CHAPTER 9: ART

From Great Issues in Philosophy, by James Fieser

© 2008, updated 1/1/2026, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

 

CONTENTS

A. Beauty

Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?

Beauty and Goodness

Beauty and Taste

Beauty and Evolution

B. Aesthetics

The Aesthetic Attitude of Disinterestedness

The Aesthetic Experience

The Aesthetic Object

C. What is Art?

Imitationism: Representing Things in the World

Expressivism: Communicating Emotions

Formalism: Art for Art's Sake

Family Resemblance Theory: Non-Exclusive Common Features

Institutional Theory: Agreement by Art Institutions

References

Study Questions

 

When we think of great works of art, what comes to mind are paintings like DaVinci's Mona Lisa, architectural works like the Parthenon, musical compositions like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or novels like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. These are universally praised and serve as models for what other works of art should be. Some pieces of art, though, are more controversial, such as one by Carl Andre that consists simply of 120 bricks stacked neatly on a museum floor. An even more extreme example is "The Museum of Non-Visible Art", founded by a group of performance artists. Unlike any other museum in history, it contains no tangible artworks. Rather, it is a museum of ideas where each piece is "text based and is designed to be seen with the minds-eye using a brief text on a card mounted on a wall" (museumofnonvisibleart.com). The work of art itself consists of what the reader of the card conceptualizes, and the card is only the trigger for the mental realization of the art piece. A work by Monica Jacobs, titled "Tree of Life", has a 50-word description of an imaginary sculpture of a tree that extends into outer space with the stars at the tip of each branch. At the same time, the tree can fit into one's hand, while its roots touch every spot on the planet and its bark displays the names of every human, past, present and future. The Museum of Non-Visible Art began on a crowd-funding website, and the pieces for sale came with this disclaimer: "Important! You are not buying a visible piece of art; you are buying the title and description card for the imagined artwork." Presumably, buyers would attach the cards to walls in homes or offices, and encourage others to read the cards to have the conceptual experience.

          Maybe the Museum of Non-Visible Art counts as actual art, maybe it doesn't. This is a matter of debate, and is only one of many equally puzzling issues about the nature of art. Theorists have wrestled with such issues, both within philosophy and the field of art. In philosophy this exploration is called "the philosophy of art", and in the field of art it is "art theory". The two approaches overlap, but philosophers and artists come from distinct disciplines with different knowledge bases, and the philosophy of art is confined mostly to what philosophers have said on the subject. Since ancient Greece, major philosophers have given serious attention to this topic, and argued that the creation and appreciation of art is among humanity's highest achievements. The philosophies of art that have emerged are sometimes general and apply to all branches of art, and other times focus more narrowly on specific ones. The commonly recognized branches of art are these:

• Visual arts: drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, architecture, filmmaking, fashion.

• Performing arts: music, dance, theatre.

• Literary arts: poetry, fiction, nonfiction.

In this chapter we will look more broadly at the philosophy of art, using examples from these different branches. The main issues are the differing theories of beauty, theories of aesthetics, and definitions of art.

A. BEAUTY

The oldest philosophies of art focused on the concept of beauty, such as the beauty in a natural landscape, the beauty of a person, or the beauty of a human-made object like a vase. As different as these objects are from each other, something within each brings about a similar judgment that the object is beautiful. Here we will look at four issues about beauty: (1) whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder, (2) the interrelation between beauty and higher metaphysical qualities, such as goodness, truth and unity, (3) the psychological faculty of taste that enables us to detect beauty within objects, and (4) the evolutionary origin of our human sense of beauty.

Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?

Imagine that you meet someone for the first time, and have a conversation like this:

You: "So, what kind of music do you like?"

Acquaintance: "Country."

You: "Aaaghh! What are you, my grandpa?"

Acquaintance: "Well, what do you like?"

You: "Hip-hop."

Acquaintance: "Hip-hop? That's not music! It's just a drum machine and some guy chanting disrespectful things about his girlfriend!"

It's not that country or hip-hop are uniquely polarizing styles of music. Pick any genre that you like, whether it's indie rock, smooth jazz, or opera, and you will easily find people who hate it. Musical disagreements like this, though, will not erupt into bitter fights or hard feelings. We all recognize that musical preference is a personal matter, all the arguing in the world isn't going to change someone's inclination, and we simply accept it. This goes not only for music but any art form.

          This attitude about art is not only common, but it is one of the central questions in the philosophy of art: Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? The competing answers are these two theories:

• Subjectivism: beauty resides in the preference of the observer, and judgments about beautiful objects have only subjective validity.

• Objectivism: beauty resides in the objects themselves, and judgments about beautiful objects have objective validity.

Looking first at subjectivism, we've just seen the main evidence in its defense: people have their own differing opinions about beautiful music or paintings, and, as the famous Latin saying goes, "there is no disputing matters of taste" (De gustibus non disputandum est").  This stands in sharp contrast to things that we judge to be objective. If you and I stand in front of a chair that is three feet high, we can independently measure at and arrive at the same conclusion that it indeed is three feet high. Thus, the height of the chair is an objective fact. In cases like this, there is a consensus and universality with our judgments, and if someone disputes us, we can rightfully consider the person to be irrational. This, though, is precisely what is lacking with judgments about beauty. While the height of the chair has universal agreement, its beauty does not. There is nothing remotely like universality with our artistic or musical preferences, and this is reflected in the endless genres and styles each of which individually have only limited appeal to the whole population. See for yourself: go to a large online store, type in the word "chair" and judge which of the thousands of options work for you artistically. For each one you reject, there are certainly other buyers who think otherwise. The argument for subjectivism from the absence of universality, then, is this:

(1) Beauty is either objective or subjective.

(2) Beauty is not objective since judgments of beauty lack universality.

(3) Therefore, beauty is subjective.

          Turning next to objectivism, we find the exact opposite argument: there is indeed consensus and universality with judgments of beauty, which demonstrates that beauty is objective. More formally, the argument for objectivism from the presence of universality is this:

(1) Beauty is either objective or subjective.

(2) Beauty is not subjective since judgments of beauty exhibit universality.

(3) Therefore, beauty is objective.

To see the evidence for this universality, we need to step back from our private preferences and consider the larger social context in which any work of art arises. In all artistic styles, there are schools that teach the concepts and techniques behind those pieces, which presumes that there is a standard of beauty to which each art object must conform. In music, there are rules of harmony and voice movement. In visual art there are rules of balance and color. Similarly, within all artistic fields and styles, there are universally accepted masterpieces that stand as models of beauty, such as the Parthenon, the Mona Lisa, or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. There are also experts in all fields of art that have been trained to know what makes a work of art good or bad. All these factors provide evidence that the standards of beauty reside in something beyond the subjective preferences of individual spectators.

          Exactly where objective beauty resides, though, is another question and philosophers have offered theories, one of which is by Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (1710-1796). According to Reid, we have something like a sixth sense that detects the beauty embedded in external objects like a flower, much like our tongues detect flavorful qualities of foods. He describes it as "an agreeable feeling or emotion, accompanied with an opinion or judgment of some excellence in the object, which is fitted by nature to produce that feeling" (Essays on the Intellectual Powers, 1785, 8.4.5). While that feeling exists in our minds, it also involves a judgment about whether the object itself contains real beauty. Consider, he says, the very language we use when judging beauty, such as "the flower is beautiful": it's clearly a statement about the object itself, and not about the feelings of the spectator. Without training, though, our faculties are too dull for the ordinary person to perceive all the beauty that exists within both nature and works of human art. He writes, "the man who is skilled in painting or statuary, sees more of the beauty of a fine picture or statue than a common spectator. The same thing holds in all the fine arts." Thus, according to Reid, it is through training that the universal components of art will become more apparent.

          With subjectivism and objectivism split on the issue of the universality of beauty, how can we decide whether or not beauty is in the eye of the beholder? The solution is to recognize that the problem as originally laid out is flawed for forcing a choice between only the two options of subjectivism and objectivism. In logic, this is called the fallacy of false dilemma, namely, falsely assuming that only two options are available when there are in fact others. In this case, there are two such oversights. First, it could be that at least some, if not all, judgments of beauty blend together both a subjective and objective element. On the one hand, for example, a certain type of musical pitches and rhythms might objectively have the potential to universally please humans. On the other hand, a particular musical piece or style may subjectively appeal to only certain individual personalities, in spite of whether it has universally pleasing musical elements.

          The second oversight is that there may be a third factor involved in judgments of beauty that is neither subjective nor objective, namely, that human society or culture shapes our sense of beauty. We may call this "culturalism", defined as follows:

• Culturalism: beauty resides in the preferences of human cultures, and judgments about beautiful objects have mainly cultural validity.

Subjectivism is fundamentally about individual preference, and objectivism is about facts outside of human dependence. Culturalism, though, is neither of these, and is instead about a larger value system or world-life view created by society. Culture is a powerful tool that can indoctrinate entire continents of people to believe that their science, religion or politics is the correct one, and that the views of everyone else in the world are wrong. In this way, culture's psychological force is almost as strong as objective facts, and this often makes it nearly impossible to distinguish objective fact from acculturation.

          There is, then, a three-part distinction regarding the possible origin of art: subjectivism, objectivism, and culturalism. We find a similar three-part distinction within the field of ethics. When exploring where morality comes from, philosophers commonly differentiate between (a) subjective/individual relativism, (b) cultural relativism, and (c) objectivism. That is, morality could be a creation of each individual person, or a creation of different cultures, or grounded in some objective fact independent of human creative activity, or some combination of these. In this sense, "culturalism" is to beauty what "cultural relativism" is to morality. A notable difference between artistic culturalism and cultural moral relativism, though, is that artistic culturalism is far less controversial. Within the field of ethics, cultural relativism has a bad reputation since, according to its critics, it implies that morality changes over time and from one society to another, as those societies themselves evolve in different directions. This is presumably bad since, if morality is ever-changing, then it's not clear why we should follow one standard over another. With beauty, however, there is no serious concern when the artistic preferences of societies shift, and we even expect them to do so. Let clothing styles change as much as they will, there is no problem unless they cross the boundaries of decency, in which case it becomes a moral or legal issue, not just an artistic one. The difference in the level of controversy between artistic culturalism and cultural moral relativism owes to their respective levels of harm and the social need to punish offenders. With morality, the potential for harm is great, with art, not so much.

          But even here, culturalism is not the only other option to subjectivism and objectivism. Another we may call "instinctivism":

• Instinctivism: beauty is grounded in some instinctive psychological principles.

Such instinctive principles incline us towards a general appreciation of beauty, and perhaps also towards some specific styles and forms of beauty. Its claim is that at least some aspects of art appreciation are not based on purely subjective whims, or objective features within art objects themselves, or cultural conditioning. Rather, there is a genetic component to our mental processes that at least in some ways direct us towards artistic beauty. Subjectivism, objectivism, culturalism and instinctivism may not be the only four answers to the question "is beauty in the eye of the beholder". Further, none of these four explanations necessarily need to be taken isolation to each other. We could, for example, devise a theory our sense of beauty is triggered by features in external objects which our human psychology instinctively responds to, yet at the same time is flexible enough to allow for some purely subjective standards in some cases, and some firmly grounded cultural standards in others. We might find an analogy with our standards of romantic beauty. Regardless of one's gender orientation, there is an innate psychological guidance to romantically appreciate specific physical features of some people, which is shaped by both cultural norms and our individual preferences. It could well be that all theories of artistic beauty draw on all four of these explanations. With a subject as complex as beauty, we should not expect any single criterion to adequately explain everything involved.

