chugging along

My mind is a steam engine, not a sports car.

It is reasonably impressive merely to behold it at rest, immobile and ornamental, but that cannot be very interesting to very many people for very long.

My mind is surprisingly slow at getting up to track speed. This requires tremendous waste of time and energy compared to the more advanced technologies that have come around more recently. Most people who behold this spectacle are back at the station. They see something very powerful that moves too slowly. But eventually we will get up to track speed, out here in the vast and sparsely populated rolling hills.

Critical Commonplaces

The Commonplace Raised to a Higher Power
Arthur Danto
interviewed by Hans Maes
(excerpt)

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This so-called 'method of indiscernibles'...arises, according to Danto, not only in the field of aesthetics but in all other areas of philosophy. Philosophy is supposed to address its subject matter...by seeking the conditions that make the things under scrutiny the kinds of things they are. The appropriate way of seeking these conditions, Danto suggests, is to examine how the thing...differs from an object or event that is ostensibly indiscernible from it.

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Ugh.

Could you forgive some of us, just maybe, for seeing in this merely an exercise?

KENDALL WALTON—Categories of Art

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

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[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
.