Family resemblances, relationalism, and the meaning of 'art'

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 47, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 280-297

  Kaufman, Daniel A ^a  

^a MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149248798     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/aesthj/aym008     Document Type: Review

References (35)

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G .E. M. Anscombe (1953), §133
2. Peter Kivy, Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences (New York: Cambridge U.P., 1997), P-35
3. Anita Silvers has argued that analytic aesthetics has consistently rejected the idea that critical reasons function as traditional justifications for critical judgements. See her 'Letting the Sunshine In: Has Analysis Made Aesthetics Clear?' (1987) reprinted in John W. Bender and H. Gene Blocker (eds), Contemporary Philosophy of Art: Readings in Analytic Aesthetics (Upper Saddle-River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), pp. 10-34
4. Morris Weitz, 'The Role of Theory in Aesthetics' (1956), reprinted in in Bender and Blocker (eds), Contemporary Philosophy of Art, pp. 195-196
5. Maurice Mandlebaum, 'Family Resemblances and Generalizations Concerning the Arts', American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 2 (1965), pp. 219-228
6. Terry Diffey, 'The Republic of Art' (1969) and 'The Institutional Theory of Art' (1984), reprinted in The Republic of Art and Other Essays (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), pp. 39-51 and 63-70
7. George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1974)
8. and The Art Circle (New York: Haven, 1984)
9. Arthur Danto, 'The Artworld', Journal of Philosophy, vol. 61 (1964), pp. 571-84
10. and The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1981)
11. Robert Stecker wonders aloud whether Danto is in the business of offering definitions at all (see Robert Stecker, Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value [University Park, PA: Penn State U.P., 1997], p. 45)
12. but I take statements like this-'As an essentialist in philosophy, I am committed to the view that... there are conditions necessary and sufficient for something to be an artwork regardless of time and place'-to be conclusive. Also see Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1997), p. 95
13. Danto believes that art history had a clear direction once: a millennia-long cycle, in which one artistic movement succeeded another and the beginning of the end of which started in the late nineteenth century, with a rapid series of artistic 'erasures', which took us from fullblown representation to the stripped-down aesthetics of abstract expressionism and minimalism, and which culminated with postmodernism, at which point art history 'was no longer possible in terms of a progressive historical narrative'. Arthur Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992), pp. 4-5 and 7-9
14. Marx Wartofsky, 'Art, Artworlds, and Ideology', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 38, no. 3 (1980), pp. 245-246
15. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, pp. 31-32
16. Stecker, Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value, p. 14
17. Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2003), p. 22
18. Hilary Putnam, 'Is Semantics Possible?' (1970)
19. reprinted in Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge U.P., 1975), p. 148
20. 'The Meaning of "Meaning"' (1975)
21. reprinted in Mind, Language, and Reality, vol. 2, pp. 247-252
22. Putnam, 'The Meaning of "Meaning"', p. 246
23. Many will argue that all of this talk about 'mentally representing' stereotypes would have been an anathema to Wittgenstein, but I see no reason why we cannot accept some of Wittgenstein's linguistic 'performativism', while rejecting, wholesale, the behaviourism that is commonly ascribed to him. Indeed, some have argued that Wittgenstein's is as much an anti-behaviourist philosophy as it is an anti-referentialist one, as evinced by the fact that it rejects the idea of topic-neutrality-the idea that we might identify behaviour, in language that has been purged of the intentional idiom-common to reductionism and eliminafivism of both the physicalist and behaviourist varieties. As Peter Hacker has put the matter: '[I]t is the behaviour of a human being that constitutes the logical criteria for saying of him that he is perceiving or feeling something, thinking or recollecting, joyful or sad. Such behaviour is not mere bodily movements, but smiles and scowls, a tender or angry voice.......Human behaviour is not a mere physical phenomenon like the... movements of an industrial robot' (P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein [New York: Routledge, 1999], p. 45)
24. Peter Lamarque has suggested that a definition like Dickie's can aid me in determining that the bar of soap in my bathroom is not an artwork. I don't see how. After all, imagine that I have just completed a move. Is it not possible that the contents of my moving truck were mixed up with the contents of a truck bringing items to the local 'Readymade' exhibition, which includes Soap, a heretofore unknown work of Robert Rauschenberg? Of course, if I am given proof that this mix-up has not occurred, then I can be assured that I am not washing my underarms with a priceless work of art, but notice that I have not, then, succeeded in identifying an artwork (or non-artwork), by way of having the definition in mind, but by being told, in essence, that my bar of soap is not Rauschenberg's
25. Jerrold Leviiison, 'Refining Art Historically', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 47 (1989), p. 21
26. James Carney, 'The Style Theory of Art', Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 72 (1991), P-273
27. One of the strongest critiques of the idea that natural languages require-or have-a compositional semantics is Steven Schiffer's Remnants of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), esp. chs. 7 and 8
28. Levinson, 'Defining Art Historically', p. 232
29. See my 'Normative Criticism and the Objective Value of Artworks', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol, 60, no. 2 (Spring 2002), pp. 157-159
30. Carney, 'The Style Theory of Art', p. 281
31. Levinson, 'Defining Art Historically', p. 240 (emphases in the original)
32. Putnam, 'The Meaning of "Meaning"', pp. 247-252
33. Clive Bell, Art (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, Co., 1913), pp. 16-17, 24, 28-29, 44-46
34. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Routledge, 1971), p. 13
35. I would like to thank Ian Ground, of the Centre for Lifelong Learning, David Shein, of Bard College, and the students enrolled in my upper-division aesthetics course, at Missouri State University, Fall 2005, in conversation with whom many of the ideas explored in this essaywere developed. I would also like to thank Peter Lamarque and an anonymous referee for their help at the 'post-production' stage of the essay's development