NORMATIVITY AND BEAUTY IN CONTEMPORARY ARTS (original) (raw)
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Aesthetic and Artistic Verdicts
Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 2019
In this article I propose a way of thinking about aesthetic and artistic verdicts that would keep them distinct from one another. The former are refl ections of the kinds of things we prefer and take pleasure in; the latter are refl ections of other judgments we make about the kinds of achievements that are made in works of art. In part to support this view of verdicts, I also propose a way of keeping distinct the description, the interpretation, and the evaluation of works of art. (And along the way, I worry about whether we offer the same kinds of interpretations of the objects of our aesthetic pleasures, properly considered, that we clearly do offer with respect to works of art.) The thesis I propose-the achievement model-is not original with me. What is original, perhaps, is that it is posed as an alternative to two other views of artistic evaluation, namely the appeal to "ideal critics" and the appeal to one way of understanding our preferences with regard to works of art. I do not attempt to show that each of these alternatives meets with insuperable problems; but I do indicate what I take to be the substantive content of those problems. In the end, in order to fl esh out the thesis I propose, I borrow some material from the literature on human well-being concerning how we determine what an achievement is.
What Matters in Contemporary Art? A Brief Statement on the Analysis and Evaluation of Works of Art
(Peer-reviewed Journal) Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine, 2019
[Peer-reviewed article by two scientific committee members of the magazine] This essay seeks to provide an idea of the basis of the main theories of contemporary art criticism. It begins with the assumed knowledge and tradition of the Academies of Fine Art, with their ideal of beauty and classical structure. The importance of such traditional references has its origin in the Renaissance in the 16th century, in Florence with Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), in Haarlem with Karel van Manda (1548-1606) and, above all, in Paris with Charles Lebrun (1619-1690) of the French Royal Academy, which established the first strict rules for the fine arts and was a reference for Europe as a whole. Academies of Fine Art were established in the major European capitals, and from the 19th century, in the Americas and worldwide. The themes and rules presented over the course of history always related to the functions of art and the legacy of classical thought as tradition. However, values and ruptures, ethics, ideologies and political ideals, and the progress of science have conditioned the fundamental importance of the renewal of Western thought. This essay concerns the decline of tradition in the arts, the lack of ideologies guiding modern art, and the transition to contemporary art. The main theories that marked this transition period-20th and 21st century-are analyzed with respect to the art, its criticism, and the theories to the understanding and transformative sense of artistic creation. Such creativity usually appears strange or transgressive to the public and primarily to be seeking a legitimation of the artist's autonomy of choice and freedom of thought. On the whole, this essay presents the main aesthetics notions relating to the critical analysis of traditional European cultures and, more recently, American ones too. American culture, in which the languages of art are based, is analyzed for its effect on occidental philosophy. Both theories of art and contemporary aesthetics are emphasized so as to better understand the work of art's current aim with regard to the discernment of theoretical, prescriptive, and ideological thinking in the visual arts. Cite as: Wagner, Christiane. 2019. “What Matters in Contemporary Art? A Brief Statement on the Analysis and Evaluation of Works of Art.” Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine, nº 1, (March): 68-82. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5168105
Aesthetic Values Before and Beyond the Evaluation of Artworks
Essays on Values and Practical Rationality - Ethical and Aesthetical Dimensions (Ed. by A. Marques & J. Sáàgua), (Bern: Peter Lang AG), 2018
One of the main purposes of this chapter is to determine the meaning and scope of the expression ‘aesthetic value’, to argue that aesthetic and artistic values are not exactly the same even though the artistic value of an artwork may result in part from its aesthetic value. Moreover, other types of values such as cognitive, ethical, political and social shall every so often be taken into account in the evaluation of artworks. And one of the consequences of that distinction – between the aesthetic and the artistic3 – is the fact that the range of consideration of aesthetic values goes way beyond the evaluation of artworks insofar as aesthetic experience is not an exclusive business4 of the artistic domain. Thinking about aesthetic values, as often happens when we think about aesthetic concepts, properties or experiences, will give us the opportunity to question the term 'aesthetic', which progressively entered philosophical discourse during the eighteenth century but whose meaning has oscillated over time and generated various misconceptions and ambiguities. Finally, another important aspect that this chapter takes in consideration for the clarification of the notion of ‘aesthetic value’ is obviously the concept of 'value' per se and the close affinities between aesthetic values, on one hand, and ethical and cognitive ones on the other.
