Art and Its Objects by Richard Wollheim (review)

Leonardo,Vol. 4, pp. 289-300. PergamonPress 1971. Printed in Great Britain BOOKS Readersare invited to recommend books to be reviewed. Onlybooks in English and in French can be reviewed at this stage. Readers who would like to be added to Leonardo’spanel of reviewersshould write to the Founder-Editor, indicating their particular interests and specialization . Art and Its Objects. Richard Wollheim. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England and Victoria, Australia, 1970. 152 pp. Reviewed by: Kenneth R. Adams* Art and Its Objects is an excellent and substantial work in the field of philosophical aesthetics. Perhaps, as Anthony Quinton said in his review in the Listener,it is the best to have been written. It is certainly the best to have come my way. The sixtyfive sectionsinto which the short text is divided are virtually cleared of references, so that the threads of arguments can be pursued readily. The English edition (but not the American one) starts with a useful section-by-section summary. A range of related studies by other writers is set out in an eighteen-pageannotated bibliography at the end of the book. This seems to include most that is good in philosophic-aesthetic thought of the present century, with further reference back principally to Kant and Hegel. Wollheim’s ideas seem to develop through an interplay between existential-phenomenological thought, psychoanalysisand linguisticanalysis. His expository method, though not his style, belongs to the linguistic tradition but his substantial position owes much to Freud and seemsto be closelyrelated to that of Valery. While there is no questionof reducinghis work to that of his influences,it wouldbe difficultto saythat he has arrived at any one or two positive or outstanding conclusions. For many of his conclusions are either negative (that certain generalizations cannotbemadebecauseofcertaincounter-examples) or agnostic(forinstance, that while there is indeed a peculiar aesthetic attitude essential to art, we are perhaps in no position to say anything definitive about it and we may perhaps continue to have it without discoveringanythingbetter to sayabout it). Theeffectof Wollheim’swork as a wholeis, in my opinion, both positive and outstanding. His intention is to render the ‘envelope’ of (verbal) thoughtaboutartsufficientlyelastictoaccommodate * 19Dartmouth Park Road, London, N.W.5, England. (or sufficiently transparent to expose) the possible experiencesof the object. He proceedsby dissecting out those elements that are inelastic (or opaque), starting with the larger impurities. His success consists in securing conceptural spacefor a variety of truths. There are four points at which I think Wollheim goesslightlywrong andI shouldliketo explainthese in detail. The numbers in brackets refer to the numbered sectionsof the book. 1. Traditionalmedia distinguishedby the nature of their tokens (36) A number of logical problems arise from the assumption that all works of art are physical objects or events (419). It is unsatisfactory, for example, to identifya symphonywiththescore,withaparticular performance or with any class of performances. Wollheim shows that the concept of types, as used by C. S.Pierce, can be used to solvethese problems without robbing a work of art of its physicality. Withthe realisation(for I think it is soj’thatmany works of art have the logical status of types, comes an acceptance that, in different media, different things may constitute the tokens of the work. He is inclined to say that the tokens of an opera are its performances, while the tokens of a poem are its written instances. Here I think that he has not appreciated the logical freedom that his own arguments confer on the artist and/or spectator. Different genreswithin one medium may be allowed to have differentsorts of thingsastokens. Within theconventionof poetry there are subconventions for which the token is necessarily aural (having, for example, a definitive tape recording) and subconventions for which the token is necessarilyvisual (concretepoetry). It is interesting that any single word, removed from the context of art, may be regarded as having both written and aural instances for its tokens. It might be thought to followlogicallythat the sameis true of any sequence of words that constitutes a poem. I think this would be a mistake. I think that the nature of the token is an implicitpart of what an artist decides when he is consideringthe detailsof a 289 290 Books poem and...