I identify two mutually exclusive notions of formalism in Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement: a thin concept of aesthetic formalism and a thick concept of aesthetic formalism. Arguably there is textual support for both concepts in Kant’s third critique. I offer interpretations of three key elements in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement which support a thick formalism. The three key elements are: Harmony of the Faculties, Aesthetic Ideas and Sensus Communis. I interpret these concepts in relation to the conditions for (...) theoretical Reason, the conditions for moral motivation and the conditions for intersubjectivity, respectively. I conclude that there is no support for a thin concept of aesthetic formalism when the key elements of Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement are understood in the context of his broader critical aims. (shrink)

This chapter presents the formalist account of the moral status of an artwork as an aesthetically significant and autonomous form, with due emphasis on the Anglo-American art-for-art’s-sake aesthetic, as it developed between 1870 and 1960. The author shows that the formalist art-is-above-morals approach is a substantive moral stance in itself. Formalist aesthetics is usually presented in the literature as evincing a purist indifference to ethics, construing moral properties as external to art, in opposition to the internal pure properties of art’s (...) composition. The chapter demonstrates that this is a misrepresentation of the complex formalist prescriptive idea of the relations between art and ethics. Through its autonomy and imperviousness to external co-opting—which is accomplished by due focus on aesthetic form—art on the formalist account is held to be a paradigm of the liberalist principles of individual freedom and self-fulfillment, thus an inherent means to the good. (shrink)

Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton—born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a (...) broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton, “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367, 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton, “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–25, 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18(1): 67–72, 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity. His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. (shrink)

In the past 60 years or so, the philosophical subject of artistic expression has generally been handled as an inquiry into the artistic expression of emotion. In my view this has led to a distortion of the relevant territory, to the artistic expression of feeling’s too often being overlooked. I explicate the emotion-feeling distinction in modern terms, and urge that the expression of feeling is too central to be waived off as outside the proper philosophical subject of artistic expression. Restricting (...) the discussion to the art of painting, I sketch a partial psychological model for the exrtistic expression of feelipression of feeling. Although the feeling-emotion contrast is seldom made clear in their writings, I stress that many, or even most of the eminent pre-1960’s voices in aesthetics and art criticism—Croce, Dewey, Langer, Bosanquet, Berenson and others—would more or less agree that feeling is no less important for expression than emotion, and indeed can be interpreted as anticipating many points that I set forth. (shrink)

What does it mean to be an aesthetic beholder? Is it different than simply being a perceiver? Most theories of aesthetic perception focus on 1) features of the perceived object and its presentation or 2) on psychological evaluative or emotional responses and intentions of perceiver and artist. In this chapter I propose that we need to look at the process of engaged perception itself, and further that this temporal process of be- coming a beholder must be understood in its embodied, (...) contextual and dynamic speci- ficity. Through both phenomenological and neuroscientific explorations I analyze what is characteristic about a more “aesthetic stance” and argue that there is a certain asym- metry between beholder and beheld, which has to do with a disengagement of goal- directed action, and which allows for other kinds of perceptual involvement than in a more “practical stance”. It is a multi-disciplinary project integrating a sensorimotor no- tion of aesthetic affordances, 18th century philosophy, and large-scale brain network findings. What ensues is a new dynamic framework for future empirical and theoretical research on aesthetic perception. (shrink)

This article has two parts. The first one compares the ontological and epistemological implications of two main philosophical stances on how reality relates to appearance. I call the first group the “plane of superficiality,” where reality and appearance are the same; there is no gap between what a thing is and how it manifests itself. I call the second group “volume of representation,” in which reality is beyond appearances; there is an insurmountable gap between the thing and its phenomena. The (...) second part of the article focuses on Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as the second group’s contemporary position. Within the OOO epistemological model of “knowledge without truth,” Harman’s schema of the observer’s participation in the object’s knowledge production is questioned. Alternatively, based on the notion proposed here of “flat representativity” in which each appearance is equally valuable to represent different aspects of the object, I argue for the full spectrum of the sensual as the basis for “knowledge without truth.” In particular, the aesthetic method, excluded from Harman’s concerns about knowledge, is suggested as another contribution to the episteme. (shrink)

In this paper we analyse the ideas implicit in the style of exhibition favoured by contemporary galleries and museums, and argue that unless the audience is empowered to ascribe meaning and significance to artwork through critical dialogue, the power not only of the audience is undermined but also of art. We argue that galleries and museums preside over an experience economy devoid of art, unless (i) indeterminacy is understood, (ii) the critical rather than coercive nature of art is facilitated, and (...) (iii) the conditions for inter-subjectivity are met. (shrink)

Anjan Chatterjee has promoted an analogy between the Bengalese finch and the human artist. With reduced selective pressure from females due to its domestication, the male finch’s song has become more elaborate. Similarly, art’s lack of a practical function facilitates the creative generativity shown by artists. I argue that this analogy is flawed on both sides. Only recently has some art been regarded as non-functional. And the elaboration of the finch’s song is an effect of female selection under the conditions (...) of domestication. (shrink)

Alan Simpson; The Usefulness of ‘Aesthetic Education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 273–280, https://doi.org/10.11.

