Ted Cohen—The Possibility of Art

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

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[186]

10. The Possibility of Art:
Remarks on a Proposal by Dickie

TED COHEN
[orig. 1973]

... Like much of Dickie's best work, this essay ["Defining Art"] is brief, direct, and convincing ... This time, however, I think he has tried to make things more simple and ingenuous than they can be.

The definition Dickie presents ...

A work of art in the descriptive sense is (1) an artifact (2) upon which some society or some sub-group of a society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation .

... it may be helpful to note three special features of Dickie's thesis.

JACK GLICKMAN—Creativity in the Arts

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

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[168]

9. Creativity in the Arts

JACK GLICKMAN
[orig. 1976]

I

What is it to be creative?

The answer usually given
is that there is a "creative process,"
and most writers on creativity have taken their task
to be a description of ... activity ...

... I will argue that that is the wrong way to go about characterizing creativity,
that one must attend to the artistic product rather than to the process.

Well . . . speaking again as a twice-over Music Major, immediately I see one obvious candidate explanation for why most writers on creativity would emphasize the process rather than the product: because they are teachers of prospective practitioners, not of prospective scholars; their prospective-practitioner students cannot learn the process directly from inspection of the product.