Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art

BLACKWELL PHILOSOPHY ANTHOLOGIES

Each volume in this outstanding series provides an authoritative and comprehensive collection of the essential primary readings from philosophy’s main fields of study. Designed to complement the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, each volume represents an unparalleled resource in its own right, and will provide the ideal platform for course use.

1 Cottingham: Western Philosophy: An Anthology (second edition)2 Cahoone: From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (expanded second edition)3 LaFollette: Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (third edition)4 Goodin and Pettit: Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology (second edition)5 Eze: African Philosophy: An Anthology6 McNeill and Feldman: Continental Philosophy: An Anthology7 Kim and Sosa: Metaphysics: An Anthology8 Lycan and Prinz: Mind and Cognition: An Anthology (third edition)9 Kuhse and Singer: Bioethics: An Anthology (second edition)

10 Cummins and Cummins: Minds, Brains, and Computers – The Foundations of Cognitive Science: An Anthology11 Sosa, Kim, Fantl, and McGrath Epistemology: An Anthology (second edition)12 Kearney and Rasmussen: Continental Aesthetics – Romanticism to Postmodernism: An Anthology13 Martinich and Sosa: Analytic Philosophy: An Anthology14 Jacquette: Philosophy of Logic: An Anthology15 Jacquette: Philosophy of Mathematics: An Anthology16 Harris, Pratt, and Waters: American Philosophies: An Anthology17 Emmanuel and Goold: Modern Philosophy – From Descartes to Nietzsche: An Anthology18 Scharff and Dusek: Philosophy of Technology – The Technological Condition: An Anthology19 Light and Rolston: Environmental Ethics: An Anthology20 Taliaferro and Griffiths: Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology21 Lamarque and Olsen: Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art – The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology (second edition)22 John and Lopes: Philosophy of Literature – Contemporary and Classic Readings: An Anthology23 Cudd and Andreasen: Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology24 Carroll and Choi: Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology25 Lange: Philosophy of Science: An Anthology26 Shafer‐Landau and Cuneo: Foundations of Ethics: An Anthology27 Curren: Philosophy of Education: An Anthology28 Shafer‐Landau: Ethical Theory: An Anthology29 Cahn and Meskin: Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology30 McGrew, Alspector‐Kelly and Allhoff: The Philosophy of Science: An Historical Anthology31 May: Philosophy of Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings32 Rosenberg and Arp: Philosophy of Biology: An Anthology33 Kim, Korman, and Sosa: Metaphysics: An Anthology (second edition)34 Martinich and Sosa: Analytic Philosophy: An Anthology (second edition)35 Shafer‐Landau: Ethical Theory: An Anthology (second edition)36 Hetherington: Metaphysics and Epistemology: A Guided Anthology37 Scharff and Dusek: Philosophy of Technology – The Technological Condition: An Anthology (second edition)38 LaFollette: Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (fourth edition)39 Davis: Contemporary Moral and Social Issues: An Introduction through Original Fiction, Discussion, and Readings40 Dancy and Sandis: Philosophy of Action: An Anthology

Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art The Analytic Tradition

An Anthology

Second Edition

Edited by

Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen

This edition first published 2019© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (1e, 2004)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

The right of Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

Editorial OfficesJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of WarrantyWhile the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication data is available.

Paperback ISBN: 9781119222446

Cover Design: WileyCover Image: Landscape with Apollo and the Muses, Claude Lorrain, National Galleries of Scotland. Purchased with the aid of the Art Fund and a Treasury Grant 1960.www.nationalgalleries.org

Set in 9.5/11.5pt Bembo by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

Printed and bound in Singapore by C.O.S. Printers Pte Ltd

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments xExtracts from the General Introduction to the First Edition (2004) xiiiGeneral Introduction to the Second Edition xvii

Part I Identifying Art 1

Introduction 3

1 The Artworld 7Arthur C. Danto

2 The New Institutional Theory of Art 15George Dickie

3 An Aesthetic Definition of Art 22Monroe C. Beardsley

4 “But They Don’t Have Our Concept of Art” 30Denis Dutton

5 Nobody Needs a Theory of Art 43Dominic McIver Lopes

6 Art: What it Is and Why it Matters 54Catharine Abell

Part II Ontology of Art 67

Introduction 69

7 What a Musical Work Is 71Jerrold Levinson

8 Defending Musical Platonism 84Julian Dodd

vi contents

9 Against Musical Ontology 98Aaron Ridley

10 The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics 108Amie L. Thomasson

Part III Aesthetic Properties and Aesthetic Experience 117

Introduction 119

11 Aesthetic Concepts 121Frank Sibley

12 Categories of Art 134Kendall L. Walton

13 In Defence of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism 149Nick Zangwill

14 How to Be a Pessimist about Aesthetic Testimony 159Robert Hopkins

15 Recent Approaches to Aesthetic Experience 170Noël Carroll

Part IV Intention and Interpretation 183

Introduction 185

16 Intentions and Interpretations: A Fallacy Revived 187Monroe C. Beardsley

17 The Literary Work as a Pliable Entity: Combining Realism and Pluralism 197Torsten Pettersson

18 Authors’ Intentions, Literary Interpretation, and Literary Value 208Stephen Davies

Part V Values of Art 223

Introduction 225

19 Originals, Copies, and Aesthetic Value 229Jack W. Meiland

20 Artistic Value 236Malcolm Budd

21 The Ethical Criticism of Art 247Berys Gaut

22 Artistic Value and Opportunistic Moralism 258Eileen John

23 What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude? A Feminist Perspective on Art and Pornography 266A.W. Eaton

contents vii

Part VI Art and Knowledge 283

Introduction 285

24 On the Cognitive Triviality of Art 289Jerome Stolnitz

25 Art and Moral Knowledge 295Cynthia A. Freeland

26 Reading Fiction and Conceptual Knowledge: Philosophical Thought in Literary Context 310Eileen John

27 Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries 326Peter Lamarque

Part VII Fictionality and Imagination 337

Introduction 339

28 Fearing Fictions 343Kendall L. Walton

29 The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse 355John Searle

30 The Expression of Feeling in Imagination 363Richard Moran

31 The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance 378Tamar Szabó Gendler

32 Anne Brontë and the Uses of Imagination 393Gregory Currie

33 Fiction as a Genre 402Stacie Friend

Part VIII Pictorial Art 417

Introduction 419

34 On Pictorial Representation 421Richard Wollheim

35 Pictorial Realism 431Catharine Abell

36 Telling Pictures: The Place of Narrative in Late Modern ‘Visual Art’ 441David Davies

Part IX Photography and Film 451

Introduction 453

37 Photography and Representation 457Roger Scruton

38 Photography and Causation: Responding to Scruton’s Scepticism 472Dawn M. Phillips

viii contents

39 Cinematic Art 483Berys Gaut

40 Theses on Cinema as Philosophy 496Paisley Livingston

41 Narration in Motion 503Katherine J. Thomson‐Jones

Part X Literature 511

Introduction 513

42 Style and Personality in the Literary Work 517Jenefer M. Robinson

43 Literary Aesthetics and Literary Practice 527Stein Haugom Olsen

44 Fictional Characters and Literary Practices 537Amie L. Thomasson

45 The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning 549Peter Lamarque

Part XI Music 561

Introduction 563

46 The Profundity of Music 567Peter Kivy

47 Against Emotion: Hanslick Was Right about Music 574Nick Zangwill

48 Listening with Emotion: How Our Emotions Help Us to Understand Music 583Jenefer Robinson

Part XII Popular Arts 601

Introduction 603

49 Defining Mass Art 607Noël Carroll

50 Just a Song? Exploring the Aesthetics of Popular Song Performance 623Jeanette Bicknell

51 Comics as Literature? 632Aaron Meskin

52 The Vice of Snobbery: Aesthetic Knowledge, Justification and Virtue in Art Appreciation 647Matthew Kieran

contents ix

Part XIII Aesthetics of Nature and Everyday Aesthetics 659

Introduction 661

53 Appreciation and the Natural Environment 665Allen Carlson

54 Scientific Knowledge and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature 673Patricia Matthews

55 Aesthetic Character and Aesthetic Integrity in Environmental Conservation 684Emily Brady

56 Everyday Aesthetics 695Yuriko Saito

57 The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience 700Sherri Irvin

Index 710

1 Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964), pp. 571–84. Reproduced by permission of The Journal of Philosophy.