          However, the issue with any proposed theory of beauty is which of these four elements predominates. For Reid, it was clearly objectivism. For skeptical philosophers such as Nietzsche, it is the subjective component. For anthropologists it might be culturalism, and for cognitive scientists it might be instinctivism. All four of these components underlie much of what we will discuss throughout this chapter.

Beauty and Goodness

For around 2,000 years, a common theme in ancient and medieval philosophy was that beauty and goodness are intertwined. If something is beautiful then it is good, and if it is good it is beautiful. This applies to anything, whether its beauty in nature, beautiful people, or beautiful artwork. The type of "goodness" they had in mind included moral goodness, but also meant perfection more broadly. For example, the Parthenon is not only beautiful, but has a level of perfection to it. Gandhi had a beauty of character along with moral goodness. Emily Dickenson's poem "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" is both beautiful and morally uplifting. In ancient Greek culture the connection between beauty and goodness was so strong that they created the term "beauty-good" (kalokagatia) by combining the two notions. We will call this view the beauty-goodness theory: beauty and goodness are inseparably related within nature, human beings, and human artwork.

          There are two central features to this theory. First, beauty-goodness in its purest form exists independently of human subjective or cultural preferences. Many ancient philosophers held that beauty-goodness is the ultimate reality of the cosmos itself. Imagine that at the very center of the universe there exists an ultimate reality, sort of like a giant glowing ball, which is the source of everything else that exists. Natural objects, human minds, and human works of art, are just radiations of this ultimate reality, like rays of light shooting out from the sun. These things share ultimate goodness and beauty in lesser degrees. The closer to the ball, the more pure and perfect things are, the further away the more they deteriorate and become imperfect. Similarly, the closer to the ball, the more good and beautiful, the further away the more evil and ugly. The originator of this view was Plato, and that giant ball of ultimate reality he called "the Good". Just as the sun illuminates physical objects, he argued, the Good illuminates and gives beauty and perfection to things, depending on how close or distant they are from the Good.

          The second feature of the beauty-goodness theory is that ultimate beauty and goodness are related in such a way that if you have one, you have the other, and they are in some sense interchangeable. Many philosophers of the time held that this interrelation went beyond just beauty and goodness to include other ultimate concepts, such as "truth", "unity", and even "being" or existence itself. In this way, the ultimate reality of the cosmos is ultimately perfect, beautiful, true, unified and existing. Philosophers today refer to this position as the "convertibility of transcendentals", meaning that at least some ultimate qualities are connected together where one implies the others. Past philosophers disagreed with each other about the number and relation between these various ultimate qualities, and they carefully selected them to mesh with their specific philosophical or religious perspectives.

          A case in point is the Platonist Christian philosopher Augustine, who held that the Christian God is the ultimate reality that exhibits goodness, beauty, truth, unity and being, but these qualities extend to God's creation in only a limited way. He held that God created the world out of material stuff that was "formless and without any beauty" (Confessions, 12.2). We are thus separate entities from God, and are removed so far from him that the limited beauty and goodness we see around is only a shadow of God's ultimate beauty and goodness. This view forms the foundation of Augustine's theory of artistic beauty: artistic beauty is just a vehicle for us to encounter the ultimate beauty-goodness of God. In his book On Music, he describes how the beauty of music owes to its rhythm and harmony, which in turn is an imperfect reflection of the perfect proportions and ratios within God's mind. When I focus on the inferior order and harmony of music within this lower realm, my soul will be naturally inclined to seek out the more perfect version in the higher realm. Through this, my soul is "released from its burden" and "continues its flight towards the home of peace, thereby returning to the joy of the Lord" (On Music, 6.14). So too with other objects that we find beautiful in this lower realm, such as a rose, a polished statue, or a magnificent building. Their purpose is to draw us into the higher realm of perfect beauty, leaving behind the objects of limited beauty that first caught our attention. He writes,

Let us not place our joys either in the pleasures of the flesh, or in the greatness and glory of the world, or in the search for things that act from without upon our senses. Let us instead possess God within the depths of ourselves, as he offers only immutable and eternal beauties for us to love. In this way, the things of this temporal world may present themselves to us without trapping us within their bonds. [Ibid]

Earthly art, then, is just a vehicle for encountering heavenly beauty, and we dispense with that vehicle once we've reached our destination.

          There are many components to Augustine's and similar Platonist theories of beauty-goodness of that time, but, again, for our purposes what matters are its two central features noted above:

• Beauty-goodness in its purest form exists independently of human subjective or cultural preferences.

• Ultimate beauty and goodness are related in such a way that if you have one, you have the other.

There are still some defenders today of the Platonist theory of beauty-goodness, particularly Augustine's Christianized version, but the theory no longer has anything like the appeal that it once did. Part of the reason for its decline is that science has since overshadowed metaphysics in our understanding of the cosmos, and Platonic concepts of ultimate realities seem unnecessary.

          Nevertheless, the two above features of Platonic beauty still have some place in more modern theories of art, as we can see with British philosopher George Edward Moore (1873-1958). Regarding the first principle above, Moore argues that beauty is objective insofar as it is valuable independently of our human contemplation of it. He offers a famous thought experiment to prove this point. Imagine, he says, two uninhabited planets at distant parts of the universe that no person will ever visit. One is exceptionally beautiful with all the features that we admire on earth, such as "mountains, rivers, the sea; trees, and sunsets, stars and moon," and it has "these all combined in the most exquisite proportions, so that no one thing jars against another, but each contributes to the beauty of the whole" (ibid, 3.50). The other planet, by contrast, is exceptionally ugly, and is "simply one heap of filth, containing everything that is most disgusting to us." Again, even though no person will ever see these worlds, it is reasonable for us to hold that "it is better that the beautiful world should exist than the one which is ugly." That is, the beautiful world is "in itself" better than the ugly one, and its mere existence, unexperienced as it is, adds "something to the goodness of the whole" even though it is "beyond the limits of human experience". Thus, on the issue of whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Moore sides with objectivism, rather than subjectivism or culturalism.

          Regarding the second feature above, Moore argues that the main task of ethics is to seek out those things in life that have intrinsic value, that is, activities and experiences that are recognizably good in and of themselves, irrespective of any benefit we may receive from them. To that extent, he argues, the two most important intrinsically good things are personal affection and the appreciation of beauty. He writes,

By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves. [Principia Ethica, 1903, 6.113]

In the context of our discussion, his point is that beauty and goodness are interrelated, and beauty is an ultimate good.

          Again, Platonist theories of beauty-goodness are no longer central to the philosophy of art. However, Moore's version illustrates how it could be viable in contemporary times.

Beauty and Taste

Suppose that you're dressing up for a party, and you want to make a strong impression with what you wear. You pick out an outfit, carefully color coordinating the shirt, pants, shoes, socks and hat. If all goes well, people at the party will like it and compliment you on your good taste. If not, someone who had too much to drink might tell you that you have bad taste. We use the expressions "good" and "bad" taste with many things, like musical preference, home decor, favorite books or movies, and pretty much anything that has to do with artistic beauty. In the eighteenth-century, though, this concept of "taste" was the ruling philosophical theory of art. We may call this taste theory: humans have a sixth sense that detects beautiful and ugly artistic features, similar to how culinary taste detects delicious and repulsive flavors. There is an important rationale for this analogy between artistic and culinary taste. Our other senses, particularly sight and sound, are primarily vehicles for gaining factual knowledge about objects in the world: your eyes report the fact that a dog is in front of you, your ears report the fact that the dog is barking. The sense of taste from your tongue, however, is more about pleasure than it is factual knowledge. When you bite into a pickle, you experience a flavor that is immediately pleasing or displeasing to you in different degrees. So too with artistic taste: it is an immediately pleasing or displeasing response to the beauty or ugliness of an art object. Thus, both focus on some pleasurable psychological experience, namely, the sensation of an object's flavor on the one hand, and the sensation of an object's beauty on the other.

          An early proponent of the theory of taste was English writer Joseph Addison (1672-1719), who specifically investigated artistic taste in literature. He defined artistic taste as "that faculty of soul which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike." He gives a vivid example of culinary taste, where a connoisseur of tea he knew could instantly identify all types of tea, and even complex mixtures of those types. Experts in literary taste, he argues, have the same ability to detect subtle stylistic differences among writers:

A man of a fine taste in writing will discern, after the same manner, not only the general beauties and imperfections of an author, but discover the several ways of thinking and expressing himself, which diversify him from all other authors, with the several foreign infusions of thought and language, and the particular authors from whom they were borrowed. [Spectator, 409, June 19, 1712]

If you want to improve your literary taste, Addison recommends that you read as much literature as you can, have conversations with others about it, and consult the opinions of experts and critics. A good imagination, he adds, will also help.

          There are three important features of the theory of artistic taste proposed by Addison and others of his day. First, taste theory is primarily an investigation into human psychology. It is not about higher beauty radiating from God, but rather about human mental anatomy. It asks that we examine the psychology behind this sixth sense of beauty in the same way that we do our other five senses. To this extent, it is the beginning of a truly modern account of the human experience of art. The second feature is what is now called the immediacy of art thesis: the experience of artistic beauty is direct and unfiltered by rational evaluation. When you bite into a pickle, you immediately taste its sourness, and, similarly, when you look at a compelling work of art, you immediately "taste" its beauty. You can certainly rationally evaluate the artwork after the fact, as a food connoisseur might do, but that in no way takes away from the immediacy of the initial experience.

          The third feature of taste theory is that, from the start, advocates of the theory recognized that beauty was only one of several qualities that our mental tongues detect. To simplify it to just four, it helps to think of our mental tongues as having different types of taste buds that respectively detect (1) beauty, (2) sublimity, (3) virtue, and (4) humor. All four follow the same mechanism: we observe some object or event through our five senses, and this triggers a special type of mental pleasure or pain within our mental tongues. If I view a painting like the Mona Lisa, I get a pleasing sensation of its beauty. When visiting the Grand Canyon, I get a pleasing sensation of its sublimity, that is, its awe and grandeur. When reading about the life of Gandhi, I get a pleasing sensation of his moral virtue. When watching the movie "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" I get a pleasing sensation of its humor. If I observe more imperfect objects, such as a bad work of art, my experience will not be one of mental pleasure, but mental pain. I will thus see ugliness rather than beauty, excruciating dullness instead of sublimity, moral vice instead of moral virtue, and lameness instead of humor.

          All four of these are mental experiences about things that we value, as opposed to mere reports about facts. In this way, our mental tongues are like value detectors that produce different pleasures from our four mental taste buds, and we can call these all "value-tastes". With all four of our value-tastes, the critical question is how much of that value lies with our mental tongues, and how much within the observed objects themselves. Again, we are asking whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder: does the beauty of the Mona Lisa reside more within my personal good taste for beauty or within the physical painting itself? Once again, our options are subjectivism, objectivism and culturalism in art. Theories of taste at the time addressed this precise issue, and they typically sided with subjectivism.

