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.

Maurice Mandelbaum—Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts

[219]

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.

...

Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 5—Part I

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

 

[SK's vitriol]

 

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[206]

5
Art, definition and identification

Part I
Against definition

Neo-Wittgensteinianism: art
as an open concept

... we have examined successive attempts to define art. ... each of them appears inadequate in turn. Undoubtedly, this has led some readers to suspect that maybe one cannot define art at all; ... Or, perhaps some of you thought this from the very beginning; ... you may feel reassured to learn that [this] is also a philosophical position, sometimes called Neo-Wittgensteinianism.

...   Probably one reason that Western philosophers have been preoccupied with defining art for the last century or so is that it is during this period that we have found ourselves confronted with a dazzling array of different kinds of art ...

And, ... during the same period, Westerners grew more and more familiar with the art of other cultures, ...

[207]

... Whereas for centuries art developed slowly and smoothly ... , by the twentieth century matters were getting confusing. ...

It is at least plausible to suppose that if we had assembled a group of informed art lovers at some imaginary point around the middle of the eighteenth century and paraded a selection of objects before them ... they would have been able to agree, to a surprising extent, about which of the objects were art and which were not. ... They possessed a shared, though often unarticulated, understanding ...

Artists, too, shared in this common understanding, ...

...

Identifying art became a pressing issue;

 

Not really. I mean, those few who did care, cared intensely. That is one way to measure pressingness. But if we also find that many of these people had something more riding on this issue, so much more than the comfort of shared understanding or the general human hatred of confusion, then the "pressing" quality of their discourse on the matter is more plausibly explained by self-interest than by anything more cosmic. But, do expect the case for the cosmic importance of x to be made in a book devoted to x!

 

...

MORRIS WEITZ—The Role of Theory in Aesthetics

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

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[143]

The Role of Theory in Aesthetics

MORRIS WEITZ

[Pub. 1956, tho' a prizewinner in '55]

Theory
has been central
in aesthetics and
is still the preoccupation
of
the philosophy of art.

Its main avowed concern remains the determination of the nature of art which can be formulated into a definition of it.

It construes definition as the statement of the necessary and sufficient properties of what is being defined, where the statement purports to be a true or false claim about the essence of art, what characterizes and distinguishes it from everything else.

Each of the great theories of art—Formalism, Voluntarism, Emotionalism, Intellectualism, Intuitionism, Organicism—converges on the attempt to state the defining properties of art.

Each claims
that it is
the true theory
because
it has formulated correctly
into a real definition
the nature of art;

and that the others
are false
because
they have left out
some necessary or sufficient property.

"This looks reads like a setup, Jim Morris."

By now, with several decades of shockingly robust pluralism in the rear view mirror, those -isms look more like affirmative declarations of intent, whether before or after the fact, than they do like negative boundary-drawing maneuvers. We've moved on to using art, and we dare any purported definitions to try to catch up to us and our using; we use art in whatever way feels correct to us in a given moment, this rather than casting about for some necessary or sufficient property that has been left out.

It turns out that art, seemingly, has infinite uses. It has too many uses to be amenable to a real definition. But that doesn't matter, because the outcomes of the uses are clear as day, and because we human beings are, for better and worse, moral creatures. That's why we actually do need to hear everyone's opinion, and it's alright if some of those opinions seem too moralistic and not sufficiently aesthetic. Here, for once, bad opinions are more valuable than good definitions!

No one would/could expect philosophers of art to be any but the last to notice. Our Man here is among the more acute. First, though, he has to set us up.

MARGOLIS—The Definition of Art

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

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[137]

Part Two

The Definition of Art

...

The trouble with any effort to fix the basic category-term, "work of art," is that it will depend on what counts as an aesthetic point of view.

But
what counts as an aesthetic point of view cannot itself be decided by some simple inspection of actual usage.

Philosophers seem to decide,
more than to find,
what the boundaries of aesthetic interest are
...