Artist-audience communication: Tolstoy reclaimed

Journal of Aesthetic Education

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 38-52

  Trivedi, Saam ^a  

^a SIMMONS COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249363946     PISSN: 00218510     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3527315     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. George Bernard Shaw, quoted on the inside jacket cover of Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? and Essays on Art, trans. Aylmer Maude (New York: Oxford University Press, 1930.)
2. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, eds., The Philosophy of Art (New York: McGraw Hill, 1995), 506
3. For a brief classification of at least four different concepts of artistic communication, including the one discussed at length here, see Saam Trivedi, "An Epistemic Dilemma for Actual Intentionalism," British Journal of Aesthetics 41 (2001): 192-206
4. In addition to artist-audience communication, I claim there are concepts of artistic communication of value-laden messages, of factual information, and of mental states. I offer an account of the musical expressiveness involved in the musical communication of mental states in Saam Trivedi, "Expressiveness as a Property of the Music Itself," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001): 411-20
5. and Saam Trivedi, "The Funerary Sadness of Mahler's Music," in Dominic Lopes and Matthew Kieran, eds., Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts (New York: Routiedge, 2003)
6. See Trivedi, "An Epistemic Dilemma for Actual Intentionalisrn."
7. Compare Allen Carlson, "Education for Appreciation," Journal of Aesthetic Education, 35 (2001), 97-98
8. H.O. Mounce, Tolstoy on Aesthetics (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2001), vii
9. See Arnold Schönberg, Style and Idea, trans. Leonard Stein (London: Faber, 1984.)
10. Quoted in Tim Page, "Notes on a Musical Original: An Appreciation," in The Washington Post, 22 February 1996, C1 and C8
11. A notion of artistic conversation similar to my concept of artist-audience communication has been elucidated by Noël Carroll in "Art, Intention, and Conversation," in Gary Iseminger, ed., Intention and Interpretation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992)
12. Compare Eva Schaper, "Taste, Sublimity, and Genius," in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge, 1992), 371-72: "He who has taste... has the ability to respond with immediate and unclouded pleasure to beauty in nature and art, and then communicate this pleasure to others who can share it," italics added. Unlike Schaper, though, my stress is more on communicating and sharing something more cognitive, to wit, a correct experiential understanding of the work, which in turn may be pleasurable, both in aesthetic terms, insofar as an aesthetic understanding is acquired, and also in humanistic terms insofar as there is sharing involved
13. I am continually puzzled by the insistence of many that seeing art as involving communication involves seeing it as some sort of language, a view which I deny. Taking music, for example, even if music is language-like in involving meaning, understanding, conventions, rules, communication (between artist and audience, and also communication of mental states via expressiveness and arousal, and also communication of information about itself when understood), there are significant differences between music and language concerning truth, reference, predication, description, syntax, translatability, and so on, as pointed out by many, including Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)
14. Similar arguments could be made about the other arts. An instance of this insistence is found in Dabney Townsend, An Introduction to Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 101-6, 176. Townsend is also opposed to the "participatory aesthetics" of what I have called audience-audience communication, pp. 138-41. He claims that the metaphysics of participation is questionable, and so must be the aesthetic theory based on it. I think Townsend is mistaken in thinking that participatory aesthetics must make some sort of substantive claim about knowledge of the other, a kind of ineffable, experiential knowledge. Rather, participatory aesthetics could be understood as making only a more modest psychological claim about how art can afford an experience of unity with other people, in the sense I try to explain above
15. For more on this, see Trivedi, "An Epistemic Dilemma for Actual Intentionalisrn" and Jerrold Levinson, "Intention and Interpretation in Literature," in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996)
16. See Tolstoy, What is Art?
17. Compare Gordon Graham, Philosophy of the Arts (New York: Routiedge, 1997), 29. Graham argues that arousal of emotion is neither good nor bad but neutral
18. This answer draws on the institutional theory of art advanced by George Dickie, The Art Circle (New York: Haven, 1984)
19. and Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)
20. This answer draws on the historical definition of art advanced by Jerrold Levinson, "Defining Art Historically," in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Given the problem that the historical definition faces with the "ur-arts," namely, the very first artworks such as cave-paintings and carved arrowheads, I wonder if it might not be an advance to propose some kind of disjunctive account of art that disjoins the historical view and some sort of aesthetic property view that says artworks are artifacts that possess certain aesthetic properties. Thus, the ur-arts are artworks because they are artifacts with certain aesthetic properties and that is what makes them artworks. In contrast, revolutionary artworks that lack obvious aesthetic properties, such as Duchamp's Fountain and John Cage's 4′33," are artworks because they relate to earlier artworks by repudiating them
21. I believe a move like this is made in Robert Stecker's Artworks (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1997). Stecker, however, disjoins art-historical views not with an aesthetic property-based view as I suggest, but instead he disjoins the art-historical view and artworks fulfilling certain functions
22. See Tolstoy, What is Art? and Essays on Art, 121
23. I believe this example is used by Noël Carroll in "Art, Intention, and Conversation."