Artists, art critics, art historians, and cognitive psychologists have asserted that visual artists perceive the world differently than nonartists and that these perceptual abilities are the product of knowledge of techniques for working in an artistic medium. In support of these claims, Kozbelt (2001) found that artists outperform nonartists in visual analysis tasks and that these perceptual advantages are statistically correlated with drawing skill. We propose a model to explain these results that is derived from a diagnostic framework for object (...) recognition and recent research in cognitive neuroscience on selective visual attention. This research demonstrates that endogenous shifts of visual attention enhance the encoding of expected features in the visual field and inhibit the perception of potential distracters. Moreover, it demonstrates complementary roles for spatial schemata and motor plans in visual attention. We argue that artists develop novel spatial schemata, which enable them to recognize and reproduce stimulus features sufficient for adequate artistic production in a medium, and that these schemata become encoded as motor plans as artists develop technical proficiency in a medium. We hypothesize that artists' perceptual advantages can therefore, be explained by the role spatial schemata and motor plans play in selective attention. (shrink)

The thesis is a critical examination of Danto's philosophy of art. It begins with his article 'The Artworld' where he proposes a special is of artistic identification to distinguish artworks. Danto's idea of the artworld is discussed, a historical and contextual theory of art, which arose from his attempt to explain the difference between Warhol's Brillo Boxes sculpture and an indiscernible stack of everyday Brillo boxes. It is argued that Danto unsuccessfully attempts to shore up his artworld concept with the (...) special is. The technique of comparing indiscernible counterparts, from Danto's book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, is examined. It is argued that the technique is philosophically redundant, but it is a redundant premise which has been added to a valid inference (Danto's historical and contextual view of art: his artworld theory) therefore, this does not make the original inference invalid. Danto's treatment of metaphor, expression, and style is shown to result in four claims. First, artworks embody rhetorical ellipsis. Second, artworks share features of metaphor: they are intensional (with an s) in structure and cannot be paraphrased. Third, a work of art expresses what it is a metaphor for by the way it depicts its subject. Fourth, artworks embody style. The conclusion, has two parts. The first part gives a summary of the criticism of Danto's theory of art: (1) there are logical inconsistencies in his concept of the is of artistic identification and in his use of indiscernible counterparts, (2) his theory suffers by being over-inclusive and (3) he uses circular arguments. The second part is based on a response to the criticism: it provides a definition of art. This has three elements. First, an argument is proposed for a spectrum of artistic presence in which all human activity and artefacts can be placed. Second, there is an acceptance of Danto's view of art (or artistic presence) being both intentional (with a t) and intensional (with an s); however, by applying these concepts to a spectrum, the problem of over-inclusiveness is avoided. Finally, it is argued there can he no wholly non-circular account of art. (shrink)

This article combines critical, visual and aesthetic theory to argue that the very act of design is a Utopian process. Crucially, the Utopian dimension is not simply a matter of subject matter or utility. Rather, it lies in the act of formal arrangement and composition, and therefore can apply to visual texts with no apparent subject matter at all. The argument is grounded in Ernst Bloch’s critical theory of Utopia, which sees Utopia as a process rather than a destination. It (...) is illustrated with a case study of Navajo weaving, in tandem with an analysis of Navajo creation mythology. It concludes by arguing that we need to go beyond creation theory to a critical theory of creativity. Utopia is not something that we can delegate either to nature or to the supernatural because, as Bloch declares in The Spirit of Utopia, ‘Life has been put into our hands’. (shrink)

This paper extends the fields of visual and object semiosis, style, and rhetoric by introducing the concept of critical object images. It identifies five of their rhetorical functions in literature and demonstrates the semiotic and rhetorical specificity and force of literary object images. Inter-disciplinary concepts and theories used in the study are introduced before the concept is tested and developed through analyses of object images with critical roles in the Victorian scenes of Virginia Woolf’s novels. The inductive analyses trace the (...) semiosis and stylistic affordances of the selected critical object images, with reference to three categories of kitsch inauthenticity, and their formal and cultural contexts, noting the rhetorical function they serve. Multimodal stylistics and the semiotics of visual images and of objects are used in these analyses, and the unique contribution of critical object images as rhetorical elements in literature is uncovered and explained. The analysis of Woolf’s representation of selected objects shows how the critical object images function rhetorically, through their stylistic connotations, to present unambiguous meanings that are not openly stated in the texts’ verbal discourse. (shrink)