The Imperatives of Contemporary Art (original) (raw)

Art’s Rich Contribution to Ethics

Paul Macneill (ed.) Ethics and the Arts. Amsterdam: Springer, 2014

This book is a collection of invited essays on Ethics and the Arts. Most of the chapters were written without each author being familiar with other chapters and there is (unsurprisingly) a range of different approaches taken. Nevertheless, there is also a considerable degree of coherence between the chapters, which I aim to bring out in this concluding chapter. My further aim is to examine the ways (in the particularities of each chapter) in which the arts can, and do, make a major contribution to ethics. As discussed briefly in the Introduction, I consider that the relationship between ethics and the arts is two-way. In this book, ethical concerns are discussed within the arts—but so too is ethics considered from the vantage point of the arts. In this chapter I take up this idea from both angles, in discussing the approaches taken by various authors toward ethics within their artform, as well as in drawing insights from the discussions of various ideas, art theories and practices, and a range of other disciplines, that may offer broader understandings of ethics. There are ethical issues that concern artists and a good many of them have been captured in chapters of this book. This concluding chapter is organised around the ethical issues I have drawn from the preceding chapters and these are represented by the sub-headings below. Included (for example) are: ‘intercultural issues in making art’; and ‘art as an alternative approach to understanding ethics.’ In compiling this book I have been particularly interested in the last of these: drawing understandings about ethics from the arts, and applying these in ways that may enrich our understanding of ethics more broadly.

Ethics and the Arts: A Critical Review of the New Moralisms

Paul Macneill (ed.) Ethics and the Arts. Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York, and London: Springer, 2014

This chapter explores the nature of any relationship between ethics and the arts. At one time, the dominant position in the philosophy of art was that there was no relationship. Aesthetics and ethics were seen as autonomous spheres. The various ‘new moralists’ argue that, in some circumstances, there is a relationship. Noël Carroll and Berys Gaut, for example, argue that moral ‘flaws’ in some works of art may detract from the work’s aesthetic value, while others, such as Daniel Jacobson and Matthew Kieran, counter that a morally reprehensible quality in a work may contribute positively to its aesthetic value. Although the polarities are reversed, both of these positions accept that there is—or may be—a relationship between morality and aesthetics. Others however take a less theoretically based view in acknowledging that there may be a relationship in which a moral quality is seen to add to, or detract, from the aesthetic value a work of art, but that this can only be maintained by a critical assessment of a particular work of art and not by rigid application of theory. This chapter sides with those who are resistant to applying prior moral standards in judging art and puts the view that ethics and aesthetics are independent discourses, although they potentially illuminate one another. The chapter also explores whether moral repugnance, in responding to particular works of art, such as any of Michel Houellebecq’s novels, can be indicative of aesthetic merit or deficiency. It is argued however that no one aspect (moral, affective, or cognitive) can be assumed, in advance, to trump another, and the relative weight given to any of these, is itself a part of a reflection on the aesthetic merit of a particular artwork.

Artists and Morality: Toward an Ethics of Art

Leonardo, 1977

Leonardo, Vol. 10, pp. 195-202. Pergamon Press 1977. Printed in Great Britain ... Abstract-The author distinguishes and explores a number of moral questions raised by the social influence of artistic activity. He begins by claiming that the moral discussion of art actually centres ...

The Ethical Criticism of Art: A New Mapping of the Territory

Philosophia, 2007

The goal of this paper is methodological. It offers a comprehensive mapping of the theoretical positions on the ethical criticism of art, correcting omissions and inadequacies in the conceptual framework adopted in the current debate. Three principles are recommended as general guidelines: ethical amenability, basic value pluralism, and relativity to ethical dimension. Hence a taxonomy distinguishing between different versions of autonomism, moralism, and immoralism is established, by reference to criteria that are different from what emerging in the current literature. The mapping is then proved capable of (1) locating the various theories that have been proposed so far and clarifying such theories' real commitments, (2) having the correct relationship with actual art making and art criticism practices, and showing the real weight of the alleged counter-example to a moralist position of a work that succeeds artistically because of its immorality.