          The starting point for their subjectivist analysis was culinary taste. On the table in front of me is an apple. My eyes tell me that it is red and round, and, when I bite into it, my tongue tells me that it is sweet. According to John Locke, it is only the round shape of the apple that is truly part of the apple itself, and he calls this a "primary quality" of an object. Its quality of roundness, then, is objective. However, the apple's sweetness and redness do not reside in the apple itself, but are only features generated by my mind, which I then project onto the apple. He calls these "secondary qualities", and these are not objective, but subjective. To explain, imagine that you are viewing a blue sky through a camera hooked up to your computer. Within your computer, you can adjust the hue to change the blue to orange, but that orangeness is not part of the actual sky and only a creation of your computer. This is similarly what your mind does when it creates all tastes, all colors, and all sounds. There is indeed something within the physical configuration of the apple that triggers the perceptual experience of sweetness and redness in our minds, but these experiences of taste and color in no way resemble the arrangement of physical molecules that make up the apple itself. Thus, experiences of sweetness and redness are subjective, and relative to the perceiver's mind.

          A strict interpretation of Locke's theory of primary and secondary qualities will similarly lead to subjectivism with matters of value-taste. When I view the Mona Lisa and experience the pleasing sensation of beauty, that beauty is like a secondary quality, not a primary one. For, it is a creation of my own mind, and does not reside in the physical configuration of the painting itself. Accordingly, the Lockean view of value-taste is subjectivist.

          Thomas Reid, however, offers an objectivist view of value-taste that opposes this Lockean view. We saw earlier that Reid gave an objectivist account of beauty, where beauty resides in the objects themselves. Reid was also an advocate of taste theory, but he argued that Locke pushed the distinction between primary and secondary qualities too far. He agrees with Locke that the sweetness we experience bears no similarity to "that quality or structure in the body which is adapted by nature to produce those sensations in us." However, he continues, there is something within the object itself that we can justifiably call "sweet". For, "it is evident, from the use of language, that hot and cold, sweet and bitter, are attributes of external objects, and not of the person who perceives them" (Intellectual Powers, 8.4.4). The same goes with our experience of beauty within art objects: "When I hear an air in music that pleases me, I say, it is fine, it is excellent. This excellence is not in me; it is in the music. But the pleasure it gives is not in the music; it is in me" (ibid, 8.1.2). In short, with experiences of artistic taste, the beauty resides fully in the art object, and only the pleasure is a creation of our minds. Thus, on Reid's view, while value-taste at first seems subjectivist, upon closer inquiry it is actually objectivist.

          There is a problem, though, with Reid's objectivist theory of value-taste. The theory of value-taste itself is only as good as its analogy with culinary taste, and it is here that the theory breaks down. With each of our five senses, there are specialized nerve receptors that react to outside stimuli, such as our actual taste buds on our tongues, or the cones in our eyes. With value-taste, however, there are no such physiological receptors, and the experiences are generated entirely by the brain and mind. This opens the door for other comparisons between the experience of beauty and similar non-sensory human experiences. Take, for example the feeling of nostalgia that you have when revisiting the town of your childhood. There is a strong emotional pull, similar to the feeling of beauty, but one that bears little analogy to our five senses, for, we have nothing like physiological nostalgia receptors in our eyes or ears. Rather, this feeling of nostalgia is better explained by habit, association, imprinting, and other purely psychological mechanisms that have nothing to do with physiological nerve receptors. For all we know, the psychological causes of our experience of beauty may be precisely the same psychological causes of nostalgia. Even if not, nostalgia is still a more physiologically accurate model of the experience of beauty than is culinary taste.

          Theories of taste had their day in the sun, and there is still much that we can learn from them today, such as the observation that there are important similarities between judgments of beauty, sublimity, morality and even humor. However, because of the breakdown of the analogy between culinary taste and value-taste, theories of taste are too confining. Intentionally or unintentionally, philosophers of art set them aside during the nineteenth century and looked for other explanations of beauty.

Beauty and Evolution

One of the most beautiful objects in nature is the plumage of the peacock, with its long delicate feathers and iridescent colors. Peahens are irresistibly attracted to it during mating season, and humans are similarly enamored with it. We use their feathers in clothing, home decor, and the great museums of the world have hundreds of art objects modeled after the peacock, with many containing its actual feathers. The peacock is the poster child for beauty within the natural world and the pleasure that we humans experience when viewing it. Augustine states that the colors of a single peacock feather surpass those of an entire meadow of flowers (Against the Manicheans, 15.39). In Platonist fashion, Augustine attributes the beauty of the bird's plumage to a gift from God, as a sample of the greater beauty that we will experience in heaven as our reward for enduring the trials of this life (City of God, 22.24). Evolutionary theorists, though, offer a different explanation of the origin of the peacock's feathers and the beauty that we find in them. Rather than grounding beauty in a higher metaphysical realm as Platonists do, Evolutionists argue instead that the experience of beauty arises through animal and human evolution.

          Evolutionary accounts of beauty are built upon the views of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), who transformed the study of biology in his two works The Origin of the Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). The question that evolutionary biology must address is how the sense of beauty emerged within animals and humans that gave them an advantage for survival. Darwin famously describes two evolutionary mechanisms that promote changes within species over time. First is natural selection, where a random mutation in an organism is passed onto its offspring if the mutation has a survival benefit over competing members of the species. For example, random mutations that create longer claws or sharper teeth in an animal might be passed on and thus provide a benefit for its whole species. Second is sexual selection where a random mutation in an organism is passed onto its offspring if the organism's mating partner finds the mutation more appealing. Suppose, for example, that two male animals are competing to mate with a single female. One male might have a genetic mutation that the female coincidentally finds appealing, such as more brightly colored feathers. He, then, is the male she chooses, and brightly colored feathers are passed on to their offspring. According to Darwin, it is sexual selection, not natural selection, that gave rise to the sense of beauty within animals. It is an appeal that is specifically tied in with reproduction.

          At its most basic level, we can see this sexual component at work even with plants that rely on insects for colonization. One plant might have a genetic mutation that gives its flowers a brighter color that coincidentally attracts more insects to distribute its pollen to other plants that produce seeds. In a sense, the plants are catering to the whims of the insects who are middlemen in the reproductive process. If there were no insects, Darwin states, "our plants would not have been decked with beautiful flowers" (Origin, Ch. 6). At the level of animals, again the peacock is one of the most dramatic examples of beauty emerging through the mechanism of sexual selection. The peahen is attracted to flamboyance, and, thanks to mutations, the peacock delivers. The peahen's attraction to showiness may not be completely arbitrary, and at least some of the peacock's display demonstrates his fitness to her. It takes a lot of strength for the peacock to ruffle its feathers into a plume, and by doing so he conveys a fitness signal to the peahen. Other male birds have similarly developed elaborate dance routines to attract the female, which display the male's fitness.

          For Darwin, this sense of beauty that animals develop is a "lower" one, that is tied specifically to reproduction and attraction to the opposite sex. But humans, he argues, have a "higher" sense of beauty that is independent of reproduction. Thus, while sexual selection may explain the attraction that the peahen has for the peacock's plumage, it does not explain why we humans find beauty in the peacock's plumage, which has nothing to do with human mating or sexual selection. What, then, is the evolutionary cause of our higher sense of beauty? At this point, Darwin gave up. He was unable to find an evolutionary explanation for why specific colors or sounds excite pleasure in humans and, instead, he ascribed it to a complex combination of human culture and psychological association. He writes,

no animal would be capable of admiring such scenes as the heavens at night, a beautiful landscape, or refined music; but such high tastes are acquired through culture, and depend on complex associations; they are not enjoyed by barbarians or by uneducated persons [Descent, 1871, 1.3]

For Darwin, the best we can say is that evolution through natural selection has given us an "undefined sense of beauty", along with other related mental faculties that have aided in our survival, such as imagination, curiosity, the tendency to imitate, and the love of excitement. Depending on one's culture, these "could hardly fail to lead to capricious changes of customs and fashions" (Descent, 1.3). According to Darwin, then, evolution has given humans the capacity to create and appreciate art through our psychological faculties, but the sky is the limit to what we actually count as art, and that's left to our cultural context to decide. Thus, Darwin's explanation of our human sense of artistic beauty is a mixture of objectivism and culturalism: our psychological faculties are objective features of our human physiology, while how we direct those faculties is based on our culture.

          For around a century after Darwin, evolutionary biologists seem to have agreed that what we specifically consider beautiful is of cultural rather than biological origin. Recent writers on the subject, though, see it otherwise and think that Darwin gave up too soon in the quest for an evolutionary foundation of the particulars of artistic beauty. Denis Dutton (1944-2010), in his book The Art Instinct (2009), argues that indeed what humans specifically find beautiful is an evolutionary trait shaped by natural selection, and not merely a social construction. On the surface, according to Dutton, our artistic tastes appear to arise from a random collection of evolutionary adaptations, attractions and preferences. However, he explains, while culture does allow for a wide variety of artistic tastes, "it does not follow that culture can give us a taste for just anything at all" (Dutton, p. 205). Rather, evolution has set limits on what culture can pass off as art.

          With our experience of natural beauty, he describes a study that examined the artistic preferences of people in ten countries on all continents. One result was a common preference for landscape art of a very specific format: open grassland with a few clusters of trees, water, animal life, and a pathway for walking. This, he argues, is precisely the type of landscape that existed in the African savannas a million years ago when humans were evolving. This suggests an early evolutionarily-grounded preference for this type of surrounding. With our experience of beauty in human-made art, he describes a pear-shaped carved stone from over a million years ago (called the "Acheulean tool"), found throughout Africa, Europe and Asia from over a million years ago, perhaps even before human language. Some of these tools were put to practical use, such as cutting meat, digging or chopping. But others seem to be more of ornamental use, and thus may be the earliest known works of art. They exhibit an elegant symmetrical shape and are the product of technical ability. Like the peacock's plume, they may originally have been human fitness signals that displayed the intelligence and fine motor skill of the creator, suggesting that he or she would be a suitable mate. Much of what our early ancestors appreciated about this tool is what art lovers today appreciate about works of fine art. To that end, Dutton finds seven features, or "universal signatures" of art that reveal a precise art instinct within us (pp. 51-52). They are,

• Technical artistic skill

• Nonutilitarian pleasure

• Stylistic rules

• Appreciation and interpretation

• Imitation

• Special focus

• Imagination

          The goal of evolutionary theories of beauty is to trace the development of the sense of beauty in the lowest animal forms on through humans. The task is bold, and there is yet no theory that explains all the stages. A major missing link is whether animals like the peahen experience a genuine sense of beauty at the peacock's plume that went beyond either a sexual response or a response to the mere presence of a fitness signal. We can imagine that our early ancestors experienced a genuine sense of beauty when they fashioned pear-shaped stone tools a million years ago, but even that is unclear. It may not be until the appearance of ornamental jewelry around 100 thousand years ago that we can confidently recognize a non-utilitarian sense of beauty in our predecessors. But it is reasonable to say that, at some point in evolution, the more utilitarian sense of beauty such as the peahen's, transitioned into the non-utilitarian form that you and I have today as we appreciate the many works of art in our daily lives.

