Fingerprints or Mushroom Stamps?

This is my Goodreads review of Johanna Drucker's Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity.

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Feeling horny? Grab this book and flip to page 153. You'll find a photo of Family Romance, a "mixed media" piece comprised of four half-realistic, fully naked mannequins representing mom, dad, bro and sis.

Really need your hands free while you ogle? Break the spine of the book along this page; that way it'll lay flat on the table all by itself. Or, if you live in Southern California, you can head to the Central Library in LA and grab their copy, which has already had its spine broken in precisely this spot and is prone to fall open to precisely this page and this image.

I hesitate to add, " . . . for precisely this purpose," because there is no way I could know for sure what the "purpose" of the spine-breaker was, no way to know if this purpose was shared or how widely, no way to know if there was in fact any purpose at all. Among hundreds of LAPL books I've checked out, dozens have had broken spines. I can't remember another one that had an image of nude children anywhere in it, let alone precisely where the spine was broken; but let's imagine, in a mashup of the Infinite Monkey Theorem with Lacan's Missing Signifier, that there is at least one other book in these particular stacks that would seem, to me, to depict nude children in a semi-realistic manner, and that there is at least one other person in Southern California who would agree with me that this is what it depicts. Were this all to be true, the book I happened to check out wouldn't be special even in this regard. All that would be special about it from my standpoint, perhaps, is that I happened to read some other inscrutable, overlong art-crit book which mentioned this one favorably, my interest was piqued, I swapped one for the other at the circulation desk, and I was unlucky (lucky?) enough to find my latest heist literally falling open to an unusally pungent image before I was able to read a single word. This is all that I ought to be certain of. Nothing I can observe about the book proves anything further.

This has been my inner rationalist speaking. My inner empiricist is not as sanguine.

GEORGE DICKIE—The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

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What to do with this, knowing that it comes not at the end but at the beginning of a long series of refinements, abandonments and reformulations?

I only know how to do one thing, so that's what I'll be doing here.

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[100]

The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude

GEORGE DICKIE

[orig. 1964]

Some recent articles¹ have suggested the unsatisfactoriness of the notion of the aesthetic attitude and it is now time for a fresh look at that encrusted article of faith.

Note 1 lists two articles:

Marshall Cohen, "Appearance and the Aesthetic Attitude" (1959)

Joseph Margolis, "Aesthetic Perception" (1960)

This conception has been valuable to aesthetics and criticism in helping wean them from a sole concern with beauty and related notions. However, I shall argue that the aesthetic attitude is a myth...

TIMOTHY BINKLEY—Contra Aesthetics

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

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[80]

Piece: Contra Aesthetics

TIMOTHY BINKLEY

[orig. 1977]

I. What Is This Piece?

1. The term "aesthetics" has a general meaning in which it refers to the philosophy of art. In this sense, any theoretical writing about art falls within the realm of aesthetics.

There is also a more specific and more important sense of the term in which it refers to a particular type of theoretical inquiry which emerged in the eighteenth century when the "Faculty of Taste" was invented. In this latter sense, "aesthetics" is the study of a specific human activity involving the perception of aesthetic qualities such as beauty, repose, expressiveness, unity, liveliness.

I think I prefer the first sense to the second, even though it often appears semantically imprecise or even outright deceptive.

Later in the Anthology we encounter some powerful arguments against conflating "aesthetics" with "philosophy of art"!

Although frequently purporting to be a (or even the) philosophy of art ,

aesthetics so understood is not exclusively about art :

This is exactly what I don't like about the second sense.