2 George Dickie, “The New Institutional Theory of Art,” Proceedings of the 8th Wittgenstein Symposium 10 (1983), pp. 57–64. Public domain.

3 Monroe C. Beardsley, “An Aesthetic Definition of Art,” in Hugh Curtler (ed.), What Is Art? (New York: Haven Publications, 1983), pp. 15–29. Reproduced by permission of the editor.

4 Denis Dutton, “But They Don’t Have Our Concept of Art,” in Noël Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art Today (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), pp. 217–38. © University of Wisconsin Press.

5 Dominic McIver Lopes, “Nobody Needs a Theory of Art,” Journal of Philosophy 105 (2008), pp. 109–127. Reproduced by permission of The Journal of Philosophy.

6 Catharine Abell, “Art: What it Is and Why it Matters,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (2012), pp. 671–91. Reproduced by permission of Wiley.

7 Jerrold Levinson, “What a Musical Work Is,” Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980), pp. 5–28. Reproduced by per-mission of The Journal of Philosophy.

8 Julian Dodd, “Defending Musical Platonism,” British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002), pp. 380–402. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

9 Aaron Ridley, “Against Musical Ontology,” Journal of Philosophy 100 (2003), pp. 203–20. Reproduced by permission of The Journal of Philosophy.

10 Amie L. Thomasson, “The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2005), pp. 221–9. Reproduced by per-mission of Wiley.

11 Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” in Joseph Margolis (ed.), Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics, rev. edn. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), pp. 64–87; reproduced with “extensive minor revisions” from Philosophical Review 68 (1959), pp. 421–50. Public domain.

12 Kendall L.Walton, “Categories of Art,” Philosophical Review 79 (1970), pp. 334–67. Public domain.

13 Nick Zangwill, “In Defence of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism,” Philosophical Quarterly 50 (2000), pp. 476–93. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

14 Robert Hopkins, “How to Be a Pessimist about Aesthetic Testimony,” Journal of Philosophy 108 (2011), pp. 138–57. Reproduced by permission of The Journal of Philosophy.

15 Noël Carroll, “Recent Approaches to Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (2012), pp. 165–77. Reproduced by permission of Wiley.

16 Monroe C. Beardsley, “Intentions and Interpretations: A Fallacy Revived,” in Michael J. Wreen and Donald M. Callan (eds.), The Aesthetic Point of View (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 188–207. Reproduced by permission of Cornell University Press.

17 Torsten Pettersson, “The Literary Work as a Pliable Entity: Combining Realism and Pluralism,” in Michael Krausz (ed.), Is There a Single Right Interpretation? (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002), pp.211–30. Reproduced by permission of Penn State University Press.

18 Stephen Davies, “Authors’ Intentions, Literary Interpretation, and Literary Value,” British Journal of

Acknowledgments

acknowledgments xi

Aesthetics 46 (2006), pp. 223–47. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

19 Jack W. Meiland, “Originals, Copies, and Aesthetic Value,” in Denis Dutton (ed.), The Forger’s Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 115–30. © University of California Press.

20 Malcolm Budd, Ch 1, Values of Art (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 1–16 (up to line 4), p. 38 (from line 12)–p. 43 (excluding last 4 lines), endnotes 1‐16 (pp. 173–6), 52–9 (pp. 182–4). Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

21 Berys Gaut, “The Ethical Criticism of Art,” in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 182–203. Reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Press.

22 Eileen John, “Artistic Value and Opportunistic Moralism,” in Matthew Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 331–41. Reproduced by permis-sion of Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

23 A.W. Eaton, “What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude? A Feminist Perspective on Art and Pornography,” in Hans Maes and Jerrold Levinson (eds.), Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 278–307. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

24 Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 32 (1992), pp. 191–200. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

25 Cynthia A. Freeland, “Art and Moral Knowledge,” Philosophical Topics 25 (1997), pp. 11–36. Reproduced by permission of University of Arkansas Press.

26 Eileen John, “Reading Fiction and Conceptual Knowledge: Philosophical Thought in Literary Context,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998), pp. 331–48. Reproduced by permission of Wiley.

27 Peter Lamarque, “Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries,” in Matthew Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 127–39. Reproduced by permis-sion of Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

28 Kendall L. Walton, “Fearing Fictions,” Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978), pp. 5–27. Reproduced by per-mission of The Journal of Philosophy.

29 John Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” in Expression and Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1979), pp. 58–75. Reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Press.

30 Richard Moran, “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination,” Philosophical Review 103 (1994), pp. 75–106. Reproduced by permission of Duke University Press.

31 Tamar Szabó Gendler, “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance,” Journal of Philosophy 97 (2000), pp. 55–81. Reproduced by permission of The Journal of Philosophy.

32 Gregory Currie, “Anne Brontë and the Uses of Imagination,” in Matthew Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Reproduced by permission of Wiley.

33 Stacie Friend, “Fiction as a Genre,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112 (2012), pp. 179–209. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

34 Richard Wollheim, “On Pictorial Representation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998), pp. 217–26. Reproduced by permission of Wiley.

35 Catharine Abell, “Pictorial Realism,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (2007), pp. 1–17. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis.

36 David Davies, “Telling Pictures: The Place of Narrative in Late Modern ‘Visual Art,’” in Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (eds.), Philosophy and Conceptual Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 138–56. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

37 Roger Scruton, “Photography and Representation,” in The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 102–26. Reproduced by permission of the author.

38 Dawn M. Phillips, “Photography and Causation: Responding to Scruton’s Scepticism,” British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (2009), pp. 327–340. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

39 Berys Gaut, “Cinematic Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60 (2002), pp. 299–312. Reproduced by permission of Wiley.

40 Paisley Livingston, “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (2006), pp. 11–18. Reproduced by permission of Wiley.

41 Katherine J. Thomson‐Jones, “Narration in Motion,” British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (2012), pp. 33–43. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

42 Jenefer M. Robinson, “Style and Personality in the Literary Work,” Philosophical Review 94 (1985), pp.  227–47. Reproduced by permission of Duke University Press.

xii acknowledgments

43 Stein Haugom Olsen, “Literary Aesthetics and Literary Practice,” in The End of Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 1–19. Reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Press.

44 Amie L. Thomasson, “Fictional Characters and Literary Practices,” British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003), pp. 138–57. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

45 Peter Lamarque, “The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning,” Ratio 22 (2009), pp. 398–420. Reproduced by permis-sion of Wiley.

46 Peter Kivy, “The Profundity of Music,” in Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 245–55. Reproduced by permission of Cornell University Press.

47 Nick Zangwill, “Against Emotion: Hanslick Was Right about Music,” British Journal of Aesthetics 44 (2004), pp. 29–43. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

48 Jenefer Robinson, “Listening with Emotion: How Our Emotions Help Us to Understand Music,” in Deeper than Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 348–78. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

49 Noël Carroll, Section 3 of “The Nature of Mass Art,” from A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 184–211. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

50 Jeanette Bicknell, “Just a Song? Exploring the Aesthetics of Popular Song Performance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2005), pp. 261–70. Reproduced by permission of Wiley.

