Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)
[53]
Categories of Art
KENDALL WALTON
[orig. 1970]
I Introduction
...
Paintings and sculptures are to be looked at; sonatas and songs are to be heard. What is important about these works of art, as works of art, is what can be seen or heard in them. Inspired partly by apparent commonplaces such as these, many recent aesthetic theorists have attempted to purge from criticism of works of art supposedly extraneous excursions into matters not (or not "directly") available to inspection of the works, and to focus attention on the works themselves. Circumstances connected with a work's origin, in particular, are frequently held to have no essential bearing on an assessment of its aesthetic nature—
Well okay, ALREADY we're caught between
criticism of works of art
and
an assessment of its aesthetic nature
.
