art and allusion

6 Ways of Thinking About Art - Tate Modern, 9th June - 14th July 2014

Booking will open soon for this Tate Modern course (6 Monday evening sessions) led by Nigel Warburton. 

Playing with Meaning - notes and links from the Tate Modern Course

These notes are from the course Playing with Meaning, Tate Modern, (by ticket only, sold out).

Session 1 The artist's intentions and other contributions to meaning

What does a work of art mean? Possibly nothing at all. Possibly many different things. We all engage in projective interpretation (finding our own meanings in someone else's art) to some extent. But often artists want you to recognize features of their style, content, etc. So does that mean that the artists have the last say on what their work means? The debate is polarised between those who say No (labelled 'anti-intentionalists here) and those who say Yes (Intentionalists). Some philosophers have also suggested that what matters is not actual intentions, but virtual intentions, those which, based on the work and context, might plausibly be attributed to the artist...

Anti-Intentionalists see the principal appropriate activity of an art critic/viewer as scrutiny. That is, the viewer looks to see what is there, is not unduly influenced by art historical detail, facts about the artist's life, the subject matter, and so on.  Clive Bell's views in his book Art (1914) are an extreme example. Bell believed that what all art has in common is that it possesses Significant Form. Not all form is significant, but when patterns of lines, shapes and colours (and some depth) combine they can produce an aesthetic emotion in a sensitive viewer. For Bell, we should bring nothing of life to art. All art through ages has achieved its status as art from these formal properties. The emotion they produce, aesthetic emotion, is not characteristic of everyday life. For Bell its power almost certainly came from its potential to put us in touch with the noumenal world (a Kantian term), that is the world of deeper reality that lies behind the veil of everyday appearances and is not usually available to us.

Another famous defence of anti-intentionalism was Wimsatt and Beardsley's famous paper 'The Intentional Fallacy'. ('Fallacy' in this context is simply an unreliable way of arguing) There they argued that we shouldn't treat the author of a poem as an oracle about its meaning. Rather, readers should focus on the words on the page, and not get embroiled in author psychology. Their main argument was that appeals to authors' intentions were either misleading or unnecessary. If the poem failed to achieve the poet's intentions, then it was misleading to refer to the intentions as the source of its meaning; if the poem did achieve the aims, then appeals to intention were redundant since the meaning was there to be discerned in the poem. The philosopher Stanley Cavell used a knock-down argument to make the first of these two points: '...it no more counts towards the success or failure of a work of art that the artist intended something other than is there, than it counts when the referee is counting over a boxer that the boxer had intended to duck' (in 'Music Discomposed').

Difficulties with the anti-intentionalist position include the fact that as Ernst Gombrich often pointed out, there is no innocent eye. Also it is hard to appreciate irony if you don't have some access to the artist's or writer's intentions. Extreme anti-intentionalists would say that to appreciate a Rembrandt self-portrait the fact that the artist intended (if he did) to potray himself ageing, is irrelevant to our appreciaton of it as art - this seems wrong. Subject matter has to be part of some art. It also seems a bit perverse not to find out as much as you possibly can about the circumstances in which a work of art was produced. For more about Clive Bell and why is theory of art fails, see Chapter One of my book The Art Question. Wimsatt and Beardsley's paper 'The Intentional Fallacy' is reprinted in my book (ed.) Philosophy: Basic Readings, 2nd ed.

In contrast, intentionalists, such as Richard Wollheim, argue that the job of the critic or viewer involves retrieval, retrieval of an artist's intentions, motivations, historical milieu, and so on. Understanding a work of art involves understanding how it came to be as it is. Obviously information is incomplete in many cases, but this does not prevent it from being a worthwhile goal where we do have access to background information. Nor would Wollheim want us to forego spending time looking very closely at the work itself; it is just that the history of how it came to be as it is, its aetiology is important for understanding it. For more on Intentionalism see Richard Wollheim 'Criticism as Retrieval' supplementary essay in the second ed. of his book Art and Its Objects.

A third position, taken by Jerry Fodor, amongst others,  in his article 'It's Deja Vu All Over Again' (a quotation from the accidentally brilliant Yogi Berra - my favourite quotation of his is 'When you come to a fork in the road, take it') is what might be called Virtual Intentionalism. Here the facts don't matter so much about what the artist's actual intentions were. The point is to try to reconstruct what they might reasonably have been. The artist can't overrule your interpretation here. Fodor's article is in Danto and His Critics. 

