Mike Mallory says a work of art is something that is intended by it's
maker to communicate an aesthetic experience. Cheerskep animadverts
about the painting no one else has seen (and in the process, sounding
a whole lot like the beginning of Danto's Transfiguration). William
correctly points out the undisprovablity of the assertion.
Let's look at it from a different vantage point, i.e., not whether the
artist intended it to aesthetic-evoking, or even whether the perceiver
suffered an aesthetic experience. Rather, let's look at what kind of
things (objects, acts, etc.) can provoke an "aesthetic experience" and
if these a.e.'s are categorically alike or at least very similar.
[At this point, I invoke the George Harrison Exemption, namely, "Let
It Be": my use of the suspect verb "be" is a convenient linguistic
convention, and by using it, I don't mean to presuppose inappropriate
ontic prerogatives not proper to the statements I make. You can figure
it out, well enough.]
What kinds of "aesthetic" can be attributed to the feelings provoked
by (a) a well-thrown and caught pass; (b) a painting; (c) a tasty
cake; (d) a dog; (e) the proverbial sunset.
I believe they are all different in their kind, and the painting (b)
stands out because it is not contingent, it is a free experience.
(a) The particularly remarkable sporting feat can only have one
response (for each viewer, for each viewing) on a single continuum
from very bad to very good, and the quality of the feat (and thus the
cause of the "aesthetic" part of the experience) is foreordained by
the history and rules of the game.
(c) The tastiness, and thus the basis for the "aesthetic" experience
of the cake, is grounded in the physical appetite of eating,
conditioned by the eater's experiences and food and flavor
preferences, and is again limited to a scope of responses from
nauseating to addictive, or some such range. Again, it's a contingent
experience, and it's restricted by culinary history and cultural rules.
(d) The "aesthetic" feeling for a domestic animal is similar to the
"aesthetic" feeling of looking at human beauty, heavily conditioned by
the anatomical limits of the creature, its specific and generic
limits, one's own experiences of dogs, etc. More than that, the a.e.
is also contingent on the fact that a dog cannot not be a dog.
(e) Likewise with the sunset, with storm clouds blowing past, with the
sublime landscapes, etc.
All of these, and many many more things in our daily life that are
routinely called "aesthetic" and whose disciplines are often called
"art," are prescribed, they are contingent on how they are made, used,
found, etc. in social use. These things cannot be something else
without ceasing to be what they are. [Cskp: "be" = "be taken for"]
Works of art are made from the outset as fictions, as proposals and
probationary things. That is, they are made from the outset to be what
they are (painting, song, dance, story, etc.), but what they embody or
represent is probationary, tentative, a rehearsal. I think this is
partly what William means by saying they are "meaningless," and I know
that when I try to "look away" and disregard the connotations and
references of the pictorial subjects, what is at play is specifically
the non-contingent quality of a WoA.
It can be anything. A football pass can only be that, and when someone
proposes changing the convention so that a dropped pass is as good as
a caught pass, most people would slough it off as a way to circumvent
skill (or as a pointless Calvin and Hobbes exercise). If a dog looks
or behaves differently, we generally think something is wrong; and
when humans train animals to behave it ways that don't seem natural to
them, many consider that harmful treatment. Dogs can (should) only be
dogs. Sunsets? Every sunset is natural, for one thing, and it will
always be red at the western horizon and blue at the eastern sky. To
make it otherwise is something that can happen only in a work of art,
which is free from the contingencies of actual existence and can be
anything.
The sine qua non of a WoA is its fictitiousness, not its aesthetic
qualities. Those qualities and the feelings they provoke come from the
fictitious work, they don't precede it or inform it.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