AESTHETICS

"Aesthetic" is the term we most use today to describe our appreciation of art, along with the related experiences of beauty, sublimity, and taste that we have already discussed. I might say that your home decor is aesthetically pleasing, that your aesthetics are better than mine, and that the paintings on your wall have a higher aesthetic value than the ones on mine. "Aesthetic" is a good word choice when you consider its linguistic opposite: "anesthetic". An anesthetic, such as you'd receive in a hospital, dulls sensations, particularly that of pain. "Aesthetic", by contrast, enlivens sensations, particularly that of pleasure. The term "aesthetic" was introduced by German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762) as a replacement for the word "taste" in philosophical discussions of art. During the 1900's the word moved beyond the realm of philosophers and art specialists into public use. Philosophers today use the term "aesthetics" in two different ways. First, "aesthetics" can refer broadly to the entire history of philosophical discussions about art, where the older theories of Plato, Addison, and others are retrofitted to the newer terminology of aesthetics. Second, "aesthetics" is also used more narrowly to describe a special set of issues about art that have been explored by analytic philosophers in the English-speaking world since the mid 1900's. It is in this narrow sense that we will be using the term "aesthetics", specifically with the issues of aesthetic attitude, aesthetic experience, and aesthetic object.

The Aesthetic Attitude of Disinterestedness

Suppose while on vacation you tour an old mansion. As you go through it, inside and out, you have a lot of reactions. You Imagine how difficult it would have been for the workers to originally construct it, and equally difficult to maintain it over the years. You think about what you might do with the mansion if you owned it, perhaps turn it into an elite resort hotel. You might consider how the whole thing is an outrageous expression of vanity by the wealthy family that originally owned it. Completely apart from these reactions, though, there is also the matter of the mansion's beauty and the pleasure that you receive from it. When you block out all the other considerations and view the mansion only with a view towards its artistry, your aesthetic attitude towards it is disinterested: you do not consider the art object for its practical use, but give it attention and appreciation for its own sake. This notion of aesthetic disinterestedness was the brainchild of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and he illustrated it with this same example of viewing a mansion. All that matters, he says, is whether the mere representation of the mansion is to your liking, stripped of any other interest you might have in it. Disinterestedness is the most defining characteristic about an aesthetic judgment. He writes,

Everyone must acknowledge that a judgement about the beautiful which is tainted with the slightest interest, is very partial and not a pure judgement of taste. One must not be in the least influenced beforehand in favor of the real existence of the thing, but must preserve complete indifference in this respect, in order to play the part of judge in matters of taste. [Critique of Judgment, The First Moment, 2]

The clearest way to see this, according to Kant, is to contrast this disinterested experience with a more interested one. When your viewpoint is disinterested, it is only the mansion's pure beauty that holds your mind's attention, rather than, for example, the mansion's market value as a realtor would view it. Using Kantian terminology, through disinterestedness we see the mansion as "an end in itself", rather than "a means to an end". That is, we recognize its intrinsic value, rather than its mere instrumental value.

          Philosophers after Kant argued that this sort of disinterestedness is a special "attitude" that we take towards all art objects, that is, a unique frame of mind that we have when viewing art. English Psychologist Edward Bullough (1880-1934) argued that the disinterested attitude towards art involves a type of mental distancing where I forget about my practical concerns when viewing an art object like the mansion. This distancing functions like a filter that I apply to my eyes that blocks out my private interests so that I can have a purer experience of the mansion in all its glory. I thus am in a better position to recognize the beauty of the art object itself, rather than its mere agreeableness in more practical ways. Bullough argues that we can distance ourselves in differing degrees. At the one extreme, a realtor might over-distance herself from the mansion: she may be so preoccupied with finding a suitable buyer for the mansion, that all she can see are the selling points that might appeal to specific clients. Similarly, a maintenance person might view the mansion exclusively with a concern for the building's state of repair. In these cases of over-distancing, there is no emotional involvement with the mansion itself as an art object. At the other extreme, a person might under-distance herself too little from the mansion, such as by dressing up as the original architect and strutting around the lawn as a character actor, and pontificating about the building's beauty and her artistic intentions. Here she is too emotionally involved, and the line between the art object and herself has become blurred.

          All seemed well with the concept of aesthetic disinterestedness until American philosopher George Dickie (1926-2020) published his essay "The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude". He finds two major problems with this notion. First, contrary to what Kant and Bullough might claim, art lovers do not seem to enter any sort of state of mental "distancing" when they view art objects. Dickie writes,

When the curtain goes up, when we walk up to a painting, or when we look at a sunset are we ever induced into a state of being distanced either by being struck by the beauty of the object or by pulling off an act of distancing? I do not recall committing any such special actions or of being induced into any special state, and I have no reason to suspect that I am atypical in this respect. ["The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude", 1964]

For Dickie, it is true that the art lover focuses attention on the object, but this focusing is no different than what we would ordinarily do when, say, reading a newspaper or scrubbing a stubborn stain off a wall. Introducing the technical aesthetic term "distancing" is misleading, when we are ultimately talking about the ordinary psychological experience of "paying attention".

          Second, Dickie argues, the presence of personal motives in the mind of art lovers does not necessarily cancel out the aesthetic experience. The realtor could very easily appreciate the beauty of the mansion while at the same time thinking about potential buyers, and we might even think it strange if she tried to sell it without personally engaging in its beauty. We are all expert multi-taskers, and in this case, personally enjoying an art object while considering possible buyers of it. It is true that at some point the realtor might become so preoccupied with the mansion's selling points that her feeling of aesthetic appreciation dissipates. But, if so, she is simply no longer paying attention to the mansion as an art object, and has shifted her focus to it as a financial commodity. Again, for Dickie, this is just ordinary "inattention". The use of specialized terminology such as "distancing", he argues, is misleading since it wrongly implies that the art lover's experience is different in kind from, say, that of an art seller. The realtor who understands the historical and financial details of the mansion is not engaged in a different attitude about it. Rather, attention to those details may in fact contribute to her overall aesthetic appreciation of it.

          Is Dickie correct that art viewers have no special mental attitude? Defenders of Kant and Bullough may have a response. While it may be difficult to fully resurrect the theory of disinterestedness from Dickie's attack, there seems to be a little more to aesthetic attitude than just "paying attention." There are different levels of engagement that we have when standing before an art object, but, at its highest level, there is something like a "speak to me" moment where we consciously invite some aesthetic experience. We are in a sense requesting that an art object deliver a beauty-related insight or feeling to us. We certainly have "speak to me" moments in all walks of life. For example, fans of philosophy intentionally make themselves receivers of the different world-views and theories they read about, such as with the issues of skepticism, free will, or moral relativism. The whole philosophical experience would fall flat if there was no such openness to insight. What the philosophy lover receives from her "speak to me" moment is mainly insight about facts and values, specifically those pertaining to human nature and our place in the cosmos. For the art lover who stands before an art object, the insight might also include similar facts and values, but her unique insight is that of beauty in some form or other. Her principal aesthetic attitude, then, is that of a willing aesthetic-receiver. In a loose sense this may be "disinterested" because it initially puts her in a passive position of receiving an insight, rather than a more active utilitarian position of, say, selling or selling a mansion. But even these active utilitarian attitudes might arise quickly after the disinterested "speak to me" attitude, and blend with it. In this way, the realtor may be continually inspired by the mansion she is attempting to sell, and thus retain her "speak to me" attitude as a willing aesthetic-receiver.

The Aesthetic Experience

Suppose you are in an art museum standing in front of the Mona Lisa. Suppose also that you have the right kind of aesthetic attitude, such as disinterestedness. What happens next? Hopefully you'll have some kind of aesthetic experience, otherwise it would have been a waste of time to make the trip to the museum in the first place. The critical question is whether your aesthetic experience differs from other reactive experiences you have in non-aesthetic situations. For example, when you go to a baseball game you experience excitement, when watching a movie you experience entertainment, when on a first date you experience love at first sight. While you might be excited or entertained to see the Mona Lisa, and may even be in love with it, those are not uniquely aesthetic experiences. What, then, is this mysterious aesthetic experience that emerges when you view an artwork?

          There are two ways we might try to describe the aesthetic experience: directly or indirectly. The distinction between direct and indirect descriptions of things may not be immediately obvious, and here is an example of how I might directly and indirectly describe my kitchen table:

• Direct: my kitchen table is the large rectangular object with four legs in my kitchen.

• Indirect: my kitchen table is the object that I sit down in front of for every meal.

The direct description describes the table itself, and the indirect description only provides the circumstances and context surrounding the table, such as how I use it. Physical objects like tables can easily be described both directly and indirectly. Private experiences, though, are different. Take, for example, these descriptions of the taste experience of sour:

• Sour results from the activation of sour taste receptors on the tongue.

• Sour is commonly associated with acidic foods like lemons.

• Sour things incline you to pucker your mouth.

All three of these descriptions pick out the experience of sourness, but they are only indirect, not direct. What could you say about your experience of "sour" that would directly describe it? It seems there is nothing. The experience of "sour" itself defies any direct verbal description since it is a private one that each of us knows only introspectively. Aesthetic experiences work the same way, and this view is conveyed in what is sometimes called the "ineffability thesis":

• Ineffability thesis: the aesthetic experience of art objects is incapable of verbal description and thus cannot be described directly.

Many philosophers of art have adopted this view, and we find it most dramatically in Platonism. According to Plato and his followers, an aesthetic experience is an experience of beauty itself. This, in turn, requires something like a mystical experience of ultimate reality, or at least some manifestation of pure beauty. Like all mystical experiences, this is by its nature incapable of direct expression.

          Since this mysterious aesthetic experience cannot be described "directly", we next ask, can it be described "indirectly"? Taste theorists, like Addison, attempted to do just that, arguing that our experience of beauty is a special type of mental pleasure that is analogous to culinary pleasure. This is not a direct description of the experience of beauty, but only an "indirect" one that compares the beauty experience to perceptual experience. It is presumably through that comparison that we better understand what the experience of beauty might be. However, we've seen already the problems with taste theory, most notably that the analogy between value-taste and culinary taste breaks down. This means that, while taste theory offers an indirect description of aesthetic experiences, the description is not a particularly good one.

          American philosopher Monroe Beardsley (1915-1985) offers a more contemporary approach to indirectly describing the aesthetic experience. In the following he gives a set of psychological conditions under which all and only aesthetic experiences arise:

I propose to say that a person is having an aesthetic experience during a particular stretch of time if and only if the greater part of his mental activity during that time is united and made pleasurable by being tied to the form and qualities of a sensuously presented or imaginatively intended object on which his primary attention is concentrated. ["Aesthetic Experience Regained" 1961]

According to Beardsley, then, aesthetic experience is a mental activity that (1) is unified, (2) has a fixed attention on an object, and (3) produces pleasure. To state this even more concisely, the aesthetic experience is a mentally intense and pleasurable focus on an object. Thus, for Beardsley, if you look at the Mona Lisa and have an aesthetic experience, that experience will be a mentally intense and pleasurable focus on an object.