51 Aaron Meskin, “Comics as Literature?” British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (2009), pp. 219–39. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

52 Matthew Kieran, “The Vice of Snobbery: Aesthetic Knowledge, Justification and Virtue in Art Appreciation,” Philosophical Quarterly 60 (2010), pp. 243–63. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

53 Allen Carlson, “Appreciation and the Natural Environment,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37 (1979), pp. 267–76. Reproduced by permission of Wiley.

54 Patricia Matthews, “Scientific Knowledge and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60 (2002), pp. 37–48. Reproduced by permission of Wiley.

55 Emily Brady, “Aesthetic Character and Aesthetic Integrity in Environmental Conservation,” Environmental Ethics 24 (2002), pp. 75–91. Reproduced with extensive minor revisions, by permission of the author.

56 Yuriko Saito, “Everyday Aesthetics,” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001), pp. 87–95. Reproduced by per-mission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

57 Sherri Irvin, “The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience,” British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (2008), pp. 29–44. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

Extracts from the General Introduction to the First Edition (2004)

This anthology has a number of clearly statable aims:

• to present in a single volume some of the key texts from the analytic tradition in aesthetics and philosophy of art;

• to display the development of this tradition from its beginnings in the 1950s to the present day;

• to illustrate the broad range of topics and problems addressed by analytic aestheticians, from general issues of a theoretical nature to more specific issues relating to particular art forms;

• to provide a valuable reference resource for teaching and research purposes.

In selecting articles for inclusion we have tried to strike a balance on many fronts: between “classic” contributions and more recent developments, between topics, between art forms, between the needs of undergraduate teaching and the needs of a scholarly archive, between the desire for comprehensive coverage and the constraints of managea-bility. We hope the volume will act as something of a showcase for the considerable achievements of analytic aesthetics over the past fifty years. But above all, we have sought to put together a selection which will be of practical usefulness for those working in the field, at all levels.

Why “analytic”? This volume is a companion to Blackwell’s Continental Aesthetics: Romanticism to Post­modernism: An Anthology, edited by Richard Kearney and David Rasmussen, and, we believe, nicely complements it, in showing the distinctive treatment of sometimes not dissimi-lar topics by those working in the Anglophone tradition and from the perspective of analytic philosophy. Together the two volumes give an excellent overview of the full range of  philosophical thinking about the arts in the twentieth

century. It has often been remarked how inappropriate are the designations “Continental” and “ analytic” in marking different approaches to philosophy. For one thing, the for-mer is a geographical indicator, the latter a methodological one, so they are already incommensurate. But more strik-ingly, many leading figures in analytic philosophy – Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Waismann, Moritz Schlick, and other members of the Vienna Circle –  came from Continental Europe, and currently in Germany, France, Spain, Scandinavia, and Italy there is extensive interest in analytical philosophical methods. However, these two vol-umes on aesthetics do show a pronounced difference in methodology and it is worth reflecting on the characteristics distinctive of the analytic tradition.

Clearly the idea of “analysis” is central to analytic philosophy. But the aims and methods of analysis differ markedly in the various incarnations of the analytic school. In the early years of the twentieth century, under the direct influence of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein (as author of Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus), the logical analysis of propo-sitions was paramount, with the aim of displaying their “logical form,” as distinct from their surface grammatical form. Russell’s Theory of Descriptions was held to be para-digmatic in this regard. Superficially his theory might seem like a mere paraphrasing of sentences containing definite descriptions into a logical notation; in fact it had profound repercussions for traditional problems in philosophy, nota-bly the problem of nonexistence, the relations between meaning and truth, and the manner in which false proposi-tions relate to the world. Analytic aestheticians were to draw heavily on Russell’s achievement in analyzing fiction-ality. The uncovering of logical forms developed into a more general program in philosophy: the use of logic to “regiment” language, in W.V.O. Quine’s terms, into a

xiv extracts from the general introduction to the first edition

“canonical notation,” with the aim of eliminating vagaries in common usage and delivering a streamlined vehicle for science. An even grander ambition lay behind this species of analysis, encouraged by early ideas in Russell and Wittgenstein, namely that logical analysis could reveal the vacuity of much traditional philosophy. The highpoint of this ambition came with the Logical Positivists’ sweeping denunciation of metaphysics as meaningless.

But analytic philosophy did not restrict itself to the logi-cal analysis of propositions. Specific, problematic, concepts were also subject to analysis. Sometimes this took the form of seeking definitions for troublesome terms: “knowledge,” “freedom,” “truth,” “good,” “existence,” and  –  later on  – “art.” Arguably this was an extension of an approach originating with Socrates, but the emphasis on “necessary and sufficient conditions” for the true application of a concept was a peculiarly modern  –  and “analytic”  – phenomenon. However, not all analytic philosophers took definition to be the aim of conceptual analysis. Some, the Ordinary Language Philosophers from Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s, preferred the analogy with geography, proposed by Gilbert Ryle, seeing their task as “mapping out” concepts or finding their “logical geography.” Ryle’s Concept of Mind (1949) was paradigmatic in this regard, owing much to the later work of Wittgenstein.

By the late 1960s the optimistic thought that logical analysis or the study of ordinary usage could alone solve – or dissolve – the major issues in philosophy, sweep-ing away centuries of metaphysical confusion, was being questioned. The interest in language and logic became focused into a relatively new form of inquiry, also traceable to Frege, namely “philosophy of language,” which sought a clearer understanding of such concepts as meaning, truth, reference, and indeed language itself, but without any programmatic ambition toward solving all philosophical problems. By the 1970s few philosophers styled them-selves as “linguistic philosophers” or “ordinary language philosophers,” yet significantly the term “analytic philoso-phy” grew in popularity. The Fregean tradition continued to inform philosophy of language but the original linguis-tic turn lost its “revolutionary” edge and settled down merely into a style of philosophizing.

Analytic philosophy now became distinctive for its methodology and its theoretical presuppositions. Characteristic of the analytic methodology are:

• the prominent application of logic and conceptual analysis;

• the commitment to rational methods of argument;

• the emphasis on objectivity and truth; • the predilection for spare, literal prose, eschewing overly

rhetorical or figurative language; • the felt need to define terms and offer explicit formula-

tion of theses; • the quasi‐scientific dialectical method of hypothesis /

counter‐example / modification; • the tendency to tackle narrowly defined problems,

often working within on‐going debates.

Notable among presuppositions, although not universally held, are:

• the treatment of scientific discourse as paradigmatic; • a tendency toward ontological “parsimony,” realism

about science, and physicalism about mind; • the belief that philosophical problems are in some sense

timeless or universal, at least not merely constructs of history and culture.

It is perhaps the latter presupposition that distinguishes the analytic tradition most obviously from the “Continental.” Analytic philosophers tend not to historicize their debates; there is little reference to the historical development of problems or the history of ideas and a widespread skepti-cism about the value of historically contextualized study of earlier philosophers. A consequence is that analytic philos-ophers have little interest in the social, political, or ideo-logical underpinnings of their work and tend to treat the problems they address as timeless, ahistorical, and solvable, if at all, by appeal to logic rather than to observations about external cultural factors.

Analytic philosophy came relatively late to aesthetics. It was not until the 1940s and 1950s that philosophers trained in analytic methods turned their attention to issues in aes-thetics and these were mostly philosophers who had estab-lished their reputations in different areas of the subject. Typical in this regard was the highly influential anthology, Aesthetics and Language, edited by William Elton in 1954, which collected papers published in the preceding decade from prestigious journals like Mind, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, and The Philosophical Quarterly, with contributors of the caliber of Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire, O.K. Bouwsma, John Passmore, and Arnold Isenberg. The editor was frank about the missionary pur-pose of the collection: “to diagnose and clarify some aes-thetic confusions, which it holds to be mainly linguistic in origin” and “to provide philosophers and their students with

extracts from the general introduction to the first edition xv

a number of pieces that may serve as models of analytical procedures in aesthetics.” It had many targets associated with less enlightened times: “obfuscatory jargon,” the “pit-falls of generality,” the “predisposition to essentialism,” “misleading analogies” (e.g., between the aesthetic and the moral), and “irrefutable and non‐empirical” theories.

