Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)
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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
.
Transparently, the very word "aesthetic" IS itself a matter of
what can be seen or heard
.
If an "aesthetic" appraisal now includes consideration of
(continuing)
,
for example, who created the work, how, and when; the artist's intentions and expectations concerning it, his philosophical views, psychological state, and love life; the artistic traditions and intellectual atmosphere of his society.
,
in that case we may reasonably conclude that the very word itself has been used up and a new word must now be found.
Not that there is anything unusual in the slow erosion of semantic precision, but there is something quite notable here in the form of TWO concurrent erosions of two distict usages of the same word; a co-erosion of two pawns in order to rescue a more valuable Critical chesspiece.
First, there is (or was!) the more general sense of "aesthetics" as a matter of perception, of surfaces, of beauty and its opposite, etc.;
and second, there is (or was) "aesthetics" as the formalized philosophical discipline which starts from matters implicated by this first sense of the word but, because it is formal philosophy, does not end there.
Our author here certainly implies that "criticism of works of art" is indeed a matter of "an assessment of its aesthetic nature." But he seems bugged that "recent aesthetic theorists" have eschewed "matters not (or not "directly") available to inspection" by an art subject-of-an-object.
Passages like this need never have been written if it had simply been agreed that "criticism" DOES take account of the unseen, unheard matters while "aesthetics" DOES NOT. I dare to propose such strictly ideal semantics in no fear whatsoever of the facile rejoinder that such ideals can never be realized. The ideal needs to be proposed anyway, and the rejoinder issued, because only then can we ask the actual question of import here: why do such ideals constantly suggest themselves while obstinately refusing to be realized?
In this case I think I know exactly why but I can't prove it. This epoch of "criticism" seems, somehow, both to trade on its conceit to disinterestedness and also to openly flout that disinterestedness in its own internal meta-discourses. Imagine as abstractly as possible the conceit that, e.g., a certain piece of music criticism is "aesthetic criticism" and that, at the same time, it is concerned with and directed by unseen and unheard matters, by "psychological states" and "intellectual atmospheres," or perhaps by things merely of this type about which we can't say much more unless and until those things bubble up in due course (and the course has already been charted...). The simple reality is that the terms of engagement being laid out by our author here, ALREADY on the very first page, would not be taken seriously by anybody of any walk of life were these terms actually understood as rendered here. The distinction between that which is "available to inspection" and that which is not thusly available, this distinction is readily understood, intellectually and practically alike, except perhaps (to conjure Taleb) by cloistered academics who are incentivized to lose sight of it. So too, I think, is it easy to grasp, even for absolutists like me, that the behind-the-scenes stuff can, indeed, become "important" to various people for various reasons at various times. But in merely granting that technical point, even I am at risk of obliterating the real, significant differences between inspectables and uninspectables, which are that (1) some (few) people have privileged access to the uninspectables whereas others (many) do not; (2) inspectables present a finite and transparent informational field whereas the class of uninspectables includes much which is unknown-and-unknowable. THESE TWO POINTS explain precisely why "critics" would desperately image-manage their discipline into a sort of popular form of disinterested scholarship all while taking ruthless and direct aim at anyone within their own ranks who dares to point out the profound interestedness of the enterprise and the precise social relations from which that interestedness arises.
If criticism were to become disinterested, there would not be much of it left.
So, is it really only "what can be seen or heard" in artworks which is "important?" Of course not. That is a strawman. "Important" is just another kind of value judgment.
Rather, "what can be seen or heard" is public. The rest is private. And there it ought to remain. But usually it doesn't, all the same here in 1970, before Instagram ever existed, as in 2024, after it has taken over the world. Seems like that's what all of this is really about.
When some "matters" are "not available" to the "inspection" of a balcony-dweller or a gallery-goer merely in the run of their monthly trip to the shrine, when the "elitist" admission fees and dress codes and programming have long since been scrapped by the institutions and yet the "inspections" one makes there cannot possibly (they definitionally do not) turn up the slightest whiff of all which must be considered in order to form an "assessment" of the art's "aesthetic nature," then this, truly this time, THIS is Elitism and Popery, pure and simple.
Or, if the uninspectables are merely granted to be unique to and nontransferable artifacts of the individual subject, then the "critics" are merely others among these others; hence those critics who continue to insist on their own necessity to the overall ecosystem even after this grand relativization, those critics got even more 'splainin to do, not less.
Once produced (it is argued) the work must stand or fall on its own; it must be judged for what it is, regardless of how it came to be as it is.
Arguments for the irrelevance of such historical circumstances to aesthetic judgments about works of art may, but need not, involve the claim that these circumstances are not of "aesthetic" interest or importance, though obviously they are often important in biographical, historical, psychological, or sociological researches. One might consider an artist's action in producing a work to be aesthetically interesting, an "aesthetic
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object" in its own right, while vehemently maintaining its irrelevance to an aesthetic investigation of the work. Robert Rauschenberg once carefully obliterated a drawing by de Kooning, titled the bare canvas "Erased De Kooning Drawing," framed it, and exhibited it. His doing this might be taken as symbolic or expressive (of an attitude toward art, or toward life in general, or whatever) in an "aesthetically" significant manner, perhaps somewhat as an action of a character in a play might be, and yet thought to have no bearing whatever on the aesthetic nature of the finished product.
The Rauschenberg example is an insidious one, certainly, and we will encounter it again in the next paper in the Anthology (wherein, incidentally, the very notion of parsing this work "aesthetically" is argued to be pointless). Once again Walton channels the discourse toward something which we have not witnessed ourselves. I call this "insidious" because it plays on a subtle difference between two unstated but implicit premises.
Even I would agree that "pure" aesthetics does not presuppose only the most immediate, present experience of something; plainly enough, it must be taken to include certain purely imaginative "experiences" too. And of course the contested terrain of historical circumstances typically belongs to precisely this realm; that is, to that which we must imagine for lack of experiencing ourselves.
If the matter comes to rest there, then it is settled, but in fact it does not rest so easily. The epistemological construction of an artist's action in producing a work needs to be clarified, at which point it is, as an imaginative experience, summarily and thoroughly differentiated from the kind of imaginative experiences we have of "the work itself." An "action" is not really a "circumstance." People can be jailed or knighted for their "actions" but not for their "circumstances."
To point out the faultiness of memory is to strengthen the pure aesthete's position rather than weaken it, since it is the interest in historical circumstances which demands memorial accuracy, not the interest in pure aesthetics. But even if, on the other hand, we grant a degree of accuracy that is sufficient for us to be able to take Walton seriously here, there remains the apparent fact that anyone who was not present for the creation of 'Erased de Kooning Drawing' is not invoking memory of an event they themselves witnessed which has meaning in light of their having actually witnessed it; rather, they may be invoking memory of some information they have learned second-hand; or, I would dare say paradigmatically in this peculiar context, what they are doing is to make an assumption, a justifiable and pragmatic assumption certainly, but hardly an infallible one, and then they are projecting symbolic or expressive significance onto it from that great epistemological distance. I think that's the crux of the matter, not in spite but because of just how deep you have to dig into this critic-speak to uncover it. And I think it threatens to reveal, again, what's really at stake here for the principals. Everyone who trades professionally on this kind of second-hand information is put out of business by so-called aesthetic absolutism, the same way Popes are put out of business by the ideal of an independent or "direct" relationship with God.
Merely to point all of this out says nothing about what people
must
or mustn't do when they view an artwork. I am more concerned with everything they might do (and especially say) afterward, and with the unequal consequences of who is saying it, when, where, and how. i.e. I think there is a bonafide "social justice" project here which requires a small-c conservative frame.
The issue I am here concerned with is how far critical questions about works of art can be separated from questions about their histories.
Critical questions??
Or aesthetic ones?
Which will it be, sir?