          Is this a good indirect description of the aesthetic experience? Maybe not, and there's a famous thought experiment by American philosopher William Kennick, called the "warehouse test", that we can adapt to show why. Imagine that there is a large warehouse filled with different objects, some of which are art pieces, like the Mona Lisa, and others are non-art things, such as an ordinary rock, an empty cardboard box, or a worn-out car tire. Suppose also that you are an art lover who appreciates all genres and styles of art, and you are asked to perform two tasks. First, you are to go through the warehouse and put a white sticker on each object that gives you an aesthetic experience, just like you've experienced countless times when viewing works of art. Second, you are to go through the warehouse again, but this time place black stickers on each object that triggers within you a mentally intense and pleasurable focus on that object, as per Beardsley's definition of the aesthetic experience. If Beardsley is right with his definition, you would place the white and black stickers on exactly the same objects. However, in reality, your results may be completely otherwise. Some artworks, like Edvard Munch's "The Scream" might indeed give you an aesthetic experience, but it could well be a discomforting feeling rather than a pleasurable one. If you are sufficiently discomforted, your focus could also be directed more towards your own state of mind at the time, rather than on the art object itself. Further, other objects like an ordinary rock may not give you any aesthetic experience, but it might trigger within you a mentally intense and pleasurable focus on that rock, particularly if you've taken a geology class and know the history of the rock's origins.

          Thus, the results of your two tests may not align in a meaningful way. While the Mona Lisa might receive both a white and a black sticker, many other objects in the warehouse might receive only one sticker or the other, but not both stickers. This is a problem not just for Beardsley's account of the aesthetic experience, but for any such account that's bold enough to list the precise conditions under which any and all aesthetic experiences arise. This failure of indirect descriptions of aesthetic experience should not come as a surprise, and it reveals four problems with any such attempt. First, the words that we use in our descriptions of the aesthetic experience are imprecise, such as "fixed attention" and "pleasure". Second, there are so many branches, styles and media of art that we can't expect all art objects to exhibit the same experiential conditions or features. Third, art objects in our lives serve so many purposes, like the fruit bowl arrangement on my kitchen table, that it may be impossible to disentangle the purely aesthetic ones from the non-aesthetic ones. Fourth, even after 2,000 years of speculating about how the human mind operates, we are still very much in the dark. With aesthetic experiences, perhaps this single and unique feeling really does exist in the mind of the art lover. On the other hand, perhaps it's only a combination of several, if not hundreds, of non-aesthetic cognitive states that blend together when viewing art objects. If so, perhaps that blending follows a single recipe, or maybe it involves countless variant recipes, depending on which branch and style of art the object falls into. In any of these cases, maybe we can eventually craft an indirect description of the resulting mental states when cognitive science is more advanced, or maybe it will be permanently elusive.

          With all these uncertainties, we must face the possibility that there really is no such thing as an "aesthetic experience", and it's only a misdescription by philosophers and art theorists of various non-aesthetic human experiences. But even if it is a misdescription, the question remains whether it is a useful one for either the artist and art lover, or whether it only gets in the way of us doing our art thing. Perhaps it does have some value, in that it may help unify the various branches of art, and show that music and literature, for example, are part of the same aesthetic family since they both produce similar aesthetic experiences. It may also provide a lure for people to engage in art activities, much the way that the feeling of excitement is a draw for people to engage in recreational activities, or the feeling of love to draw people into close relationships. As an analogy, historians speculate that Laozi, the alleged founder of the Daoist religion, didn't really exist and was just a fabrication by early Daoist leaders to have a focal point of their religion, similar to what Confucius is in Confucianism, and Buddha in Buddhism. It could be that "aesthetic experience" is the art world's Laozi: it doesn't really exist, but for practical reasons we need to talk about the "aesthetic experience" as though it does.

The Aesthetic Object

I pick up a coffee table book and see a picture of the Parthenon. I then approach it with the proper aesthetic attitude, and it triggers within me some kind of aesthetic experience. The next puzzle in aesthetic theory relates to the art object itself, in this case the Parthenon. There is a complex chain of links that begins with the original architect's conception of the building and my conception of it as I view it in the book. Some of these include the architect's concept, preliminary drawings, the final blueprint, the original building, the most recently renovated building, a recent photograph of it in the book, and, finally, my conception of the building that I glean from the photograph. While all of these are elements in the life of an art object, the question is, which of these links is most central to what the art object itself is? That is, which if these is the art object that we call the "Parthenon"? This isn't just a puzzle for architecture, since all branches of art face this in their own unique ways:

• Painting: artist's conception, preliminary sketches, final painting, reproduction poster, viewer's conception.

• Music: composer's conception, rough drafts, musical score, premiere performance, recording, listener's conception.

• Sculpture: sculptor's conception, preliminary sketches, original sculpture, miniature reproduction, viewer's conception.

• Literature: author's conception, rough drafts, printed words in the first edition, later editions, reader's conception.

• Theatre: playwright's conception, rough drafts, script, premiere performance, local performance, viewer's conception.

Philosophers have disagreed about which of these components is most critical to where the art object genuinely resides. For simplicity, let's divide these components into two groups (1) mental conceptions, and (2) physical manifestations. The question we now ask is, which of these two is the principal location of an art object? A famous view, called intuitionist theory, holds that it is not the physical manifestation of art but, rather, the concept within the artists mind that is then transmitted to the viewer's mind. Two philosophers are associated with this view, Italian Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) and Englishman Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943). The following two quotations express their positions:

I will say at once, in the simplest manner, that art is vision or intuition. The artist produces an image or a phantasm; and he who enjoys art turns his gaze upon the point which the artist has indicated, looks through the chink which he has opened, and reproduces that image in himself.  [Croce, The Essence of the Aesthetic, (1921), p. 8]

the [musical] work of art, is not the collection of noises, it is the tune in the composer's head. The noises made by the performers, and heard by the audience, are not the music at all; they are only means by which the audience, if they listen intelligently (not otherwise), can reconstruct for themselves the imaginary tune that existed in the composer's head. [Collingwood, Principles of Art (1938), 7.5]

In both quotes, the central position is that the viewer "reproduces" or "reconstructs" the artist's original intuition through some physical medium, such as the artist's painting or the composer's musical performance. In this sense, the artist is not merely a craftsperson, but rather a visionary, and her artistic creations are just vehicles for transferring her unique artistic intuitions to the viewer. In many ways this view makes sense. When we're done viewing a painting or listening to a musical piece, we retain a conception of it in our minds, and this conception maybe enough to trigger an aesthetic experience of it. The physical manifestation is just a middleman. At the outset of this chapter we discussed The Museum of Non-Visible Art, which aims to do precisely this. There is a written description of the art piece "The Tree of Life", which, in just a few short sentences on the card, is only the minimal way of verbally conveying the artist's intuition directly to the viewer.

          However, there are two problems with the intuitionist's theory, both of which suggest that the location of an art object is more in its physical manifestation than in the conception. First, the artist might not have a clear conception of her artwork until her craftwork is fully complete. With much art, it is a difficult and tedious process of crafting an artistic intuition into some physical medium. Having an idea of a sunset is one thing, but it is another for a painter to articulate it with the right choice of colors and brush strokes, which takes years of intense training. Often, the details of an art piece can only be worked out through its physical manifestation, through trial and error, rough draft after rough draft. In engineering, the designer of an electric motor must at some point set aside mathematical equations, and physically build a prototype to see if it actually works as conceived. The artist, like the engineer, is very much a craftsperson, and the artist herself may not have a clear conception of her artwork until her craftwork is fully complete. This is reflected in a common saying that a work of art is never finished, but only abandoned.

          The second problem is that the intuitions of the artist may be completely irrelevant to the art object. Suppose that Jane composes a musical piece, but, revision after revision, it doesn't come close to what she mentally envisions it to be. She absolutely hates the work because of this failure, but records it anyway, and, to her surprise, it wins awards. Suppose further that this repeats throughout her life: she hates every piece she writes because they fail to capture her intuitions, but they nonetheless are praised as works of artistic genius. Finally, imagine that this is how it is with every artist who ever lived: not a single creation by artists have come close to exemplifying their intuitions, and they all hate what they create. We may call this "the world of self-deprecating artists". In such a world, would their use of the term "art object" have a substantially different meaning from what we in the actual world ordinarily denote by the term "art object"? Probably not, which suggests that we in the actual world associate art objects more with their physical manifestations than the artist's mental intuitions. We should not entirely dismiss the mental intuitions of the artist and viewer, however, since the artist is indeed guided by her own aesthetic vision when creating the work, and, in turn, the viewer responds with her own aesthetic experience of the art object. But it seems natural to place the balance of the location of an art object on its physical manifestation, and not its mental conception.

          The next question we may now ask about an art object is, among its various physical manifestations, which one is most central to its location? That is, is it the preliminary sketch, the first completed version, or later renditions? The short answer is, the closer we get to the first completed version of an artwork, often its public debut, the closer we are to its identity as the original art object. The Parthenon as it currently stands in Athens today is the closest we have to the original, and we make do with that. But imagine that a space-time wormhole opened in Athens, out of which emerged the actual Parthenon of 2,500 years ago. A lucky tourist in Athens could visit both the newly emerged Parthenon in the morning and, later that day, the ruins of the Parthenon as we currently have it. Instantly we would recognize the newly emerged one as the "original" art object, and the ruins as a successor to the original, but not identical to it. Borrowing a concept from copyright law, we can call such a successor a derivative art object, that is, an art object with a secondary status that depends upon an earlier original version. Much of the art we encounter daily is clearly derivative. For example, right now I cannot visit Athens to directly see the Parthenon-in-ruins, so I must accept photographs of it. These photographs are even more distant successors of the original art object. Derivative art objects like these photographs have merit as art objects in and of themselves. However, their value, both aesthetically and monetarily, would clearly be far less than either the original Parthenon, or the derivative Parthenon-in-ruins. In all branches of art there are special terms for derivative art objects, such as copies, replicas, recreations, interpretations, restorations, renovations, revisions, covers, forgeries. Each of these indicate in its own way that a thing is a derivative art object, rather than the original.

          If we push the matter further, we discover what we may call the derivative art object thesis: we are permanently removed from any truly "original" art object, because of the passage of time and the ordinary process of decay, and derivatives are all we can know. This is most evident with aesthetic artifacts like paintings, sculptures and buildings that are primarily fixed three-dimensional things, which inevitably change through the passage of time. There is no wormhole that gives us access to the original Parthenon, and what stands in Athens today is only a descendent of it in ruins. But this is also true of performing arts like music and theatre, and even literature, which are primarily events rather than fixed things. The original Fifth Symphony by Beethoven was defined by the instruments, musical interpretation and cultural context of its day. Historians of music attempt to recreate this based on Beethoven's written performance directions, but it will always be incomplete. A current performance of Beethoven's Fifth is a derivative art object in a whole new context, likewise with a current reading of Mary Shelly's  Frankenstein. American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) argued that the original use and context of an art object is central to its identity. We often place art objects on pedestals, both literally and metaphorically, and, by divorcing them from their social context, radically change what they are. He writes,

When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement. [Art as Experience, 1934, Ch. 1]

Dewy recommends that we think about the original use of art objects when we view them, and thereby reawaken a more authentic aesthetic experience within us. But Dewey's recommendation can go only so far. While we might be brought a little closer to the original art object by better understanding its original context, it is still a little cartoonish, much like how a civil war reenactor represents an actual historical civil war soldier. In the end, it seems that every art object is only a derivative of some original that is no longer accessible.

