for future reference in identifying the particular work of one painter; an auctioneer identifies pieces of furniture by such descriptions; a map-maker, a mountain; and a police department, a Man Wanted. The second sort of account of the same objects could not usefully serve such purposes. The second sort, usually if not always, is found in the context of the evaluating of objects. "This is a fine Sheraton chair-it is graceful, but sturdy." Here, relevant reasons are furnished for an aesthe tic rating of an object, and the first sort of description does not, and could not, serve this function
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirAbstract: Appropriation art has often been thought to support the view that authorship in art is an outmoded or misguided notion. Through a thought experiment comparing appropriation art to a unique case of artistic forgery, I examine and reject a number of candidates for the distinction that makes artists the authors of their work while forgers are not. The crucial difference is seen to lie in the fact that artists bear ultimate responsibility for whatever objectives they choose to pursue through their work, whereas the forger's central objectives are determined by the nature of the activity of forgery. Appropriation artists, by revealing that no aspect of the objectives an artist pursues are in fact built in to the concept of art, demonstrate artists' responsibility for all aspects of their objectives and, hence, of their products. This responsibility is constitutive of authorship and accounts for the interpretability of artworks. Far from undermining the concept of authorship in art, then, the appropriation artists in fact reaffirm and strengthen it.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirIntroduction: In recent years, momentum has been gathering in defense of the appropriateness of aesthetic discourse in relation to a number of domains other than art and nature. Philosophers have argued that food, sports, and sex can be viewed aesthetically. It has been claimed that the "lower senses" of smell, taste, and touch may play legitimate or even exclusive roles in some aesthetic judgments. And there has been sustained criticism of the view that aesthetic judgments must be disinterested or must transport us out of the concerns of everyday life. Can this extension of the realm of the aesthetic be taken even further, so as to accommodate the idea that even the most mundane incidents of everyday life have an aesthetic character, or that there can be aesthetic experiences of such incidents? With attention to two especially hard cases, itches and scratches, I will argue that it is appropriate and worthwhile to think of even the simplest moments of everyday life in aesthetic terms. It is appropriate, because on the most plausible accounts of aesthetic experience there can be legitimate aesthetic experiences of itching and scratching; and it is worthwhile, because aesthetic attention to this domain offers the prospect of unique and significant satisfaction.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirIntroduction: Contemporary artworks raise a variety of ontological, epistemological, and interpretative questions that have not yet been adequately dealt with in aesthetics. Whereas traditional visual artworks have typically had a set of privi leged and (ideally) unchanging properties fixed at a particular moment early in their histories, a contemporary installation artwork may be installed differently each time it is taken out of storage, or even constituted out of different objects at each exhibition site. The resulting variation in its configuration and visual properties may simply be a function of the changing features of galleries or available materials, or it may be essential to the work's meaning. Or both: many contemporary works are site specific, essentially responsive to their environments in such a way that context is incorporated into the work's meaning
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Added by: M. Jimena Clavel Vázquez and Andrés Hernández VillarrealAbstract:
In this chapter, Laack analyzes a migration account visually depicted in the Mexican early colonial pictorial manuscript known as the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2. This pictographic map tells the story of a group of Aztecs leaving their primordial home, changing their social, cultural, and religious identity through migration and the passing of ordeals, and finally settling in the town of Cuauhtinchan. It is painted in the style of Aztec pictography, which used visual imagery to convey thoughts and meanings in contrast to alphabetical scripts using abstract signs for linguistic sounds. Drawing on the theories of embodied metaphors and embodied meaning by philosopher Mark L. Johnson and cognitive linguist George P. Lakoff, I argue that Aztec pictography offers efficient and effective means to communicate embodied metaphors on a visual level and evokes complex layers of embodied meaning. In doing so, I intend to change perspective on the narrative powers of religious stories by transcending textual patterns of analysis and theory building and opening up to non-linguistic modes of experience and their influence on narrative structures and strategies.
Comment (from this Blueprint): This paper analyses the embodied metaphors found in the pictorial manuscript Mapa de Cuauhtinchan no. 2 (the map of Cuauhtinchan number 2) based on the theory of embodied cognition proposed by Lakoff and Johnson. According to the latter, our concepts are grounded on embodied metaphors. Laack’s proposal is that Aztec pictographic manuscript exploits these kinds of concepts to enable the communication of non-propositional meaning. It is useful to read it accompanied by Newman, Sarah E.. Sensorial experiences in Mesoamerica
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Added by: Björn Freter, Contributed by: Björn FreterAbstract: In this chapter, I examine the role African art play in the institutionalization of difference in African traditions. I am particularly interested in how aesthetic signs and symbols or other forms of art are employed by persons of an African culture to differentiate themselves or set themselves apart from other persons within the same culture or other cultures. Such forms of art of interest here include modes of dressing, tribal marks, hairstyles, and nonverbal signs of communication. I assert in this chapter that these aesthetic forms of difference are in some way institutionalized into the fabric of culture that they are taken by members of the society as objective givens and often not subject to questioning. Hence the othering is sustained and maintained through time. I also argue that these forms of differences sustained through art often promote inequality and preferential treatment of the self over and above the other. A case in mind is the preferential treatment of female folks from the royal family as against those who are not from the royal family, a difference clearly made visible through art.
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Added by: Rossen VentzislavovSummary: Jones' essay offers a critique of philosophical and art-historical interpretation. Her main contention is that attributions of meaning in philosophical aesthetics and art criticism are traditionally a manner of top-down bestowal - i.e. artworks are rendered intelligible by certain pre-established and often institutionalized conceptual paradigms. In this, the often unstable meanings of art works themselves are not only inadvertently lost but often even intentionally stifled. To rehabilitate such meanings, and destabilize the homogenous discourses that try to contain them, Jones proposes a "feminist phenomenological approach… deeply invested in performing meaning." What this amounts to is a newfound sensitivity to all aspects of art - the performative, physical, contingent, messy, gendered, theatrical, emotional etc. - that have been systematically marginalized by philosophers and art critics since Kant. There is, according to Jones, an intractable economy of desire that absorbs artistic creation into the cumulative enterprise of human interaction and, instead of sweeping it under the rug for the sake of stability, philosophers and art critics should engage this economy on its own tentative terms.
Comment: Useful in classes on art interpretation. Can inspire great discussions when read together with (parts of) Kant's Critique of Judgment.
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Added by: Erich Hatala MatthesSummary: This text offers a brief overview of some approaches to the concept of authenticity in international heritage management. Focusing on a case study of Buddhist sites in Laos, Karlström then argues that culturally specific understandings of authenticity pose problems for the universal application of a preservationist approach to heritage management. It concludes with some open-ended questions about how we should pursue alternative approaches.
Comment: This is a good text for instructors who want to discuses authenticity in the context of a reasonably in-depth look at a particular non-Western cultural context. While the article itself is light on conceptual/ philosophical work, if offers useful material for philosophical analysis and discussion. It would pair well with the theoretical framework provided in Yuriko Saito's "Why Restore Works of Art?", or the alternative approach to authenticity captured in Carolyn Korsmeyer's "Real Old Things."
Comment: This paper would be useful for undergrads and postgrads studying and questioning the difference between aesthetic value and artistic value, the dependence relation between features of works and their value, and generally the metaphysical basis of value in art. Hanson is very clear about her argumentative strategy. This makes the paper a prime example of good philosophical methodology.