One who wants to make this separation quite sharp may regard the basic facts of art along the following lines. Works of art are simply objects with various properties, of which we are primarily interested in perceptual ones—visual properties of paintings, audible properties of music, and so forth. A work's perceptual properties include "aesthetic" as well as "nonaesthetic" ones—the sense of mystery and tension of a painting as well as its dark coloring and diagonal composition; the energy, exuberance, and coherence of a sonata, as well as its meters, rhythms, pitches, timbres, and so forth; the balance and serenity of a Gothic cathedral as well as its dimensions, lines, and symmetries. Aesthetic properties are features or characteristics of works of art just as much as nonaesthetic ones are. They are in the works, to be seen, heard, or otherwise perceived there.
A work's perceptual properties
include
"aesthetic"
as well as
"nonaesthetic" ones...
Presumably the sense of mystery and tension of a painting , e.g., is put forward here as aesthetic . I still find this usage to be head-spinning and unnecessary. Might as well keep reading though!
Seeing a painting's sense of mystery or hearing a sonata's coherence might require looking or listening longer or harder than does perceiving colors and shapes, rhythms and pitches; it may even require special training or a special kind of sensitivity. But these qualities must be discoverable simply by examining the works themselves if they are discoverable at all. It is never even partly in virtue of the circumstances of a work's origin that it has a sense of mystery or is coherent or serene. Such circumstances sometimes provide hints concerning what to look for in a work, what we might reasonably expect to find by examining it. But these hints are always theoretically dispensable; a work's aesthetic properties must "in principle" be ascertainable without their help. ...
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...
The view sketched above can easily seem very persuasive. But the tendency of critics to discuss the histories of works of art in the course of justifying aesthetic judgments about them has been remarkably persistent. This is partly because hints derived from facts about a work's history, however dispensable they may be "in principle," are often crucially important in practice. (One might simply not think to listen for a recurring series of intervals in a piece of music, until he learns that the composer meant the work to be structured around it.)
This "principle"/"practice" distinction is asinine. Or at least it's not at all what the given example suggests. Rather, what is suggested (suddenly!) is that the "can" in what can be seen or heard was never actually half as generous a "can" as it first seemed. It is actually more of a "must."
We have merely to entertain the notion of a listener persisting in not thinking to listen for anything in particular on the level of structure (whatever that is), and then ask ourselves: what exactly is the problem here? "In principle" there is none. Indeed! So when's lunch?
No doubt it is partly due also to genuine confusions on the part of critics. But I will argue that (some) facts about the origins of works of art have an essential role in criticism , that aesthetic judgments rest on them in an absolutely fundamental way. For this reason, and for another as well, the view that works of art should be judged simply by what can be perceived in them is seriously misleading, though there is something right in the idea that what matters aesthetically about a painting or a sonata is just how it looks or sounds.
So,
judgment
of artworks
entails more than
what can be perceived in them
;
but
if you think that
what matters
aesthetically
about an artwork
is
just how it looks or sounds
then
there's something righteous
in your notion,
too
.
"Judgment" of the work is one thing,
ascertaining "what matters aesthetically"
is something else.
My tummy is rumbling.
II Standard, Variable, and Contra-Standard PropertiesI will continue to call tension, mystery, energy, coherence, balance, serenity, sentimentality, pallidness, disunity, grotesqueness, and so forth, as well as colors and shapes, pitches and timbres properties of works of art, though "property" is to be construed broadly enough not to beg any important questions.
Hmm. Doesn't lumping things like tension in with things like color invite all kinds of questions?
I will also, following Sibley, call properties of the former sort "aesthetic" properties, but purely for reasons of convenience I will include in this category "representational" and "resemblance" properties, which Sibley excludes—... It is not essential for my purposes to delimit with any exactness the class of aesthetic properties (if indeed any such delimitation is possible), for I am more interested in discussing particular examples of such properties than in making generalizations about the class as a whole.
So be it declared. But we seem to have major problems along precisely these lines pretty much from the first paragraph.
It will be obvious, however, that what I say about the examples I deal with is also applicable to a great many other properties we would want to call aesthetic.
Sibley points out that a work's aesthetic properties depend on its nonaesthetic properties; the former are "emergent" or "Gestalt" properties based on the latter. I take this to be true of all the examples of aesthetic properties we will be dealing with,... It is because of the configuration of colors and shapes on a painting, perhaps in particular its dark colors and diagonal composi-
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tion, that it has a sense of mystery and tension, if it does.
Should read: "..., if you think it does."
...
Moreover, a work seems or appears to us to have certain aesthetic properties because we observe in it, or it appears to us to have, certain nonaesthetic features (though it may not be necessary to notice consciously all the relevant nonaesthetic features). A painting depicting an old man may not look like an old man to someone who is color-blind, or when it is seen from an extreme angle...
I will argue, however, that a work's aesthetic properties depend not only on its nonaesthetic ones, but also on which of its nonaesthetic properties are "standard," which "variable," and which "contra-standard," in senses to be explained. I will approach this thesis by way of the psychological point that what aesthetic properties a work seems to us to have depends not only on what nonaesthetic features we perceive in it, but also on which of them are standard, which variable, and which contra-standard for us...
N.B. The ... to us ... and ... for us ... have made appearances!
It is necessary to introduce first a distinction between standard, variable, and contra-standard properties relative to perceptually distinguishable categories of works of art. Such categories include media, genre, styles, forms, and so forth—for example, the categories of paintings, cubist paintings, Gothic architecture, classical sonatas, paintings in the style of Cézanne, and music in the style of late Beethoven—if they are interpreted in such a way that membership is determined solely by features that can be perceived in a work when it is experienced in the normal manner. Thus... whether a work was produced by Cézanne or Beethoven has nothing essential to do with whether it is in the style of Cézanne or late Beethoven. ... A category will not count as "perceptually distinguishable"
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in my sense if in order to determine perceptually whether something belongs to it, it is necessary (in some or all cases) to determine which categories it is correctly perceived in partly or wholly on the basis of nonperceptual considerations. ...
A feature of a work of art is standard with respect to a (perceptually distinguishable) category just in case it is among those in virtue of which works in that category belong to that category—that is, just in case the lack of that feature would disqualify, or tend to disqualify, a work from that category. A feature is variable with respect to a category just in case it has nothing to do with works' belonging to that category; the possession or lack of the feature is irrelevant to whether a work qualifies for the category. Finally, a contra-standard feature with respect to a category is the absence of a standard feature with respect to that category—that is, a feature whose presence tends to disqualify works as members of the category. Needless to say, it will not be clear in all cases whether a feature of a work is standard, variable, or contra-standard relative to a given category, since the criteria for classifying works of art are far from precise. But clear examples are abundant. ... The exposition-development-recapitulation form of a classical sonata is standard, and its thematic material is variable, relative to the category of sonatas.
So what about
a recurring series of intervals in a piece of music ,
a series
around
which
the composer meant the work to be structured
?
Is there any
perceptually distinguishable category ,
extant or imaginable,
of which this is a
standard
feature?
If it is
merely
a "variable" feature,
does this not
have some bearing
on
the importance
(actually the non-importance)
of
thinking
to listen for
it?
Or,
are these
features,
those
that can be perceived in a work
when it is experienced
in the normal manner
,
are these,
then,
required to be
thusly
perceivable
merely
as a matter of
convenience
rather than
a matter of
necessity
?
In order to explain what I mean by features being standard, variable, or contra-standard for a person on a particular occasion, I must introduce the notion of perceiving a work in, or as belonging to, a certain (perceptually distinguishable) category. To perceive a work in a certain category is to perceive the "Gestalt" of that category in the work. ... Such recognition is dependent on perception of particular features that are standard relative to these categories, but it is not a matter of inferring from the presence of such features that a work is [e.g.] Brahmsian or impressionist. One may not notice many of the relevant features, and he may be very vague about
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which ones are relevant. If I recognize a work as Brahmsian by first noting its lush lextures, its basically traditional harmonic and formal structure, ... and so forth, and recalling that these characteristics are typical of Brahmsian works, I have not recognized it by hearing the Brahmsian Gestalt. To do that is simply to recognize it by its Brahmsian sound, without necessarily paying attention to the features ("cues") responsible for it. ...
I had to read last two sentences several times. The that in "To do that..." refers to recognition-by-sound. This is opposed to recognition-by-cues. Gestalt then seems to indicate something intuitive as against rationally considered, indeed perhaps something "preconceptual."