[…]

Analytic contributions to aesthetics […] soon took off and Frank Sibley saw no need in his classic paper “Aesthetic Concepts” from 1959 to keep disparaging earlier efforts. In fact in 1958 the analytic school of aesthetics came of age with the publication of Monroe C. Beardsley’s Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, which provided a sus-tained treatment of a wide range of problems illustrated by examples from an equally wide range of art forms. By the 1980s and 1990s the felt need to apologize for, or be defen-sive about, working in aesthetics had long subsided. Philosophers of the highest caliber  –  Nelson Goodman, Richard Wollheim, Arthur Danto, Kendall Walton, Martha Nussbaum, Roger Scruton – were not only writing in aes-thetics but were introducing debates in the subject to phi-losophers from quite different areas.

In fact to the extent that aesthetics has been integrated into the mainstream analytic tradition this is because of movement in two directions. The first is through the appearance of ostensibly aesthetic issues in debates on quite other kinds of topics, often by philosophers who have no deep concern with aesthetics for its own sake. Thus, for example, in recent times, John McDowell, Crispin Wright, and Philip Pettit, among others, have used aesthetic proper-ties as a test case for realism; David Lewis has applied possible world semantics to fiction; Peter van Inwagen and Nathan Salmon have written on fictional objects and ontology; David Wiggins has defended subjectivism in rela-tion to aesthetic judgement. Many similar examples could be given. Discussions of realism and anti‐realism, super-venience, ontology, secondary qualities, and relativism will not infrequently allude to the aesthetic realm. But these as it were incidental incursions into aesthetics are not the only measure of the standing of aesthetics in the analytic com-munity. Of more central concern, moving in the opposite direction, is the recharacterization of traditional questions within aesthetics in an idiom drawn from other branches of philosophy. Treating aesthetics as a special case for meta-physics, ontology, epistemology, theory of meaning, value theory, and social or political philosophy has served, perhaps above all else, to entrench aesthetics – and aestheticians – in the analytic mainstream. Work of aestheticians has made an

impact beyond aesthetics back to the very areas from where the original issues grew up. One thinks of Goodman on symbolism, Walton on make‐believe, Sibley on aesthetic concepts, Danto on indiscernibles, Levinson on ontology, Margolis on interpretation, Scruton on aesthetic culture, Currie on fiction. These are efforts which could never be deemed marginal in philosophy.

We take up later, in the different sections of the anthol-ogy, the story of how analytic aesthetics developed in its own right. Let us end this introduction, though, with a few more observations of a general nature about its characteris-tic features.

First of all, as just noted, analytic aesthetics has tended to give priority to topics arising from concerns elsewhere in philosophy. The emphasis on logic and philosophy of lan-guage, for example, led inevitably to an interest in questions about meaning and truth in aesthetics. One notable aspect of this is the attention given to fictionality. We saw how work by Frege and Russell raised problems about nonexist-ence and reference in the context of seeking logical forms. It did not escape the notice of aestheticians that this had a bearing on fictional narratives of all kinds in the arts. […] When speech act theory developed in the 1960s, initially through J.L. Austin’s work, later by John R. Searle and oth-ers, it too was soon applied to aesthetics. Searle’s speech act analysis of fiction had considerable impact. When Monroe Beardsley returned to the question of intention and literary meaning later in life he also appealed to speech acts. Indeed the debate about intention – to a large extent initiated by Beardsley in his original attack on the Intentional Fallacy – is typical of the analytic tradition, drawing both on theories of meaning and philosophy of mind. The influence of Wittgenstein, especially his views on language, can be felt throughout the development of analytic aesthetics. [… and] it appears [for example] in the thought that there is a dis-tinctive “practice” associated with the arts and perhaps also in the appeal to “games” to illuminate our interactions with art. The recent revival of interest in metaphysics among ana-lytic philosophers has led to a substantial amount of work on the ontology of art. Again the logical emphasis – exploring the categorizations of objects, properties, types, instances – is distinctive of the analytic approach and marks it off from ontological enquiries in the “Continental” tradition, notably that of Heidegger, even though the problems are ostensibly similar. Finally, among characteristic topics, is the discussion of aesthetic concepts, initiated by Sibley. …

Given the nature of analytic philosophy it is not surpris-ing to find the kinds of topics just mentioned – meaning,

xvi extracts from the general introduction to the first edition

reference, ontology, concepts, definition, fictionality, repre-sentation – but a notable aspect of recent work in analytic aesthetics has been the attention given to particular art forms, painting, literature, music, film, photography. We have acknowledged this development with sections on the different arts and the anthology contains contributions on all the arts just listed. In becoming more specialized in this way analytic aesthetics might be seen as falling into line with other meta‐enquiries in philosophy. No competent researcher in philosophy of mind, for example, can now show the kind of ignorance of empirical psychology provocatively flaunted by Gilbert Ryle half a century ago. And philosophy of science is commonly divided into distinct specialities – philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology – just as ethics has a growing normative strand in medical or business ethics. It is a strength of current analytic aesthetics that it too focuses on the individual arts. For one thing it brings aesthetics closer to actual critical practice and encourages links with subject specialists, in musicology, film studies, literary theory, and art history. For another it puts salutary constraints on the grand designs of aesthetics, particularly attempts to develop overarching or all‐embracing theories of the arts.

It is, however, worth signaling potential dangers too. One danger is that aesthetics becomes more culture bound. When philosophers talk about music or film or literature it is usually a pretty narrow band of works that are taken as paradigmatic – inevitably these are works that the writers know. More often than not they are canonical works in the Western tradition. Generalizations about these works and their properties might not always carry over to works from different cultural traditions. Nevertheless, even if it were the case that discussion of particular arts had a relatively narrow frame of reference there is benefit to be gained just to the extent that philosophers can shed light on an important canon of works. In fact more characteristic of the analytic approach is a balance between proposing genuinely univer-sal claims about a particular art form and illustrating those claims by reference to individual works. We have selected papers on particular art forms – including painting, music, literature, photography, film, and other popular arts – which seem especially effective in this regard. […]

Analytic aesthetics has sometimes been identified with “philosophy of art” or even meta‐criticism (Beardsley’s Aesthetics made the identification explicit). But not all work by analytic aestheticians concerns the aesthetics of art. We have included a section on the aesthetics of nature. […] The idea that aesthetic descriptions apply to all kinds of objects, not only works of art, is as important as is the recognition of other cultural traditions when speaking of art.

We mentioned at the beginning one feature characteris-tic of analytic philosophy, the tendency to tackle narrowly defined problems. The complaint of William Elton was that aesthetics, prior to the advent of the analytic school, was overly ambitious, inclined to generality and given to untest-able theories. We will end with a word about the scope of these essays. Individually, they do tend to stick to the pro-posing and defense of specific, even limited, theses. Such is the manner of the analytic enterprise. Indeed it has long been thought a merit of this enterprise that it favors slow meticulous work  –  finding strong arguments to support precise, clearly defined theses – over generalizations weakly or imprecisely defended. This can give the impression of pedantry and lack of ambition. It is, however, a false impres-sion. Certainly debates by analytic aestheticians seem to move slowly, but that is because attention to detail is highly valued. There is a sense of community among contributors to these debates however overtly critical analytic philoso-phers can seem of each others’ work. Progress comes through criticism, often in the form of unexpected coun-terexamples to general theses. […] The cumulative effect of such debates is a sense of concentrated effort on carefully circumscribed ground.

