Art, Perception and Reality by E. H. Gombrich, Julian Hochberg, Max Black, and: Perceptions: Mechanisms and Models by Richard Held, Whitman Richards (review)

Books 75 This impression is unhappily conveyed at its strongest in the very first chapter that was written ten years ago and traverses what is by now thoroughly familiar territory in the logic and ontology ofart, with only a little awkwardness in the drawing ofthat important distinction made by Nelson Goodman more recently between what he (Goodman) calls 'autographic' and 'allographic' arts or art forms. This impression of familiarity, appropriate to the text of a students' survey course, is only very gradually dispersed as the principal thesis, which turns on the interplay of descriptive and evaluative uses of the phrase 'work of art', is progressively unwrapped. But as it emerges that this text is more venturesome than a survey, so too does it emerge that its author is not only cautious (which must be commendable in a philosopher) but conservative as well (which need not be). His illustrative examples are drawn massively from the Beethoven-Brahms-Dante-EliotEstablishment and, rather surprisingly in a book that is nominally about the visual arts, only a dozen visual artists are indexed along with sixty or more writers and musicians. Christo is treated, toward the end, as a very queer case. The author is contemptuous of Sino-Soviet social realism and its attendant habits of criticism as having been 'influenced by philosophy', while he is himself evidently ready to influence Western art and art criticism philosophically at the drop of a phrase from 'ordinary language'. A theorist who places so much weight on the ordinary linguistic practices of his time and place is surely challenged at such a point to discuss the difficulty that whereas in the West there may be some warrant for treating political, moral, religious and ideological questions as 'unrelated' to art, the ordinary language of other times and places may sound quite different. On temporal relativism, if not on cultural relativism, Khatchadourian equivocates: ' . . . some artists in any given period, but particularly in the twentieth century, have claimed that they are indeed trying to broaden or otherwise modify the traditional aims of art .... Futurism and Dadaism in painting, in this century, might perhaps be examples of this.' And so, indeed, and more persuasively, might some more recent manifestations culminating in at least one version of so-called 'conceptual art' that makes the modification of the concept criterial ofart-and, incidentally, challenges the distinction drawn in ordinary language between the allegedly 'descriptive' and 'evaluative' uses of the phrase 'work of art'. A way of taking Khatchadourian's developed thesis might be as an extended argument against the worthwhileness -perhaps even against the very possibilityof an art incorporating or presupposing radical conceptual revision. But to work in this way, it would need to be sharpened and aimed more explicitly against an articulate opposing view. As it stands, it seems rather to be a synopsis ofthe conventional wisdom of(roughly) late romanticism, cautiously qualified at likely points of contention and hesitatingalways on the brink ofderiving some plain recommendation from the sampling of conservative, cultivated Western habits of speech and thought. Peacock's book is, by contrast, an unphilosophical book, frankly addressed to the appreciation and practical criticism of literature and to some of the theoretical problems raised by the activity of appraising poems and novels. It is overtly polemical and vividly written, with both energy and grace, around the central thesis that correct literary appraisal need not and should not aim toward the 'objective' ideal of commanding universal assent. On the personal use of literature the author claims, surely correctly, that (p. 37): 'I pick out the words that feed my taste, my longings and desires, I read them, and repeat the reading; doing that, I rehearse my own nature, I become clear about myself, assert myself, renew myself. It is on a par with any natural activity or selffulfilment .' . The implication for criticism of this assessment of the reader's natural behaviour is spelled out in this way: 'The point of my argument is that this subjectivity, this individualized imaginative and emotional context or area, is valid precisely because it is person-focused. It is in no way, as is often implied in conventional critical writing, aesthetically irrelevant and inferior because it falls...