The problem of nonperceptual art

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 43, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 363-378

  Shelley, James ^a  

^a AUBURN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 65849504934     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/43.4.363     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. From an unpublished interview with Harriet Sidney and Carrol] Janis (New York, 1953). Cited in F. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Ghent: Ludion, 1999), p. 19
2. Aestheticians now appear overwhelmingly to affirm the existence of non-aesthetic art, so much so that they tend not to see the need to argue for its existence. For recent basic-premise appeals to the existence of non-aesthetic art, see T. Gracyk, 'Valuing and Evaluating Popular Music', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 57 (1999), p. 218, n. 25
3. I. C. Vaida, 'The Quest for Objectivity: Secondary Qualities and Aesthetic Qualities', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 56 (1998), p. 291
4. M. Kieran, 'Review of Weintraub's Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society, 1970s-1990s, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 56 (1998), p. 413
5. (S) is the claim that the set of properties on which any aesthetic property depends must include some properties perceivable by the five senses. (S) is not the stronger claim that the set of properties on which any aesthetic property depends must include only properties perceivable by the five senses. [I take Kendall Walton to have refuted the stronger claim, but to have left (S) untouched. See his 'Categories of Art', Philosophical Review, vol. 79 (1970), pp. 334-376.] Nor does (S) entail that two objects can have the same aesthetic properties only if they have the same sensory properties
6. See Clement Greenberg, 'Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties', in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 292-303
7. and Monroe Beardsley, 'An Aesthetic Definition of Art,' in H. Curtler (ed.), What is Art? (New York: Haven), pp. 15-29. If any contemporary aesthetician can be said to be working in the tradition of Greenberg and Beardsley, it is Nick Zangwill. Zangwill, however, does not deny the existence of non-aesthetic art, but seeks rather to defend a weakened version of formalism that is compatible with its existence
8. See his The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 2001), particularly ch. 4
9. Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1981)
10. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia U.P., 1986)
11. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1997)
12. Timothy Binkley, 'Piece: Contra Aesthetics', Journal of Aesthetics and An Criticism, vol. 35 (1970), pp. 265-277
13. and Noël Carroll, 'Art and, Interaction', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 45 (1986), pp. 57-68
14. Stephen Davies appears to advocate the third solution. See his Definitions of Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1991), in which he argues, following Danto, that Fountain has 'aesthetic properties gained as a result of its attaining art status' (p. 67)
15. But this proposal requires such a broadening of the notion that one wonders why the label 'aesthetic' should be retained. (For a sharp criticism, see Carroll, 'Beauty and the Genealogy of Art Theory', Philosophical Forum, vol. 22 [1991], no. 4, p. 334.) My proposal is relatively modest. It is that we allow that aesthetic properties depend on semantic properties just as they depend on sensory properties. If the historical claims made in this paper are correct, this proposal not only does not involve a stipulative redefinition of the notion of the aesthetic, but is in fact demanded by the original notion
16. Previous to the appearance of After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, a case could have been made for classifying Danto as an advocate of the third solution. Davies in fact makes such a case (Definitions, pp. 66-70, 107-109)
17. Danto's philosophical demonstration largely consists in deriving the existence of non-aesthetic artworks from the existence of artworks that have counterparts that are perceptually indistinguishable but artistically distinct (Transfiguration, pp. 94-95; Disenfiranhisement, pp. 30-31; After the End, p. 91). This argument is roughly the same as Binkley's, which I consider below
18. Beardsley, 'An Aesthetic Definition of Art:', p. 25
19. Carroll, Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction (London: Routledgc, 1999), p. 182
20. Sec also Binkley, 'Piece: Contra Aesthetics', p. 450
21. Carroll, 'Art and Interaction', p. 66
22. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, p. 42. It should he noted that I have not claimed that Dickie himself advocates the first-solution, only that he provides an argument useful to the first-solution cause
23. Danto, Transfiguration, pp. 93-94
24. Binkley, 'Piece', p. 276. Carroll, meanwhile, attributes impishness to Paris Air (a vial of fifty cubic centimetres of Parisian air) and humour to In Advance of a Broken Arm (an ordinary snow shovel). But he classifies these properties and works as aesthetic (Philosophy of Art, pp. 181, 223). That Carroll makes these attributions and classifications in his recent Philosophy of Art appears to suggest that he is moving away from the second solution toward the third. However, he continues to hold the line on Fountain, citing it as an example of non-aesthetic art (p. 181). This appears to commit him to the following implausibilities: (i) that Fountain is different in kind from Paris Air and In Advance of a Broken Arm, (ii) that the property of being amusing, which he attributes to Fountain, is different in kind from the properties of being humorous and of being impish, and (iii) that either Fountain does not possess impishness or humour, or that their presence is irrelevant to its appreciation as art
25. See Monroe Beardsley, 'What Is an Aesthetic Quality?', in The Aesthetic Point of View (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1982), pp. 93-110
26. See Peter Kivy, 'What Makes "Aesthetic" Terms Aesthetic', Philosophy and Phenornenological Research, vol. 36 (1975), no. 2, pp. 197-211
27. Carroll, Philosophy of Art, pp. 157-158
28. Frank Sibley, 'Aesthetic and Non-aesthetic', Philosophical Review, 74, (1957), no. 2, p. 137
29. Binkley, 'Piece', p. 26S. Beardsley's definition of'perceptual object', here cited hy Binkley, can he found in his Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), p. 31
30. Sibley, 'Aesthetic and Non-aesthetic', p. 137
31. It is not merely from Kant that Zangwill's proposal departs, however. To give three further examples: Aristotle betrays no hint that we ought not take literally his ascription of beauty to plots (see ch. 7 of The Poetics, ed. and trans. S. Halliwell [London: Duckworth, 1998])
32. Hume maintains that the (literal) beauty of literary works depends, in part, on their moral content (see 'Of the Standard of Taste', in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller [Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987], pp. 246-249)
33. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, ed. P. Kivy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973)
34. cited in Carroll, 'Beauty and the Genealogy of Art Theory', p. 312
35. Carroll,'Beauty', p. 316
36. Hutcheson, Inquiry, §I, art. XI; §III, arts I, II, V
37. Arthur Danto, 'The Artworld', Journal of Philosophy, vol. 61 (1964), p. 581