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On Giving Works of Art a Face
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
The remarks that critics make about works of art are various in character. Some of them are strictly interpretative—for instance, The Lord of the Rings may be claimed to be an allegorical representation of the Gospel Story; the slow movement of a symphony may be said to express a period of calm after a revolution; a painting may be said to depict the horrors of war. Some may be biographical—that the play was written in 1654, that the poem was written while the poet was in love, that the sculpture was commissioned by the Canada Council. Some may be autobiographical—that the 7th has always been one's favourite Beethoven symphony, that one identifies with Joe in Room at the Top, that Medea was the first tragedy one saw performed in the original Greek. Some are ‘descriptive’ in the philosopher's sense, ‘matters of fact’—that the narrator is a senior civil servant, that the painting is all in pastel colours, that the conductor has not played all the repetitions. Some invoke formal structural principles—that the doors are in classical proportions, that the work's catastrophe is deferred to the finale, that the poem is in iambic pentameters. Some are concerned with the exposition of technique—that the spaciousness is suggested by the use of open fifths, that speed is portrayed by making the moving object sharper than anything else in the picture, that the effect of a sculpture is achieved by the use of metallurgically distinct materials. I wish to concentrate on a type of remark found frequently in art criticism, which defies reduction to any of the kinds mentioned above. The following are typical instances:
That picture will not, at the first glance, deceive as a piece of actual sunlight; but this is because there is more in it than the sunlight, because under the glazing veil of vaulted fire which lights the vessel on her last path, there is a blue deep, desolate hollow of darkness, out of which you can hear the voice of the night wind, and the dull boom of the disturbed sea; because the cold deadly shadows of twilight are gathering through every sunbeam, and moment by moment as you look, you will fancy some new film and faintness of the night has risen over the vastness of the departing form (Ruskin, on Turner's The Fighting Temeraire).
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References
1 ‘(1) Thesis. The judgment of taste is not based upon concepts, for otherwise it would admit of controversy (would be determinable by proofs).
(2) Antithesis. The judgment of taste is based on concepts, for otherwise, despite its diversity, we could not quarrel about it (we could not claim for our judgment the necessary assent of others)’ Critique of Judgment I. ii, 56.Google Scholar
2 Sibley's view that the applicability of aesthetic terms is not condition-governed is complex, but precise. I assume it to be familiar; the 1959 and 1961 papers should be consulted by those who wish to refresh their memories.
3 The detailed phenomenology of the business is one of the most valuable things Sibley has to contribute: vide 1965, 142 ff.Google Scholar
4 Sibley's term; first used by him at 1965, 143; its appropriateness to aspects of the earlier articles is manifest.
5 I do not wish to suggest that in the case of aesthetic judgment the temptation to defend an anti-objectivist position stems only from the availability of at best perceptual proofs. There is also, as Michael Tanner has pointed out in replying to Sibley 1968, the connection between a person's aesthetic judgments of works of art and his ‘affection’ for them (Arist. Soc. Suppl. Vol. 1968, 68Google Scholar). I shall not pursue this further in the present paper, although clearly a fully developed theory of criticism requires attention to it.
6 I have begun to say something about this in ‘Wittgenstein and the Foundations of Knowledge’, Proc. of Arist. Soc. 1977–1978.Google Scholar
7 Cf. also here my ‘Goldman on the Non-contingency Thesis’, Mind 10 1977.Google Scholar
8 The slipperiness of ‘descriptive’, and the tendency of philosophers not to realize that relevant questions are begged by its standard use in meta-ethics have been well discussed by Julius Kovesi in Moral Notions; cf. also Shiner, R. A. & Bickenbach, J. E., ‘Misconceptions About Moral Notions’, Analysis 1975–1976.Google Scholar Hardy ends his comment, ‘Hence “realism” is not Art’. That, however, is a separate issue; the truth of that claim does not follow from what he has said before.
9 These last two remarks are of course a considerable simplification from the point of view of legal theory as a separate technical discipline. There, Ronald Dworkin has recently argued (Taking Rights Seriously, Chs. 2–4) that principles do have status and authority independently of statutes and cases. For a strong counter-attack, vide Raz, J., Yale L. J. 1972.Google Scholar
10 I have argued elsewhere (Br. J. of Aesthetics 1974) that over-concentration on these locally deductive aspects of criticism seems to have tripped up Wittgenstein, and led him to present an overly emotivist (or, rather, Tractarian) account of criticism.
11 He does, however, permit, curiously, the exception of some negative conditions. He writes:
It seems clear that with only pale pastels and no instances of bright (or apparently bright) colours in existence, there could be no examples of gaudy or garish colouring, and it would be dubious whether anyone could have learned, or whether there would be, any such concepts (p. 153).
This is held to be a logical ‘could’. I see no reason for thinking that this negative relationship is any different from some putative positive relationship, and therefore no reason why the whole lot could not be called logical.
12 Earlier versions of this paper were read to the Canadian Philosophical Association, the American Society for Aesthetics, the American Society for Value Inquiry, and the 1977 Fullerton Colloquium. I am very grateful for strenuous and thorough criticism of previous drafts to Monroe Beardsley, Jerry Bickenbach, Steve Burns, Allen Carlson, Sherman Stanage, Margaret van de Pitte and Bruce Vermazen.