How to judge a work of art today
Artefilosofia, 2017
How to judge a work of art? This question, already present in the Critique of the Power of Judgment by Immanuel Kant, was updated in France in the early 1990s (thus more or less two centuries later), when the Esprit and Télérama journals dedicated some issues to what was called a "crisis" in contemporary art, namely the supposed loss of normative criteria allowing one to evaluate artworks. Following their publication, several French philosophers-among which Marc Jimenez, Yves Michaud, Gérard Genette, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, and Rainer Rochlitztook part in a public debate on judgment, which more or less explicitly centered on the third Critique, in terms similar to those employed by Kant himself in 1790. Underlining the specificity of this debate, the present paper intends to (re)examine the issue of the judgment on works of art, by presenting and responding to two types of relativism and establishing a dialogue between Kantian aesthetics and contemporary philosophical discourses.
How do some people feel pleasure while others feel displeasure as they are viewing the same piece of art craft or they are watching the same dramatic work? It is hard to define "beauty" from an objective point of view because beauty is a subjective judgment and it changes from one person to another. There has been a long debate about criteria of beauty; but in a global and changing world it is hard to define beautiful in strict borders for the reason that a piece of art can have aesthetic value without being beautiful since the emergence of modern art.
The traditional conception of art is about sensual beauty and refined taste; modern art on the other hand has introduced an entirely unexpected dimension to the visual arts, namely that of 'revelatory narrative'. Classical art aspires to present works which can be appreciated as sensually beautiful; modern art, when it succeeds, presents us instead with the unsettling narrative. This radical difference in artistic purpose is something relatively new, and not yet fully appreciated or understood.
From Visual Culture to Visual Art: the Normative Shift
Humans conceptualize reality in different ways, but the very capacity to conceptualize entails reference to a stable reality - a massive, shared cognitive stock, which semiotic approaches overlook. Reference to this cognitive stock reveals objective criteria that justify the distinction between art and visual culture on normative as well as conceptual grounds. Part One offers an account of the intrinsic significance of the visual image-artifact, and suggest that this aesthetic and phenomenological significance is disclosed fundamentally through its comparative relations. Part Two elaborates this by considering a case history, namely Griselda Pollock’s problematic interpretation of a work by Gauguin. In Part Three, the more general implications of comparative meaning is explored through the question of syntactic unity in pictorial art. It is concluded that whilst art can be normatively distinguished from other products of visual culture, its scope is, nevertheless, rather broader than is commonly thought.
Normativity – A Lesson from Aesthetics
Normativity, descriptivity and instrumentality are terms often used in literature as significant factors of distinction between theories and standpoints, which makes their more detailed analysis playing a great role in understanding contemporary analytic philosophy, and its lack making a problem in finding correct formulations and elaborating theories. Terms have their genesis, as well as standard use, so an overview of both can help in enlightening various problems which different theories are faced with. It is a two way path: while the content of the terms is a ground for better understanding of the constraints of the theories that use them, so far is their usage in theories a ground for determining the content of the terms and sketching the margins where real problems are best recognized. Peter Railton argues that the radical difference in moral theories may be due not to a difference in their conceptions of normativity, but to a difference in their empirical psychological theories, a difference that can be spotted in their accounts of aesthetics.
What Makes One Work of Art Better Than Another - From Aesthetic Judgment to Canonicity
This is a shortened version of a longer unpublished paper which sets out ideas explored throughout my books especially Defining Art, Creating the Canon. In this version, I first draw attention to familiar features of the aesthetic judgment in general, and then identify objective criteria whereby evidence to support aesthetic judgment can be provided. I give particular emphasis to the fact that such judgments logically involve a critical comparative aspect – a feature that the existing philosophical literature has not addressed. After explaining this, I go on to consider the objective validity of aesthetic judgments concerning the arts.