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On Cinematic Genius: Ontology and Appreciation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2013
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- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 71: Philosophy and the Arts , October 2012 , pp. 85 - 104
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2013
References
1 For background, see my ‘Poincare's “Delicate Sieve”: On Creativity in the Arts’, in Krausz, Michael, Dutton, Denis and Bardsley, Karen (eds.), The Idea of Creativity (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 129–146Google Scholar; ‘Creativity’, in Borchert, Donald (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd edition (Detroit: Macmilland, 2006), Vol. 2, 688–691Google Scholar, and Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), chapter 2Google Scholar.
2 For instructive surveys, see Currie, Gregory, ‘Art works, ontology of’, in Edward, Craig (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998, 2010)Google Scholar; retrieved April 08, 2011 from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/M012; Davies, Stephen ‘Ontology of Art’, in Levinson, Jerrold (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 155–180Google Scholar; Gracyk, Theodore, ‘Ontological Contextualism’, in Davies, Stephen, et al. (eds), A Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd edition (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 449–453Google Scholar, and Thomasson, Amie, ‘The Ontology of Art’, in Kivy, Peter (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 78–92Google Scholar.
3 Davies, Stephen, ‘Ontology of Art’, in Levinson, Jerrold (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 155–180Google Scholar.
4 See Benjamin, Walter, ‘L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction mécanisée’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (1936), 40–66Google Scholar; ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, in Tiedemann, Rolf and Schweppenhäuser, Hermann (eds.), Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I:2 (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1980), 431–469Google Scholar.
5 Lewis, C. I., An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1946)Google Scholar, Ushenko, Andrew Paul, Dynamics of Art (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1953), 21–25Google Scholar, Strawson, Peter F., Individuals (London: Methuen, University Paperbacks, 1959), 231, n.1Google Scholar; see also his ‘Aesthetic Appraisal and Works of Art’, in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Metheun, 1974), 178–88, at p. 183Google Scholar: ‘There is no reason for regarding the members of some classes of works of art as essentially particulars, rather than types. All works of art, certainly, are individuals; but all are equally types and not particulars’.
6 O'Hear, Anthony, ‘Art and Technology: An Old Tension’, in Fellows, Roger (ed.), Philosophy and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 143–158Google Scholar; reprinted in The Landscapes of Humanity: Art, Culture and Society (Exeter: Imprint, 2008), 126–142Google Scholar.
7 For a survey, see my ‘History of the Ontology of Art’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2011)Google Scholar; http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-ontology-history/
8 A fairly early, and generally overlooked example is Boas, George, A Primer for Critics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937)Google Scholar.
9 Collingwood, Robin George, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1938), 281–282Google Scholar.
10 Aquinas, St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, Ia IIae q. 57 a. 5. Cited by Tatarkiewicz, Władysław in History of Aesthetics, II: Medieval Aesthetics (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 261CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The context is an argument for the necessity of prudence to virtue and a good life, but not to goodness in art.
11 Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der Urteilskraft. Kants gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 5. (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1902 [1790]), paragraph 43Google Scholar; Guyer, Paul and Matthews, Eric (trans.), Guyer, Paul (ed.), Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),182Google Scholar. For a discussion of Kant's definition of art and its relation to some more recent views, see Guyer, Paul, ‘From Jupiter's Eagle to Warhol's Boxes: The Concept of Art from Kant to Danto’, Philosophical Studies 25:1 (1997), 83–116Google Scholar.
12 ‘Style’ and ‘stylistic’ are, of course, amongst the most contested and ambiguous terms in aesthetic discourse. On one usage, these terms are employed to refer to the manner or mode involved in some feature or collection of features of a work or works; cf. Jules David, Prown, ‘Style as Evidence’, Winterthur Portfolio 15:3 (1980), 197–210Google Scholar.
13 Goodhart-Rendel, H. S., Fine Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), 3–4Google Scholar, Pepper, Stephen C., ‘The Individuality of a Work of Art’, University of California Publications in Philosophy 20 (1937), 81–97Google Scholar, The Basis of Criticism in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945)Google Scholar, The Work of Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955)Google Scholar, Davies, David, Art as Performance (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004)Google Scholar.
14 Jerrold, Levinson, Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, Currie, Gregory, An Ontology of Art (London: Macmillan, 1989)Google Scholar.