When we stand back and survey all the micro‐debates two features stand out: the seriousness of purpose and the difficulty of the issues. However narrowly defined the topics of individual papers and however small the steps taken, there is no disputing the centrality and resonance of  the underlying questions: What is the nature of art? What is the place of art in human life? How do meaning and truth and representation arise in the arts? What is the scope of the aesthetic? These essays make a substantial impact on such questions.

General Introduction to the Second Edition

The overall rationale for this anthology has not changed from that of the first edition (2004) and accordingly we have included a substantial extract from the General Introduction to the First Edition which spells out our aims and gives the context within analytic philosophy.

But times move on and it has become clear that a newer, revised version is needed. The new edition has grown in size, now including 57 articles, where before there were 46; and there are more individual sections, 13 instead of 11. There are new sections on Art and Knowledge and on Photography and Film. Some sections have been renamed; some items have been moved around. But the basic struc-ture is the same. Also we have retained 19 of the original articles, comprising what we see as a core of well‐estab-lished pieces that provide paradigms of the analytic approach. The authors of these are just the names one might expect as the leading lights of analytic aesthetics from a time when it was establishing itself as a strong and autonomous branch of philosophy: figures such as Monroe Beardsley, Malcolm Budd, Allen Carlson, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Peter Kivy, Jerrold Levinson, Jenefer Robinson, Roger Scruton, Frank Sibley, Kendall Walton, and Richard Wollheim.

But while we are retaining 19 articles from the First Edition we have also introduced no fewer than 38 new ones. So the anthology will have a new, we hope fresh, feel to it. Although the majority of the new articles were pub-lished in the period after the publication of the first edition, this is not the case with all. Occasionally we have felt that articles published prior to the first edition – for example, those by Denis Dutton, Cynthia Freeland, Nick Zangwill, Eileen John, Richard Moran, Tamar Gendler, and Yuriko Saito – usefully lay the ground for topics that have grown in importance since 2004. It is wrong to fetishize dates.

For the most part we have deliberately not chosen articles that have appeared very recently (e.g., the past two or three years). It can take time for articles to bed down and prove their usefulness in ongoing debates.

We have sought out work that has something lasting and significant to say, that adds to prominent debates, and that fits well with other pieces in the anthology. None of the papers selected has been abridged: all are in their original published form. Many, but not all, come from academic journals, but some are from collections of papers. One point of an anthology is to gather in one place items that might be scattered and perhaps not easily obtained. As we said in the Introduction to the First Edition we have had to strike a balance between “the needs of undergraduate teaching and the needs of a scholarly archive, between the desire for comprehensive coverage and the constraints of manageability.” As always, selection has been the most difficult challenge, not from a shortage of well‐qualified contenders but from a surfeit.

We are sometimes asked: why give focus to the “analytic tradition”? Perhaps the term is indeed becoming less sig-nificant. In Anglophone aesthetics arguably this is just the mainstream way of proceeding and it is far from obvious that there is a unique style of philosophizing across all  the  articles included in the anthology. On the other hand the features we identified in the General Introduction to the First Edition do seem to be present in nearly all the articles, whatever their style of writing. For example, there is not much emphasis given to earlier historical figures by way of contextualizing a discussion: usually topics are introduced directly as problems to be addressed, even if they do draw on recent debates. (There are exceptions: Zangwill appeals to Hanslick, Moran to Hume.) Also there is a marked tendency in most of the articles to state a thesis

xviii general introduction to the second edition

more or less explicitly and defend it against potential coun-terexamples, crucially the defence resting on argument rather than appeal to authority. And the idea of clarifying, even analysing, concepts is well in evidence. So even if it is correct to say that “analytic aesthetics” is a broad‐brush term covering different methods and different styles, it is by no means empty. Those of us for whom the analytic method in philosophy is important have little difficulty recognizing it in practice and above all noticing when it is absent. We think the articles presented here are good exemplars, albeit exhibiting a healthy diversity of writing styles, interests, and ideas advanced.

So what is the state of the field? On the evidence here, it is very strong. There is a substantial body of serious and orig-inal work in aesthetics, recent and continuing to grow, right across the Anglophone world. What is encouraging is that it is dynamic not static. Subtle shifts are noticeable –  indeed apparent from the two editions of this anthology. Think how reflections on art itself, what it is, how it might be defined, have changed, not least through the work of Dominic Lopes (Part I). Or consider the renewed interest in relations between fiction and imagination (Part VII); or the continu-ing work on art and ethics (Part V); or the new kinds of

interest in aesthetic testimony (Hopkins, Part III); or the ever‐growing aesthetics of film and photography (Part IX); or poetry (Part X); or comics (Part XII); or everyday experi-ences (Part XIII). Many of these topics simply wouldn’t have occurred to those pioneering analytic aestheticians in the 1950s and 1960s. We take it that counts as progress.

Numerous people have offered advice on this second edition, not least through a survey conducted by Blackwell, and we are most grateful to them all, specifically to Greg Currie for his detailed comments. We haven’t quite been able to accommodate every suggestion but we have done our best. The Blackwell team, as always, has been patient and constructive throughout and we thank them for their help and forbearance, in particular Marissa Koors, Rachel Greenberg, Manish Luthra, Natasha Wu, and Janey Fisher, the latter our extremely efficient copy‐editor. Above all, I suppose it is our students who have offered the most help-ful guidance; it was from them that we have learnt what worked well or less well in the first edition and what they thought might be improved. So thank you to them too.

Peter LamarqueStein Haugom Olsen

Further Reading

Beardsley, Monroe C. (1981) Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (2nd edn.). Indianapolis: Hackett.

Budd, Malcolm (1995) Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.

Carroll, Noël (ed.) (2000) Theories of Art Today. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Danto, Arthur C. (1983) The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Eaton, Marcia Muelder (1988) Basic Issues in Aesthetics. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Elton, William (ed.) (1954) Aesthetics and Language. Oxford: Blackwell.Feagin, Susan L., and Maynard, Patrick (eds.) (1997) Aesthetics.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.Freeland, Cynthia (2001) But Is It Art? Oxford: Oxford University

Press.Gaut, Berys and Lopes, Dominic McIver (eds.) (2013) Routledge

Companion to Aesthetics (3rd edn.). London: Routledge.Goodman, Nelson (1976) Languages of Art, 2nd edn. Indianapolis:

Hackett.Kelly, Michael (ed.) (2014) Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2nd edn.), 4

vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kieran, Matthew (ed.) (2006) Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Korsmeyer, Carolyn (2004) Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge.

Levinson, Jerrold (ed.) (2005) The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Margolis, Joseph (1980) Art and Philosophy: Conceptual Issues in Aesthetics. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

Neill, Alex and Ridley, Aaron (eds.) (2008) Arguing About Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates (3rd edn.). New York: McGraw‐Hill.

Sheppard, Anne (1987) Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shusterman, Richard (ed.) (1989) Analytic Aesthetics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Walton, Kendall L. (1990) Mimesis as Make‐Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wollheim, Richard (1980) Art and Its Objects (2nd edn.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part I

Identifying Art

It might reasonably be thought that the starting point for any serious philosophy of art must be the question “What is art?” After all, so the argument goes, without knowing what art is we could not know what enquiry we are pursu-ing. Furthermore, on this line of thought, nothing short of a list of essential or defining properties of art  –  those properties both necessary and sufficient for something to be a work of art – will satisfy the need to identify art apart from other human endeavors.

The proliferation of avant‐garde art movements in the twentieth century, from Dadaism to Performance Art, Abstract Expressionism to Conceptual Art, made it all the more difficult to isolate any such defining essence of art. The often‐heard skeptical question “But is it art?” increased the pressure on art theorists and philosophers of art to tackle the definitional issue. But when analytic philosophers entered the fray in the 1950s they introduced a distinctive twist to the debate, not only seeking to formulate an ade-quate definition but, more characteristically, asking what might count as an adequate definition, if anything at all.

