Art and the Aesthetic

"Yes. George Dickie, who I should tell you was my doctoral advisor, is very important as a transitional figure for several reasons. Notice, first of all, that his book is called Art and the Aesthetic — those are the two things that Beardsley wanted to link together in a functional relationship. It was the function of art to bring about aesthetic experiences. Dickie wanted to call into question the notion of aesthetic experience. He was very influenced by the feeling that philosophy of art needed to deal with developments in the avant-garde. Beardsley actually dimissed avant-garde counterexamples — from what we now call anti-aesthetic art — saying they were not art proper but comments on art, and he therefore excluded them from his definition. An example might be Duchamp’s “Readymades” — including a steel canine comb for combing dogs that he bought off a shelf in a department store. It really doesn’t seem to afford aesthetic experience and, in fact, Duchamp tried to pick things that would not be aesthetically pleasing. Though trained as a painter, he was against ‘retinal’ art. He thought art, like the art of the Middle Ages, should address the intellect, and not simply the senses. Dickie wanted to develop a concept of art which would encompass and cover all those features that avant-garde artworks presented which defy aestheticism of all sorts. For that reason, he argued that a functional account of art based on bringing about a certain emotion or state would be inadequate. If you wanted to know what made something a work of art, you had to look at contextual features. You had to look at various institutions of what he called, following Danto, the Artworld. In his initial theory, something was a work of art if it was presented in a certain institutional context, by the right kind of person, as ‘a candidate for appreciation.’ The model here is something like ordination in the Catholic Church. To become a priest, you have to meet certain qualifications: you have to be male, you have to be a certain age, and you have to have this status conferred on you by a bishop or an archbishop. Dickie was suggesting that, similarly, you have to have the status of art conferred by the right kind of person: a curator, a critic etc. People have often misunderstood this. The primary person who conferred this status was the artist and the work had to meet certain qualifications, it had to be intelligible as a candidate for appreciation. Many people resisted Dickie’s theory on the grounds that they thought it quite dubious that art should always include or require institutions and the way the current art world is organised. Surely people made art before there were institutions? Think of a lone Cro-Magnon man who walks down the riverside picking up various different coloured stones and puts them in his own configuration for his own delight. Surely, they would say, that is an artwork: a composition of sorts from which he took pleasure? Surely it didn’t require an institution for that? So, because of the strong suggestion that comes with the notion of an institution — like the Church or The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — as an extremely formalised and hierarchical organisation, people resisted Dickie’s view. Maybe there were various practices, decorative practices among people, that gave rise to organisations, though I think the people who make that argument think it’s quite clear there was no institution there. One could make a pleasing configuration for the purpose of just enjoying making something that is nice to look at. It’s not really clear how we could know the answer to that. A more logical version of the argument might be something like this: if we need the institution of art in order to have art, how do we explain the emergence of first art? The example that I gave of the Cro-Magnon someone might claim as an example of what first art looked like. How do you get first art on a view that what is required is institutions? That’s a very good point. Dickie draws a distinction between the notion of a classificatory view of art versus a more commendatory or honorific view of it. So when we say “Ah! That’s an artwork!” we mean that’s a good artwork. By the way, this is a problem which bedevils the discourse of the philosophy of art throughout its entire career. A formal theory like Bell’s, that art is Significant Form, has the consequence that there can’t be any bad art. But we’ve all been at nights at the theatre or the concert hall where we’ve experienced bad art. So that’s one problem with some of the functional theories — they have no room for bad art. Whereas I would say that the execrable play that I’ve been subjected to is certainly an artwork but a bad one. I would support this by saying ‘Look, it is an artwork because it has been set before me with a certain set of expectations that belong to a genre that is an art genre.’ It’s not something else. I wouldn’t be able to evaluate it if I couldn’t put it into the art category. So, I think there is a lot of pressure to accept a classificatory versus commendatory view of art. Though I have noticed that some people are reinserting the commendatory standard by the backdoor — people like Alan Goldman and Malcolm Budd who say, ‘the theories that I want to offer really only pertain to the good or the great art.’ So, they’ve acknowledged the classificatory versus commendatory distinction and then said, ‘but for philosophical reasons it’s not really relevant to what I’m doing.’"