WHAT IS ART?

Several times already we've noted the wide range of art objects that we create, including paintings, symphonies, buildings, novels. As different as these are from each other, they still all count as "art". This raises the question of whether there is a special feature of art that ties together its unique branches. Is there some definition of art that can answer the question "what is art"? How about this typical dictionary definition:

• Art is a creative activity that results in the production of things such as painting, music, literature and dance.

This would be a good definition to give to a space alien who wanted to know more about Earthlings, since it does accurately separate art from other human activities. However, it's not a good definition for philosophical inquiry for two reasons. First, it mainly lists different types of art objects, which we already know count as art, and thus the definition is circular. Second, it doesn't tell us what unique feature these art objects share. It must be more than simply "creative activity", since this applies to almost everything that humans do. We compulsively create things for food, clothing, shelter, and we create tools for making countless more things. We will look at five philosophical answers to this question, which hold respectively that art is defined by (1) imitation, (2) expression, (3) form, (4) family resemblance, and (5) social institutions.

Imitationism: Representing Things in the World

In art classes from kindergarten onwards, students are asked to draw some object that the teacher places on the front table. Whether it's a fruit bowl, a flower arrangement, or a shoe, the assignment is to copy it. The student's artwork, then, is an imitation or representation of that thing. The imitation theory of art is that all art represents something in the world, either in nature or human behavior. Whether it's visual arts, performing arts or literary arts, each specific branch of art imitates in its own way some aspect of reality that we can perceive. This view is also called the representation theory of art.

          Art as imitation is perhaps the oldest theory of this subject, and was championed in Ancient Greece by both Plato and Aristotle. Plato held that human art is an attempt to copy ultimate realities in the higher realm of the cosmos, such as the perfect model of a chair, horse, or person. He calls these perfect models "Forms". The art is good when it comes close to depicting the truth of the Forms, such as the Form of a perfect chair or perfect person, but bad when it merely attempts to copy imperfect physical things, such as the physical chair. Such paintings of a chair, then, are merely "imitations three times removed from the truth" (Republic, 10). That is, there is, first, the perfect Form of the chair, then, second, the physical chair which is an imperfect copy of the Form, then, third, the painting of the chair, which is an imperfect copy of the physical chair. Aristotle's view of art as imitation was different: human art copies things in the physical world, not things in the higher realm of the so-called Forms as Plato maintained. For Aristotle, art imitates both physical objects, such as chairs, and also human thought and behavior. For example, he states that "dancing imitates character, emotion, and action, by rhythmical movement" (Poetics, 1).

          It is Plato and Aristotle's theories that are most associated with imitation theory, but one of the most systematic modern treatments of the subject was by French philosopher Charles Batteux (1713-1789). The very title of Batteux' book reveals what he is up to: The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (1746). That single principle is imitation. We might think that artists have the ability to fashion their works out of thin air, in an act of total creative freedom. But that is wrong, argues Batteux: "even monsters created by a frenzied imagination in the grip of madness can only be composed of ideas copied from nature" (1. 2). All artistic genius, he argues, draws on observations from nature as the raw material for creativity. Painting most obviously imitates visible objects. Dance, music and literature imitate someone telling a story. He writes,

On the basis of this principle, we can conclude that the arts imitate reality. This imitation must be carefully considered and well informed. The arts do not imitate slavishly. . . . In short, the arts present an imitation of, or a perspective on, reality, not as it is in itself, but as the mind conceives it ought to be. [The Fine Arts,1.3]

For Batteux, the artist does not represent nature as it actually is, but rather as it could be as truly beautiful with all the perfections it could have. Artists enter a state of mind often called "enthusiasm", which is like an intoxication or heavenly vision, in which they transport themselves into the reality that they wish to represent. It is through this shared vision of imitating the beauty of nature that we can identify all the disciplines that fall under the domain of the "fine arts". Painting, sculpture, and dance imitate nature "by means of colors, three-dimensional shapes, and bodily attitudes". Music and poetry do this "by means of sounds or by rhythmic speech".

          Batteux's theory has the honor of being the first to specify the major branches of the "fine arts", which we still hold today: painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, dance. This leaves out other activities, such as the "arts" of cooking, swimming, fishing, teaching, fighting, or a thousand other so-called "arts". Sometimes all of these genuinely fine arts come together in theatrical productions with their set designs, music, dancing and speaking, which reveals the unity they have in imitating nature. Nevertheless, each fine art can stand on its own as an artistic imitation of nature's beauty in its own way.

          So, with his theory that imitation is the single principle of all fine art, has Batteux settled once and for all the philosophical issue of what art is? It is evident that much art is imitative, such as landscape paintings that depict the outdoors, and historical portraits that depict people and events. The problem with Batteux's account, though, is its sweeping claim that all art is imitative, and there are two criticisms that we can make of this.

          First, his claim is trivial since virtually everything that we think, say or do is fashioned out of experience of the world around us. The entire educational process, from birth to formal schooling, to career training, is a process of copying knowledge from our teachers and, if we are creative enough, modifying that content in interesting ways, just as the painter does. In our common lives this mimicking is reflected in the language we speak, the daily routines we follow, how we spend our money, how we entertain ourselves. We are always imitating. There is no escaping that all our thoughts and activities are creative copies of prior experiences. This is the view of John Locke who famously wrote,

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience. [Essay, 2.1]

Imitation theorists like Aristotle and Batteux may be accurately describing the psychological process that artists go through. However, on Locke's reasoning, this is a process that we all experience every waking moment of our lives, and it is in no way unique to the fine arts. To identify art with imitation, then, is unhelpful since we could say that about any task. Thus, the art imitationist's claim is trivial.

          The second criticism of imitation theory is that it is unconfirmable. There is a wide gap between (1) art activity that is transparently imitative, like landscape paintings, and (2) art activity that is only remotely imitative and even undetectable. Batteux acknowledged this gap himself when describing the range of human emotions that are imitated in music:

It is true, someone might say, that there are some emotions that we recognize in a piece of music. Love, joy, and sadness are examples. But for each readily identifiable expressive passage, there are a thousand others where we cannot say what is expressed. [The Fine Arts, 3.3]

Batteux tries to solve this problem by saying that, even if we cannot name these emotions, "it is enough that we feel the emotion". But it is here that his theory looks suspicious. If we can't identify which type of aesthetic emotion we are experiencing, then we don't know what, if anything, the music is copying. Maybe the music is just triggering some generic pleasurable experience within us, without imitating any specific human emotion. As an analogy, if I look at a fuzzy photograph that has no identifiable image, it's a stretch to say that it is a representation of my aunt Ella. With art pieces that are only remotely imitative, imitation theory seems more like an untestable hypothesis where nothing can confirm it, rather than being an actual theory that can be demonstrated through evidence.

          While imitation theory may fail to be the single principle behind all the fine arts, it does highlight one important fact about art: much if it is a deliberate attempt to creatively imitate something in nature or human behavior.

Expressivism: Communicating Emotions

A favorite work of visual art is Edvard Munch's "The Scream", which is often reproduced on wall posters, T-shirts, and coffee cups. It depicts a ghostly person walking across a bridge, hands over his ears, shrieking. Our immediate reaction is to ask, What happened to the screamer? What's the artist trying to say? Might this actually be about me? What "The Scream" appears to do overtly, the expressivist theory holds that all works of art do at some level, and this is what all fields of art have in common. Just to be clear, "expressivism" as a theory of art should not be confused with the twentieth-century modern art movement called "expressionism", spelled slightly differently. Our concern here isn't with any particular art style or movement, but rather a claim about something that is presumably essential to all works of art. According to the theory of expressivism, art involves the communication of some emotional content through an art object. We will look at two influential expressivist theories here.

          First is a theory held by Aristotle that we may call cathartic expressivism, which is that artworks help viewers express their bottled-up emotions.  When I view "The Scream," this gives me the opportunity to vent my own fears or anxieties. Aristotle uses two words to depict this expressive experience: catharsis and purgation. Both, though, have the same point: art prompts us to vent certain emotions, often unpleasant ones. Aristotle discusses this specifically with music and theatre, but these two art forms are so diverse that his theory could apply equally well to painting, sculpture, or architecture. Here is what he says about it with music:

Some people who listen to sacred music to soothe their mind, are made as sedate and composed as if they had employed the skill of the physician. So too with people influenced by compassion and fear, and others who have a very emotional nature. Indeed, everyone, as far as they are affected with those emotions, admit of the same cure, and are restored to pleasing tranquility. Similarly, all music that has the power to purify gives innocent pleasure to everyone.  [Politics, 8.7]

For some people, music is like a drug that can free them of emotional burdens, and through that purging brings them pleasure. The music itself doesn't need to be sad or terrifying, but it at least must strike the right chord, so to speak, to have the right impact. Think about the times that you've listened to a musical passage and got chills down your spine. In those moments, released within you is a strange mixture of joy and sadness. It can have a therapeutic cleansing effect that makes it easier to face the day. Aristotle is not necessarily claiming that emotional purging is the only characteristic of art, or even that it always takes place with every art encounter. But it does show how art can trigger the expression of feelings within the viewer.

          The second expressivist theory, which we may call artist-viewer expressivism, is that art expresses the artist's emotions and communicates them to the viewer. We've already seen this with the Croce-Collingwood theory of the aesthetic object, where the artist's feelings are communicated to the viewer through the art object. We will consider here, though, a version of this theory by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) which, in its simplest form, is that art is the infectious communication of emotions through some created object. Art, he argues, is not the manifestation of perfect beauty as Plato said, nor a venue for releasing our stored-up energy as Aristotle said. It is also not an instrument of pleasure. Rather, it is a means of communication between people. Every work of art, says Tolstoy, causes the viewer to enter into a certain kind of relationship with both the artist as well as every other viewer of that artwork throughout history. There is a uniqueness to this artistic form of communication in that, while through words we principally transmit our thoughts, but through art artists transmit their feelings. The transmission of these feelings is infectious, just as when one person laughs a nearby observer will also laugh. Tolstoy's full definition of art is this:

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling -- this is the activity of art. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands onto others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by those feelings and also experience them. [What is Art? 1897, Ch. 5]

Many things fit this definition of art beyond what is contained in museums or theatres. This would also include home decor, clothing and kitchen utensils. But, Tolstoy argues, when we think of "fine art" properly speaking, this is a specially selected subset that likely had its origin in religious practices. It is through this higher art that we join people together in the same feelings, even if those people lived thousands of years apart. This, he says, is "indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity."

          There are important differences between Aristotle's and Tolstoy's expressivist theories. For Aristotle, the viewer's emotional reaction is only triggered by the artwork, and it has mainly a therapeutic effect. With Tolstoy, the emotional reaction is passed from the artist to the viewer through the artwork, and the experience has mainly a bonding effect with other people. What the two have in common is art's capacity to excite special emotions within people who are in contact with an artwork. Is this a good explanation of what art is? It is clear that artworks can and do excite emotions. But the critical question is whether this is the defining feature of all art, or even most art.