Some, like Morris Weitz (1956), following Wittgenstein, argued that no definition of art, conceived as a set of neces-sary and sufficient conditions, was possible, given that the concept of art is an “open concept” and that any definition would compromise the creativity of art. In the end few came to agree with Weitz in rejecting the definitional project but it was acknowledged that the key to the debate would lie in what kinds of properties might be sought as the “essence” of art. Out of this debate there arose two

different conceptions of what kind of definition might count as adequate. These have been labeled (by Stephen Davies, 1991) as “procedural” and “functional” definitions. These approaches are discussed in detail in the papers by Dominic McIver Lopes (Chapter 5) and Catharine Abell (Chapter 6).

Broadly a procedural definition, which can take different forms, is one that identifies as an essential feature of art certain facts about how works of art come to be accepted as such in the first place, notably the procedures (practices, institutions) that make it possible for something to be art. In contrast functional definitions, again of different kinds, focus on the functions that works of art serve, such as, for example, inviting aesthetic interest or expressing emotions.

The two approaches are well exemplified, indeed paradig-matically so, in the papers below by Arthur Danto, George Dickie, and Monroe Beardsley, the former two offering procedural accounts, the latter a functionalist account. Danto (Chapter 1) takes the first crucial step – remarkable in the history of aesthetics – by directing our attention to features of artworks that are not perceptible. In his often quoted words (in the essay here): “To see something as art requires some-thing the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of art theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld”. To help us grasp this revolutionary insight he uses thought‐experiments about what he calls “indiscernibles.” In his later work The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981) the idea is finely honed but it figures strikingly also in “The Artworld,” where he uses the example of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. If Warhol’s

Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art – The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology, Second Edition.Edited by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen.© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Introduction

4 introduction

Brillo boxes are indistinguishable in appearance from ordinary Brillo boxes, how could the former be art but not the latter? The stark answer Danto offers (an answer that gets more refined in later work) is that what makes all the differ-ence is “a certain theory of art.” The artworld at particular stages of its development makes possible certain kinds of works. Only against the background of Pop Art – with its theoretical presuppositions – do works like Brillo Boxes, or in Danto’s other example, Rauschenberg’s bed (which from a certain perspective looks like a quite ordinary bed), become possible. For Danto, then, there is something essential to all art – contra Weitz – namely embeddedness in an artworld along with its supporting theories.

Dickie (Chapter 2), in his “institutional theory” of art, developed and formalized certain aspects of Danto’s account. Going further than Danto, Dickie proposed a definition of art, employing the notion of an “artworld”. It is striking in its simplicity: “A work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public.” The crucial feature is that what makes something an artwork is not what it looks (sounds, etc.) like or what materials it is made of, or any of its intrinsic qualities, but how it relates to a loosely characterized institution (the “artworld”) or set of practices. Without the institution of art there would be no artworks even if there were things that looked exactly like what we call artworks. Dickie is content to acknowledge a circularity in his definition (“art” and “artworld” are inter‐definable) but insists that it is non‐vicious circularity.

Beardsley’s starting point (Chapter  3) is different: that the artistic is essentially connected, not to an institution, but to the aesthetic. He boldly presents a definition of art in these terms: “An artwork is something produced with the intention of giving it the capacity to satisfy the aes-thetic interest.” As an analytic philosopher he carefully analyzes  –  and thus explains and justifies  –  each of the main terms in the definition. The definition is important, not least for presenting a clear contrast with institutional theories. The emphasis is on the function or aim of art rather than on institutional endorsement. Beardsley is much less tolerant of avant‐garde art – such as Duchamp’s “readymades” – than either Danto or Dickie but his insist-ence on “aesthetic interest” does, controversially, make problematic those species of “conceptual art” which overtly repudiate the aim Beardsley identifies. It should probably be conceded, though, that Beardsley captures an intuition about the nature of art which still has widespread support, if not among philosophers certainly among the general public.

The papers by Danto, Dickie and Beardsley provide the classic background to the definitional debate about art in analytic aesthetics, not least in exemplifying the procedural and functional approaches. The remaining papers in this section show the different kinds of direction that analytic discussion has taken in more recent years. Denis Dutton, in “But They Don’t Have Our Concept of Art” (Chapter 4), addresses the question whether “art” is a genuinely cross‐cultural, universal concept (i.e., applicable across cultures and across time). He argues that it is and challenges the views of certain anthropologists that “art” is essentially a Western, and modern, concept. He identifies a set of char-acteristics that he believes are central to art even if they do not strictly count as necessary and sufficient conditions, arguing that

any human practice which had none of the features enumer-ated would not be art, and that any human practice which possessed most of them would be art … in the sense that characterizes it through the whole of human history.

Dutton’s conception of art happily embraces a wide variety of practices, objects, and human activities, including those of “small‐scale, nonliterate tribal societies” that are a world away from Western twentieth‐century avant‐garde works, which Dutton believes have distorted how philosophers think about art.

Dominic McIver Lopes, in his essay (Chapter 5), returns directly to the question of definition and has much to say about how the problematic avant‐garde cases are to be handled – the sorts of cases that helped to motivate institu-tional theories. Lopes’s view, as his provocative title “Nobody Needs a Theory of Art” suggests, is radical. Stop looking for a theory of art in general and seek only “theo-ries of the arts.” What are the arts? Well, things like music, dance, theatre, literature, film, painting, architecture, and so on. He calls this “buck passing” (from “art” to “the arts”) and it is encapsulated, paradoxically perhaps, in a definition of “art” as: “item x is a work of art if and only if x is a work in activity P and P is one of the arts.” To settle the art status of the avant‐garde cases we need to appeal not to a theory of art but to theories of art forms. That, he thinks, is where the problems reside but also where they can be solved: after all, where the puzzling cases do not fit established art forms they often serve to create new art forms.

Catharine Abell, in “Art: What it Is and Why it Matters” (Chapter  6), seeks to draw on both institutional and functional theories, and brings the idea of the values of art to the fore. She grounds her account in John Searle’s

introduction 5

conception of institutions and institutional facts. Her definition of art appeals not only to art institutions but to the functions that art institutions perform (or are per-ceived to perform by participants in the institutions). Hence: “Something is an artwork … [if and only if] it is the product of an art institution, and it directly affects how effectively that institution performs the perceived

functions to which its existence is due.” The artistic value of artworks is then explained in terms of their “tendency to improve how well the institutions of which they are products perform the functions that make them art insti-tutions.” As always with analytic philosophy, the convinc-ingness of the definitions lies in the detail with which they are explained and supported.

References

Davies, Stephen (1991) Definitions of Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Weitz, Morris (1956) “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15: 27–35.

Further Reading

Carroll, Noël (ed.) (2000) Theories of Art Today. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Currie, Gregory (2010) “Actual Art, Possible Art, and Art’s Definition,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68: 235–41.

Danto, Arthur (1981) The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dickie, George (1984) The Art Circle. New York: Haven.Dean, Jeffrey T. (2003) “The Nature of Concepts and the

Definition of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61: 29–35.

Dutton, Denis (2006) “A Naturalist Definition of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64: 367–77.

Gaut, Berys (2000) “‘Art’ as a Cluster Concept,” in Noël Carroll, ed., Theories of Art Today, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Iseminger, Gary (2004) The Aesthetic Function of Art, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Levinson, Jerrold (1990) “Defining Art Historically,” in Music, Art and Metaphysics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Margolis, Joseph (1999) What, After All, is a Work of Art? University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Shiner, Larry (2001) The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Shiner, Larry (2007) “Western and Non‐Western Concepts of Art” [a reply to Dutton], in A. Neill & A. Ridley, eds. Arguing about Art (3rd edn.). London: Routledge.

