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What is a “Work of Art”?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Ruth Saw
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Extract

This examination of the concept “work of art” has been prompted by the desire to find a starting point for aesthetic inquiry which, to begin with at any rate, will arouse no dispute. A claim for general agreement such as Clive Bell's: “The starting point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a pecular emotion”, is countered by I. A. Richards's “the phantom aesthetic state”, and any attempt to claim “beauty” as the central concept is straightway confused by the varied contexts in which “beauty” and “beautiful” may function. We hear much more often of a beautiful stroke in cricket than in painting, and many of our moral judgments have an aesthetic flavour. An action may be bold, dashing, mean, underhanded, unimaginative, cringing, fine, as well as right or wrong. Aesthetic adjectives and adverbs may occur in any context, and part of our job is to separate out the various uses and establish their inter-relationships,

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 36 , Issue 136 , January 1961 , pp. 18 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1961

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References

1 A definition by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is of interest here. Giving judgment in connection with a claim by composers for royalties from gramophone record makers he defined a composition as “ … a rational collocation of sounds apart from concepts, reduced to a tangible expression from which the collocation can be reproduced either with or without continuous human intervention”.