Languages of Art

"I disagree. I think Bell is the father of analytic philosophy of art, to a certain extent. He’s the one that wants a definition: he says if we don’t have a definition of art, we gibber. In a way, his book is a response to Tolstoy, who also claimed we needed a definition of art. Tolstoy doesn’t think that we can really come up with the right kind of definition, unless we’re able to tell what makes art socially important. They break there. But Tolstoy is, in a way, a ghost that is haunting Bell. Bell sets down the claim that the job of a philosopher of art is to present a definition of the concept. As I said, there was a kind of Wittgensteinian interlude that said it couldn’t be done, and in the first edition of Aesthetics Beardsley is a little shy. But he hunkers down in the second edition and comes up with a definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Something is a work of art if, and only if, it has the primary intention of affording a certain magnitude of aesthetic experience. He is actually presenting a kind of empiricist/analytic philosophy of art. In that way, he’s making the philosophy of art respectable to analytic philosophers. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I began by saying that some philosophers come to the philosophy of art from art and others come from other areas of philosophy. Goodman did have a deep personal relationship with art — he was an art-dealer for many years. But by the time he wrote about the philosophy of art, he was already a distinguished epistemologist — one of the most distinguished. He brought a great deal of prestige and cachet to the philosophy of art, but he was very different than Beardsley because, in the tradition of Bell, Beardsley made a distinction between aesthetic and cognitive experience. In that respect, Beardsley was a non-cognitivist. What you find in Goodman is the notion that aesthetic experience is cognitive through and through. Artworks, for him, are symbol systems. Art works tell you about the way the world is, they alert you to the presence of certain qualities and properties, and they show you the relationships between things, they reconfigure relationships between things. With Goodman, you find a real break with what I earlier called ‘the aesthetic subconscious.’ You find Goodman suggesting that art is a cognitive instrument which, among other things, means that it has a justifiable role in teaching us about the world because all artworks are, for him, certain kinds of symbols – either representations, exemplifications, or expressions. Yes. One of his favourite sayings was that somebody complained that Picasso’s picture of Gertrude Stein did not look like her, and the response was, “It will.” By that he meant that our canons of realism are what we’re used to, and realism is really a matter of what we’ve been taught. You might think about that in relation to those medieval drawings of rhinoceroses , where they’re armour-plated as if they were knights on the field of Agincourt. The artists thought those pictures were realistic. We often don’t see the unreality of representations in our own times. To take a silly example, we didn’t think it was strange in Spartacus when we saw Kirk Douglas had a flattop. This was the hairstyle of our own day and hardly realistic. Goodman, in that sense, advocated an extreme form of relativism, and that set off a major debate in the discussion of representation that people like Danto attempted to rebut — with the pendulum swinging gradually to the view that picturing, at least in certain respects, is keyed to our perceptual system and that’s how we explain the fact that when we show pictures to people in other cultures, their recognition is either immediate or very fast. Those anthropological stories and stories by missionaries have been questioned because it often turns out that people were not clear what they were being asked. Sometimes they thought they had been asked what the fabric or the surface was. When it was clarified what was being asked, they were able to identify, say, a picture of a chicken as of a chicken. There was also a question about the blurriness of some of the photographs. The cases may be a little more complicated with things like perspective. Perspective might be something that these claims can be made about, but object recognition is a different story. There was a very famous experiment here in New York. Two psychologists raised their child without any exposure to pictures: they tried to take them off the cereal boxes and everywhere else. I understand the child’s grandmother was very upset by this. Nevertheless, they then exposed the child to pictures when he was, I think, three years old. It turned out he was able to recognise both drawings and photographs at rates way, way, way above random, which gave some support to the hypothesis that at least some kind of object recognition capacities are hardwired. Also, some animals have been able to evince some response to pictures which also suggests that it’s not convention all the way down, although it is important to emphasise that there are conventions involved."