There is a further issue of whether this sort of discussion of artist’s intentions implies a misleading picture of what it is to do something intentionally. Many writers in this area describe intentions as if artists always had introspectible mental events that are the precursors of and causes of their works. But is this so? What of R.G. Collingwood’s account of art (in his The Principles of Art) where he described the artist as beginning with an inchoate emotion that he or she makes clear to him or herself in the process of producing a work of art. On that picture (which rings true with many artists), the idea that an artist has a clear intention that precedes the creation of the artwork is implausible in most cases.

On the general question of how we discern the meaning of various communications, this audio podcast interview with the philosopher Stephen Neale on Meaning and Intention might be of interest.

7 Ways of Thinking About Art: Notes from Session 2

Art as Intentional

Read notes from session 1 of the course

For session 2 of the Tate Modern course 7 Ways of Thinking About Art (tickets only, sold out), we concentrated on the contrast between those, such as Clive Bell, who advocate scrutiny of form and those such as Richard Wollheim who argue that criticism and interpretation require retrieval, a kind of archaeology of the artist's intentions against a historical background.

Bell believed that what all art has in common is that it possesses Significant Form. Not all form is significant, but when patterns of lines, shapes and colours (and some depth) combine they can produce an aesthetic emotion in a sensitive viewer. All around us are objects charged with the capacity to move us aesthetically, but only the sensitive perceive and feel this. The beauty of a butterfly's wing, though, is not Significant Form for Bell - it is found in human creations, which may be as diverse as a Chinese carpet, the Cathedral at Chartres, or a painting by Duccio or Picasso. For Bell, we should bring nothing of life to art. All art through ages has achieved its status as art from these formal properties. The emotion they produce, aesthetic emotion, is not characteristic of everyday life. For Bell its power almost certainly came from its potential to put us in touch with the noumenal world (a Kantian term), that is the world of deeper reality that lies behind the veil of everyday appearances and is not usually available to us.

Another famous defence of anti-intentionalism was Wimsatt and Beardsley's famous paper 'The Intentional Fallacy'. ('Fallacy'  in this context is simply an unreliable way of arguing) There they argued that we shouldn't treat the author of a poem as an oracle about its meaning. Rather, readers should focus on the words on the page, and not get embroiled in author psychology. Their main argument was that appeals to authors' intentions were either misleading or unnecessary. If the poem failed to achieve the poet's intentions, then it was misleading to refer to the intentions as the source of its meaning; if the poem did achieve the aims, then appeals to intention were redundant since the meaning was there to be discerned in the poem.

The philosopher Stanley Cavell used a knock-down argument to make the first of these two points:

'...it no more counts towards the success or failure of a work of art that the artist intended something other than is there, than it counts when the referee is counting over a boxer that the boxer had intended to duck' (in 'Music Discomposed').

Difficulties with the anti-intentionalist position include the fact that as Ernst Gombrich often pointed out, there is no innocent eye. Also it is hard to appreciate irony if you don't have some access to the artist's or writer's intentions. Extreme anti-intentionalists would say that to appreciate a Rembrandt self-portrait the fact that the artist intended (if he did) to potray himself ageing, is irrelevant to our appreciaton of it as art - this seems wrong. Subject matter has to be part of some art. It also seems a bit perverse not to find out as much as you possibly can about the circumstances in which a work of art was produced.

For more about Clive Bell and why is theory of art fails, see Chapter One of my book The Art Question. The late Denis Dutton put an extract of the most pertinent passages from Bell's Art with very useful illustrations on his website. Wimsatt and Beardsley's paper 'The Intentional Fallacy' is reprinted in my book (ed.) Philosophy: Basic Readings, 2nd ed.

In contrast, intentionalists, such as Richard Wollheim, argue that the job of the critic or viewer involves retrieval, retrieval of an artist's intentions, motivations, historical milieu, and so on. Understanding a work of art involves understanding how it came to be as it is. Obviously information is incomplete in many cases, but this does not prevent it from being a worthwhile goal where we do have access to background information. Nor would Wollheim want us to forego spending time looking very closely at the work itself; it is just that the history of how it came to be as it is, its aetiology is important for understanding it.

For more on Intentionalism see Richard Wollheim 'Criticism as Retrieval' supplementary essay in the second ed. of his book Art and Its Objects. (For a fascinating discussion of a related question about why we value objects with particular histories rather than their indistinguishable copies, see Paul Bloom's interview 'Why do we like what we like?')

