art and allusion

Forthcoming Philosophy Bites book includes a philosophy of art section

Pre-order the Philosophy Bites book due out in August 2010 here.

It includes interview with Derek Matratvers on the definition of art, Barry C. Smith on wine and taste, Alain de Botton on the aesthetics of architecture and Alex Neill on the paradox of tragedy.

 

Notes from Classic Aesthetics, Tate Modern, Session 5

Aesthetics: Classic Theories - Notes from Session 5

Gotthold Lessing's ideas about the Laocoön were the main topic this week. This classical sculpture, now in the Vatican, depicts Laocoon and his two sons being attacked by serpents (a punishment meted out by the gods). Prior to Lessing's book, Winckelmann, the art historian, had maintained that Laocoön's mouth was only half-open in a sigh rather than bellowing as he is described in the Aeneid by Vergil because this reflected the grandeur and perhaps the stoicism of the Ancient Greeks.

Lessing disagrees. For him, this is about the visual arts doing what they do best: had the sculptor shown the face in the full grimace of a bellow, then the imagination would have had no further place to go...as it is, the sculpture engages our creative intellect and invites us to imagine the next phase of the writhing in agony.

Lessing disputes the Latin poet Horace's aphorism that 'ut pictura poesis'(i.e. that pictures and poetry are similar). For Lessing each has its distinctive potentials.

[The recent In Our Time BBC radio programme on Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' is relevant to this topic and even includes mention of Lessing. You should be able to listen to it here.]

In some ways Lessing's focus on the distinct properties of pictures and of words is a precursor of semiotics, and in particular C.S. Peirce's division of sign types into index, icon and symbol (there is a fuller explanation of this here). Roughly an index is a sign that represents by causal connection (smoke means fire); an icon by resemblance (a picture resembles what it is of); and a symbol represents by means of a convention ('cat' means that furry animal, but the word 'cat' is arbitrary - it could just as easily have been 'mountain').

With iconic signs, as Nelson Goodman pointed out, every change in the sign potentially represents something different (a smug retouching of the Mona Lisa's smile could, with a line as fine as a hair, radically change what was represented); whereas the colour or font in which a poem is printed don't (typically) affect the poem's meaning.

In the gallery we looked at works in Level 5 West  'States of Flux', Room 2, and also at Roy Lichtenstein's Wham! concentrating on the ways in which the still arts of painting and sculpture dealt with events unfolding over time, the main theme in Lessing's writing.

Notes from Classic Aesthetics, Tate Modern, 2010, session 4

The focus of this week's work was Edmund Burke's  ideas about the Sublime (see his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime of 1757 - see reading 12 in set book for the course Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology ed. Cahn and Meskin). A complete online searchable text of Burke's Enquiry is available here.

Burke's account of our responses to beauty and the sublime focuses on the bodily and emotional responses to physical objects: in many ways a stark contrast with Plato's more cerebral approach that ultimately sees beauty as something lying beyond sensory perception and best appreciated by the intellect. Burke also gave aesthetics an interesting direction by giving clear expression to idea that beauty may not be the only quality in nature and art that moves us profoundly...

Burke maintained, quite plausibly that pain and pleasure aren't on the same spectrum. A reduction of pain does not automatically lead to an increase in pleasure (though, in his terminology, reduction of pain results in delight).

Pain is effective in our self-preservation; pleasure makes social interaction possible.

Pain has the power to move us more profoundly than pleasure. To back up this claim he points out that few would agree to a life of exquisite pleasures if they knew that this would end with brutal torture.

Burke described beauty as 'for the greater part, some quality in bodies, acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses' (p.119 of Cahn and Meskin eds). Beauty is a quality that tends to produce pleasure.

The sublime in contrast is always in some way linked with terror. Not complete terror, but rather with the potential for danger. Causes which under different circumstances might endanger us evoke the emotions of the sublime.

The key passage in which Burke contrasts the beautiful and the sublime is this (see p.120 of Cahn and Meskin eds.), from Section XXVll of theEnquiry [NB he uses 'the great' as a synonym for 'sublime' here at several points]:

 "For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small;beauty should be smooth, and polished; the great rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates, it often makes a strong deviation; beauty should not be obscure; the great out to be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive. They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure..."

