The artist's sanction in contemporary art

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 63, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 315-326

  Irvin, Sherri ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33744910758     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0021-8529.2005.00214.x     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. For example, a set of murals by Mark Rothko were removed from their setting at Harvard University because of fading that Rothko did not intend. See Marjorie B. Cohn et al., Mark Rothko's Harvard Murals (Harvard University Art Museums, 1988),
2. and John T. Bethell, "Damaged Goods," Harvard Magazine, July-August (1988): 24-31.
3. Kendall Walton and Jerrold Levinson, among others, hold that the artist's intention about in which category a work belongs is relevant to how it must be considered. See Kendall Walton, "Categories of Art," Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 334-367,
4. and Jerrold Levinson, "Intention and Interpretation in Literature," in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 175-213. I suggest that we need consult only the artist's sanction, and not his or her intention, for this purpose.
5. Marion Barclay and Richard Gagnier, "Is Time Up for Time and Mrs. Tiber" Journal of the International Institute for Conservation - Canadian Group 13 (1988): 3-7.
6. For discussion, see Anthony Savile, "The Rationale of Restoration," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993): 463-474.
7. Richard Wollheim suggests that "asked about the colour of Bacchus' cloak in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne we should answer 'Crimson', and this would be the correct answer to give alike when the painting was freshly painted, when discoloured varnish and dirt had turned the relevant part of the canvas brown, and now that it has been cleaned." See "A Note on the Physical Object Hypothesis," in Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 182.
8. The artist's sanction might, however, serve to determine the correct orientation of the work, and thus which is the lower right-hand corner. For discussion of issues related to orientation, see John Dilworth, "Pictorial Orientation Matters," The British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003): 39-56.
9. Well-known examples include E. D. Hirsch, Jr., and Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels. See Hirsch's Validity in Interpretation (Yale University Press, 1967)
10. and The Aims of Interpretation (The University of Chicago Press, 1976),
11. as well as Knapp and Benn Michaels's "The Impossibility of Intentionless Meaning" in Intention and Interpretation, ed. Gary Iseminger (Temple University Press 1992), pp. 51-64.
12. For a recent defense of Hirsch's early, strongly intentionalist view, see William Irwin, Intentionalist Interpretation: A Philosophical Explanation and Defense (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999). Intentionalists are sometimes referred to as "actual intentionalists," since they are concerned with the artist's actual intentions. Such views are to be contrasted with hypothetical intentionalism, discussed below.
13. See especially Levinson, "Intention and Interpretation in Literature,"
14. as well as Alexander Nehamas, "The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 133-149
15. and "Writer, Text, Work, Author," in Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 267-291.
16. For useful discussions of the relationship between hypothetical and actual intentionalism, see Noël Carroll, "Interpretation and Intention: The Debate Between Hypothetical and Actual Intentionalism," Metaphilosophy 31 (2000): 75-95;
17. Gary Iseminger, "Actual Intentionalism vs. Hypothetical Intentionalism," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (1996): 319-326;
18. and Robert Stecker, "Apparent, Implied and Postulated Authors," Philosophy and Literature 11 (1987): 258-271.
19. and "Interprétation et description d'une œuvre d'art," Philosophiques 32 (2005): 135-148.
20. Critical monists who hold that only one correct interpretation of an artwork is ever available would deny this claim. The view I defend in this paper is in fact compatible with either monism or pluralism. The point here is that my view does not force us into monism: although it establishes that the artwork has a particular set of features, it does not force us to adopt a particular interpretation of the work (unless one holds, with the monist, that any particular set of artwork features forces us to adopt a particular interpretation). For the debate between critical monism and critical pluralism, see Is There a Single Right Interpretation?, ed. Michael Krausz (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).