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Leonardo, Vol. 14, pp. 48-50. PergamonPress, 1981. Printed in Great Britain. COMMENTARY ON THE BOOK THE CONCEPT OFSTYLE Gerhard Charles Rump* 1. This book, edited by Berel Lang (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1979. 246 pp., illus.) is an instance of the 'classic' case in which one has a number of authors who deal with the same subject and each of whom disagrees with the others. This situation is at the same time confusing and enlightening. The 10 essays were delivered as lectures at the Summer Institute in Aesthetics in Boulder, Colorado, in 1977. In his Preface , Lang states that it was hoped that the lectures would reveal the connections (if not necessarily a unity) among style differences and also display the relations among the disciplines that focused on style and/or the concept of style. The book is divided into three main parts, and there is a check list of questions on the Concept of Style by the editor, plus a bibliography of works cited and notes on the contributors. I shall concentrate on the essays with more direct reference to the visual arts, leaving aside the one by Leonard B. Meyer (Toward a Theory of Style), which presents a musicologist's point of view, and those by Monroe Beardsley (Verbal Style and Illocutionary Action), Seymour Chatman (The Styles of Narrative Codes), Ann Banfield (The Nature of Evidence in a Falsified Literary Theory) and Hayden White (The Problem of Style in Realistic Representation : Marx and Flaubert). 2. Kendall Walton deals with Style and the Products and Processes of Art. He points out that the notion of style is irrelevant to objects that are not products of human action, so that, although one discerns differences between a sunset in the tropics and one in the Arizona desert, one does not think of these differences in stylistic terms. The qualities attributed to artifacts, and especially to artworks, have corresponding predicates that serve primarily to describe human actions. Thus a work may be in a sentimental or a flamboyant style, but sentimentality and flamboyance do not constitute styles; they are what Walton calls 'style qualities ' . Consequently, Walton is dissatisfied with the cobbler -model of the institution of art. The cobbler-model has a trip art structure: Cobblers (producers) make shoes (products) that are worn by customers (consumers ). The point of the model is: How well do products fit the needs of the consumers, the efforts of producers being only a means to this end? Applied to the institution of art, he says this model shows the defect that it ~oncentrates too much on an artwork, the 'object Itself, and pays too little attention to the process of its *Art historian, Ubierstrasse 135, D-5300 Bonn-Bad Godesberg , Fed. Rep. Ger. (Received6 March 1980) production. He then tries to make up for this defect by concluding that the idea should be encouraged to understand the notion of an artwork's style in terms of the way it was made. Although what one 'sees' in an artwork may not correspond to what the artist actually did in making it, still how an artwork appears to have been made is crucial as regards the characteristics of its style. Even if one should discover that a 'Daumier' drawing was not made by Daumier but by a computer, one would still feel comfortable in saying it was in the style of Daumier. Walton also stresses the role of everyday experiences in complex acts of cognition and discusses various aspects of his theoretical analysis, concluding with a brief discussion of Robert Rauschenberg's paintings 'Factum I' and 'Factum II'. 'Factum I' consists of a canvas onto which paint has been dripped very much as was done by Jackson Pollock, and 'Factum II' consists of a canvas on which Rauschenberg tried to reproduce 'Factum 1'. Walton asks, If a viewer of 'Factum II' is told how it was made, what effect does this information have on how it appears to the viewer to have been made? He states that one's beliefs affect one's perceptual experience; to minimize this effect, one must try to put things in their historical and cultural contexts. He arrives at distinguishing two different...

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