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Recent Currents in Aesthetics of Relevance to Contemporary Visual Artists
- Leonardo
- The MIT Press
- Volume 12, Number 2, Spring 1979
- pp. 111-119
- Article
- Additional Information
The principal currents of aesthetics in Britain and in the U.S.A. from the
Developments in aesthetics are linked to more general tendencies in philosophy, to the increasing convergence of British–U.S.A. and Continental European speculation, and to the interaction of art and philosophy. A large variety of fairly detailed conceptual puzzles are sketched, including those regarding the following: the alleged distinctiveness of aesthetic perception, representational schemata, forgery, intentional considerations, the ‘innocent eye’, conceptual art, relations between physical object and artwork, the individuation and ontological distinction of artworks, relativism and nonconverging interpretations, expressive qualities, the definitions of art, the objectivity of aesthetic judgment, the cultural and historical character of art.
The salient work of the principal contributors is identified, including in addition to those within the tradition of Britain and of the U.S.A., representatives of the other chief European tendencies—phenomenology (Ingarden), hermeneutics (Hirsch), structuralism (Barthes), anti-structuralism (Derrida), Marxism (Lukács). The convergence of these various intellectual streams is linked with the developing sense, within British–U.S.A. aesthetics, of the quite specific inadequacies of aesthetic empiricism, defined in terms of what is directly accessible to some form of sensory perception.
Finally, the principal conceptual puzzles posed for the various arts are surveyed: the identification and individuation of musical pieces, the role of musical notation, extreme nominalist and realist views of music; the complexity of visual perception, the conventional element of pictorial representation and naturally perceived resemblances; the application of speech-act theoretical analyses to the categories of the literary arts (fiction, poetry and metaphor). Brief attention is paid to current interest among visual artists regarding philosophical puzzles, hence the mutual fertilization of art and philosophy.
The developing focal theme of the seventies appears to be the search for an adequate hypothesis for various kinds of artworks, in virtue of which the objectivity and range of critical appreciation may be satisfactorily grounded.