Stecker, Robert (1997) Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Zangwill, Nick (2007) Aesthetic Creation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art – The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology, Second Edition.Edited by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen.© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The Artworld

Arthur C. Danto

1

Hamlet: Do you see nothing there ?The Queen: Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.

Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act III, Scene IV

Hamlet and Socrates, though in praise and deprecation respectively, spoke of art as a mirror held up to nature. As with many disagreements in attitude, this one has a factual basis. Socrates saw mirrors as but reflecting what we can already see; so art, insofar as mirrorlike, yields idle accurate duplications of the appearances of things, and is of no cog-nitive benefit whatever. Hamlet, more acutely, recognized a remarkable feature of reflecting surfaces, namely that they show us what we could not otherwise perceive – our own face and form – and so art, insofar as it is mirrorlike, reveals us to ourselves, and is, even by socratic criteria, of some cognitive utility after all. As a philosopher, however, I find Socrates’ discussion defective on other, perhaps less pro-found grounds than these. If a mirror‐image of o is indeed an imitation of o, then, if art is imitation, mirror‐images are art. But in fact mirroring objects no more is art than returning weapons to a madman is justice; and reference to mirrorings would be just the sly sort of counterinstance we would expect Socrates to bring forward in rebuttal of the theory he instead uses them to illustrate. If that theory requires us to class these as art, it thereby shows its inade-quacy: “is an imitation” will not do as a sufficient condition

for “is art.” Yet, perhaps because artists were engaged in imi-tation, in Socrates’ time and after, the insufficiency of the theory was not noticed until the invention of photography. Once rejected as a sufficient condition, mimesis was quickly discarded as even a necessary one; and since the achieve-ment of Kandinsky, mimetic features have been relegated to the periphery of critical concern, so much so that some works survive in spite of possessing those virtues, excel-lence in which was once celebrated as the essence of art, narrowly escaping demotion to mere illustrations.

It is, of course, indispensable in socratic discussion that all participants be masters of the concept up for analysis, since the aim is to match a real defining expression to a term in active use, and the test for adequacy presumably consists in showing that the former analyzes and applies to all and only those things of which the latter is true. The popular dis-claimer notwithstanding, then, Socrates’ auditors purport-edly knew what art was as well as what they liked; and a theory of art, regarded here as a real definition of ‘Art’, is accordingly not to be of great use in helping men to recog-nize instances of its application. Their antecedent ability to do this is precisely what the adequacy of the theory is to be tested against, the problem being only to make explicit what they already know. It is our use of the term that the theory allegedly means to capture, but we are supposed able, in the words of a recent writer, “to separate those objects which

Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964), pp. 571–84. Reproduced by permission of The Journal of Philosophy.

8 arthur c. danto

are works of art from those which are not, because … we know how correctly to use the word ‘art’ and to apply the phrase ‘work of art’.” Theories, on this account, are some-what like mirror‐images on Socrates’ account, showing forth what we already know, wordy reflections of the actual linguistic practice we are masters in.

But telling artworks from other things is not so simple a matter, even for native speakers, and these days one might not be aware he was on artistic terrain without an artistic theory to tell him so. And part of the reason for this lies in the fact that terrain is constituted artistic in virtue of artistic theories, so that one use of theories, in addition to helping us discriminate art from the rest, consists in making art pos-sible. Glaucon and the others could hardly have known what was art and what not: otherwise they would never have been taken in by mirror‐images.

I

Suppose one thinks of the discovery of a whole new class of artworks as something analogous to the discovery of a whole new class of facts anywhere, viz., as something for theoreti-cians to explain. In science, as elsewhere, we often accom-modate new facts to old theories via auxiliary hypotheses, a pardonable enough conservatism when the theory in ques-tion is deemed too valuable to be jettisoned all at once. Now the Imitation Theory of Art (IT) is, if one but thinks it through, an exceedingly powerful theory, explaining a great many phenomena connected with the causation and evalua-tion of artworks, bringing a surprising unity into a complex domain. Moreover, it is a simple matter to shore it up against many purported counterinstances by such auxiliary hypoth-eses as that the artist who deviates from mimeticity is per-verse, inept, or mad. Ineptitude, chicanery, or folly are, in fact, testable predications. Suppose, then, tests reveal that these hypotheses fail to hold, that the theory, now beyond repair, must be replaced. And a new theory is worked out, capturing what it can of the old theory’s competence, together with the heretofore recalcitrant facts. One might, thinking along these lines, represent certain episodes in the history of art as not dissimilar to certain episodes in the history of science, where a conceptual revolution is being effected and where refusal to countenance certain facts, while in part due to prejudice, inertia, and self‐interest, is due also to the fact that a well‐established, or at least widely credited theory is being threatened in such a way that all coherence goes.

Some such episode transpired with the advent of post‐impressionist paintings. In terms of the prevailing artistic

theory (IT), it was impossible to accept these as art unless inept art: otherwise they could be discounted as hoaxes, self‐advertisements, or the visual counterparts of madmen’s ravings. So to get them accepted as art, on a footing with the Transfiguration (not to speak of a Landseer stag), required not so much a revolution in taste as a theoretical revision of rather considerable proportions, involving not only the artistic enfranchisement of these objects, but an emphasis upon newly significant features of accepted artworks, so that quite different accounts of their status as artworks would now have to be given. As a result of the new theory’s acceptance, not only were post‐impressionist paintings taken up as art, but numbers of objects (masks, weapons, etc.) were transferred from anthropological museums (and heterogeneous other places) to musées des beaux arts, though, as we would expect from the fact that a criterion for the acceptance of a new theory is that it account for whatever the older one did, nothing had to be transferred out of the musées des beaux arts – even if there were internal rearrange-ments as between storage rooms and exhibition space. Countless native speakers hung upon suburban mantel-pieces innumerable replicas of paradigm cases for teaching the expression ‘work of art’ that would have sent their Edwardian forebears into linguistic apoplexy.

To be sure, I distort by speaking of a theory: historically, there were several, all, interestingly enough, more or less defined in terms of the IT. Art‐historical complexities must yield before the exigencies of logical exposition, and I shall speak as though there were one replacing theory, partially compensating for historical falsity by choosing one which was actually enunciated. According to it, the artists in ques-tion were to be understood not as unsuccessfully imitating real forms but as successfully creating new ones, quite as real as the forms which the older art had been thought, in its best examples, to be creditably imitating. Art, after all, had long since been thought of as creative (Vasari says that God was the first artist), and the post‐impressionists were to be explained as genuinely creative, aiming, in Roger Fry’s words, “not at illusion but reality.” This theory (RT) fur-nished a whole new mode of looking at painting, old and new. Indeed, one might almost interpret the crude drawing in Van Gogh and Cézanne, the dislocation of form from contour in Rouault and Dufy, the arbitrary use of color planes in Gauguin and the Fauves, as so many ways of drawing attention to the fact that these were non‐imitations, specifically intended not to deceive. Logically, this would be roughly like printing “Not Legal Tender” across a bril-liantly counterfeited dollar bill, the resulting object (coun-terfeit cum inscription) rendered incapable of deceiving

the artworld 9

anyone. It is not an illusory dollar bill, but then, just because it is non‐illusory it does not automatically become a real dollar bill either. It rather occupies a freshly opened area between real objects and real facsimiles of real objects: it is a non‐facsimile, if one requires a word, and a new contri-bution to the world. Thus, Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters, as a  consequence of certain unmistakable distortions, turns out to be a non‐facsimile of real‐life potato eaters; and inasmuch as these are not facsimiles of potato eaters, Van Gogh’s picture, as a non‐imitation, had as much right to be called a real object as did its putative subjects. By means of this theory (RT), artworks re‐entered the thick of things from which socratic theory (IT) had sought to evict them: if no more real than what carpenters wrought, they were at  least no less real. The Post‐Impressionist won a victory in ontology.