Introduction: Ethics and the Arts

Paul Macneill (ed.) Ethics and the Arts. Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York, and London: Springer, 2014

This book sets out to explore many facets of a relationship between ethics and the arts in (almost) all the arts: literature, music, painting, photography, film and documentary, dance and theatre. There is a section dealing with the relationship between ethics and the arts from philosophical perspectives—and a chapter in that section considers the role of the media in framing ethical issues. Ethics and the arts are also explored in relation to bioart—a new mode of art that draws on the biological sciences and techniques for manipulating life forms. The final section considers uses of the arts in relation to science and medicine. In particular: the arts as they are employed within the medical humanities; rhetorical devices in supporting ‘medical progress’; and artists and their works in response to climate change. The contributing authors write from many different disciplinary perspectives and discourses. These include discourses from within the various arts, and the authors’ different philosophical positions and commitments. Many of the authors are both academics and practitioners. Philip Alperson, for example, is both a philosopher and a saxophonist. Debora Diniz is an anthropologist and documentary-film maker. Rachael Swain is a theatre director who drew on her own work for a doctoral dissertation on theatre practice. Both James Thompson and Phillip Zarrilli are university professors and theatre practitioners. Zurr and Catts are artists within an academic research laboratory. The book is inter-disciplinary in approach and composition: drawing on the arts in practice and theory, philosophy (from analytic and European perspectives), and many other disciplines. This, I claim, is one of the books strengths. However, such diversity may attract criticism from purists who stand firmly in any one of the fields covered: which is the fate of many interdisciplinary works. However the collective strength of these chapters is that they relate the arts—including a broad range of current and original work—to aesthetic philosophy, science, medicine, perceptual psychology, cognitive science, and (to some extent) law and politics. This is to take a broad approach to what counts as knowledge by including both cognitive and experiential approaches. A possible outcome is that ethics itself could be re-conceived (at least in part) as aesthetic practice and experience, informed by this wide-ranging theoretical discussion.

Art and Morality

In the nowadays acknowledged moral crisis in/of art, a split has occurred between the public and some artistic manifestations. Stuck in the so called "radical actionism"-as the artistic short and violent movement developed by Fluxus Group during 1960-1970, with origins in the "Viennese Actionism"-, the art segment dealing with contemporaneity, disputing the traditional art as well as social and moral conventions, has created a new area of expression, in which art and life converge, arising questions that go beyond the aesthetic experience, and managing to introduce an ethical dimension in artistic expression. In a plurality of theoretical and practical concerns, the contemporary art has produced repeated attacks on human dignity or animal life. So, the present art manifestations may include people, animals, corps/thereof parts (human or animal), explicit sexual images, psychological abuses as well as references to self-harm. A balance between art and morality, a ...

Art and Ethics: Formalism, in James Harold (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art

Art and Ethics: Formalism, 2023

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 aesthetics, 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-fulllment, thus an inherent means to the good.

The Frontiers of Ethical Transgressions in Contemporary Art

Art and morality share a complex, almost paradoxical, intersection of interests; often an offence levied against one is offered the possibility of acceptance in the another. But art is not created in an environment of isolation; they are to a certain extent bound by the rules of society, the socio-cultural space of whose landscape it utilises for its creation, reception and preservation. And the moral codes of the society are often guilty of cultural relativism and religious or historical dogmatism. Hence, neither the fair practice of Art without any moral obligations nor social ethics without consideration for artistic freedom can be accepted when theorising a rationally founded cultural utopia. The present paper engages with the particular issue of animal treatment in contemporary artistic practices to rear further insights on the legitimacy of using moral standards as an evaluatory framework to judge art objects and the aesthetic value of 'immoral' art.