The philosopher Stephen Neale discusses the wider question of the importance of intentions to meaning and interpretation in this podcast interview from the Philosophy Bites series (highly recommended for his  discussion of  his involvement in the interpretation of US drugs law in relation to the use of firearms!). For a general discussion of the question 'What is Art?' listen to this Philosophy Bites audio interview with Derek Matravers.

A third position, taken by Jerry Fodor in his article 'It's Deja Vu All Over Again' (a quotation from the accidentally  brilliant Yogi Berra - my favourite quotation of his is 'When you come to a fork in the road, take it') is what might be called Virtual Intentionalism. Here the facts don't matter so much about what the artist's actual intentions were. The point is to try to reconstruct what they might reasonably have been. The artist can't overrule your interpretation here.
Fodor's article is in Danto and His Critics.

Something we didn’t get on to: the question of whether discussion of artist’s intentions implies a misleading picture of what it is to do something intentionally. Many writers in this area describe intentions as if artists had introspectible mental events that are the precursors of and causes of their works. But is this so? What of R.G. Collingwood’s account of art (in his The Principles of Art) where he described the artist as beginning with an inchoate emotion that he or she makes clear to him or herself in the process of producing a work of art. On that picture (which rings true with many artists), the idea that an artist has a clear intention that precedes the creation of the artwork is implausible in most cases.

In the galleries we visited 'Elements of Chance', 'The Reclining Nude', and Joseph Beuys, testing the stance of a formalist against that of an intentionalist in relation to particular works.

Next week: ticketholders meet in Tate Britain via Clore wing (NOT Tate Modern!) at usual time. We'll be in the Duffield Room, and then in the galleries. No drinks afterwards just for this week. Finishing time 8.30pm. More information about topics and dates of sessions.

 

Tate Modern Aesthetics courses 2010 - booking now open

You can book for the Aesthetics courses I'm teaching at Tate Modern in 2010 here. Places usually go very quickly.

Contemporary Aesthetics - sessions 3 - 6

Download Contemporary Aesthetics session 3 Powerpoint
Download Contemporary Aesthetics session 4 Powerpoint
Download Contemporary Aesthetics session 5 Powerpoint
Download Contemporary Aesthetics session 6 Powerpoint

Contemporary Aesthetics - Tate Modern - Session Two

Sorry for the delay in getting these notes to you.

Download Powerpoint of Contemporary Aesthetics Week 2

Read an Interview with Jeff Koons

Here's something I wrote for a previous course which connects with the topic, this was specifically about conceptual art...I hope it's useful.

What is conceptual art?

There are at least two answers:

What is conceptual art? There are at least two answers:

1) A post-Duchamp art movement that reached its zenith in the 1960s and 70s. (see Paul Wood Conceptual Art, Tate Publications or Wikipedia article on Conceptual Art with numerous links to conceptual artists' work)

2) Any art that is predominantly idea-based rather than created mainly for aesthetic appreciation. This is the more colloquial sense of the term ‘conceptual art’.
The main focus of this week’s session was on the second of these senses of ‘conceptual art’. In a broader sense, perhaps almost all art has some conceptual element (think of religious art, impressionism, cubism); but only where this dominates do we usually speak of a work as conceptual.

Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades are usually taken to be paradigms of conceptual art (in both senses above). With works such as Mark Wallinger’s A Real Work of Art (a real racehorse that he bought and put into races, but which he declared a work of art by choice of its name which was not meant to be metaphorical), there may be an aesthetic element: but what you see isn’t what you get.

The best explanation of what is going on with conceptual art is given by Arthur Danto (e.g. in his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace) who wrote about the non-identity of indiscernibles. Just because you can’t tell two objects apart simply by looking at them it doesn’t follow that they express the same emotions, have the same content or meaning. The context and etiology of an object influence its meaing. A urinal on a production line has different proerperties from the urinal that Duchamp dubbed ‘Fountain’, signed R. Mutt and entered for exhibition in 1917.

But how can conceptual art be art? George Dickie’s first version of his Institutional Theory of Art gives one explanation. For him a work of art is an artifact some aspect of which has had the status of ‘candidate for appreciation’ conferred upon it by a member or members of the artworld (by artworld he meant anyone who believed themselves to be part of the artworld, not the social elite of curators, critics, gallery owners, collectorsand well-known artists). These provide necessary and sufficient conditions (pre-requisites and guarantees) that anything is a work of art. But this is a neutral sense of ‘art’: to say that something is a work of art implies nothing about its value. On this theory (which has been much criticized for being over-inclusive) it is very easy to see that, for example the minimal intervention of selecting and signing a urinal transforms it into an artifact, and entering it for an exhibition is an act of conferral of status of ‘candidate for appreciation’ (further reading, including criticism of this approach, Nigel Warburton The Art Question, chapter 4).