It is in terms of RT that we must understand the art-works around us today. Thus Roy Lichtenstein paints comic‐strip panels, though ten or twelve feet high. These are reasonably faithful projections onto a gigantesque scale of the homely frames from the daily tabloid, but it is pre-cisely the scale that counts. A skilled engraver might incise The Virgin and the Chancellor Rollin on a pinhead, and it would be recognizable as such to the keen of sight, but an engraving of a Barnett Newman on a similar scale would be a blob, disappearing in the reduction. A photograph of a Lichtenstein is indiscernible from a photograph of a coun-terpart panel from Steve Canyon; but the photograph fails to capture the scale, and hence is as inaccurate a reproduction as a black‐and‐white engraving of Botticelli, scale being essential here as color there. Lichtensteins, then, are not imitations but new entities, as giant whelks would be. Jasper Johns, by contrast, paints objects with respect to which questions of scale are irrelevant. Yet his objects cannot be imitations, for they have the remarkable property that any intended copy of a member of this class of objects is automatically a member of the class itself, so that these objects are logically inimitable. Thus, a copy of a numeral just is that numeral: a painting of 3 is a 3 made of paint. Johns, in  addition, paints targets, flags, and maps. Finally, in what I hope are not unwitting footnotes to Plato, two of  our pioneers  –  Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg – have made genuine beds.

Rauschenberg’s bed hangs on a wall, and is streaked with some desultory housepaint. Oldenburg’s bed is a rhomboid, narrower at one end than the other, with what one might speak of as a built‐in perspective: ideal for small bedrooms. As beds, these sell at singularly inflated prices, but one could sleep in either of them: Rauschenberg has expressed the

fear that someone might just climb into his bed and fall asleep. Imagine, now, a certain Testadura – a plain speaker and noted philistine – who is not aware that these are art, and who takes them to be reality simple and pure. He attributes the paintstreaks on Rauschenberg’s bed to the slovenliness of the owner, and the bias in the Oldenburg to the ineptitude of the builder or the whimsy, perhaps, of whoever had it “custom‐made.” These would be mistakes, but of rather an odd kind, and not terribly different from that made by the stunned birds who pecked the sham grapes of Zeuxis. They mistook art for reality, and so has Testadura. But it was meant to be reality, according to RT. Can one have mistaken reality for reality? How shall we describe Testadura’s error? What, after all, prevents Oldenburg’s creation from being a misshapen bed? This is equivalent to asking what makes it art, and with this query we enter a domain of conceptual inquiry where native speakers are poor guides: they are lost themselves.

II

To mistake an artwork for a real object is no great feat when an artwork is the real object one mistakes it for. The prob-lem is how to avoid such errors, or to remove them once they are made. The artwork is a bed, and not a bed‐illusion; so there is nothing like the traumatic encounter against a flat surface that brought it home to the birds of Zeuxis that they had been duped. Except for the guard cautioning Testadura not to sleep on the artworks, he might never have discov-ered that this was an artwork and not a bed; and since, after all, one cannot discover that a bed is not a bed, how is Testadura to realize that he has made an error? A certain sort of explanation is required, for the error here is a curiously philosophical one, rather like, if we may assume as correct some well‐known views of P. F. Strawson, mistaking a per-son for a material body when the truth is that a person is a material body in the sense that a whole class of predicates, sensibly applicable to material bodies, are sensibly, and by appeal to no different criteria, applicable to persons. So you cannot discover that a person is not a material body.

We begin by explaining, perhaps, that the paintstreaks are not to be explained away, that they are part of the object, so the object is not a mere bed with – as it happens – streaks of paint spilled over it, but a complex object fabricated out of a bed and some paintstreaks: a paint‐bed. Similarly, a per-son is not a material body with  –  as it happens  –  some thoughts superadded, but is a complex entity made up of a body and some conscious states: a conscious‐body. Persons,

10 arthur c. danto

like artworks, must then be taken as irreducible to parts of themselves, and are in that sense primitive. Or, more accu-rately, the paintstreaks are not part of the real object – the bed – which happens to be part of the artwork, but are, like the bed, part of the artwork as such. And this might be generalized into a rough characterization of artworks that happen to contain real objects as parts of themselves: not every part of an artwork A is part of a real object R when R is part of A and can, moreover, be detached from A and seen merely as R. The mistake thus far will have been to mistake A for part of itself, namely R, even though it would not be incorrect to say that A is R, that the artwork is a bed. It is the ‘is’ which requires clarification here.

There is an is that figures prominently in statements con-cerning artworks which is not the is of either identity or predication; nor is it the is of existence, of identification, or some special is made up to serve a philosophic end. Nevertheless, it is in common usage, and is readily mastered by children. It is the sense of is in accordance with which a child, shown a circle and a triangle and asked which is him and which his sister, will point to the triangle saying “That is me”; or, in response to my question, the person next to me points to the man in purple and says “That one is Lear”; or in the gallery I point, for my companion’s benefit, to a spot in the painting before us and say “That white dab is Icarus.” We do not mean, in these instances, that whatever is pointed to stands for, or represents, what it is said to be, for the word ‘Icarus’ stands for or represents Icarus: yet I would not in the same sense of is point to the word and say “ That is Icarus.” The sentence “That a is b” is perfectly compatible with “That a is not b” when the first employs this sense of is and the second employs some other, though a and b are used nonambiguously throughout. Often, indeed, the truth of the first requires the truth of the second. The first, in fact, is incompatible with “That a is not b” only when the is is used nonambiguously throughout. For want of a word I shall designate this the is of artistic identification; in each case in which it is used, the a stands for some specific physical prop-erty of, or physical part of, an object; finally, it is a necessary condition for something to be an artwork that some part or property of it be designable by the subject of a sentence that employs this special is. It is an is, incidentally, which has near‐relatives in marginal and mythical pronouncements. (Thus, one is Quetzalcoatl; those are the Pillars of Hercules.)

Let me illustrate. Two painters are asked to decorate the east and west walls of a science library with frescoes to be respectively called Newton’s First Law and Newton’s Third Law. These paintings, when finally unveiled, look, scale apart, as follows:

A B

As objects I shall suppose the works to be indiscernible: a black, horizontal line on a white ground, equally large in each dimension and element. B explains his work as fol-lows: a mass, pressing downward, is met by a mass pressing upward: the lower mass reacts equally and oppositely to the upper one. A explains his work as follows: the line through the space is the path of an isolated particle. The path goes from edge to edge, to give the sense of its going beyond. If it ended or began within the space, the line would be curved: and it is parallel to the top and bottom edges, for if it were closer to one than to another, there would have to be a force accounting for it, and this is inconsistent with its being the path of an isolated particle.

Much follows from these artistic identifications. To regard the middle line as an edge (mass meeting mass) imposes the need to identify the top and bottom half of the picture as rectangles, and as two distinct parts (not necessar-ily as two masses, for the line could be the edge of one mass jutting up – or down – into empty space). If it is an edge, we cannot thus take the entire area of the painting as a single space: it is rather composed of two forms, or one form and a non‐form. We could take the entire area as a single space only by taking the middle horizontal as a line which is not an edge. But this almost requires a three‐dimensional identification of the whole picture: the area can be a flat surface which the line is above (Jet‐flight), or below (Submarine‐path), or on (Line), or in (Fissure), or through (Newton’s First Law) – though in this last case the area is not a flat surface but a transparent cross section of absolute space. We could make all these prepositional qualifications clear by imagining perpendicular cross sections to the pic-ture plane. Then, depending upon the applicable preposi-tional clause, the area is (artistically) interrupted or not by the horizontal element. If we take the line as through space, the edges of the picture are not really the edges of the space: the space goes beyond the picture if the line itself