15 Leon Batista, Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria (1486)Google Scholar, I, 4-4v. http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/ECHOg.de/ECHOdocuView?url=%2Fmpiwg%2Fonline%2Fpermanent%2Farchimedes%2Falber_reaed_004_la_1485&tocMode=thumbs&viewMode=text_dict&pn=1; (accessed 28.9.2011); L'architettura (De re aedificatoria) di Leon Battista Alberti trodotta in lingua fiorentina da Cosimo Bartoli. . . con l'aggiunta de disegni (Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1550)Google Scholar; Alberti, Leon Batista, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Joseph, Rykwert, Neil, Leach, and Robert, Tavernor (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 7Google Scholar. I am aware that there is a tendency in the literature on Alberti to stress the neo-Platonic assumptions in his aesthetics, and there is a good basis for this in his remarks on beauty. See, for example, Gadol, Joan, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969)Google Scholar. Yet the rather non-Platonic, positive emphasis on the artist's ingenuity is an element in the text to which many of Alberti's translators and commentators have also been attuned.
16 For background to this remark, see my ‘On the Appreciation of Cinematic Adaptations’, Projections 4:2 (2010), 104–127Google Scholar. I am grateful to Trevor Ponech for valuable collaboration on the topic of cinematic adaptations.
17 Thackeray, William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, Tillotson, Geoffrey and , Kathleen (eds.) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., Riverside Edition, 1963), 474Google Scholar. For those using other editions, the passage is to be found at the end of chapter 49. In the novel, Becky's singing does not win over the other ladies, who keep up a ‘loud and ceaseless buzzing and talking’. Here there can be no reasonable doubt that the filmmakers intentionally diverged from the novelistic source.
18 For background and a more detailed explication, see my ‘Nested Art’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61:3 (2003), 233–245Google Scholar, and ‘Artistic Nesting in The Five Obstructions’, in Hjort, Mette (ed.), On The Five Obstructions (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 57–75Google Scholar.
19 Readers are invited to compare the song sequences, which are available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeqU0maaQL0 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFQc6PyAf5I (accessed 28.9.2011).
20 To my knowledge, the first argumentative use of this source in English in the context of aesthetics was Savile, Anthony's, ‘Nelson Goodman's “Languages of Art”: A Study’, The British Journal of Aesthetics 11:1 (1971), 3–27Google Scholar. For other references, see ‘History of the Ontology of Art’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2011)Google Scholar; http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/art-ontology-history/.
21 By ‘indistinguishable’ I mean competent or normal observers cannot perceive any intrinsic differences between the two items and so would classify them accurately as tokens of the same type of audio-visual display. If these observers had no independent knowledge whether they were experiencing a screening of Vehicle 1 or Vehicle 2, they would, after a particular screening, have a 50% chance of correctly identifying which one they had just seen. For the sake of the argument, I stipulate that the credits in Vehicle 1 make no reference to the novelistic source, perhaps because it was deemed too obvious to require mention. This makes A2′s ignorance of N a glaring weakness, but that only reinforces the point about the artistic differences between Work 1 and Work 2.
22 This more general thesis was, of course, argued for in a more eloquent and less roundabout way by Erwin Panofsky in his essay, ‘The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’, in Greene, T. M. (ed.), The Meaning of the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 89–118Google Scholar. The greatest (unintended) achievement of post-structuralist art theory was prodding analytic philosophers into developing increasingly elaborate justifications of traditional humanistic positions.
23 See his remarks as cited in Muir, John Kenneth, Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (New York: Applause Theater and Cinema Books, 2006), 220–223Google Scholar. Like all statements about artistic intentions, this is one is fallible, both as a characterization of Fellowes' effective intentions, but also as a description of the overarching intentions behind the making of the film as a whole.
24 Carroll, Noël, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.
25 For an informative discussion of this issue, see Nussbaum, Charles, ‘Kinds, Types, and Musical Ontology’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61:3 (2003), 273–291CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Versions of this paper were presented at the Royal Institute of Philosophy and at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and I am grateful to members of the audience for their questions and comments. Thanks are due as well to Rafael De Clercq and Kelly Trogdon for criticisms of a draft of the paper. This research has benefited from financial support from the Research and Postgraduates Studies Committee of Lingnan University, Hong Kong.