Aesthetics for the Contemporary Artist

Leonardo, Vol. 8, pp. 163-166. Pergamon Press 1975. Printed in Great Britain AESTHETICS FOR THE CONTEMPORARY ARTIST Elmer H. Duncan, Corresponding Editor Readers are invited to draw attention to articles on aesthetics appearing in English language journals that are of special interest to studio artists and art teachersfor review by Elmer H. Duncan, Dept. of Philosophy, Baylor University, Waco, TX76703, U.S.A. H. G. Alexander, The Paradox of the Universal in Art, acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the ArtSouthwesternJ .Phil.5,49 (1974). This essay is a bit diff- world) have conferred the status of candidate for erent becausetheauthordefendsviews on aesthetics that appreciation’ (p. 25). Thus ‘ready-mades’ or ‘found many people consider somewhat dated and probably objects’ become art works by being placed on display exploded. The ‘paradox’ is that art is at once an in museumns and art galleries. expression of that which is individual and of universal truths. The author thinks that one way this paradox can be resolved is by treating the individual as an ideal type, as his father, Hartley B. Alexander, had suggested in his Poetry and the Individual in 1906. In passing, H. G. Alexander defends the views of Croce and Bullough against the recent challenges of V. Aldrich and G. Dickie. The reader will find Alexander’s position unusual-but plausible. M. C. Beardsley, What is an Aesthetic Quality?, Theoria 39, 50 (1973). This entire issue of Theoria was devoted to eight good essays on aesthetics. In addition to the present paper, there are essays by A. Danto, R. Sclafani, A. Tormey, G. Hermeren, M. Weitz, T. Cohen, G. Dickie (see below), plus a review by E. Schaper. Most of the papers are responses to F. Sibley’s ‘Aesthetic Concepts’ (Phil. Rev.,1959). In his paper, Beardsley offers a clear, if of necessity somewhat technical, survey of the literature of the subject. There have been a great many papers written on Sibley’s subject. Part of Beardsley’s own contribution is that Sibley’s aesthetic concepts, e.g. ‘gaudy’, ‘garish’, etc. are a curious fact-value hybrid, used to support aesthetic judgments-this painting is aesthetically poor because it is garish. Beardsley also discusses another type of aesthetic quality-human qualities that we sometimes use to help us evaluate art works. His examples of such ‘H-qualities’ include ‘. ..the soaring, floating and sinking of music’ (p. 69). G. Dickie, The Institutional Conception of Art in Language and Aesthetics, B. R. Tilghman, ed. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1973), p. 21. This paper is, in part, a response to the work of M. Weitz (see below). Dickie argues that ‘art’ is a ‘closed concept’ and definable. This is the latest in a series of papers in which Dickie has argued that there is no distintively aesthetic attitude, or experience or object. How, then, does anything come to be recognized as art or, more simply, how does anything become art? Dickie’s answer is that an art work is something made, an artifact, ‘. ..upon which some person or persons G. Dickie, Taste and Attitude: the Origin of the Aesthetic, Theoriu 39, 153 (1973). It is often claimed (e.g. by J. Stolnitz) that the modern notion of the aesthetic attitude dates back to the British (chiefly Scottish, actually) philosophers of the 18th-century. Specifically, A. Alison is cited as an early ‘attitude’ theorist. In the present essay Dickie argues, rather convincingly, that this is not the case. Alison should be remembered for applying association psychology (which he derived from Hume and other Scots, not from Hartley) to aesthetics; he was not an attitude theorist at all. Dickie argues instead that we must look to the German philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th-centuries, to Kant and to Schiller, to find a clear statement of an ‘attitude’ theory of aesthetics. The real value of the paper is that the author achieves the purpose that he sets forth early in his essay. ‘Even if my historical theses go awry I hope that my analyses of the structure of the theory of taste and of the structure of aesthetic attitude theory will make more precise discussion of these theories and...