Walton, Kendall (Encyclopedia of Aesthetics entry)

A conversation about Categories of Art, Transparent Pictures, Mimesis as Make-Believe, and much more.

e IRENE]. WINTER I n the wider arena of the waves) in which the arts and the sciences generate appropriate tenus and concepts to be used as instruments in analytical operations, the term/concept "style" occupies a rather special place: applicable both to the ways in which the operations are undertaken' and [0 describable characteristics of the objects of analysis. In the present chapter. I wish [0 pursue, on the one hand, the lack of discreet boundaries between "style" as it is manifest in a work and subject rnatter-chence. Content and meaning-and, on the other hand, the henneneuric problems raised by attempts to correlate style and meaning through "stylistic analysis" as operationalized in art history. I have chosen my tenus carefully to mirror the language used for certain mathematteal operations, as I believe the analogy holds well, and in the hope it will raise questions of methodology common to both the sciences and the humanities. To the extent * The general issues dealt with in this paper were presented in a College An Assoctanon panel in 1957. Ahhou~h the case studies used have not changed since then. I am most grateful for this opporrumrv to reformulate the rmHem. I would also like to thank a number of graduate students. now colleagues, ..... ho ever the yean have rut their /:,,,><1 minJ.' to nuanced delinitions of style; many will see echoes of themselves in what is presented here. In r.lnicuhr.1 would cite

Versopolis, 2018

The paper explores the origin of confusion that rules much of the (visual) art world today. How have we arrived at the situation that the same group of contemporary artists are deemed geniuses by one group of critics, curators, theorists and collectors and total hacks by another group of critics, curators, theorists and collectors? While omiting the question of taste as the possible reason for this dispute - the discussion on taste is impossible anyway - the paper looks deeper into how the confusion arose.

The present paper discusses the possibility that aesthetic perception and interpretation reveal themselves as mutually inclusive within the same aesthetic experience of art in a non-trivial way. It will take its point of departure from Hans-Georg Gadamer and Nöel Carroll. Although they belong to different traditions, both philosophers nonetheless coincide in their indication that the experience of art overflows the region of perception and enjoyment of the aesthetic qualities of works of art. Yet while Gadamer subordinates aesthetic perception and maintains that the experience of art is necessarily hermeneutical, Carroll proposes that the aesthetic and the hermeneutical are two equally genuine responses to art. My claim is that perceptual elements in a work of art are decisive for interpretation, and that this should be properly considered when examining the aesthetic experience of art.

Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine, New York/Sao Paulo, #issue 4, 2019, 73-87, 2019

How does an audience receive a work of art? Does the experience only affect the viewer or does it have an effect and thus influence his or her actions? It is the cultural philosopher Ernst Cassirer and his successors in philosophy and developmental psychology as well as in neuroscience to this day who postulate that perception in general and perception of art in particular are not neutral in their origins but alive and thus meaningful. They assume that both are based on analogous principles: in the perception of moving forms and spatial forms in the world and rhythms of forms, colors, light and shadow in art. In practice, this means that perception and its felt effects have an effect on the feelings of the viewer and thus help him to inform himself directly and intensively about the world through art. In contrast to this general epistemological aesthetic theory, which philosophers in particular accept, it is to be shown that this assumption must redefined not with reference to the world, but with reference to art and design. For the latter, the approach will be extended to a semiotic theory. The background is that in contrast to the world, the designed forms and thus the designed intentions of the artist and designer or his client in relation to the chosen theme have an impact on the viewer and thus on culture and its communicative dynamics.

We praise certain artworks for their profundity and subtlety, for the insights they provide or for how they make us see the world anew and we think these features are artistically relevant. We criticize other works for their shallowness, superficiality or sentimentality and think them thus artistically flawed. These are artistic evaluations that seem also to be, or to depend on, cognitive evaluations. Aesthetic cognitivism takes such features of our evaluations of artworks seriously. It is best thought of as a conjunction of an epistemic and an aesthetic claim: 1