To perceive a Gestalt quality in a work—that is, to perceive it in a certain category—is not, or not merely, to recognize that Gestalt quality. Recognition is a momentary occurrence, whereas perceiving a quality is a continuous state which may last for a short or long time. ... This involves perceiving (not necessarily being aware of) features standard relative to that category. But it is not just this, nor this plus the intellectual realization that these features make the work Brahmsian, or impressionist. These features are perceived combined into a single Gestalt quality.
We can of course perceive a work in several or many different categories at once. ... Some pairs of categories, however, seem to be such that one cannot perceive a work as belonging to both at once,... One cannot see a photographic image simultaneously as a still photograph and as (part of) a film, nor can one see something both in the category of paintings and at the same time in the category (to be explained shortly) of guernicas.
It will be useful to point out some of the causes of our perceiving works in certain categories. (a) In which categories we perceive a work depends in part, of course, on what other works we are familiar with. ... (b) What we have heard critics and others say about works we have experienced,... If no one has ever explained to me what is distinctive about Schubert's style... or even pointed out that
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there is such a distinctive style, I may never have learned to hear the Schubertian Gestalt quality, even if I have heard many of Schubert's works,...
Hmm. The gestalt stuff in music definitely has some layers to it.
In the preceding paragraphs it's easy enough to detect the contrary implication that
What we have heard critics and others say
can only point us
to the features ("cues") responsible for
the gestalt, and not to the gestalt itself.
i.e.
Hearing others say things
about works we have experienced
is radically different than actually...experiencing the works.
i.e.
It is very unclear how
critics and others
could actually effect the above-mentioned
learning, but it is all too clear how they could get in the way.
As a personal aside: this game of identifying composers by gestalt was a favorite one of my public-radio-listening, classical-music-loving parents from the time of my earliest memories, as is not uncommon among that cohort even as it remains uncommon in the wider world at large. If memory serves, I could not do it at all until well into adolescence, despite wanting to play along. As I assume is also not uncommon for children when in the company of adults, for a time I wanted somewhat more to be able to play along with this adult game than I really wanted to listen to or play the music. But I still couldn't do it at all. Finally in a moment of frustration I asked my mom to explain how she did it. I have forgotten her answer, which no doubt would be interesting to consider here, but I do remember that it didn't make much sense or help me in any way. In hindsight it feels like a general developmental landmark rather than an acquired skill. If it is merely acquired then I should have been able to do it younger: I was intellectually precociousness and was exposed more-and-earlier to classical music than almost anyone ever is. In any case, this colors my approach to the above issues!
(c) How we are introduced to the particular work in question may be involved. If a Cézanne painting is exhibited in a collection of French Impressionist works, or if before seeing it we are told that it is French Impressionist, we are more likely to see it as French Impressionist than if it is exhibited in a random collection and we are not told anything about it beforehand.
Well okay, paging Captain Obvious. This would definitely connect a gestalt to a category , i.e. to a word or phrase. Is the suggestion that from there on future experiences are related back to this intuitively even if the intellectual acquisition of the category qua category was very crude? We seem to be flirting with mere inference here after being specifically told not to.
I will say that a feature of a work is standard for a particular person on a particular occasion when, and only when, it is standard relative to some category in which he perceives it, and is not contra-standard relative to any category in which he perceives it. A feature is variable for a person on an occasion just when it is variable relative to all the categories in which he perceives it. And a feature is contra-standard for a person on an occasion just when it is contra-standard relative to any of the categories in which he perceives it.
III A Point About Perception
I turn now to my psychological thesis that what aesthetic properties a work seems to have, what aesthetic effect it has on us, how it strikes us aesthetically often depends (in part) on which of its features are standard, which variable, and which contra-standard for us. I offer a series of examples in support of this thesis.
Sure. Wake me up when we get back to the proposal that
(some) facts about the origins of works of art
have an essential role in criticism,
that aesthetic judgments rest on them
in an absolutely fundamental way.
So far I don't see how the standard -ness of features could bear necessarily upon the facts of an artwork's origins . We have even established the truism that
whether a work was produced by Cézanne or Beethoven
has nothing essential to do with
whether it is in the style of Cézanne or late Beethoven .
Of course literal authorship is just one example of a fact-about-origins, additional examples of which may be produced endlessly. The trick is to produce examples that actually happened in a given instance, i.e. examples which would hold up if the people and groups implicated in them were on trial in a court of law rather than a mere court of public opinion. Otherwise, if we insist that facts-about-origins have an "essential role" in aesthetic judgment and criticism, and if we also insist that it doesn't matter too much how these "facts" get established, then the institutions and transactions in which these "judgments" have such a pivotal role are corrupt, tout court.
(a) Representational and resemblance properties provide perhaps the most obvious illustration of this thesis. Many works of art look like or resemble other objects—... Rembrandt's "Titus Reading" looks like a boy, and in particular like Rembrandt's son;... A portrait may even be said to be a perfect likeness of the sitter, or to capture his image exactly.
An important consideration in determining whether a work depicts or represents a particular object, or an object of a certain sort... is whether the work resembles that object, or objects of that kind. A significant degree of resemblance is, I suggest, a necessary condition in most contexts for such representation or depiction,...
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... Resemblance is of course not a sufficient condition for representation,...
It takes only a touch of perversity, however, to find much of our talk about resemblances between works of art and other things preposterous. Paintings and people are very different sorts of things. ... There is practically no danger of confusing them. How, then, can anyone seriously hold that a portrait resembles the sitter to any significant extent, let alone that it is a perfect likeness of him? ...
To resolve this paradox we must recognize that the resemblances we perceive between, for example, portraits and people, those that are relevant in determining what works of art depict or represent, are resemblances of a somewhat special sort, tied up with the categories in which we perceive such works. The properties of a work which are standard for us are ordinarily irrelevant to what we take it to look like or resemble in the relevant sense, and hence to what we take it to depict or represent. The properties of a portrait which make it so different from, so easily distinguishable from, a person—such as its flatness and its painted look—are standard for us. Hence these properties just do not count with regard to what (or whom) it looks like. It is only the properties which are variable for us, the colors and shapes on the work's surface, that make it look to us like what it does. And these are the ones which are taken as relevant in determining what (if anything) the work represents.
Other examples will reinforce this point. A marble bust of a Roman emperor seems to us to resemble a man with, say, an aquiline nose, a wrinkled brow, and an expression of grim determination, and we take it to represent a man with, or as having, those characteristics. But why don't we say that it resembles and represents a perpetually motionless man, of uniform (marble) color, who is severed at the chest? It is similar to such a man, it seems, and much more so than to a normally colored, mobile, and whole man. But we are not struck by the former similarity when we see the bust, obvious though it is on reflection. The bust's uniform color,
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motionlessness, and abrupt ending at the chest are standard properties relative to the category of busts, and since we see it as a bust they are standard for us. ...
Well, okay.
Much Modern and Conceptual art (and pretty much this whole blog) is concerned to force the question:
what is so bad,
really,
if someone sees
a perpetually motionless man, of uniform (marble) color, who is severed at the chest
rather than a
Roman emperor
?
I tend to take the Vulgar Populist angle on this old question simply because I, personally, can't imagine a convincing answer. In fact I can more easily say what I think is right than wrong here. And even for Walton, though it is certainly possible to read some residual "elitism" between the lines of this paper (and I have not hesitated to do so), Walton himself has not yet gone so far as to say that there is anything wrong with this. When he says It takes only a touch of perversity to see a torso rather than an emperor, he is talking about the initiated viewer who can quite well see an emperor but who insists (for whatever reason) on playing the Devil's Advocate.
The real point is that
The properties of a work which are standard for us
are ordinarily irrelevant
to what we take it to look like
or resemble in the relevant sense;
instead,
It is only the properties
which are variable for us...
that make it look to us like what it does .
Hence category is ineluctably bound up with depiction. But this merely shows just how fragile depiction is. It shows how easily depiction can fail qua depiction. It shows, in other words, that the work can fail the viewer as well as the viewer can, by the prevailing customs of this airless crevasse called "criticism," fail the work.
