Online Conference in Aesthetics

February 19, 2007

The bar is open

Though the conference itself is closed, we invite all of you to the Philosophy of Art weblog to continue any discussion that still may be in you. Treat it as you would the bar where you meet after the official proceedings are over. We will make space specifically for this purpose over there.

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February 18, 2007

Thank You

The Online Aesthetics Conference is now closed to new comments. The organizers would like to thank Professor Arthur Danto for his generous and detailed comments (as well as for the book which inspired this conference); the contributors for their complex, provocative papers; and the approximately 3,300 people who have visited this website and taken part in the conference these past few weeks.

We are also happy to announce the winners of two $250 prizes for papers by graduate students: Kalle Puolakka and Mario Wenning. We congratulate them both, and thank them for their outstanding contributions.

We hope that this is only the first of many online conferences in aesthetics. Anyone interested in helping to organize, or proposing a topic for a future conference should contract one of this conference's organizers. In the meantime, thanks once again for helping make this inaugural event such an interesting one.

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February 11, 2007

Time extension

Since there is still a lot here to chew on, the discussion is still lively, and we don't have to pay for extra hotel nights, we will leave comments open for another week.

(We've had a total of 3000 visitors and still have somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 page views per day--we'll give a more complete report next week, if anybody is curious.)

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February 05, 2007

Arthur Danto: The Transfiguration Transfigured

The Transfiguration Transfigured: Concluding remarks (click to view full pdf version)

Arthur C. Danto

Confronted by this outpouring of philosophical analysis bestowed upon a book I published twenty five years ago, I all at once realize how impoverished our language is in words for expressing gratitude. I mean that all we have is some variation on “thanks,” whether someone has passed the salt or held the door open, or rescued a child or saved ones life or murmured, like Molly Bloom, yes I said yes I will Yes. The word, compared to whatever elicits it, is inadequate and mechanical. Perhaps its having become perfunctory implies how commonplace generosity really is in our lives. It is the default condition of each of us to be in constant need of acknowledging the generosity of others. So I thought of the feast of thanksgiving that our forefathers thought of as a way of acknowledging the magnitude of grace by devouring its benefits, showing thanks by demonstrative philosophical gluttony. Lydia Goehr, in her brilliant mock sermon, has after all blurred the boundary between a conference and a congregation, somewhat playing on my own propensity for secularized liturgical language, which Richard Shusterman has made the occasion for his remarkable keynote address. “Transfiguration,” as you will see, is the least of it.

So I have tried, as a sign of devouring if not entirely digesting this banquet of essays, to respond as I could to each of them, sorted into courses by the organizers. The “Concluding Remarks,” while not quite as long as the aggregate length of the papers, is long enough to have been indigestible were it read aloud at the end of a conventional conference, with everyone stifling yawns and looking at their watches and wondering when will he be done? That may be one of the immediate benefits of the online conference, to compensate for those that Lydia itemizes as the pleasures of what we must henceforward call offline conferences. There are many others – like downloading presentations for later perusal, rather than frantically taking inadequate notes, and reading over and over what, at a conference, we could not possibly ask the speaker to repeat.

I have some observations to make, though not on this occasion, of how the medium inflects the message, to pick up on Lydia’s alerting us to the differences the Internet can make in communication. Instead, I conclude this thanksgiving preamble with a genuine acknowledgement. I cannot begin to say how much I have learned from this interchange, from having to think through in some degree what came in these papers, not just about the book but about our subject as aestheticians and philosophers of art. I hope that will be evident as you in your turn work through what I have written in response to you...

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Keynote: David Carrier

Is Danto's Aesthetic Truly Universal? (click to download full pdf version)

David Carrier

Arthur Danto has always said that his aesthetic, like his account of action, history and knowledge, is absolutely general. His definition of art describes works of art in all cultures. In making that claim, he goes against the dominant ways of thinking of his fellow art critics, and also, I believe, of most art historians. But his analysis does grow out of a long philosophical tradition. The central concern of philosophical aesthetics is to define art. Until we know what art is, we cannot properly describe its history, interpret it, or explain why it is significant.

In looking at the history of these definitions of art, the questions posed by historicism, relativism, and multiculturalism, are especially pressing. Within the West the forms of art have changed dramatically over time. Some philosophers thought that art was representation. But then abstract art was created. Other aestheticians said that art was expression. But then works of art that were not expressive were created. No one in 1850 could have imagined cubism; and in 1910, who could have imagined conceptual art? This is why the older general definitions of art are no longer acceptable. Given that such radically new forms of art have been developed relatively recently, why should that process not continue? When we look to China, India and the Islamic world we find very different forms of art. Chinese use scroll paintings; Indians sculpt Hindu gods; Muslims make calligraphy and decoration. Many of these works of art look very different from ours. And because the Chinese, Indians and Muslims have exotic customs, political institutions and religions, we can reasonably expect that their art will be unlike ours. And so it is natural to ask if Western-style definitions will accommodate this art.

Although Danto the art critic has very wide ranging interests, the examples of Danto the aesthetician almost always come from Western art. Were a sociologist of religion to offer a general theory based solely upon Christianity and Judaism, it would be natural to wonder whether his analysis applied also to Buddhism, Daoism and Hinduism. Danto’s working procedure raises similar problems. But the philosopher, of course, is not a mere sociologist, who gathers examples and then offers a description, which may need to be revised when further examples are gathered. After describing the nature of knowledge and our relationship to the world the philosopher offers a very general account of the identity of art...

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