Art, knowledge and virtue: comments on Alana Jelinek's This Is Not Art

Abstract

This article is a commentary on Alana Jelinek's book, This Is Not Art. It broadly agrees with Jelinek in her diagnosis of the current ills of the artworld, who is to blame for this, and the need for an endogenous value of art. Furthermore, it agrees with her that the value of art lies in its status as a ‘knowledge-forming discipline’. However, it takes issue with the very notion of an ‘avant-garde’ art, with Jelinek's claims concerning truth, and raises questions as to what it is for the discipline of art to be ‘knowledge-forming’. It ends with a sceptical doubt as to whether it is the nature of art to favour politically progressive messages.

Keywords:

• Alana Jelinek
• definition of art
• truth
• knowledge

Notes on contributor

Derek Matravers is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University and a Senior Member of Darwin College, Cambridge. He has published three books recently: Introducing Philosophy of Art: Eight Case Studies (Routledge, 2013); Fiction and Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2014); and Figuring Out Figurative Art (co-edited with Damien Freeman, Routledge, 2014). He is working on another book, on empathy, to be published by Polity in 2015. He is the author of Art and Emotion (Oxford University Press, 1998), as well as numerous articles on aesthetics, ethics and the philosophy of mind.

Notes

1. In my experience those in cognate disciplines have the same kind of reaction to Anglo-American philosophers as the Bishop of Southwark has to Lionel, his parish priest in David Hare's Racing Demon: ‘There is something in your tone that is sanctimonious. You give an appearance of superiority that is wholly unearned. It is profoundly offensive. Because it is based on nothing at all’ (Hare 1991, 76).