Margolis—The Importance of Being Earnest about the Definition and Metaphysics of Art

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[215]

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 68, No. 3 (SUMMER 2010), pp. 215-223

JOSEPH MARGOLIS

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The Importance of Being Earnest about the Definition and Metaphysics of Art

[SK's comments]

The philosophy of art may be doomed,
again and again
but always once and for all,
to define what it is to be
"a work of art,"
an "artwork,"
"art"
in the sense

best suited to "the fine arts."

Modern efforts seem to end
in exhaustion
or bafflement
or sheer scatter
or

a sort of bad faith

that assures us that it was never worth the bother in the first place.

But many are troubled by the nagging sense of failure that no mere dismissal seems able to dispel.

We are still caught in the puzzles of Morris Weitz's extraordinarily disturbing early essay, ...

published ... only a few years after the appearance of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953),

on which,

however inaccurately,

it claims to depend.

If Weitz's account is regarded
as
the original gauntlet analytic aesthetics took up so eagerly almost at once ...

it is equally plausible
to credit Arthur Danto's immensely influential essay,
"The Artworld," published in 1964,
with
having confirmed
(by the absence of explicit mention,
so to say)
the single most-discussed version
of
the great complication
that
baffled all efforts
at
defining art
in accord with
the new spirit of rigor
that had just taken hold
in
analytic aesthetics.

I mean,
of course,

the trauma

produced by

Duchamp's devilish jokes

(especially the notorious Fountain)

transfigured,

in Danto's hands,
into

the sober metaphysics

of Warhol's Brillo Box.

Kristeller—The Modern System of the Arts

Paul Oskar Kristeller
The Modern System of the Arts:
A Study in the History of Aesthetics
Part I
Journal of the History of Ideas,
Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct., 1951),
pp. 496-527

[SK's comments]

[minimal excisions in main body]

[many Greek terms dashed out]

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I read this a while back, once and quickly. It's good to come back to it. But I would not have thought that it would figure in the Definition Wars, and I'm still not sure that it should.

[496]

THE MODERN SYSTEM OF THE ARTS:

A Study in the History of Aesthetics (I)

By Paul Oskar Kristeller

Dedicated to Professor Hans Tietze on his 70th birthday

I

  The fundamental importance of the eighteenth century in the history of aesthetics and of art criticism is generally recognized.

To be sure, there has been a great variety of theories and currents within the last two hundred years that cannot be easily brought under one common denominator.

Yet all the changes and controversies of the more recent past presuppose certain fundamental notions which go back to that classical century of modern aesthetics.

It is known that the very term "Aesthetics" was coined at that time, and, at least in the opinion of some historians, the subject matter itself, the "philosophy of art," was invented in that comparatively recent period

and can be

applied to earlier phases of Western thought

only with reservation. ¹

It is also generally agreed that such dominating concepts of

  ¹ ...

For music: H. Sahlender, Die Bewertung der Musik im System der Kuenste: Eine historisch-systematische Untersuchung (thes. Jena, 1929). ...

[497]

modern aesthetics as taste and sentiment, genius, originality and creative imagination did not assume their definite modern meaning before the eighteenth century.

Some scholars have rightly noticed that only the eighteenth century produced a type of literature in which the various arts were

compared with each other

and discussed

on the basis of common principles,

whereas up to that period treatises on poetics and rhetoric, on painting and architecture, and on music had represented quite distinct branches of writing and were primarily concerned with

technical precepts

rather than with

general ideas.

Finally, at least a few scholars have noticed that the term "Art," with a capital A and in its modern sense, and the related term "Fine Arts" (Beaux Arts) originated in all probability in the eighteenth century.

  In this paper, I shall take all these facts for granted, and shall concentrate instead on a much simpler and in a sense more fundamental point that is closely related to the problems so far mentioned, but does not seem to have received sufficient attention in its own right.

Although the terms " Art," "Fine Arts " or "Beaux Arts" are often identified with the visual arts alone, they are also quite commonly understood in a broader sense.

In this broader meaning, the term "Art" comprises above all the five major arts of

painting,

sculpture,

architecture,

music

and

poetry.

These five constitute the irreducible nucleus of the modern system of the arts, on which all writers and thinkers seem to agree.

On the other hand, certain additional arts are sometimes added to the scheme, but with less regularity, depending on the different views and interests of the authors concerned: gardening, engraving and the decorative arts, the dance and the theatre, sometimes the opera, and finally eloquence and prose literature.

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.