Ittelson's paper examines this problem more technically.
e.g.,
Markings that have the form of a cat are rarely intended to represent dogs. When we couple these constraints with equally powerful constraints imposed by current social usage, very little room may be left for multiple interpretations.
This process works; we generally deal successfully with the vast numbers of markings we daily encounter. But this is a pragmatic, not principled, solution to the problem of the correctness of the perception of markings, and it can be wrong.
Taleb might add: it can be wrong frequently, perhaps endemically, for a very long time, without doing anyone much harm. But then, one day, for some truly unforeseeable reason, after someone has again been wrong about a marking, THIS time catastrophe ensues. And after the catastrophe, an inquest establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was the mistaken parsing of the marking which caused the catastrophe. And after the inquest, a bitter and fruitless flame war about "pragmatic" versus "principled" epistemologies erupts all over Substack and Reddit. And after the flame war subsides, everyone outside of academia forgets that epistemology is a word until the next catastrophe arrives to remind them.
Of course vis-a-vis sculpture or painting it's hard to imagine this correctness of perception being asked to bear the full portent of "catastrophe." It may in fact be precisely the point of sculpture and painting, e.g., that there is no such thing at stake; in which case we may equally well see an emperor or a torso or a chunk of rock without in any of these eventualities risking the earth flying off its axis. The Talebian Sulk is thus rendered a strawman in the "aesthetic" arena. But hold that thought.
Perhaps (channeling Danto) something substantial has indeed come to an end with this radical pluralism of perception. But the institutional, the transactional, indeed the beautiful itself, no one in their right mind can think that these things have also ended. The point is (now re-reiterating): purportedly Walton, later, "will argue that (some) facts about the origins of works of art have an essential role in criticism, that aesthetic judgments rest on them in an absolutely fundamental way." Presumably Walton himself has thought through all of this sufficiently to avoid the error of facilely reading such facts-of-origin directly from the artworks. The fact remains nonetheless that very few people inside or outside the professorate can be trusted to hold out for "principled" solutions where the merely "pragmatic" options are both plentiful and malleable enough to serve almost anyone's preconceived notions. Presented with the 'Erased De Kooning Drawing,' e.g., the pragmatic options are indeed obvious. They seem harmless enough. But not all of them are correct, not in the Vulgar Populist sense in which I am writing here, and also not in the Walton's "critical" sense.
I have merely skimmed and sampled the empirical inquiry into the "ecosemiotics" of "pragmatic" parsing of stimuli, but what it suggests (strongly) is that heuristics run rampant here, and that an "heuristic" is just a cognitive bias by a sweeter name. Walton here has impressively anticipated certain aspects of this later research, but in this respect he is not nearly skeptical enough.
This means that, once again, the benevolent intentions even of the humble newspaper critic or assistant professor are not so easily assumed to result in benevolent outcomes. I am sounding like a broken record by now, and also I am leveling very harsh criticisms against a whole profession while conceding that their intentions may (possibly) be good ones. The reason I do so is that an artwork's facts-of-origin implicate the actions of persons and groups, and this leap into what people said and did, to and with whom, when, and why, this is an area where mistakes can have catastrophic consequences, whether it is art or any other cultural or natural phenomenon we are discussing. If you don't believe me as I launch these salvoes from my proverbial armchair, just ask anyone who has been "canceled" on faulty pretenses.
A few pages earlier in the anthology, Sibley (quite accidentally it would seem) exemplefies the danger better than any hypothetical I might come up with. Here he is concerned, among other things, to show that,
The fact that many aesthetic terms are metaphorical or quasi-metaphorical in no way means that common language is an ill-adapted tool with which we have to struggle.
(45)
...
We do...often make extensive and helpful use of similes and genuine metaphors: "It's as if there were small points of light burning," "as though he had thrown on the paint violently and in anger,"...
(46)
In the abstract perhaps the "anger" line is indeed every bit the "metaphor" as the "points of light" line, but it would be unusually disingenuous to insist as much in practice. What better way to run afoul of A bias for social information in human cultural transmission than this? The "anger" metaphor need not be claimed or intended to establish a fact-of-origin, but the more people read it the more likely it is to do so. This seems to me basically the history of mainstream music criticism's dealings with free jazz, e.g. How's that for "pragmatism," gents?
Anyway...
The shapes of a painting or a still photograph of a high jumper in action are motionless, but these pictures do not look to us like a high jumper frozen in mid-air. Indeed, depending on features of the pictures which are variable for us... the athlete may seem in a frenzy of activity;... But if static images exactly like those of the two pictures occur in a motion picture, and we see it as a motion picture, they probably would strike us as resembling a static athlete. ... My point here is brought out by the tremendous aesthetic difference we are likely to experience between a film of a dancer moving very slowly and a still picture of him, even if "objectively" the two images are very nearly identical. ...
In general, then, what we regard a work as resembling, and as representing, depends on the properties of the work which are variable, and not on those which are standard for us. The latter properties serve to determine what kind of a representation the work is, rather than what it represents or resembles. ... This principle helps to explain also how clouds can look like elephants, how diatonic orchestral music can suggest a conversation or a person crying or laughing,...
We can now see how a portrait can be an exact likeness of the sitter, despite the huge differences between the two. ...
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... It is clear that the notions of resemblance and exact resemblance that we are concerned with are not even cousins of the notion of perceptual indistinguishability.
(b) The importance of the distinction between standard and variable properties is by no means limited to cases involving representation of resemblance. Imagine a society which does not have an established medium of painting, but does produce a kind of work of art called guernicas. ...versions of Picasso's "Guernica" done in various bas-relief dimensions. All of them are surfaces with the colors and shapes of Picasso's "Guernica," but the surfaces are molded to protrude from the wall... Some guernicas have rolling surfaces, others are sharp and jagged,... Picasso's "Guernica" would be counted as a guernica in this society—a perfectly flat one—rather than as a painting. Its flatness is variable and the figures on its surface are standard... It seems violent, dynamic, vital, disturbing to us. But I imagine it would strike them as cold, stark, lifeless,... We do not pay attention to or take note of "Guernica"'s flatness; this is a feature we take for granted in paintings, as it were. But for the other society this is "Guernica"'s most striking and noteworthy characteristic—what is expressive about it. ...
It is important to notice that this difference in aesthetic response is not due solely to the fact that we are much more familiar with flat works of art than they are,... Someone equally familiar with paintings and guernicas might, I think, see Picasso's "Guernica" as a painting on some occasions, and as a guernica on others. On the former occasion it will probably look dynamic, violent,... , and on the latter cold, serene,... Whether he sees the work in a museum of paintings or a museum of guernicas, or whether he has been told that it is a painting or a guernica, may influence how he sees it. But I think he might be able to shift at will from one way of seeing it to the other,...
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This example and the previous ones might give the impression that in general only features of a work that are variable for us are aesthetically important—...
No such impression taken or given, sir. What is curious, though, is this particular angle in on how diatonic orchestral music can suggest a conversation or a person crying or laughing . We seem here to have quite efficiently and properly relativized that question in spite of the theme of "categories." It could be argued, actually, that it has been relativized beyond even what the "Guernica" hypothetical aims at, since "conversation," "crying," and "laughing" are elemental in a way that no painting can be. This would explain the tremendous mischief that has been wrought by nearly every effort to proffer words about music. The crudely mimetic aspects of music are obvious enough; here in the theory of "categories" and "features," then, we have the complementary side of the question: all that is required for the mimetic features to be read as standard rather than variable is a certain kind of preoccupation with the "real" phenomena of which those features are mimetic. (Dare I point once more, gently, to the Frank Schmidt paper and the finding that "A much larger percentage of males are interested in inanimate things (i.e., physical phenomena) rather than people or other living things, and a much larger percentage of females are interested in people and other living beings rather than inanimate things.")
Just how "elemental" are "crying or laughing?" We needn't construct a hypothetical mirror-image culture to imagine a fluidity of standard and variable features here. Even an early initiation into the formalist posture seems to guarantee nothing in this respect. So, once again, perhaps true formalism is more of an autism.
