Aesthetics for Contemporary Artists

Leonardo. Vol. 14, No.2, pp. 153-156. Pergamon Press Ltd., 1981. Printed in Great Britain. AESTHETICS FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS Elmer H. Duncan Readers are invited to draw attention to articles on aesthetics appearing in English languagejournals that are ofspecial interest to studio artists and art teachers, for review by Elmer H. Duncan. Dept. of Philosophy, Baylor University, Waca, TX 76798. U.S.A. R. Arnheim, A Plea for Visual Thinking, Critical Inquiry 6, 489 (1980). In the area of psychological aesthetics, Arnheim remains a major figure. He is the author of several books on the subject, though he is perhaps best known for his Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1960). This paper is written to combat a popular misconception. He begins by noting that 'Perception and thinking are treated by textbooks of psychology in separate chapters' (p. 489). This leads to the belief that the two are quite different functions. The senses give us perceptions of the world; the mind processes this material to make it into useful information. Thinking is thus related to the 'higher' powers of the mind and is obviously important. By contrast: 'The exercise of the senses is a mere recreation, relegated to spare time. It is left to the playful practice of the arts and music and is readily dispensed with when a tight budget calls for economy' (p. 489). Similarly, he notes that, especially since the time of such rationalist philosophers as Descartes and Leibniz, thinking has been regarded as clear and distinct, whereas the senses were, by their very nature, confused, not to be trusted. The examples he uses to combat this view are too complicated to reproduce here. But he seeks to show that people do, in fact, solve rather complex problems by visual thinking. Then he asks the rhetorical question, 'Was it seeing or was it thinking that solved the problem? Obviously, the distinction is absurd. In order to see we had to think; and we had nothing to think about if we were not thinking' (p. 492). He next tries to describe the classical problem offreedom and determinism and to argue that the two are not, as they are commonly thought to be, incompatible. The reader may not find this argument entirely convincing, but that is to miss the point that thinking and perceiving need not be considered as separate functions; this is false dichotomy. 'By no means is my imagery only a by-product of the "real" thinking going on in some other region of my mind. It is no epiphenomenon but the very arena in which the action takes place' (p. 493). (see Section in Leonardo 13, 328 (1980)) D. Best, The Objectivity of Artistic Appreciation, Brit. J. Aesth. 20, 115(1980). It is often claimed that a major difference-if not the major difference-between art and science is that science is objective while art isessentially subjective. Best's paper is written in opposition to this view. In his own terms, his thesis is: 'Artistic judgements are as fully objective as scientific judgements, and those who assume the subjectivity of artistic experience, or believe that artistic appreciation is ultimately a matter of intuition or is answerable solely to inner feelings, have so totally failed to understand the nature of artistic appreciation but also of objectivity and knowledge' (p. 116). One reason many people think that art is basically subjective is that they think that objective explanations are scientific explanations (p. 119). If this is true and if it is true that art is not science, then it follows that Best's thesis is false by definition. 153 Best is sure that the claim is not true, nor is it true that to be objective a statement must be quantifiable. Best argues, on the other hand, that there are many kinds of reasoning, 'I particularly want to stress the kind of reasoning which I call 'interpretative' since it has been surprisingly overlooked' (p. 120). The question then becomes: How are artistic interpretations defended if they are challenged? Do I simply refer to my 'intuitions' or my feelings? If so, then such interpretations would be subjective in the bad...