Two Thoughts

1) What about the status of the Idea in Conceptual Art? A challenge: if the ideas expressed in conceptual art are trite or unoriginal (which they often are) does that make the artwork trite? One possible answer is that the idea is an element of the work of art, not its sole purpose: the ingenuity of the way of communicating the idea is part of the work. This might be supported by the notion that if you want to communicate a complex idea writing a philosophy book or paper is usually better than making a work of conceptual art that is likely to be ignored or misunderstood by gallery goers…

2) Should we approach conceptual art with cynicism or charity? Cynicism involves a starting position that most conceptual art deals in alluding to not very profound thoughts that would be better expressed in straightforward ways, and has limited aesthetic appeal by way of consolation. Charity involves approaching these works in a more open way, starting with the working assumption that there is something worth engaging with there to be discovered. Both approaches have their dangers…

Contemporary Aesthetics - Tate Modern - Notes from Session One

Tate Modern course: notes from Session One of Contemporary Aesthetics

Reading 35 from set book: Morris Weitz 'The Role of Theory in Aesthetics'

We considered Weitz's anti-theoretical position - he declares 'Art' and its sub-concepts (e.g. collage) to be Open Concepts and explains traditional aesthetic theorizing as resting on the mistake of misidentifying Art as the sort of concept that can be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions (remember necessary = pre-requisite; sufficient = guarantee). Because of the influence of Wittgenstein's notion of a family resemblance term, Weitz's approach is sometimes described as neo-Wittgensteinian. Basically he opposes the idea that Art and its sub-concepts are the sorts of concepts that lend themselves to definition - instead we rely on a pattern of criss-crossing and overlapping resemblances with paradigm cases of art or of the subconcept and as a community of language users make a judgement (presumably usually a tacit one) about whether or not to extend the concept to cover the new or controversial case.

Art theory of the past isn't useless though - Weitz suggests we read it as recommending paying greater attention to particular features of art (representation, expression, form or whatever) that may have been neglected in the past rather than what it purports to be, namely an attempt at definition.

For Weitz, any attempt to close the concept Art (or its sub-concepts) risks foreclosing on creativity...

His conclusion about the logical impossibility of defining Art is too strong - his supporting evidence is:  art theory or the past has failed; the open concept idea has some plausibility as an explanation; and art is adventurous and thrives on not being constrained. None of these, even jointly, leads to the conclusion that art, logically, cannot be defined, only that it may be difficult to define and possibly to the conclusion that the open concept approach is the best available explanation of what is going on.

Listen to a podcast interview on the definition of art

For further discussion of this topic, see my book The Art Question (Routledge), especially Chapter 3 'Family Resemblances'.

Download Powerpoint Presentation from Session One (for personal use only)

Next week: Readings 36 and 37. The Artworld and the Institutional Theory of Art.

Readings Week by Week (numbers are references to readings in ed. Cahn and Meskin Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology ).

Week One: 35 (Neo-Wittgensteinian approaches to Art)
Week Two, 36, 37 (The Institutional Theory of Art)
Week Three: 39 (Identifying Art ) NB note change to previous reading!
Week Four: 43 (Aesthetic Concepts)
Week Five: 47, 48 (Intentions and Interpretation)
Week Six 52 (Individual Style)

Contemporary Aesthetics - Tate Modern - Reading For the Course

Contemporary Aesthetics, Tate Modern.

Several students asked me to provide advance notice of reading and topics for this course which begins on Monday 1st June at 6.45 p.m in Tate Modern. So here it is. I may need to change the order and content, depending on which bits of the gallery we can use. All numbers refer to the set book ed. Cahn and Meskin.

Week One: 35 (Neo-Wittgensteinian approaches to Art)
Week Two, 36, 37 (The Institutional Theory of Art)
Week Three: 39 (Identifying Art ) NB note change to previous reading!
Week Four: 43 (Aesthetic Concepts)
Week Five: 47, 48 (Intentions and Interpretation)
Week Six 52 (Individual Style)

My book, The Art Question (Routledge) is also relevant background reading for weeks one and two.