I suppose Cage is notable in this respect for making such a fuss about the mimetic qualities of jazz from the perspective of someone wishing to escape them. This suggests that fully hooked-up social wiring is not sufficient to beget aesthetic preference. (Yep, the über-bodhisattva himself had no shortage of willful preferences and judgments aimed in several directions at once!) On the other hand, I can't think of another example of someone pointing up this vocal or conversational quality of jazz only in order to say how much they dislike it. Customarily it is offered as an attribute, or (this is where we get into the perniciousness of words-about-music) as a fact of life which must simply be accepted by the student in order to achieve the style.
Anyway, Walton:
But this notion is quite mistaken,... Properties standard for us are not aesthetically lifeless, though the life that they have, the aesthetic effect they have on us, is typically very different from what it would be if they were variable for us.
(c) Because of the very fact that features standard for us do not seem striking or noteworthy, that they are somehow expected or taken for granted, they can contribute to a work a sense of order, inevitability, stability, correctness. This is perhaps most notably true of large-scale structural properties in the time arts. The exposition-development-recapitulation form (including the typical key and thematic relationships) of the first movements of classical sonatas, symphonies, and string quartets is standard with respect to the category of works in sonata-allegro form, and standard for listeners, including most of us, who hear them as belonging to that category. So proceeding along the lines of sonata-allegro form seems right to us; to our ears that is how sonatas are supposed to behave.
UGH.
most notably true here of all places??
I just don't follow how or why something of large-scale would be more manageable in this way than something briefer. This has never made a lick of sense to me.
We feel that we know where we are and where we are going throughout the work—... Properties standard for us do not always have this sort of unifying effect, however. The fact that a piano sonata contains only piano sounds, or uses the Western system of harmony throughout, does not make it seem unified to us. The reason, I think, is that these properties are too standard for us in a sense that needs explicating (see note 10). ...
Here is (the gist of) "note 10" (top of p. 78):
10. In order to avoid excessive complexity and length, I am ignoring some considerations that might be important at a later stage of investigation. In particular, I think it would be important at some point to distinguish between different degrees or levels of standardness, variableness, and contra-standardness for a person;... At least two distinct sorts of grounds for such differences of degree should be recognized. (a) Distinctions between perceiving a work in a certain category to a greater and lesser extent... (b) A feature which is standard relative to more, and/or more specific, categories in which a person perceives the work should thereby count as more standard for him. ...
So, the explicating doesn't broach the time arts question directly. But the implication, at least, is that large-scale structural features never risk becoming too standard , whereas The fact that a piano sonata contains only piano sounds , e.g., is too obvious to have this sort of unifying effect . Unity is there for the taking, but it is not simply given. We have to work a little bit for it, but not too much
I have to come clean once again about some treacherous thoughts from my first adolescence: I remember thinking precisely that the mere constancy of sound of an instrument or ensemble is already such a high degree of "unity" that the pontifications of so many educators and annotators come to look quite ridiculous against that backdrop. And I remember thinking that this unity-of-sound was precisely the effect achieved whenever I was in a certain mood-state of high receptivity but low ability to focus intellectually, e.g. at the end of the proverbial Long Day.
Consider, then, on one side, the advent of entire internet radio channels and Spotify playlists built around "Chill Piano Music" or what not; and on the other side, consider the more provocative Experimental aesthetics which work precisely against even the too-standard kind of "unity," to say nothing of the classical variety. For me at least, it's easy to understand the attraction to these extremes, and also easy to appreciate traditional "unity" wherever it makes itself felt in an organic rather than contrived manner. Meanwhile, it is not always easy to understand certain professorial declarations about "time arts."
(d) That a work (or part of it) has a certain determinate characteristic... is often variable relative to a particular category, when it is nevertheless standard for that category that the variable characteristic falls within a certain range. In such cases the aesthetic effect of the determinate variable property may be colored by the standard limits of the range. Hence these limits function as an aesthetic catalyst, even if not as an active ingredient.
... If a singer or violinist should produce sounds even approaching a piano's in suddenness of demise, they would be nerve-wrackingly
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sharp and percussive—anything but cantabile or lyrical! Yet piano music can be cantabile, legato, or lyrical nevertheless;... What makes this possible is the very fact that the drastic diminution of piano tones cannot be prevented,... A pianist can, however, by a variety of devices, control a tone's rate of diminution and length within the limits dictated by the nature of the instrument. ... A piano passage that sounds lyrical or cantabile to us is one in which the individual tones are relatively sustained, given the capabilities of the instrument. Such a passage sounds lyrical only because piano music is limited as it is, and we hear it as piano music;...
... In electronic music different pitches can succeed one another at any frequency up to and including that at which they are no longer separately distinguishable. Because of this it is difficult to make electronic music sound fast (energetic, violent). For when we have heard enough electronic music to be aware of the possibilities we do not feel that the speed of a passage approaches a limit, no matter how fast it is.
Good point. But if so then the vaunted theory of categories here comes down to little more than the intersection of crude materialism with crude sensory attentuation/acclimation.
Looking at this skeptically (and ecosemiotically!), it does seem possible that passages really can "sound easy" or "sound hard" even to someone who doesn't have much experience listening to classical music. The crudest mimetic qualities of music cannot be subsumed completely in the form-and-content, and one of those qualities, I think, is "difficulty." Mimetically, you can tell when someone is struggling, verbally, kinesthetically, or indeed "musically." It seems like there must be a mimetic baseline beyond which "categories of art" are superfluous in the above-described way.
This indicates that it's not the ease of electronic music but rather its difficulty which is what blows the technical dimension of its "category" so wide open. The above scenario becomes operative only because the baseline mimetic markers of technical struggle would have to be created from scratch by the composer, just like every other aspect of the work has to be. And that is extremely difficult, as anyone who has attempted it can attest.
The obverse case accords with this line of argument. When virtuoso violin or piano music sounds too easy, it loses much of its lizard-brain appeal. I take it that the strictly anecdotal chatter around that point is, by this late date in musical history, more than sufficient support.
There are also visual correlates of these musical examples. A small elephant, one which is smaller than most elephants with which we are familiar, might impress us as charming, cute, delicate, or puny. This is not simply because of its (absolute) size, but because it is small for an elephant. ...
(e) Properties standard for a certain category which do not derive from
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physical limitations of the medium can be regarded as results of more or less conventional "rules" for producing works in the given category (for example, the "rules" of sixteenth-century counterpoint,... These rules may combine to create a dilemma for the artist which, if he is talented, he may resolve ingeniously and gracefully. The result may be a work with an aesthetic character very different from what it would have had if it had not been for those rules. Suppose that the first movement of a sonata in G major modulates to C-sharp major by the end of the development section. ...the keys of G and C-sharp are as unrelated as any two keys can be; it is difficult to modulate smoothly and quickly from one to the other. ... If the composer with a stroke of ingenuity accomplishes the necessary modulation quickly, efficiently, and naturally, this will give them a feeling of relief—one might say of deliverance. ... Our impression of it is likely, I think, to be very much like our impression of a "beautiful" or "elegant" proof in mathematics. ...
UGH.
Dr. Grayson said never to try to learn how a composer got out of a tough spot, because the answer is: "Don't get into one." Or, in the above terms: there's nothing at all elegant in ending up a tritone away and really, badly needing to pull off a recap; this much a priori.
Walton continues this hypothetical. I choose to omit it here. I drank in the classical sonata with my Mother's Milk, I have a good enough ear to sail through music school and to "fake" my way through almost any musical situation, but I don't have perfect pitch and I definitely don't have the sonata pitch that would make arguments such as Walton's here seem reasonable. And I have worked as a professional musician for two decades and I can't confirm that I know anyone who does have this ability. I always wondered if it was just a fantasy of cloistered academics. Now I assume so. So let's move on to the next item in the list...
...
(f) I turn now to features which are contra-standard for us—that is, ones which have a tendency to disqualify a work from a category in which we
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nevertheless perceive it. ... Their presence may be so obtrusive that they obscure the work's variable properties. ... The monochromatic paintings of Yves Klein are disturbing to us (at least at first) for this reason: we see them as paintings, though they contain the feature contra-standard for paintings of being one solid color. Notice that we find other similarly monochromatic surfaces... not in the least disturbing, and indeed quite unnoteworthy.
