In a message dated 4/7/2015 5:57:54 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
This would seem correct - unless some expert tells us "x and non-x" or
"All xs are xs" may be regarded as paintings.
Well, blame Witters for that. He started talking of the picture theory of
meaning, and even Gilbert Ryle followed suit (The "Fido"-Fido theory of
meaning). Note that in proper Victorian English, it's allways the 'picture
gallery' that people visit, never painting!
The only reason why I mentioned Kosuth had to do with McEvoy having
previously referred to Gombrich, and McEvoy adding the value-laden "misguided"
as
applied to conceptual art! Perhaps I should check with Gombrich's
reference given by McEvoy for myself! -- and check how misguided Gombrich is?
(While Kosuth is being witty in quoting Ayer, perhaps my favourite
conceptual-artist claim -- cfr. Gombrich: "all art is conceptual art" -- is
Keith
Arnatt, with his "I am a real artist" -- a photograph installation and a
tribute to J. L. Austin's trouser word ever).
Personally, I follow Omar K. in finding the 'mimetic' dimension pretty
relevant, and my favourite aesthetic theory is the Florence-based Renaissance
one based on the idea of the 'design', which just means 'drawing' in
Italian.
I also would think that 'art' per se has nothing to do with 'aesthetic',
which is a field of concepts that F. N. Sibley studied, and which, presto,
he found to be defeasible!
As regards 'art' my view nicely corresponds to Catherine Lord in her essay
for the British Journal of Aesthetics. It's called "Griceian
instrumentalism". Other authors have been more specific. The addressee of a
piece of
art, x, recognises the artist-qua-utterer's intention in INCREASING the
aesthetic pleasure in perceiving x. And it's via the recognition of this
intention to increase aesthetic pleasure that makes x1 a better piece than,
say, x2
(for addressee A) -- yes, it's all algebra!
The reference to this more Griceian study is in Eva Schaper, ed.,
"Pleasure, Preference and Value: Studies in Philosophical Aesthetics",
Cambridge
University Press.
Plato condemned mimetic art because he saw in it an emotional display
which called for, and usually achieved, imitative reaction from the addressee
to a piece of art x.
On Plato's view, the emotional content of a piece of ar x directly affects
the emotional make-up of the addressee, who, as it were, caught the
emotions displayed in a work through infection.
Aristotle does not deny that a piece of ar may be emotionally effective,
and those pieces of art which Aristotle singles out, namely tragedies,
hardly allow of any doubt on this score.
But there is no suggestion in Aristotle's aeshtetic theory that the
emotions aroused by mimetic art are the same as or even similar to those which
may be expressed or presented in other pieces of art.
In appreciating and deriving pleasure from a tragedy by Aeschylus, say, an
emotion of grief, pain, sorrow, dejection os despair is usually displayed.
The addressee, however, does NOT in any important sense continue these
emotions as such.
Rather, the addressee responds to the whole tragedy with, to echo
Aristotle, "pity and fear wherewith to accomplish the catharsis of such
emotions ".
That is to say, on the Aristotelian view, the aesthetically important
emotions are response emotions, emotions towards something.
Plato believes that the emotions felt in the presence of a piece of art
are emotions shared and emotions imitated, emotions somehow handed over by
the piece of art to the addressee.
For Aristotle the emotions which are undoubtedly felt are emotions
"created".
According to Aristotle we do not simply take over or copy the emotions
which are presented to us.
Rather, we respond to the total structure of the piece of art with
emotions of our own, not with emotions caught by infection.
Such emotions bring about the cathartic transformation of felt involvement
into aesthetic joy or pleasure.
We can describe this as "the thrill of recognition", stressing the hybrid
and yet unique character of aesthetic enjoyment, of felt under-standing in
which both passion and intelligence are transposed into the aesthetic key.
Plato has serious doubts on moral grounds about whether we should even
TOLERATE art which deeply affects us emotionally.
Aristotle had no such misgivings.
Art works can indeed be profoundly disturbing.
Good art,however, does not require, and should not lead to, indulgence in
emotional upheaval, but rather to constructive and creative responses,
calling upon the entire person to transform emotions through understanding.
Indulgence,if it occurs, is an irrelevancy.
Crude emotions, emotions simply had and endured, could never justify the
piece of art which stimulates them, through the addresee's recognition of
the artist-qua-utterer displaying a piece of art.
They have only a transitory place in the experience of art as Aristotle
sees it.
They prepare for the enjoyment in aesthetic understanding.
This is the enjoyment or pleasure attendant upon getting something clear,
the pleasure of seeing things fall into place.
What is experienced in this way must be particularised in individual
situations-only through these can our passions be engaged and our emotions
affected.
They are situations which we can grasp and understand because their
structures are laid bare for us, in pieces of art which still mimetically (or
iconically, as Grice prefers, following Peirce's terminology) present whatever
they have to say in a whole connected "according to probability or
necessity".
A piece of art which succeeds in being complete in itself, which is a
presentations of a human possibily in a particular constellations, is directed
not simply towards our emotional participation, or our capacity for
make-belief, but also towards our potentiality for felt understanding.
The connection of art and the emotions, of art and enjoyment, first stated
by Plato as a threatening and dangerous fact, emerges from Aristotle;s
theory -- at least on the interpretation here attempted which I dub
Kantotelian -- as one aesthetic understanding.
What Aristotle suggests in the catharsis clause and elaborates only
indirectly through the context in which this clause appears, can be adapted to
the need we still feel in our aesthetic theories to explain the complex
phenomena of the efficaciousness of a piece of art by focusing on its
structure.
Such an interpretation of Aristotle's (or Kantotle's) most puzzling
remarks on catharsis firmly links these with Aristotle's central views on the
formal characteristics and structural principles of art.
Those aspects for which Aristotle has been called a formalist, those for
which he has been claimed as the father of all organic aesthetic theories,
those which make the "Poetics" the basis for every classicist aesthetic, and
those for which he is remembered as the great theoretician, are then all
part of the same undertaking : to show what it means for something to be a
piece of art that the artist-qua-utterer displays to an addressee of an
incrementation of the addressee's pleasure.
Cheers
Speranza
McEvoy: "Famously, Gombrich has applied this approach to the visual arts,
where it is immensely useful in drawing out "The Story of Art" - and
probably the only approach that can give adequate rationale to the misguided
outreaches of modern "conceptual art"".
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