          Maybe not, and here is the problem. Expressivism depicts an emotional reaction that is too melodramatic and unrepresentative of what the vast majority of art lovers experience. Imagine that I hired an amateur actor to dramatize his emotional reaction to the Mona Lisa. He stands before the painting with one fist clenched to his chest, and says in a trembling voice, "I ne'er saw true beauty till this night!" I then hire an evangelist to react to "The Scream". He thrusts forward the palm of one hand and shouts, "In the name of all that is good and holy, I rebuke you!" I then hire a yoga instructor to react to Van Gogh's "Starry Night". She holds her arms outward, closes her eyes and says serenely, "Breathe deep the gathering gloom, watch lights fade in every room." These are the sorts of cartoonish emotional reactions to art that expressivists seem to have in mind. Ecstasy, hysteria, rapture, euphoria, tranquil bliss, mystical union. The reality is that the typical art experience is much more subdued, and, if verbalized, the art viewer might say simply, "that's pretty neat", or "that's cool", conceivably with little or no emotion. Human emotions, we know, are associated with the release of hormones. Suppose that we took blood samples of true art lovers as they viewed artistic masterpieces. Would we expect to find a higher than normal level of emotion hormones? Probably not. Even if art viewers have some type of unique aesthetic experience that is sometimes extreme, the typical experience may be only minimally emotional, and possibly not emotional at all. Instead, it may be dominated by some non-emotional mental state or collection of states. Thus, emotional expression may be a secondary feature of what art is about, but not the defining feature.

Formalism: Art for Art's Sake

Suppose that you are looking at Joseph Turner's painting "The Shipwreck", which depicts a boat capsizing in a sea storm. You can almost feel the mist spraying from the massive waves as they jolt the ship in every direction. You feel the desperation of the crew as they hold on for dear life. You also see metaphorically how, like the ship's crew, you too are subject to cataclysmic events outside your control that at any moment can upend your life and everything you hold dear. Powerful imagery! Art in all its branches has the capacity to convey emotions and messages like this that can radically change how you view the world. Is this what art is ultimately all about? "Yes", says imitation and expression theory, but "no" says the theory of formalism. While it is true that art can be about these sorts of thoughts and feelings, formalism holds that art itself has nothing to do with these. According to formalism, art is about the purely visual or auditory components of the artwork that are alterable, not about what it represents or its relationship to the larger world. Art is intrinsic to the art object itself, not extrinsic to the world outside of it. In visual art, all that matters are the lines, colors, and the emotional reaction that we have to these alone. In music, it's about the notes and our emotional reaction to these alone. The formalist view is encapsulated in the motto "art for art's sake", coined by a nineteenth-century French art theorist. Genuine art, then, is divorced from any content that might accompany it.

          The first full-blown theory of formalism was developed by English art critic Clive Bell (1881-1964), and it is he who first used the word "form" to express the view. Pick any art object you like, the quality it has in common with all other art objects is what Bell calls its "significant form":

What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? Only one answer seems possible— significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way; certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call 'Significant Form'; and 'Significant Form' is the one quality common to all works of visual art. [Art, 1915, 1.1]

Bell was an historian by training, not a philosopher, and his choice of the word "form" departs from the usual philosophical meaning of the term. When philosophers hear the word "form", such as with the "form of a boat", they immediately think of Plato or Aristotle's view that form is the essence of a thing, or the defining characteristic of a thing, independent of a boat's particular and changeable features. Bell means almost the opposite of this: significant form in art consists only of an object's particulars, such as a particular paintings lines and colors, or arrangements of notes in a song, with no larger meaning beyond these. Bell himself asks, what is the particular significance of a boat? It is certainly not that of, say, a cargo ship. Rather, he says, "imagine a boat in complete isolation, detach it from man and his urgent activities and fabulous history" (4.1). All that remains is its pure form, that is, the sensible qualities that make it up.  Bell argues that all branches of art, whether painting or music or poetry, are tied together because they involve an emotional response to an artwork's significant form. He challenges whether those who disagree "can discover any other quality of which the same can be said" (ibid).

          There are three central themes in Bell's theory of significant form as he develops it. First, we do not need to give the psychological reasons behind what makes specific lines, colors or notes aesthetically pleasing, but only recognize that they are so. He admits it is natural for us to ask about art objects, "Why are we so profoundly moved by forms related in a particular way?" The question, he says, is interesting, but irrelevant to art itself, and we must only consider the art object and our emotional reaction to it. Even what the artist herself intended about the artwork is irrelevant: "for the purposes of aesthetics we have no right, neither is there any necessity, to pry behind the object into the state of mind of him who made it." It is not even the job of aesthetics to identify the underlying psychological laws are that give rise to an aesthetic experience, and it sufficient to recognize that "forms arranged and combined according to certain unknown and mysterious laws do move us in a particular way" (ibid).

          Second, we must distinguish between the truly art-related emotions that people have to paintings versus their non-art-related emotions. Bell recognizes that many works overtly describe historical events or human emotions, such as paintings of battles or rulers. However, he says, these do not count as works of art since it is not their forms themselves that bring out our emotions, but merely "the ideas or information suggested or conveyed by their forms that affect us" (ibid). These kinds of representational works, he believes, display a weakness in the artist, for, "a painter too feeble to create forms that provoke more than a little aesthetic emotion will try to eke that little out by suggesting the emotions of life." Often, he says, we "can tell by the quality of a single line whether or no a man is a good artist" (ibid), or merely a skilled craftsperson who makes convincing representations. A similar deficiency arises within viewers of art, when, for example, they are only moved by the romantic elements of a works. For example, you might find painted portraits beautiful only because the people depicted in them are beautiful; or, you might appreciate romantic poetry only because it reminds you of your first love; or, you might only enjoy music that is associated with courtship. With such viewers, he states, "the sexual flavour of the word [beauty] is stronger than the aesthetic" sense of beauty.

          Third, the truly aesthetic emotional response we have to an artwork's significant form may vary greatly depending on our expertise in that branch of art. A musician, for example, will be better equipped than a non-musician to recognize and respond to the note arrangements in a piece of music. The term "philistine" is often used to describe people who, for one reason or another, are incapable of understanding or appreciating the nuances of fine art. A philistine might say, for example, "I only like pictures of tractors and horses". A philistine for Bell would be the person who emotionally responds to only the representational elements of an artwork, and not to its significant form. Bell himself admits that his knowledge of music is vastly inferior to his knowledge of visual arts. Sometimes, he says, he can have a pure aesthetic emotional response to a musical passage, but in a much less intense way than a musician would. However, he continues, because of his limitations, he reads human emotions into musical works, like "terror and mystery, love and hate", and spends much time dwelling on these confused and inferior feelings. These same limitations are also present in viewers of visual arts, although the typical viewer is less likely to admit it. He thus suggests that "others should be as honest about their feelings for pictures as I have been about mine for music" (ibid).

          There is a tidiness to Bell's theory of formalism that is compelling. Art is a complex entanglement of differing art objects and experiences, and Bell simplifies the matter by eliminating all extraneous components and reducing the matter to only our pure emotional response to an artwork's significant form. This allows us to identify works of art in all its branches, and it gives validity to newer styles, like abstract art, that are less representational than traditional styles. What could be bad about that?

          There are two problems. First, by focusing specifically on the lines, colors or notes of the art object, formalism goes against a common rule of art that, it is essential to any art to conceal the technique by which an artwork is achieved. As the Roman poet Ovid originally stated it, "true art is to conceal art" (artis est celare artem). Imagine, for example, an actor on stage reading his lines while holding the script in his hand pointing to each word, or a conductor explaining to the audience the musical technique of a piece during the performance itself, or a painting that has stick-on notes explaining the artist's line and color choices. These are all elements of art that should be hidden within the are pieces, and singling them out distracts from their value and impact. While these aspects may all be relevant to critical evaluations of the art pieces, it should be secondary to the art lover's experience itself. Formalism does something like this, but in a less obvious way: the viewer is reacting to the effectiveness of the artwork's components, rather than to the work as a whole.

          The second problem with formalism is that, the essence of art may very well reside in the complexity that Bell is trying to eliminate. As an analogy, suppose I take an elaborately prepared plate of spaghetti, and, one after another, dismiss each of the ingredients as peripheral, until all that's left are the noodles. Yes, a pile of noodles would still constitute a plate of spaghetti, and they may taste good by themselves, but it would be a pretty one-dimensional experience. Part of the joy of art is linking an artwork with its subject matter, along with the historical context of the piece, the life of the artist, how art critics have responded to it, its influence on culture, how reproductions of it fit into our own lives, and maybe even taking a pilgrimage to a museum to see the original. Human experiences and emotions blend together, in much the way that multiple food ingredients and spices do, and isolating a pure aesthetic experience as Bell suggests may be going in the wrong direction. Art gains its identity by expanding its impact, rather than reducing it. Return to Turner's painting "The Shipwreck" and your emotional reactions to it. A formalist might accuse you of being a philistine because your emotional response was mainly a sympathetic reaction to the crew on the capsizing boat. However, that's precisely what Turner hoped to achieve, and it seems that the work as an art piece becomes richer because of this added human experience, beyond just the emotions stemming from line and color.

Family Resemblance Theory: Non-Exclusive Common Features

So far we've looked at theories that define art as imitation of nature, expression of emotion, and significant form. Each of these has problems that are serious enough to remove them from the contest of what art is mainly about. We might also try to define art in terms of some other aesthetic feature that we've discussed earlier, such as that all art involves a unique aesthetic attitude of distancing, or a unique aesthetic experience of pleasure. But, as we've seen, these characteristics of art also have major problems. Is there any other central feature of art that we've overlooked that might define what art is about?

          To answer this, let's take another trip to the art warehouse to conduct new test. Again, you are adequately trained in all branches of art, and your first task is to put a white sticker on every item that your common sense tells you is an art object. For your next task, you select your favorite definition of art, such as imitationism, and put a black sticker on every object that you think is imitative. If your favorite definition of art succeeds, then both the white and black stickers will be on exactly the same objects. That is, each object will both match your commonsense intuitions which tell you what art is, and at the same time be imitative. But this test will certainly fail, since, for whatever definition of art you choose, there will be some art object that has only one of the two stickers, that is, an object which your common sense tells you is art, yet is not, for example, imitative. We of course wouldn't know this for sure unless we've conducted this test on every conceivable definition of art, which is impractical. But the point of this thought experiment is that, based on the famous definitions of art that we've so far devised, our track record for passing the warehouse test is pretty bad, and we have no reason to expect a dark horse definition to magically appear that will finally succeed. Thus, it seems unlikely that we will ever find any definition of art that applies to all and only art objects.

          Where does that leave us with our understanding of what art is? There are two main options that are sometimes called "de-definitions" of art, that is, loose explanations of art that fall short of precise definitions.