Burke believed that the reason we frequently take delight in intrinsically painful situations - an apparent paradox [related to the Paradox of Tragedy - listen to a podcast on Paradox of Tragedy] is that this is nature's way of toning up our nervous systems. While this last point isn't particularly persuasive, his general account of the contrast between beauty and the sublime has been extremely influential.

In the Tate Modern gallery we looked at all the works in Room 6 Poetry and Dream: Joseph Beuys' huge work 'Lightning With Stag in Its Glare' (there's a longer description of the piece and its symbolism here). The key question for us was the degree to which Burke's notion of the sublime illuminated this work which both in its scale and materials emphasises natural power. There is a very interesting article here which sheds some light on the genesis of the piece and the use of materials. It also seems to imply that the iron fixing and girder were added, but that Beuys had used a similar device to support the work (which also suggests that perhaps this isn't to be seen as part of the work, but rather as a device to support it, the equivalent of a plinth).

Free Speech: A Very Short Talk

I'm giving a 15 minute (free) talk on Free Speech at the Oxford Literary Festival in the bookshop in the marquee this Saturday 20th March at 5.15 pm. Details of the event (no. 168) if you scroll down under 20th March here.

Notes from Classic Aesthetics, Tate Modern 2010, session 3

In the third session of the Tate Modern course Classic Aesthetics we jumped ahead from 5th Century Athens to 18th Century Edinburgh. You can listen to a 20 minute podcast I made of last year's session 3 of this course to refresh your memory of the topics covered. 

The main focus of this session was David Hume's view of aesthetic judgment as discussed in his essay 'Of the Standard of Taste' [download a sensitively-paraphrased version] thoughts which he had presumably already worked out as a young man when he planned the never-published fifth book of his Treatise 'Of Criticism'. This essay is quite difficult to read in part because he jumps from topic to topic. At its heart, though, is the  paradox that we both want to say that beauty and other aesthetic merit is in the eye of the beholder, and so a matter for subjective judgement, but at the same time think that people who hold views such as 'Tracey Emin is a greater artist than Leonardo da Vinci' (not Hume's example!) are just wrong.

Hume maintains that most of us are not in a great position to make reliable aesthetic judgements because we do not necessarily have accurate perception and understanding of the work under consideration. There must be general principles underlying critical judgments whether or not we know what they are. Given the human perceptual apparatus some things are just better at evoking certain sorts of responses than others. But above all we need a critic who can perceive what is there. The ideal critic, amongst other things, has

Delicacy of Taste (remember the story of the key with the leather thong at the bottom of the hogshead of wine. You might also want to read the further essay Hume wrote called 'Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion')
Practice (Hume also includes the requirement that the critic view the work more than once)
The Ability to Make Comparisons (historical as well as contemporary)
Is not Prejudiced and has
Good Sense (i.e. reason that allows him or her to weight the different factors)
 
Someone who exercises these qualities can stand as a touchstone against which to measure taste. Others can learn from such a person and recognize the distinctions that he or she draws. Where, over time, there is a consensus amongst such critics this is the strongest evidence we have of a work's worth (people now speak of a work's 'passing the Test of Time'). It may be a matter of subjectivity how we feel about a work of art, but that doesn't mean that any judgement we make, which may well be based on a poor assessment of what it is that w e are looking at, is respectable...not unless we possess the attributes of an ideal critic. And if we do, we can set the standard of taste. For a related discussion about judgements of taste in relation to wine, informed by a reading of Hume,  listen to Barry C. Smith, editor of a recent book Questions of Taste on Philosophy Bites. Read my review of this book here and a longer one by Christopher Shields here I'd' recommend reading Barry Smith's essay in that book if you are interested in the topic of how it might be possible to make objective aesthetic judgments.

You can listen to Peter Millican's excellent overview of Hume's importance as a philosopher here.

In the gallery we looked at three key rooms in the Tate Modern Arshile Gorky exhibition [NB this link includes a 20 minute video about Gorky - if, like me, after watching this video you are fascinated by Gorky's widow who is obviously a remarkable woman, read this fuller account of her involvement with him and her subsequent life]

 In the Gorky exhibition we made critical comparisons between the three phases of the artist's work and thinking about what is involved in such judgements. One topic that came out in discussion was the relevance of originality, not least because in his early work Gorky appeared derivative of other artists. This is a topic which we will pick up on in the course on Contemporary Aesthetics. [You can read notes from a different Tate Modern course on different senses of originality here.]