So how many decades need to pass before a contra-standard feature becomes standard? Or, better yet: if a feature has still not become standard 20, 30, 40 years after catching on, do we get to assume that it never will? That is certainly what anti-modernists are banking on. But there is the risk of lapsing into tautology here.
If we are exposed frequently to works containing a certain kind of feature which is contra-standard for us, we ordinarily adjust our categories to accommodate it,... ...we no longer see these works [with objects attached] as paintings, but rather as members of either (a) a new category—collages—... , or (b) an expanded category which includes paintings both with and without attached objects, in which case that feature is variable for us.
... If a work differs too significantly from the norms of a certain category we do not perceive it in that category and hence the difference is not contra-standard for us, even if we have not previously experienced works differing from that category in that way. A sculpture which is constantly and vigorously in motion would be so obviously and radically different from traditional sculptures that we probably would not perceive it as one... In contrast, a sculptured bust which is traditional in every respect except that one ear twitches slightly every thirty seconds would be perceived as an ordinary sculpture. So the twitching ear would be contra-standard for us and would be considerably more unsettling than the much greater movement of the other kinetic sculpture. ..
...
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...Wagner's Tristan and Isolde... ...retains enough of the apparatus of tonality, despite its deviations, to be heard as a tonal work. For this reason its lesser deviations are often the more shocking. Tristan plays on harmonic traditions by selectively following and flaunting them, while Pierrot Lunaire and the others simply ignore them.
...it must be emphasized that to be contra-standard relative to a certain category is not merely to be rare or unique among things of that category. ... What is important is not the rarity of a feature, but its connection with the classification of the work. Features contra-standard for us are perceived as being misfits in a category which the work strikes us as belonging to, as doing violence to such a category, and being rare in a category is not the same thing as being a misfit in it.
It should be clear from the above examples that how a work affects us aesthetically... depends in a variety of important ways on which of its features are standard, which variable, and which contra-standard for us.
Well...he does say for us . But whose "us" is it?
... I should emphasize that my purpose has not been to establish general principles about how each of the three sorts of properties affects us. How any particular feature affects us depends also on many variables I have not discussed. ...
IV Truth and Falsity
The fact that what aesthetic properties a thing seems to have may depend on what categories it is perceived in raises a question about how to
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determine what aesthetic properties it really does have. If "Guernica" appears dynamic when seen as a painting, and not dynamic when seen as a guernica, is it dynamic or not? Can one way of seeing it be ruled correct, and the other incorrect? One way of approaching this problem is to deny that the apparently conflicting aesthetic judgments of people who perceive a work in different categories actually do conflict.
Another
way of approaching this problem is to deny that
questions such as
is it dynamic or not?
are in any sense
urgent questions.
Judgments that works of art have certain aesthetic properties, it might be suggested, implicitly involve reference to some particular set of categories. ... An elephant might be both small as an elephant and large as a mini-elephant, and hence it might be called truly either "large" or "small," depending on which category is implicitly referred to.
I think that aesthetic judgments are in some contexts amenable to such category-relative interpretations,... But most of our aesthetic judgments can be forced into this mold only at the cost of distorting them beyond recognition.
My main objection is that category-relative interpretations do not allow aesthetic judgments to be mistaken often enough .
Okay!!
...one who asserts... that a Roman bust looks like a unicolored, immobile man severed at the chest and depicts him as such, is simply wrong, even if his judgment is a result of his perceiving the work in different categories from those in which we perceive it.
Honestly, I think this is perfectly backwards, at least if "Truth and Falsity" are really what we're after. The above is the only really "true" assessment of the bust; this precisely because all of our precious "critical" conventions been emptied out of the assessment, and not in spite of it. God help us if "critical" and "aesthetic" are interchangeable.
...
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... The conflict between apparently incompatible aesthetic judgments made while perceiving a work in different categories does not simply evaporate when the difference of categories is pointed out, as does the conflict between the claims that an animal is large and that it is small,... The latter judgments do not (necessarily) reflect a real disagreement about the size of the animal, but the former do reflect a real disagreement about the aesthetic nature of the work.
Thus it seems that, at least in some cases, it is correct to perceive a work in certain categories, and incorrect to perceive it in certain others;
Look, not to play Captain Obvious any more than I already have, but do we really, truly mean correct ? Are things really quite that dire here?
that is, our judgments of it when we perceive it in the former are likely to be true, and those we make when perceiving it in the latter, false. This provides us with absolute senses of "standard," "variable," and "contra-standard": features of a work are standard, variable, or contra-standard absolutely just in case they are standard, variable, or contra-standard (respectively) for people who perceive the work correctly. ...
Sounds tautological!
How is it to be determined in which categories a work is correctly perceived? There is certainly no very precise or well-defined procedure to be followed.
Of course there's not. Any idiot can see that. So why tf is this statement made at the end of a long paper rather than at the beginning of a shorter one?
... But there are several fairly definite considerations which typically figure in critical discussions and fit our intuitions reasonably well.
Great! When tf have critical discussions or our intuitions ever been wrong?
I suggest that the following circumstances count toward its being correct to perceive a work, W, in a given category, C:
(i) The presence in W of a relatively large number of features standard with respect to C. The correct way of perceiving a work is likely to be that in which it has a minimum of contra-standard features for us. ...
(ii) The fact, if it is one, that W is better, or more interesting or pleasing aesthetically, or more worth experiencing when perceived in C than it is
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when perceived in alternative ways. The correct way of perceiving a work is likely to be the way in which it comes off best .
(iii) The fact, if it is one, that the artist who produced W intended or expected it to be perceived in C, or thought of it as a C.
(iv) The fact, if it is one, that C is well established in and recognized by the society in which W was produced. A category is well established in and recognized by a society if the members of the society are familiar with works in that category, consider a work's membership in it a fact worth mentioning, exhibit works of that category together, and so forth—that is, roughly if that category figures importantly in their way of classifying works of art. ...
In certain cases I think the mechanical process by which a work was produced, or (for example, in architecture) the non-perceptible physical characteristics or internal structure of a work, is relevant. A work is probably correctly perceived as an apparent etching rather than, say, an apparent woodcut or line drawing, if it was produced by the etching process. ...
What can be said in support of the relevance of conditions (ii), (iii), and (iv)? ... I would suppose that "Guernica" is better seen as a painting than it would be seen as a guernica... ...the category of paintings is, and that of guernicas is not, well established in his (that is, our) society. But this of course does not show that (ii), (iii), and (iv) each is relevant. It tends to indicate only that one or other of them, or some combination, is relevant. ...
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... An artist tries to produce works which are well worth experiencing when perceived in the intended way and, unless we have reason to think he is totally incompetent, there is some presumption that he succeeded at least to some extent. But it is more or less a matter of chance whether the work comes off well when perceived in some unintended way. ...
I will begin with (ii). If we are faced with a choice between two ways of perceiving a work, and the work is very much better perceived in one way than it is perceived in the other, I think that, at least in the absence of contrary considerations, we would be strongly inclined to settle on the former way of perceiving it as the correct way. The process of trying to determine what is in a work consists partly in casting around among otherwise plausible ways of perceiving it for one in which the work is good. ...
But if (ii) is relevant, it is quite clearly not the only relevant consideration. Take any [inferior] work of art... It is quite possible that if this work were perceived in some farfetched set of categories that someone might dream up, it would appear to be first-rate,... Finding such ad hoc categories obviously would require talent and ingenuity... But we can sketch how one might begin searching for them. (a) If the mediocre work suffers from some disturbingly prominent feature that distracts from whatever merits the work has, this feature might be toned down by choosing categories with respect to which it is standard,... (b) If the work suffers from an overabundance of clichés it might be livened up by choosing categories with respect to which the clichés are variable or contra-standard... (c) If it needs ingenuity we might devise a set of rules in terms of which the work finds itself in a dilemma and then ingeniously escapes from it, and build these rules into a set of categories. Surely, however, if there are categories waiting to be discovered which would transform a mediocre work into a masterpiece, it does not
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follow that the work really is a hitherto unrecognized masterpiece. ... It cannot be correct, I suggest, to perceive a work in categories which are totally foreign to the artist and his society, even if it comes across as a masterpiece in them.
