Intentionality in art: empirical exposure

ABSTRACT

In academicized art history, artworks were traditionally construed to embody historical time and place as well as the particulars of artistic production, from the intentions of the artist to the broader historical context. But there has been no general agreement – formalism for example completely excised context from analysis – as to which particulars had to be dealt with in order for an art-historical interpretation to be complete. Instead, it was analytic aesthetics (and literary theory) that most extensively applied itself to one such particular, the issue of artistic intention. While there are certain parallels between the analytic philosophical and art historical references to intention, the vigorous debate of intentionality that is alive and well in philosophical and literary circles has no equivalent in art historical discourse. This article will address this lacuna by locating intentionality in the domain of the visual arts with a view to real-world art production and consumption mechanisms.

KEYWORDS:

• Art interpretation and criticism
• actual and hypothetical intentionalism
• image ambiguity and interactivity
• meaning-making and branding
• psychological aesthetics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Petra Frank-Witt is a graduate student of Art History at Hunter College, New York and a docent in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Economics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Her dissertation was published as a book, and her art historical research has appeared in Third Text.

Notes

1 Carolingian scholars’ examinations as to the nature of art were followed by the distinct literature devoted to art interpretation in the Renaissance. See, for example, Quiviger (2002).

2 In the absence of ‘intentional’ data the mindreading envisioned by some researchers (see Sperber and Wilson 2002) in ordinary language situations is of course utterly utopian in the realm of art with its substantial gaps, spatial and temporal, between art production and consumption.

3 Many other interesting observations result from empirical models, for example that expertise was associated with stronger art experiences and that the most robust predictor of art appreciation among all viewers was emotion (Leder et al. 2012). A presumed effect on the brain’s reward centers, moreover, aligns art with eating chocolate and enjoying sex (Leder et al. 2004).

4 This is followed by a final stage, in which an aesthetic judgment is rendered based on an evaluation of all previous stages (Leder et al. 2004).

5 ‘The mixture of personal, political, and social concerns that fuel all forms of moods, worries, and psychological states of being, is the material that feeds my work’, states Anne Gilman, the artist interviewed.

6 Mace and Ward (2002, 184). Margaret Boden (2013, 4) applies a similar indeterminacy to scientists and mathematicians: ‘Artists, scientists, and mathematicians often report that they have no idea how they came up with their valuable new ideas … In general, much more goes on in our minds below the level of consciousness than can ever be accessed by it. Were that not so, we’d be paralyzed by information overload’.

7 See the artist’s website for images of her work: https://www.annegilman.com.

8 Latour defines material agency as ‘any thing that does modify a state of affairs … that does […] make a difference in the course of some other agent’s action’ (2005, 71).

9 Kant’s (2000, 195) eighteenth-century definition of aesthetic idea is still astoundingly relevant: ‘In a word, the aesthetic idea is a representation of the imagination, associated with a given concept, which is combined with such a manifold of partial representations in the free use of the imagination that no expression designating a determinate concept can be found for it, which therefore allows the addition to a concept of much that is unnameable, the feeling of which animates the cognitive faculties and combines spirit with the mere letter of language’.

10 A group of current MFA students at Hunter College was unanimous in stating that their interest lay in providing interpretative guidance only, granting the art consumer freedom to add or subtract to what is being proposed or to mount interpretations independently of the author.

11 Short of an institutionalization of this process and if third party interpretation such as the economic reality of branding, i.e. meaning-making by art market operators, is objectionable to the artist, the artist may have to be the architect of ‘intention’ dissemination (artist manifestos served this purpose).