Art and Recollection

Undoubtedly, as the discussions about how to commemorate the events of 9/11 have shown, we need to think seriously about memorial art — those statues whose often forgotten heroes molder in public parks and town squares everywhere. But perhaps that neglect is no more pronounced in any relevant domain of inquiry than it is in the philosophy of art, since memorial art is art expressly designed to perform cultural functions and there remains in modem aesthetics a strong tendency to withhold the title of art, properly so called, from works noteworthy for their social utility. Such art is, for a great many aestheticians, below their theoretical radar screen.

The culprit here is the aesthetic theory of art which maintains, roughly speaking, that something is an artwork if and only if it is designed with the primary intention of affording or having the capacity to afford experiences valuable for their own sakes.¹ The aesthetic theory of art might be diagnosed as a philosophical reflection of that wing of modernism called aestheticism.Artists in the nineteenth and twentieth century, so the story goes, sought to resist the assimilation of all value to utilitarian and especially market value by attempting to create works that had no other value than that available through the contemplation of the work itself, isolated from whatever useful, including socially useful, purposes such works might be expected to serve.²

Philosophers then, like the owl Minerva, spread their wings over this artistic tendency, protecting it with formidable argumentation until it became one of the most deeply ingrained biases of the philosophy of art — or, at least, the default assumption of a great many of those who practice said philosophy. Perhaps some evidence of this lingering, almost automatic or subconscious prejudice is that the scholarly societies in the English-speaking world that specialize in the philosophy of art bear names such as the American Society for Aesthetics, the British Society for Aesthetics and so on.

But if art, properly so called, must be intended primarily to deliver aesthetic experience — experience valued for its own sake and not for social utility — where does that leave memorial art, art dedicated first and foremost to discharging social functions, art that would not succeed on its own terms if indeed it was valuable primarily or exclusively for the intrinsic value of the experience it afforded? It leaves it off the theoretical map of the philosopher of art, unless the philosopher is prepared to argue, somewhat in the face of the facts, that such artworks, despite the convictions of those closest to it, were undertaken with the primary intention of affording aesthetic experience, appearances notwithstanding.

Of course, another option is for the philosopher to deny that such work is art at all, consigning it to the category of kitsch. And perhaps a parallel observation to that of taking note of the philosopher's discomfort with memorial art is that high modernism, of which I maintain the aesthetic theory of art is a reflection, has been, for the most part, singularly unsuccessful historically in producing major art of this sort, the Vietnam Memorial being an exception to this generalization of which there are only a few others. Fundamentally, both high modernism and the aesthetic theory of art appear constitutionally inhospitable to memorial art.

Of course, the theoretical cost of cashiering memorial art from the orderof the muses is potentially quite high, since so much art traditionally has hada memorial function or, at least, a significant commemorative dimension.³ For that matter, one might even be tempted to claim that most traditional art has had a memorial dimension as part of its essential address, though I do not require such a strong assertion to be true in order to make my argument. It is enough that a vast amount of traditional art is memorial for the argument to proceed. And that much is undeniable.

The Iliad and the Mahabharata, along with countless other epics, commemorate the founding struggles of their respective peoples. The depiction of Christ's crucifixion, the motif of an indefinitely large number of Christian paintings and sculptures, is basically commemorative in purpose as...