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2003

The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2004

European Journal of Philosophy, 2002

and led them to create in Harrison's words, a "studio filled up with large pictures of cunts." And he continues, "For a while, it was these, rather than the process of masking, that claimed autonomy of a kind, though-if this is not a contradiction-it was in their very stylistic degeneracy that their self-sufficiency seemed to lie" (p. 137). This gives a sample of Harrison's somewhat unusual style of art writing. "Masking" refers to the coverings that were made to hide the original Courbet painting from a viewer who might be shocked; it also refers to the coy attitudes of Khali-Bey, who commissioned it and hid it behind a landscape of Courbet, and to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, into whose possession it came and who hid it behind a painting by Andre Masson (p. 135). At least there are moments of entertainment hidden in this history of art! The final section, "Whose Looking," raises questions that have preoccupied several American aestheticians. Harrison, rather than musing over the end of art, as we do, titles his essay "Painting and The Death of The Spectator" (pp. 171-191). He begins with this provocative statement: "The question whether anyone should persist with painting as an art hangs over this book, as of many others concerned with the practical and theoretical circumstances of art in general at the end of the twentieth century and the outset of the twenty first" (p. 171). Conditions that, in his opinion, would justify painting into the future would be reasons to "persist with the making of pictures," and an audience who would find them "edifying." He is frightened by the production of "blank painting" in our time and seems to be haunted by the Balzac story, "The Unknown Masterpiece." Underlying his anxiety is the conviction that painting must realize "imaginative perception" through which it delivers both knowledge and strong feeling to the viewer. That is, he sees the need for theory to be generated within and through painting itself and not imposed upon it by philosophical ideas of the sort that modernism itself tried to escape. It will be helpful to the reader if Harrison's examples are set alongside Danto's example of a set of red rectangles, intended to demonstrate the role of theory in interpretation of a set of objects exactly alike (see The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, chap. 1). Harrison's response to this problem is the statement, "If any blank surface can be 'a painting' ... how can painting any longer claim to be the occasion for significant acts of critical discrimination?" (p. 181). In contrast, Danto's analysis shows that painting itself generates philosophical interpretations, and often must be interpreted by the viewer through a philosophical structure. Harrison, whose presuppositions are different from Danto's, insists that painting is a "socially significant activity ... that involves cooperation, exchange, self-criticism, and learning," all contributing to what he calls "a culture of ideological resistence" (p. 173). What he means, I think, is that painting must, in a kind of Deweyan sense, be actively fruitful in the lives of the perceiver. And if that is no longer possible, then painting is at an end, or should be given up. One gets the impression that Harrison feels bereft in the postmodern-anythinggoes world he sees about him and that the Art & Language movement sees itself in its explorations as marking the end of a historical process culminating in the death of the spectator.

According to R. G. Collingwood in The Principles of Art, art is the expression of emotion-a much-criticized view. I attempt to provide some groundwork for a defensible modern version of such a theory via some novel further criticisms of Collingwood, including the exposure of multiple ambiguities in his main concept of expression of emotion, and a demonstration that, surprisingly enough, his view is unable to account for genuinely creative artistic activities. A key factor in the reconstruction is a replacement of the concept of expression with that of interpretation: what artists do is to interpret, rather than express, their initial emotions, in creative ways that may go far beyond their initial impulses. Thus more broadly the paper attempts to show that the concept of interpretation is just as central to understanding artistic creativity as it is in the analysis of the critical appreciation of artworks. In this paper I shall provide some groundwork for an attempt to rehabilitate an expression theory of art, which is similar in some ways to that proposed by R. G. Collingwood.

Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions. After revealing flaws in the psychological approach, we introduce a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation. This framework demonstrates that a science of art appreciation must investigate how appreciators process causal and historical information to classify and explain their psychological responses to art. Expanding on research about the cognition of artifacts, we identify three modes of appreciation: basic exposure to an artwork, the artistic design stance, and artistic understanding. The artistic design stance, a requisite for artistic understanding, is an attitude whereby appreciators develop their sensitivity to art-historical contexts by means of inquiries into the making, authorship, and functions of artworks. We defend and illustrate the psycho-historical framework with an analysis of existing studies on art appreciation in empirical aesthetics. Finally, we argue that the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure can be amended to meet the requirements of the framework. We conclude that scientists can tackle fundamental questions about the nature and appreciation of art within the psycho-historical framework.