Next week: Edmund Burke on the Sublime...

Notes from Classic Aesthetics, Tate Modern 2010, Session 2

In the second session of the course Classic Aesthetics, we continued looking at Plato's approach, concentrating on his ideas about beauty, as expressed in his great dialogue The Symposium. There, through the nested characters of Socrates and Diotima, Plato  stresses the limitations of the phenomenal world. He does, though, allow that physical beauty can play a part in the ascent towards appreciation of the Form of beauty.

This is all part of a conversation about the nature of erotic love that takes place at a drinking party. [Listen to a podcast interview about Plato on Erotic Love]. Socrates recalls Diotima's teaching that the desire for one beautiful man's body is merely the first rung on the ladder that leads up to the appreciation of the Form of beauty, and so is merely a means to the higher end of appreciating the abstract idea. To learn about beauty, first of all recognize the physical beauty of the desired lover. But then the rational individual will appreciate not just the individual loved one's beauty, but also the physical beauty of others too. From this the next step up the ladder is to see the beauty that lies beyond appearances in wisdom and knowledge. The last step is to come to recognize the Form of beauty itself - with the implication that this Form itself possesses beauty. The Form of beauty also carries with it moral qualities of goodness. Plato does not mention beauty in art as having a potential role in this ascent - given the views he expressed in The Republic, it is unlikely that he thought it could play a role. (For a nice summary of Plato on Art, see Christopher Janaway's essay in the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics).

This sort of approach stands in stark contrast with an empiricist one. For an empiricist beauty is a quality in objects which tends to produce a certain sort of effect upon human bodies when it is perceived. It is intimately linked with the senses, not least because empiricists believed that everything comes to us via the senses. Whereas for Plato, once again, beauty is best appreciated through thought not perception. In this sense, Plato is anti-aesthetic (though obviously an anachronistic line to take since the notion of aesthetic distance etc. is a product of the 18th Century) - if art can't communicate truth accurately and particularly truth about morality, so much the worse for art in Plato's view. 

We also considered the main ideas from Iris Murdoch's succinct critical summary of Plato on Art in her short book (originally a series of lectures) The Fire and the Sun. Murdoch a practising novelist who was passionate about the arts stressed that 'Plato never did justice to the unique truth-conveying capacities of art’ (p.85). She believed that great art could provide a therapy for the soul and take us towards the good (and in order for great art to flourish, we need to tolerate less great art).

Friedrich Nietzsche in his first book, The Birth Of Tragedy, gave Art a far more significant role than Plato did. This provides another contrast. Nietzsche believed that art was what made life endurable and creative for the ancient Greeks who were fundamentally pessimists; remember that Plato wanted to turn the mimetic artists away from the borders of his ideal republic. [Listen to a podcast interview on Nietzsche on Art] Without their great art of tragedy, the Greeks would have been lost, Nietzsche believed. The combination of the musical theatre with the enactment of taboos that tragedy provided allow sufficient engagement with the Dionysian aspects of life while at the same time tempering it with Apollonian elements for the Greeks to emerge invigorated from experience. Dionysius symbolised loss of self, intoxication, and wild revelry; Apollo, on the other hand, symbolised order, and self-consciousness.

Nietzsche (influenced by Schopenhauer) believed (or feigned to believe) that at a deep level reality is simply a seething mass that is completely impersonal. Great art can give us a glimpse of that reality without destroying us. The Dionysian element in art is essential to its profundity, but without some Apollonian element the art would be too dark to endure.

In the Gallery

In the gallery at Tate Modern we started discussing the basis of critical judgements as a prelude to discussing David Hume's essay 'Of The Standard of Taste' next week. [You can read Hume's essay here. You might also want to look at 'Of the Delicacy of Taste'.] We compared works by Picasso and Francis Bacon and touched on questions about how we might justify saying that some works were better than others, whether someone who was ignorant of other works by these artists could make a reliable judgement, etc. Next week we will be picking up on these themes and relating them to what Hume wrote about the ideal critic.