It is in moments like this when we really, desperately need something to (have) be(en) said re: any ostensibly practical aspect of perceiving a work correctly. A century on from Nietzsche it remains unclear what if any real force is behind the Aesthetic Philosopher's construct of correct-ness.
Having once proposed that The correct way of perceiving a work is likely to be the way in which it comes off best , now that proposal is walked back. Contra Debussy, pleasure is not the law, or not always. What force or entity could possibly override it? That would be the artist and his society . But the artist, though the creator of the work, is but one person among many; and society viewed from the bird's eye view cannot possibly be the best barometer for this kind of theoretical question.
... To test the relevance of (iii) we must consider a case in which (iii) and (iv) diverge. One such instance occurred during the early days of the twelve-tone movement in music. Schoenberg no doubt intended even his earliest twelve-tone works to be heard as such. But this category was certainly not then well established or recognized in his society: virtually none of his contemporaries (except close associates such as Berg and Webern), even musically sophisticated ones, would have (or could have) heard these works in that category.
So, twelve-tone works get their own category ?
Is there going to be a section where we consider what it takes to establish or disestablish a category? Whether a profusion or a parsimony of categories is best?
That aside, if we are taking intent seriously, it seems highly dubious that Schoenberg intended to establish a new category of work. What about that?
(I for one am not taking intent too seriously, and I am as confused as I was after the first paragraph as to just how seriously it is to be taken here.)
...
The above example is unusual in that Schoenberg was extraordinarily self-conscious about what he was doing, having explicitly formulated rules—that is, specified standard properties—for twelve-tone composition.
Hmm... It is an unusual example, certainly, but I don't know if it is quite as implied above. Were Schoenberg's formulated rules for twelve-tone composition also rules for the listener? In these terms it's hard to say.
What's less hard to say is that creation and reception seldom play by the same rules, in this or in any other respect, intentions on both sides be damned.
...
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... There are bound to be a large number of undecidable cases on my criteria. Artists' intentions are frequently unclear, variable, or undiscoverable. Many works belong to categories which are borderline cases of being well established in the artists' societies... There is, in addition, the question of what relative weights to accord the various conditions when they conflict.
It would be a mistake, however, to try to tighten up much further the rules for deciding how works are correctly perceived. To do so would be simply to legislate gratuitously, since the intuitions and precedents we have to go on are highly variable and often confused. But it is important to notice just where these intuitions and precedents are inconclusive, for doing so will expose the sources of many critical disputes.
So
it is possible
to
legislate gratuitously
,
But
it is important to notice just where these intuitions and precedents are inconclusive
.
That would be...
everywhere?
...
The occurrence of such impasses is by no means something to be regretted. Works may be fascinating precisely because of shifts between equally permissible ways of perceiving them. And the enormous richness of some works is due in part to the variety of permissible, and worthwhile, ways of perceiving them. But it should be emphasized that even when my criteria do not clearly specify a single set of categories in which a work is
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correctly perceived, there are bound to be possible ways of perceiving it (which we may or may not have thought of) that they definitely rule out.
... I have sketched in rough outline rules for deciding in what categories a work is correctly perceived (and hence which of its features are absolutely standard, variable, and contra-standard). The aesthetic properties it actually possesses are those that are to be found in it when it is perceived correctly.
V Conclusion
I return now to the issues raised in Section I. ( I will adopt for the remainder of this paper the simplifying assumption that there is only one correct way of perceiving any work. Nothing important depends on this. )
Umm...
If a work's aesthetic properties are those that are to be found in it when it is perceived correctly, and the correct way to perceive it is determined partly by historical facts about the artist's intention and/or his society, no examination of the work itself, however thorough, will by itself reveal those properties.
It does seem possible to advocate for the anathema: a perception of a work cannot reasonably be deemed in- correct per se on the basis of anything that is not transparent in its aesthetic presentation. What's a plebe to do otherwise?
Is the upshot of the whole category excursus merely to undercut precisely this kind of argument? To show that the unseen/unheard aspects always already have an importance which is outsized relative to their perceptibility? That may accurately describe the Classical and Romantic period norms, but it does not seem to serve very many people's purposes, or any good purposes that I can think of. And moreover, it does not seem to be in any way necessary.
If we are confronted by a work about whose origins we know absolutely nothing (for example, one lifted from the dust at an as yet unexcavated archaeological site on Mars), we would simply not be in a position to judge it aesthetically.
This seems merely to claim the hallowed word aesthetic for something that almost no one does, is even capable of doing, and indeed would not have any good reason to start doing if they do not already. I would prefer to reserve the word for something which everyone does, indeed cannot help doing without great effort and cultivation. Suspension of judgment is a "cultivated" skill, aesthetic contemplation is (definitionally) not. In my parlance, at least.
But this seems not to be the linguistic world into which I have been thrust by birth, so maybe I should finally give up all of my "aesthetic" pretentions and lean into Hanslick's "warm bath" metaphor instead.
We could not possibly tell by staring at it, no matter how intently and intelligently, whether it is coherent, or serene, or dynamic, for by staring we cannot tell whether it is to be seen as a sculpture, a guernica, or some other exotic or mundane kind of work of art. (We could attribute aesthetic properties to it in the way we do to natural objects, which of course does not involve consideration of historical facts about artists or their societies. [Cf. Section IV.] But to do this would not be to treat the object as a work of art.)
Well okay, I guess I would not be the first person to respond to this sort of argument: the way we have been treating works of art this whole time is totally full of shit.
It should be emphasized that the relevant historical facts are not merely useful aids to aesthetic judgment; they do not simply provide hints concerning what might be found in the work. Rather they help to determine what aesthetic properties a work has; they, together with the work's nonaesthetic features, make it a coherent, serene, or whatever. If the origin of a work which is coherent and serene had been different in crucial respects, the work would not have had these qualities; we would not merely have lacked a means for discovering them. And of two works which differ only in respect of their origins—that is, which are perceptually indistinguishable—one might be coherent or serene, and the other not.
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Thus, since artists' intentions are among the relevant historical considerations, the "intentional fallacy" is not a fallacy at all. I have of course made no claims about the relevance of artists' intentions as to the aesthetic properties that their works should have, and these intentions are among those most discussed in writings on aesthetics. I am willing to agree that whether an artist intended his work to be coherent or serene has nothing essential to do with whether it is coherent or serene. But this must not be allowed to seduce us into thinking that no intentions are relevant.
So, as has so often bubbled up along the way here, the whole thing really comes down to intentionalism, but intentionalism of a very particular kind; perhaps metaintentionalism, the granular "intent" being construed not as itself an "aesthetic concept" but rather as a meta-intent or uber-intent which inheres in any set of norms, conventions, traditions, etc.
In the Mars hypothetical we do lack a means for discovering the category-bound features, it is true; but we do not lack means for discovering almost anything else. Human beings are nothing if not profligate "discoverers" of just about anything imaginable in each other's works of art. We are usually "wrong" rather than correct in the universal sense, if not necessarily in the "critical" sense. I have tried a few times recently to say precisely why I think certain such discoveries tend to be in-correct; but really it's not so much having the thoughts which is "wrong" but rather the social transaction of such thoughts as if they were universal when in reality they are merely personal. "Opinions are the stuff of life." They just aren't universally transactable in the public arena. We are apt to misattribute, imagine, or project these discoveries. But merely making such discoveries to ourselves can perfectly well remain a private matter. I can think all I want that an instrumental work of Bach is "about" something very specific. That is one thing. On the other hand, if I assign my class of unsuspecting first-year Music History students to write a term paper "interpreting" this instrumental work of Bach as a narrative, that is something else entirely. (Yep, this is another thing that happened at the ol' U!) This latter action ramifies beyond me myself to affect many other people. It is a social action which runs up against any number of concurrent social norms and institutional and cultural practices, in some ways comfortably and in other ways uncomfortably. But there is always the option to keep my interpretation to myself. We seem less able to keep interpretations to ourselves than just about any other sort of thought. This seems meaningful, though I haven't the slightest idea how one would go about actually formulating or empirically testing theories about this works. We seem to veritably crave social validation for our interpretations no matter how mundane or off-the-wall they might be. I wonder if that's where the real action is when it comes to the larger discussion of interpretation. If we can be content to be solitary interpreters, most of the other problems evaporate. But interpretation no less than politics or religion themselves does seem to be just one more way that we human beings "work out our problems on each other" in Becker's sense. Hence there is an argument to be made for a certain pragmatic-but-not-principled remedy to the problem of critical interpretation: everyone just shut the fuck up.
