On Jul 8, 2009, at 12:30 AM, William Conger wrote:
Where we differ is one how the question is asked. You say we must know if something is qualified as art before we subjectively agree or disagree. I say you've already decided one way or the other by claiming that there are qualifiers, which is just another way of saying artworks have intrinsic necessary and sufficient features. That would be nice (and easy) because all we need to do is count them up and prove that art is a matter of quantity of art-proving features (your mentioning skill, etc., seem to be your examples).
My one qualifier for an object is not a feature like skill, but whether we can take the object to be literally or denotationally true or whether it's a free creation. The rest of those things, whether traditional components like manual skill or nontraditional things like museum installations or recorded encounters on a sidewalk, etc., become the stuff of the thing viewed as an artwork.
Further, your view is a redux of Roger Fry's famous "significant form" theory, wherein he claims that artworks, real art, have formal features -- qualities of shape, line, etc.-- that are independent of subject matter and are universal, stemming from antiquity (proportions and the like in classic Western art).
This I don't get at all. I do not claim that a WoA has some form that distinguishes it. As I said, it's the preceding judgment of how to construe the truth properties of the object.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [email protected] http://considerthepreposition.blogspot.com/
