Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 5—Part II (cont.)

Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)

[SK's comments]

[this post picks up where this one left off]

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[226]

...

Neo-Wittgensteinianism has an obvious problem dealing with readymades and found objects. If In Advance of a Broken Arm is an artwork, then any snow shovel that is indiscernible from it, including yours and mine, should be an artwork as well. If we simply attend to the

[227]

perceptible features of the shovels in question, they should all count as artworks, since they are perceptually indiscernible. ... But this result is wrongheaded. ... The Institutional Theorist appeals to certain nonmanifest, relational properties that In Advance of a Broken Arm possesses and that my snow shovel does not, ...

The Institutional Theorist calls the relevant social practice "the artworld." The artworld, he claims, is

a social institution, like religion,

insofar as it is

underwritten by rules and procedures.

Candidates are artworks because they abide by the pertinent artworld rules and procedures. In other words, an artwork is

generated by

playing by

the required rules and procedures. These social rules are the underlying factors that

make artworks possible

(they are

analogous to the genetic mechanisms

that account for family resemblances).

The relation of the artwork

to the rules

is

not a manifest property

of the artwork—you cannot eyeball it ... ; it is

a function of

the social context

into which the artwork is inserted.

This seems not quite

genetic

so long as it is
not quite a

mechanism.

.

It approaches a "mechanistic" tractability only as scale and sample approach infinity.

i.e. It is tractable in this way only where it can be formulated as a problem of disorganized complexity and its surface thereby observed.

But
to land on these emergent

rules

you have to ignore all of the "rules"
which prevail at the organized level,

i.e.,
in this case,
at the so-called individual level.

If the discovery that humanity is a culture-bound superorganism merely becomes the latest rationalization for subjugating 'individuals' to 'the system', then it would be better to put this discovery on a rocket and shoot it to the moon.

Maurice Mandelbaum—Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts

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AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Volume 2, Number 3, July 1965

V. FAMILY RESEMBLANCES AND GENERALIZATION
CONCERNING THE ARTS

MAURICE MANDELBAUM

[SK's comments]

In 1954 William Elton collected and published a group of essays under the title Aesthetics and Language.

As his introduction made clear,
a common feature of these essays was

the application to aesthetic problems

of

some of the doctrines

characteristic of

recent British linguistic philosophy.

... there have been a number of important articles which, in addition to those contained in the Elton volume, suggest the direction in which this influence runs.

...

"The Task of Defining a Work of Art"
by Paul Ziff,

"The Role of Theory in Aesthetics"
by Morris Weitz,

Charles L. Stevenson's
"On 'What is a Poem'"

and
W. E. Kennick's
"Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?"

In each of them one finds a conviction which was also present in most of the essays in the Elton volume:

that it is a mistake

to offer generalizations concerning the arts,

...

to attempt to discuss

what art, or beauty, or the aesthetic, or a poem,

essentially is.

In partial support of this contention, some writers have

made explicit use

of Wittgenstein's doctrine of family resemblances;

Morris Weitz, for example, ...

However, ... [he] made no attempt to analyze, clarify, or defend

the doctrine itself.

...