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Art-Names and Aesthetic Judgments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Haig Khatchadourian
Haig Khatchadourian
Affiliation:
American University, Beirut, Lebanon
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Extract

In an earlier paper I have attempted to show, among other things; that the names (primarily) of human artifacts and man-devised activities and processes involve in their uses the notion of some end-in-view, function, or use (more or less different in the case of different names), which partially regulates these uses. In this paper I shall limit myself to a somewhat detailed discussion of one very important class of such common names which requires a separate treatment. I mean art-names.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 36 , Issue 136 , January 1961 , pp. 30 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1961

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References

1 For a general analysis of names of artifacts and man-devised activities and processes, the reader is referred to the author's “Common Names and ‘Family Resemblances’”, which appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 18, No. 3 (March 1958).

2 We apply “work of art” to “works” mostly when we assume that they are capable of producing an aesthetic effect but are not concerned with the degree or extent of this effect. We qualify “work of art” by “good” or “poor”, or by similar value terms, when we are assessing or judging the degree or extent of the effect that a work is regarded as capable of producing. However, “work of art”, with emphasis on “art”, is also used as a value term, as equivalent to “good work (of art)”.

3 On the other hand, we ordinarily hesitate to say “poor work of art”, though we do say: “X is poor or bad art”. “Work of art”, or perhaps “art” in this expression, seems to have a laudatory meaning, to involve the notion of achievement—to borrow the term from Gallie, W. B. [“Art as an Essentially Contested Concept”, Philosophical Quarterly, Vol.6, No.23 (04 1956)]. Thus it would be odd if not self-contradictory to say: “Bad or poor work of art.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 We should mention here that the affections which are implicitly involved in the uses of art-names, except in so far as they all seem to include an element of pleasurableness, are probably not related other than by criss-crossing “family resemblances”. Moreover, this pleasurableness itself is understood so broadly and indefinitely in the ordinary uses of art-names that it constitutes only a thin link between different sorts of affections, and allows very great flexibility. It also allows the almost indefinite extension of the notion of an “aesthetic experience”—and hence of the notion of work of art—so that new kinds of affections and new kinds of artifacts and sensible devices which are capable of producing one or another of these affections can be added to the list of genres of one and the same art, and even to the list of the arts: as has constantly happened in the history of art. This flexibility in the notion of art makes it impossible to give a final description or definition of art in terms of kinds of formal characteristics or of kinds of affections; but at the same time it makes it possible to include new kinds of artifacts and emotional or intellectual affections under the embracing notion of art.

4 Art as an Essentially Contested Concept, pp. 100–101. But the author there does not distinguish between a work's formal qualities and the effects which it produces or may be able to produce in a listener or spectator.

5 In Aesthetics and Language, edited by William Elton (Oxford, 1954), p. 148.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., p. 157.

7 Ibid., p. 159.

8 In Aesthetics and Language, edited by William Elton (Oxford, 1954), p. 159.Google Scholar

9 In Aesthetics and Language, edited by William Elton (Oxford, 1954), p. 154.Google Scholar

10 Ibid.