Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)
[59]
2
Art and expression
Part I
Art as expression
The expression theory of art
For centuries, representation was taken to be the central, defining feature of art. ... broadly, the emphasis in imitation theories of art was on
the outward aspects of things—
the look
of objects and
the actions
of humans.
In a loose sense ... the objective features of the "external" world— ...
nature and observable behavior.
But, in the West, as
the eighteenth century
dissolved into
the nineteenth,
ambitious artists
... began
to turn inward;
... less preoccupied with ... appearance ... than with ... their own
subjective experiences.
... landscapes [e.g.] were charged with
a significance beyond their physical properties.
... artists ... attempted to
register their reactions
—the way they felt—
about the landscapes. ...
... Romanticism places premier value on
the self and its own individual experiences.
... some outward scene ... is not presented for its own sake, but as a stimulus for the poet to
examine his or her own emotional responses to it.
[60]
...
... We still live in the shadows of Romanticism. ... Many twentieth-century art movements ...
can be seen
as direct descendants of Romanticism.
Should
these
movements
be seen as
such?
Moreover, ... these developments ... employing distortion and abstraction for expressive purposes ... made ever more evident the inadequacies of imitation and representational theories of art.
. . . but presumably this didn't happen right away. I think Danto has a point there. The initial reaction, and the final reaction of many people until their final death-reaction, is simply to resist expansion of the "concept," as we might say in Anal. Phil. terms.
Danto can always be counted on to make many good points, but he usually manages to draw precisely the wrong conclusions from them. If "it was impossible to accept" Postimpressionism, at first, "as art unless inept art," then this does not at all suggest that "terrain is constituted artistic in virtue of artistic theories." What it suggests, in fact, is that theories and concepts are the last to adapt themselves to a new reality.
If so, then Our Man Here has an even bigger problem than Danto: What does this say about any "analysis" of "our" concepts and practices? Are we analyzing yesterday's newspaper hoping to find out what is happening today?