It's not quite fair to lay this social use of interpretation on Walton here as a full-on "hidden premise," but it's clear enough in any case that this insistence upon category-bound aestheticism is quite the life raft floated out in the general direction of conspicuously public interpretation. Since public interpretations have to stand up rationally in a way that private ones do not, some basis for them must be posited beyond the standard-issue idealistic fantasies of the midlife arriviste. "Category" serves beautifully in this capacity.
Aesthetic properties, then, are not to be found in works themselves in the straightforward way that colors and shapes or pitches and rhythms are. But I do not mean to deny that we perceive aesthetic properties in works of art. I see the serenity of a painting, and hear the coherence of a sonata, despite the fact that the presence of these qualities in the works depends partly on circumstances of their origin, which I cannot (now) perceive.
I don't believe you.
Jones's marital status is part of what makes him a bachelor, if he is one, and we cannot tell his marital status just by looking at him, though we can thus ascertain his sex. Hence, I suppose, his bachelorhood is not a property we can be said to perceive in him. But the aesthetic properties of a work do not depend on historical facts about it in anything like the way Jones's bachelorhood depends on his marital status. The point is not that the historical facts (or in what categories the work is correctly perceived, or which of its properties are absolutely standard, variable, and contra-standard) function as grounds in any ordinary sense for aesthetic judgments. By themselves they do not, in general, count either for or against the presence of any particular aesthetic property. And they are not part of a larger body of information (also including data about the work derived from an examination of it) from which conclusions about the work's aesthetic properties are to be deduced or inferred. We must learn to perceive the work in the correct categories, as determined in part by the historical facts, and judge it by what we then perceive in it. The historical facts help to determine whether a painting is, for example, serene only (as far as my arguments go) by affecting what way of perceiving the painting must reveal this quality if it is truly attributable to the work.
Seems to me that learning to perceive entails some very specific requirements. Generally we cannot "learn to perceive" at all. "Learn" and "perceive" do not fit together very well. The only way they fit together is when the "learning" is very powerful, be that a matter of time spent, intensity of engagement, affective importance to the learner, etc. It's not that "learning" is not the right word, it's just that not all learning has the same profile. I suggest that the kind of "learning" which well and truly shapes "perception" is necessarily of only a few specific types. Generally the kind of "learning" we do in school, e.g., comes nowhere close to the kind that can shape "perception." To shape "perception," "learning" must in fact rise to the level of "conditioning."
We must not, however, expect to judge a work simply by setting ourselves to perceive it correctly, once it is determined what the correct way of perceiving it is. For one cannot, in general, perceive a work in a given set of categories simply by setting himself to do it. I could not possibly, merely by an act of will, see "Guernica" as a guernica rather than a painting, or hear a succession of street sounds in any arbitrary category one might dream up, even if the category has been explained to me in detail. (Nor can I imagine except in a rather vague way what it would be like, for example, to see "Guernica" as a guernica.) One cannot merely
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decide to respond appropriately to a work—to be shocked or unnerved or surprised by its (absolutely) contra-standard features, to find its standard features familiar or mundane, and to react to its variable features in other ways once he knows the correct categories. Perceiving a work in a certain category or set of categories is a skill that must be acquired by training, and exposure to a great many other works of the category or categories in question is ordinarily, I believe, an essential part of this training. (But an effort of will may facilitate the training, and once the skill is acquired one may be able to decide at will whether or not to perceive it in that or those categories.) This has important consequences concerning how best to approach works of art of kinds that are new to us contemporary works in new idioms, works from foreign cultures, or newly resurrected works from the ancient past. It is no use just immersing ourselves in a particular work, even with the knowledge of what categories it is correctly perceived in, for that alone will not enable us to perceive it in those categories. We must become familiar with a considerable variety of works of similar sorts.
So what are the really weighty consequences if everyone who evinces real interest in contemporary works in new idioms just en masse declares, "sorry, got better shit to do than train in someone else's categories ." Does the earth fall into the sun? Are any and all contemporary artists harmed in the making of this aesthetic?
When dealing with works of more familiar kinds it is not generally necessary to undertake deliberately the task of training ourselves to be able to perceive them in the correct categories (except perhaps when those categories include relatively subtle ones). But this is almost always, I think, only because we have been trained unwittingly. Even the ability to see paintings as paintings had to be acquired, it seems to me, by repeated exposure to a great many paintings. The critic must thus go beyond the work before him in order to judge it aesthetically, not only to discover what the correct categories are, but also to be able to perceive it in them. The latter does not require consideration of historical facts, or consideration of facts at all, but it requires directing one's attention nonetheless to things other than the work in question.
I couldn't agree more that the ability to see paintings as paintings had to be acquired . But this raises a yet more elementary and unforgivable oversight. "Contemporary" works which could belong to hitherto unforeseen categories enter this same world, the one world we have, the one which Sontag said we must finally learn to do right by in advance of running off to create duplicate "interpretations" of it; these new works enter the same one-world which derivative works enter. And I suspect that the "contemporary" artists who have created the works are also products of this one-world. They make self-flattering causa-sui declarations to the contrary, but everyone knows they're lying in all but the most exceptional instances. This is to say that they have some familiarity with the world-as-it-is. If their work suggests hitherto unforeseen categories , this says nothing necessarily about their own sensibilities. Or maybe I only think this because I watched Hummers and Beamers roll around the CalArts parking lots for a couple of years all while the most puerile postmodern art-tantrums were thrown inside the buildings.
The point is: artists can only make work for the world-as-it-is. That means that no extra training is required, not even if some exceptionally self-absorbed artist says that it should be.
Probably no one would deny that some sort of perceptual training is necessary, in many if not all instances, for apprehending a work's serenity or coherence, or other aesthetic properties. And of course it is not only aesthetic properties whose apprehension by the senses requires training. But the kind of training required in the aesthetic cases (and perhaps some others as well) has not been properly appreciated. In order to learn how to recognize gulls of various kinds, or the sex of chicks, or a certain person's handwriting, one must usually have gulls of those kinds, or chicks of the two sexes, or examples of that person's handwriting pointed out to him, practice recognizing them himself, and be corrected when he makes mistakes. But the training important for discovering the serenity of coherence of a work of art that I have been discussing is not of this sort (though this sort of training might be important as well). Acquiring the ability to perceive a serene or coherent work in the correct categories is
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not a matter of having had serene or coherent things pointed out to one, or having practiced recognizing them. What is important is not (or not merely) experience with other serene and coherent things, but experience with other things of the appropriate categories .
Much of the argument in this paper has been directed against the seemingly common-sense notion that aesthetic judgments about works of art are to be based solely on what can be perceived in them, how they look or sound. That notion is seriously misleading, I claim, on two quite different counts. I do not deny that paintings and sonatas are to be judged solely on what can be seen or heard in them—when they are perceived correctly. But examining a work with the senses can by itself reveal neither how it is correct to perceive it, nor how to perceive it that way.
Notes
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23. To say that it is incorrect (in my sense) to perceive a work in certain categories is not necessarily to claim that one ought not to perceive it that way. I heartily recommend perceiving mediocre works in categories that make perceiving them worthwhile whenever possible. The point is that one is not likely to judge the work correctly when he perceives it incorrectly.
Great news! Now we know a bit more than the main body told us about what correctness is not.
Can anything at all be said about what it is?
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[Ed.—Walton wishes to add the following note: "Since the original publication of this paper I have changed my views concerning resemblance in representational art. Cf. my 'Pictures and Make-Believe,' Philosophical Review, vol. 82 (1973)."]
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