          First is the family resemblance de-definition, which says that genuine art objects have some common art-related features, but no single feature that is present in them all. The metaphor of "family resemblance" was introduced by Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1899-1951), in reference to members of the same family who clearly look related to each other, yet lack any single attribute that all members have. Some but not all family members will have dad's ears, others but not all will have mom's eyes, and so on for a dozen or so prominent physical features. With each family member, then, they have enough common features to fit into a family resemblance, yet no single feature is shared by all. This concept of family resemblance was specifically applied to the definition of art by American philosopher Morris Weitz (1916-1981). He argues that, when indicating family resemblances with art,

certain (paradigm) cases can be given, about which there can be no question as to their being correctly described as "art" or "game," but no exhaustive set of cases can be given. I can list some cases and some conditions under which I can apply correctly the concept of art but I cannot list all of them, for the all-important reason that unforeseeable or novel conditions are always forthcoming or envisageable. ["The Role of Theory in Aesthetics" 1956]

The conditions that frequently recur, he says, can be called "criteria of recognition" of artworks. To illustrate, let's take a final trip to the art warehouse. Your task this time is to place a yellow sticker on all objects that are imitative, then a blue sticker on ones that are emotionally expressive, a red sticker on ones exhibiting significant form, and so on for any feature that you commonly associate with art. Eventually we'd see a cluster of objects that have a lot of colored stickers, but not every color. Those objects with the most stickers would be paradigm art objects, like the Mona Lisa, and those with fewer might be experimental pieces of art, like Andre's stack of bricks or "The Museum of Non-Visible Art". Some objects with the fewest stickers might not count as art at all, like a box of nails or a can of paint.

          Thus, rather than rejecting outright the traditional theories of art such as imitationism, we should bring them all into the fold of features that contribute to family resemblances within art, and even identify more features when needed.  By doing so, we will better explain why some experimental artworks indeed count as genuine art. Art, says Weitz, is an "open concept" in that "new art forms, new movements will emerge, which will demand decisions" about whether the notion of art should be extended to include these.

          Weitz's family resemblance de-definition of art is an effective way to address the individual failures of each of the traditional definitions of art. However, it faces a criticism that we may call the "doppelganger problem". If you do an image search of the word "doppelganger", you will find pictures of two people who appear to be identical twins, but are completely unrelated. They by sheer accident have enough "family features" in common to be mistaken for clones of each other. The parallel with art theory is that we could envision that two objects in the art warehouse have exactly the same family resemblance criteria of recognition, yet one would be art and the other not. As an example, take an organ fugue written by Bach, and a computer-generated musical composition created though machine learning. Here a programmer would input many examples of Bach's fugues, and instruct the computer to create something similar without directly stealing any passages. In actual experiments like this, the results have been startling, and we could easily see how the Bach piece and the computer piece would have exactly the same colored stickers. Yet people are reluctant to call the computer piece a work of "art", and thus we have a doppelganger problem. The way out for Weitz would be to hunt for some as yet undiscovered family resemblance characteristic (a new colored sticker) that the Bach piece exhibits but the computer piece lacks. However, the problem is that, as new experimental art pieces arise, we either end up with a game of cat and mouse where we endlessly proliferate new family resemblance characteristics of art, or we hit a brick wall where our best list of artistic family resemblances do not match our intuitions of art. Thus, something other than family resemblance characteristics must step in and solve doppelganger problems like the computer-generated piece.

Institutional Theory: Agreement by Art Institutions

The second de-definition of art is the institutional definition, proposed by George Dickie, which states that art is that which is accepted as such by authorities of art. Like Weitz, Dickie believes that the traditional definitions of art fail because they do not pick out a unique feature that applies to all and only art works. He writes,

 A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the art-world). [Art and the Aesthetic, 1974, Ch. 1]

Consider, Dickie says, the paintings done by Betsy the chimpanzee that were exhibited in the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History. "We must say that these paintings are not works of art" since it was the wrong institutional setting. However, the paintings might be considered "art" if they were instead displayed up the road at the Chicago Art Institute, which is the appropriate social institution. The art-world which makes these decisions consists of "a bundle of systems" each providing an institutional background for "the conferring of the status" of appreciation upon objects within its domain. Thus, there is a system for each of the visual arts, performing arts, and literary arts.

          A major difficulty with Dickie's institutional definition is what we may call the "tyrannical institution problem", where the social institution that confers art status could be hijacked by a larger tyrannical social system that forces its own unique agenda. We could imagine a system of art that, on religious grounds, prohibits any representational work, whether it's of people, houses, trees, mountains, and instead only permits geometrical designs. We could also imagine a system that accepts only art that prioritizes the group over the individual, and rejects everything that promotes the individual. So too with systems that restrict art to that which brings praise to the emperor. These of course are all tyrannical systems which we would find repugnant in a society with free expression. Nevertheless, as we know about tyrannies of all sorts, they contain armies of devotees that internalize the party line to such an inflexible degree that it makes these people impossible to reason with. This problem with tyrannical art systems doesn't necessarily mean that Dickie's institutional theory of art is either wrong or unhelpful. It just means that it is tied to cultural relativism and all its disadvantages. The disadvantage here is that culture has the capacity to radically redefined the institution of art, making it almost unrecognizable.

          Thus, both Weitz's and Dickie's de-definitions of art have problems. However, by combining the two theories together, we may address their respective weaknesses, where one theory speaks to the limitations of the other. Consider what we may call a resemblance-institutional de-definition of art. On this view, over time art institutions have identified a list of family resemblance features that serve as rules for what we call "art". It cautiously weeds out some that have proven inviable, and cautiously adds new ones as new needs arise. However, when problem cases of art arise, the institution determines which side is the victor, that is, it determines whether a specific work does or doesn't count as art. This addresses the doppelganger problem that plagued Weitz's family resemblance theory. For, a social system of baroque music theorists would determine whether or not to confer legitimacy upon the computer piece. Baroque theorists haven't done this so far, but perhaps some future social system of computer music theorist might. In this way, the task of art institutions is to pass judgment on problem cases of art where family resemblance alone can't settle the issue.

          The resemblance-institutional de-definition also addresses the criticism of Dickie's theory that an art institution could be redefined by a larger tyrannical social system. For, when such tyrannies do arise, art critics from surrounding countries dismiss these tyrannical views of art, since they discard too may tried and true family resemblance rules, and whimsically replace them with their own. No art institution has free reign over what counts as art: they are under a mandate to preserve traditional rules as much as possible. As such, they must respect historical precedent, and acknowledge that a fixed body of traditional artworks indeed continues to count as "art", even when society changes. In that respect, a tyrannical system of art is no system of art at all. An advantage of this resemblance-institutional de-definition of art is that in many situations it moves beyond theory, and is descriptive of how the artworld actually works. When tyrannical social and political systems have arisen in parts of the world and attempt to redefine what counts as art, the other parts of the world recognize the tyranny, dismiss it, and continue upholding the traditional standards of art anyway.  When the tyranny finally collapses, normal standards of art are quickly restored there.

          In this chapter we have covered several philosophies of art about beauty, aesthetics and "what is art". It is surprising how diverse and complex these views are, considering that art is something that we all take for granted in our daily lives. The best part about this, though, is that these issues do not carry the same urgency as other philosophical disputes, such as with religion, free will, ethics, and politics. Some philosophical views are literally matters of life and death, and people have been prisoned, exiled or even executed because of the philosophical views they held. Philosophies of art are less consequential. The true benefit of these philosophies is that they are almost like works of art themselves. There is a free manipulation and testing of different theories that always draws on our experiences of actual artworks, like the Mona Lisa. In this respect philosophies of art are like a collage of individual artworks, emotions, reflections, and shifting principles for organizing these. This allows for a greater ease and freedom of philosophical speculation that is not present in other branches of philosophy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Addison, Joseph. Spectator, 409, June 19, 1712.

Aristotle. Poetics, 1.

Aristotle. Politics, 8.7.

Augustine. Against the Manicheans, 15.39.

Augustine. City of God, 22.24.

Augustine. Confessions, 12.2.

Augustine. On Music, 6.14.

Batteux, Charles. The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (1746), 1.3, 3.3.

Beardsley, Monroe. "Aesthetic Experience Regained." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 28 (1961).

Bell, Clive. Art (1915), 1.1, 4.1.

Bullough, Edward. "'Psychic Distance' as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle." British Journal of Psychology, 5 (1912).

Collingwood, Robin George. Principles of Art (1938), 7.5.

Croce, Benedetto. The Essence of the Aesthetic (1921), p. 8.

Darwin, Charles. Descent of Man (1871) 1.3.

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of the Species (1859) Ch. 6.

Dewey, John. Art as Experience (1934), Ch. 1.

Dickie, George. "The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude." American Philosophical Quarterly, 1 (1964).

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Dutton, Denis. The Art Instinct (Bloomsbury Press: 2009).

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Kennick¸William E. "Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?" Mind, 67 (1958).

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), 2.1.

Moore, George Edward. Principia Ethica (1903), 6.113.

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Reid, Thomas. Essays on the Intellectual Powers (1785), 8.4.5.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations (1953), Sect. 67.

STUDY QUESTIONS

Please answer all 21 of the following questions.

1. Describe the theories of subjectivism and objectivism, and give the evidence for each.

2. What are the two oversights regarding the false dilemma between subjectivism and objectivism, and how does culturalism in art differ from culturalism in ethics?

3. What is the beauty-goodness theory and its two central features?

4. Describe Augustine's and Moore's respective versions of the beauty-goodness theory.

5. Describe taste theory and its three features.

6. What is Locke's subjectivist view of value-taste, and what is Reid's objectivist criticism of it?

7. According to Darwin, how does sexual selection give rise to the lower sense of beauty in animals, and what is his explanation of the higher sense of beauty in humans?

8. What examples does Dutton give to support his theory of an evolutionary-based art instinct, and what are the universal signatures of that instinct?

9. Describe Kant's theory of aesthetic disinterestedness and Bullough's view of over and under-distancing.

10. What are Dickie's two criticisms of the aesthetic attitude of distancing?

11. Explain the difference between direct and indirect descriptions of aesthetic experiences, and give Beardsley's indirect description of it.

12. What is Kennick's warehouse test, and what are the four problems that it reveals about indirect aesthetic experiences?

13. Describe the intuitionist theory of aesthetic objects and the two problems with it.

14. What is a derivative art object and what is the derivative art object thesis?

15. Describe Batteux's imitation theory of art and the two criticisms of it.

16 Describe Aristotle's cathartic expressivism, Tolstoy's Artist-viewer expressivism, and the criticism of expressivism.

17. What is formalisim and what are the three central themes of Bell's version of it?

18. What are the two criticisms of formalism?

19. Describe Weitz's family resemblance de-definition of art, and the criticism of it.

20 Describe Dickie's institutional de-definition of art and the criticism of it.

[Short Essay]

21. Short essay: pick any one of the following views in this chapter and criticize it in a minimum of 100 words: Subjectivism, objectivism and culturalism in artistic beauty; Augustine or Moore's theory of beauty-goodness; Lockean subjectivist value-taste theory; Reid's objectivist value-taste theory; Darwin's higher sense of beauty; Dutton's universal signatures of an art instinct; Bullough's theory of aesthetic attitude distancing; Dickie's criticism of the aesthetic attitude; Beardsley's theory of aesthetic experience; Kennick's warehouse test; intuitionist theory of art objects; Batteux's imitation definition of art; Aristotle's cathartic expressivism; Tolstoy's artist-viewer expressivism; Bell's formalist definition of art; Weitz's family resemblance de-definition of art; Dickie's institutional de-definition of art.