No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Theory of The Theory of the Arts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Extract
One stands in awe of this book, and of its display of erudition, acumen, wit, elegance, taste, and uninhibited failure to suffer fools gladly. Michael Tanner in lectures at Cambridge in 1961 remarked of the then recently published Aesthetics by Monroe Beardsley that in a sense one did not need any other book in aesthetics. Now, one will be sorely tempted to say exactly the same thing about TTTA. The claim would in either case be a mistake. To understand, however, the reason why in either case the claim would be a mistake, and to understand why it would in the case of Sparshott's book be a mistake for a reason very different from that for which it would in the case of Beardsley's book be a mistake, will be to understand Sparshott's consummate and unrepeata-ble achievement in TTTA. I shall return to this topic explicitly at the end of this review, though implicitly I shall never leave it.
- Type
- Critical Notices/Etudes critiques
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1986 , pp. 533 - 546
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1986
References
1 Sparshott, Francis, The Theory of the Arts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. xiv, 726, cloth $45.00 (ISBN 0–691-07266–7); limited paperback edition $15.00 (ISBN 0–691-10130–2). One advantage ofthe otherwise deplorable delay in the writing of this review is that its author was able to hear two symposia on TTTA at the Canadian Philosophical Association meeting in June 1984, and at the American Society for Aesthetics meeting in November 1984. I had the inestimable benefit of being able to hear not only Dorter, Heintz, Crawford, and Margolis on Sparshott, but also Sparshott on Sparshott. Apart from philosophical profit, I can now have the sheer pleasure of hearing the book read to me by its author as I read itGoogle Scholar.
2 Sparshott's own term, used with à self-deprecation not wholly credible, but nonethe-less for that à term not unfairly used.
3 Note 61, 668–670, comes à close second. It is à careful account of the facts about Duchamp's “exhibition” of Fountain, with the plausible claim that these facts fail to underwrite what theorists typically do with this incident. The role of one Arensberg is subjected to particular scepticism, ending with the suggestion that perhaps he was chosen for his initials. Ignorant people like me have to consult the index to get the point of this throwaway—the relevant information is closeted there.
4 “Borrowing à phrase and part of an argument from Joseph Margolis”, Sparshott says (157). Margolis' influence on chapters six to eight is graciously acknowledged in the preface (viii), though Sparshott rightly does not try to conceal the differences between his and Margolis' own development of the underlying idea.
5 For more about the centrality of the classical line, see below, 542–544.
6 That is the difference noted between the Poetic Line and the expressive line; every person's version of the expressive line is Romanticism.
7 That multi-flavoured tube of toothpaste is in fact uncapped and extrusively stamped on in chapter seven. The issue is discussed under the rubric of à particularly tricky kind of classification of works of art. The discussion (216–224) is characteristically careful, thorough, incisive, and conclusively inconclusive.
8 That is my term. Sparshott refers to à “pure and simple version of the expressive line”. He would.
9 As Sparshott notes, though, that is exactly how Marxism looks at the artist—a neat way t o put Socialist Realism in its place.
10 The chapter ends with this dark saying—“art can be what it is only because it is as if the mystic line enshrined à system of possible truth” (413). If I understand this aright (if), then, I want to say, the same is true of philosophy.
11 Maybe this is my favourite footnote. Speaking of John Cage, Sparshott writes: “Inci-dentally, it is not obvious why 4' 33” is so much better known than the same composer's O'O“, of which my writing this note was à private performance” (662, n. 32). You now understand the selection problem.
12 Several of the topics of à standard kind are discussed interestingly and sanely in TTTA. I have mentioned already—the notes on Goodman and functional classifications of art; the discussion of “expressive qualities”; the discussion of anti-art. There is in fact à running discussion with Goodman all the way through the notes. Other standard topics discussed with similar penetration are representation (72–76), seeing-as (106–108), the identity of works of art (168–187), the nature of interpretation (246–262), the role of intention in criticism (34–38), and another running discussion about Dickie and the institutional aspects of art.
13 Some idea of the detail of the map may be provided by the following list of analytic fissions Sparshott makes (I mention the initial page only): fourteen different readings of the point being made by Duchamp in LHOOQ (661); nine versions of the benefits gained from arts of imitative play (100); eight possible structures of belief/disbelief in the mystic line (388); seven different bases for classifying works of art (196); six factors that unify and differentiate arts (47); six conditions under which abundance of natural beauty would still leave room for arts of beauty (112); six complications that arise in the use of style terms (229); six variants of the purist line (422); five distinct things “philosophy ofart” can mean (12);fivedifferent ways of understanding “imagination” i n context (140);fivedifferent grounds on which special dignity may be claimed for art (287);fivedifferent ways in which expressions of art might be conspicuous (348). There are divisions into four, three, and two too numerous to mention.
14 I do not pretend this is à great discovery—the language Sparshott uses when he speaks about the relationships between the lines is usually “dynamic”, and hardly acciden-tally so in such à gifted stylist. I assume emphasis on this is missing from the last paragraph just to give the reader some work to do.
15 Or, at least, à videotape.
16 Sparshott, Francis, “Metaphysics and Verification”, reprinted in his Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), 51.Google Scholar