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Original Articles

Backing Kant, with Interest

A Global Concept of Art

Pages 90-99 | Published online: 18 May 2015

  • Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, ‘Moral Functionalism and Moral Motivation’, The Philosophical Quarterly 45, no. 178 (1995), 20–40. See also Peter Railton, ‘What the Non-Cognitivist Helps Us to See the Naturalist Must Help Us to Explain’ in Reality, Representation, and Projection, ed. J. Haldane and C. Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 279–300; and Simon Blackburn, ‘Realism, Quasi, or Queasy?’, in ibid., 365–83.
  • See three books by Ellen Dissanayake: Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (Seattle: McLellan and University of Washington Press, 2000); Homo Aestheticus (Where Art Comes from and Why) (New York: Free Press, 1992); and What is Art For? (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1988).
  • The consequences of this aspect of human culture are not all good. There are many cases in recorded history where the values engendered through a tightly-knit culture have resulted in immeasurable suffering to those considered as aliens. This is no longer an acceptable consequence of the maintenance of culture according to the dominant strands within Westernised normative systems—although recent events in Iraq perpetrated by the West might suggest the contrary.
  • Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. W. S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
  • I still find Susanne Langer's attempts to identify the ontology of art instructive. See her Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953). For an example of philosophers attempting to adapt traditional theories of art to conceptual art see Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens, eds., Philosophy and Conceptual Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). For an example of how Susanne Langer's version of Kantian aesthetic theory can accommodate conceptual art, see chapter 9 in Jennifer A. McMahon, Aesthetics and Material Beauty: Aesthetics Naturalised (New York & London: Routledge, 2007), 177–99.
  • An attempt to accommodate Kantian aesthetic theory within art history writing is evidenced in the round-table discussions organised by James Elkins at the University of Cork and the Burren College of Art in Ireland, and the School of Art Institute, Chicago. These discussions were published in: James Elkins, ed., Art History Versus Aesthetics (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).
  • Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1914).
  • Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic’, in Analytic Aesthetics, ed. Richard Shusterman, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 147–160.
  • Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966) (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
  • See Miles Rind, ‘The Concept of Disinterestedness in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 40, no. 1 (2002), 67–87.
  • I am implying here that whether one treats an artwork as something to enjoy simply for its sensuous qualities does not necessarily have a bearing upon its artness. Its artness may or may not relate to the object's sensuous properties. The role of an object's sensuous properties in determining its artness will depend on whether they featured in the basis for the value given the object by the community of its making. I realize I go against the grain of many art historians who take themselves to be Kantian in their approach to the aesthetic. I attempt, however, to do justice to the larger role played by the aesthetic realm in Kant's aesthetic theory, which was to orient us toward community and life. What we call art are those objects within all cultures that embody the indeterminate meanings that consolidate and further this implicit role. As such, the sensuous qualities that attract a Westerner to Roman glassware, to borrow an example from Ivan Gaskell, may be more a distraction from, rather than a pointer to, the aspects that make the object an aesthetic one. For a strong argument for the multivalency of artworks against my own position (but one I hope to have withstood), see Ivan Gaskell, ‘Being True to Artists’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61, no. 1 (2003), 53–60.
  • For a study of the poetic component of the art historian's work, see James Elkins, Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
  • For a nuanced counter-argument to my conclusion, see Ivan Gaskell, ‘Rembrandt's Genius, Wittgenstein's Warning’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 52 (Fall 2007), 97–106.

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