Are there counterexamples to aesthetic theories of art?

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 60, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 111-118

  Zangwill, Nick ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049283867     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1540-6245.00059     Document Type: Review

References (27)

1. I give a full account of my preferred aesthetic theory of art in my "The Creative Theory of Art," American Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1995):123-148
2. and "Aesthetic Functionalism," in Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley, ed. Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
3. Monroe Beardsley, "An Aesthetic Definition of Art," in What Is Art? ed. Hugh Curtler (New York: Haven, 1983)
4. See also William Tolhurst, "Towards an Aesthetic Theory of Art," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42 (1984): 261-269
5. See my "The Beautiful, The Dainty and the Dumpy," The British Journal of Aesthetics 35 (1995)
6. and "The Concept of the Aesthetic," European Journal of Philosophy 6 (1998)
7. (both also in The Metaphysics of Beauty [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001], pp. 9-23 and 24-42)
8. Stephen Davies put forward the suggestion that "... the aesthetic character [of art] must be relevant to its serving the main purpose at which it is aimed" (Southern Journal of Philosophy 35 [1997]: 29). This is an interesting suggestion, but I fear it may be overstrict
9. On deviant properties of works within an established art form, see Kendall Walton, "Categories of Art," Philosophical Review 79 (1970). He calls such properties "contra-standard" properties
10. See my discussion, "In Defence of Aesthetic Formalism," Philosophical Quarterly 50 (2000): 334-367
11. See section 4 of my "Feasible Aesthetic Formalism," Noûs 33 (1999)
12. (also in The Metaphysics of Beauty, pp. 69-72)
13. See further my "Aesthetic/Sensory Dependence," The British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (1998): 66-85
14. Stephen Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 1983), p. 231
15. Jaegwon Kim, "Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction," in Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
16. Peter Kivy, Philosophies of the Arts: An Essay in Differences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
17. Paul Kristeller describes the way the arts were grouped completely differently in ancient Greece and in the Renaissance in his "The Modern System of the Arts," in Paul Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts (New York: Harper & Row, 1965)
18. As he sees it, this means that he cannot avoid blurring the boundaries between dance and other activities rarely considered "art," such as rituals, ceremonies, martial arts, many kinds of sport, bullfighting, cheerleading, and parades. This blurring is a good thing, on my view. Mara Miller describes the fall of the garden from Fine Art status (in The Garden as an Art [SUNY Press, 1993]). She also addresses the "art" status of gardens, and finds the notion of Fine Art wanting
19. Gilbert Harman, Reasoning, Meaning and Mind (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), p. 142
20. I am not interested in characterizing "high" or "fine" art as opposed to more lowly sorts. On my view, the philosophy of art should be blind to the high-art/low-art distinction. There is some justice to the complaints of the sociologically minded that such groupings are evaluatively and politically loaded. (See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984].)
21. What is deemed "high" or "fine" art is thereby given a higher value than what is excluded. I firmly reject reductionist sociological approaches to general theorizing about art (see my "The Creative Theory of Art" and "Art and Audience," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 [1999]: 315-332). But I have to agree that these sociological theorists are sometimes right about those distinctions
22. See further my "Groundrules in the Philosophy of Art," Philosophy 70 (1995): 533-544
23. For discussion of the status of "non-Western" art, see Stephen Davies, "Non-Western Art and Art's Definition,"
24. and Denis Dutton, "'But They Don't Have Our Concept of Art'," both in Theories of Art Today, ed. Noël Carroll (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000)
25. See, for example, Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986)
26. Walter Gropius writes: "There is a widespread heresy that art is just a useless luxury. This is one of our fatal legacies from a generation which arbitrarily elevated some of its branches above the rest as the 'Fine Arts,' and in so doing robbed all of their basic identity and common life.... By depriving handicrafts and industry of the informing services of the artist the academies drained them of their vitality, and brought about the artist's complete isolation from the community." Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (MIT Press, 1965), pp. 57-58. Gropius is someone who contests the notion of Fine Art
27. See also Miller, The Garden as an Art, chap. 4