While the view that we perceive aesthetic properties may seem intuitive, it has received little in the way of explicit defence. It also gives rise to a puzzle. The first strand of this puzzle is that we often cannot perceive aesthetic properties of artworks without training, yet much aesthetic training involves the acquisition of knowledge, such as when an artwork was made, and by whom. How, if at all, can this knowledge affect our perception of an artwork’s aesthetic properties? The (...) second strand of the puzzle arises when we widen the scope of aesthetic experience. The very same aesthetic properties that seem to require training for their perception in artworks do not appear to require training to perceive in objects of everyday aesthetic appreciation and natural phenomena. In this paper I argue that a prominent extant attempt to explain how training is compatible with aesthetic perception—cognitive permeation—is an inadequate solution. I also develop a positive view of aesthetic perception that provides a unified solution to both strands of the puzzle. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that pictorial styles are individuated in terms of different degrees of determinacy. For example, Morandi’s still-life etchings and Monet’s cathedral paintings embody different styles in that in the former, shape properties are differentiated in a fine-grained manner, and in the latter, coarse grained. I develop this view by critically examining John Kulvicki’s analysis of how we interpret pictures. According to Kulvicki, we rarely interpret pictures as differing in terms of features that belong to the vehicle (...) of representation—that is, the design-content relation. Rather, he thinks that we individuate pictorial styles in terms of the content that each picture represents. Contra Kulvicki, I argue that we interpret the vehicular features of pictures in light of our knowledge of picture production, and that the diversity of pictorial styles involves both content and vehicle. (shrink)

This article outlines a realist theory of aesthetic properties as higher-order manifest properties and defends it from several objections, including a possible conflict with contextualist approaches to the aesthetic properties of works of art.

The Introduction provides an overview of Kendall Walton’s make-believe framework for a variety of representations and his arguments that such representations are dependent on their social or historical context. Walton argues that diverse representations involve our capacities for imagination and make-believe with props; they overlap with the fictional. Focusing on make-believe with props explains paradigmatic representational arts such as paintings and novels, theater and film. But this perspective reaches beyond the arts: it explains pictures and photographs in general not only (...) artistic ones; stories in general as well as literary and performing arts; music; metaphors, and even the claims we make about fictional entities and existence. The first section explains the main points of the make-believe framework in Mimesis as Make-Believe, and it reconstructs Walton’s argument in “Categories of Art” that some aesthetic properties depend on the perceptible and historical categories of art to which a work belongs. The second section outlines Walton’s specific proposals about literary fiction, fictional characters, poetry, pictures, photographs, music and negative existential claims. These explanations are integrated with summaries of the papers. The third section examines Walton’s implicit view of two much-discussed issues: the ontology of art and definitions of art. This discussion clears away some misunderstandings of Walton’s contextualism or historicism and relates Walton’s work to Arthur Danto’s and Frank Sibley’s. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that norms of artistic and aesthetic authenticity that prioritize material origins foreclose on broader opportunities for aesthetic experience: particularly, for the aesthetic experience of history. I focus on Carolyn Korsmeyer’s recent articles in defense of the aesthetic value of genuineness and argue that her rejection of the aesthetic significance of historical value is mistaken. Rather, I argue that recognizing the aesthetic significance of historical value points the way towards rethinking the dominance of the very norms (...) of authenticity that Korsmeyer endeavors to defend and explain. (shrink)

I argue that authentic photography is not able to develop to the full as a communicative representational art. Photography is authentic when it is true to its self-image as the imprinting of images. For an image to be imprinted is for its content to be linked to the scene in which it originates by a chain of sufficient, mind-independent causes. Communicative representational art (in any medium: photography, painting, literature, music, etc.) is art that exploits the resources of representation to achieve (...) artistically interesting communication of thought. The central resources of representation are content, vehicle properties, and the interplay between these two. Whereas painting and other representational arts are able to exploit all three to communicate thought, authentic photography can exploit interplay only to a very limited degree. However, the exploitation of interplay is the culmination of communicative representational art: the natural endpoint in its development. (shrink)

Two themes run through Wollheim’s work: the importance of history to the practice and appreciation of the arts, and the centrality of experience in appreciation. Prima facie, these are in tension. Reconciling them requires two steps. First, we should follow Wollheim in adopting a notion of experience on which features can be experienced even if we must have experience-independent access to the fact that the work exhibits them. Second, we need to state what makes a particular experience appropriate to the (...) work. What does so? An obvious answer is that the experience reflects the work’s nature. Wollheim toyed with a more ambitious line, one linking the appropriate experience to our abilities to discriminate instances of the property appreciated. He allowed that having the right experience might require knowledge of the work, and thus that that experience need not be born of the ability to discriminate the property appreciated. But he seems to have held that the appropriate experience must engender that ability, at least against the background of those actual items that might be confused with instances of the property. I argue that Wollheim’s answer is less appealing than the obvious one. (shrink)