Aesthetics

• Michael Kelly: Making a Brillo Box Red, White, and Blue is Easy: Making an Artwork Isn't
• Elizabeth Schellekens: On the 'Sense of Beauty'
• York Gunther: Content, Embodment, and Aesthetic Force
• Kalle Puolakka: Is there Room for Aesthetic Experience in Danto's Transfguration of the Commonplace?

Excerpts from each paper below the fold...

Michael Kelly: Making a Brillo Box Red, White, and Blue is Easy: Making an Artwork Isn't (click to download full pdf version)
...
Aside from its contribution to solving the Brillo Boxes indiscernibility problem, what are we to make of this inside/outside distinction in art? When we look back at Transfiguration twenty-five years later, as we’re doing for this online conference, it is clear, among other things, that this inside/outside distinction also involves a distinction between the aesthetic and non-aesthetic, where ‘aesthetic’ seems to be equivalent to ‘perceptual’. Danto’s philosophical point, first expressed in his earlier “The Artworld” essay (1964), is that any appeal to the aesthetic/perceptual properties of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (e.g., made of wood) are not helpful in distinguishing it from a supermarket Brillo box (e.g., made of cardboard). In Transfiguration, he explicitly says that what makes Warhol’s Brillo Boxes art “could be broached without bringing aesthetic considerations in at all” (p. vi; italics added). For aesthetic considerations do not belong to the definition or logic of art, though they do belong to artistic practice (p. 91). In response to philosophers who attempt to solve the indiscernibility problem by appeal to such considerations, Danto states firmly that the definition of art as embodied meaning is logically prior to aesthetic considerations because we need the definition to identify the kinds of considerations that are appropriate to artworks (p. 95): “we often cannot perceive the aesthetic properties of artworks, as distinct from the aesthetic qualities of their material counterparts, until the concept of art is available to us” (p. 158). In short, aesthetics “hardly ever touches the heart of art” (p. 173), even though artistic practice remains deeply aesthetic.

To highlight Danto’s own emphasis on the virtually nonexistent role of aesthetics in the philosophical understanding of art, we could say that there is an “anti-aesthetic” component to his philosophy of art, though in a qualified sense relative to other anti-aesthetic tendencies in contemporary art theory. A major difference is that Danto’s anti-aesthetic is intended to open up the possibility of the philosophy of art, whereas other anti-aesthetic views are also aimed at the philosophy of art with the conscious aim to discredit both at the same time. Clearly, this is not Danto’s intention. Despite this very important difference, however, I want to analyze his anti-aesthetic precisely because I find it problematic in ways he does not intend or likely accept...

Elizabeth Schellekens: On the 'Sense of Beauty' (click to download full pdf version)

It is often held, in philosophical and non-philosophical circles alike, that the more informed we are about art, the better placed we are to appreciate it. That is to say, the more we know about, for example, the historical setting in which a work was produced and the artist’s intentions in producing it, the better equipped we are to enjoy all the layers of that work’s meaning and symbolic references, and so to appreciate its artistic accomplishment and aesthetic value.

At least at a first glance, knowledge to do with ontological status seems to be no exception to this rule-of-thumb: knowing that a work is a forgery, say, influences the way in which we perceive, assess and respond to that work. In other words, our appreciation of a work genuinely painted by Vermeer, for example, differs from our appreciation of a copy produced by Van Meegeren precisely because, of the two paintings, we know the latter not to be the genuine artwork.

A slightly more difficult case is presented by the related, albeit in some ways more complex, question about the aesthetic appreciation of objects that are visually indiscernible yet ontologically so different that only one can rightfully be described as an artwork. What, one may ask, happens when we are confronted with two objects that have exactly the same appearance, although one is a work of art and the other is not, such as with Andy Warhol’s exhibited Brillo Boxes on one hand, and the Brillo boxes to be found in our supermarkets on the other? Will our aesthetic responses be the same, or will they differ? Furthermore, can our aesthetic response to a thing change once we know that it is, or is not, an artwork?

...

York Gunther: Content, Embodment, and Aesthetic Force (Click to download full pdf version)

What is art?  What properties differentiate artworks for mundane objects, events or states of affairs? The question, which is central to the philosophy of art, has preoccupied Arthur Danto for more than 40 years now. In Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Danto sets out a detailed answer, which he later in “Art and Meaning,” his introductory essay in The Madonna of the Future, parses down. There Danto suggests that for something to be an artwork it must have two properties, viz. content and embodiment. While this economical explanation is well motivated in some respects, it is problematic. The two conditions, I contend, are by themselves insufficient to distinguish artworks from all non-artworks. My intention is to bolster Danto’s explanation by outlining a third condition. I will argue that artworks are metaphysically distinct in part because they possess aesthetic force. I begin my discussion by motivating Danto’s two conditions for art. Next, I present several counterexamples that reveal the insufficiency of his characterization. Finally, I present the idea of aesthetic force and suggest how it handles the problem facing Danto...

Kalle Puolakka: Is there Room for Aesthetic Experience in Danto's Transfguration of the Commonplace? (Click to download full pdf version)

Richard Shusterman has argued that by focusing too much on the distinction between art and reality Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art fails to take aesthetic experience into proper consideration.  Besides, in Shusterman’s view, Danto is too heavily guided by “the wrapper model of definition”, the kind of traditional and, in Shusterman’s eyes, backward-looking form of philosophical inquiry whose goal is to classify reality into different clearly demarcated categories. By searching for the features that separate art from reality Danto ends up putting “art in a box”.

Now, accusing Danto for ignoring the importance of aesthetic questions, particularly after the publication of The Abuse of Beauty (2003), does not seem appropriate. Since Shusterman’s criticism predates the new work, it may be unfair to draw on The Abuse of Beauty in the attempt to respond to Shusterman’s criticism. However, I believe that already The Transfiguration of the Commonplace contains a theory of aesthetics, a fact overlooked by Shusterman. I will focus on the seventh chapter of the work where Danto analyzes the nature of artistic representation, a part of The Transfiguration that Noël Carroll has, in fact, called “overlooked” and “misunderstood”. In my view, the analysis presented there, particularly Danto’s emphasis on the metaphorical nature of artistic representation, actually implies a notion of aesthetic experience or “artistic experience”, as Danto himself calls it. In my view, this notion is not so very different from that of aesthetic experience. My aim here is to defend Danto’s account against Shusterman’s criticism...

 

Comments

[davidcarrier]

Michael provides a very clear presentation of the place of literary examples in Arthur's system. I would add, Warhol's A: A NOVEL is a real case very much like this one; in my book in progress I will compare it to BRILLO BOX.

Michael is puzzled by the idea that we can look inside some works of art. What could that mean? Here the differences between literature and visual art obviously are important. Any object whatsoever could be presented as a sculpture, but only a text could claim to be literature.

I am not sure that I follow this discussion about aesthetic properties, for I imagined that the aesthetic in this broad sense includes all visual qualities. But of course to say that it includes what we see begs some serious questions! A related problem concerns Arthur's claim that we can subtract, as it were, the context of the display of BRILLO BOX from that work of art. (Paul Mattick took up that point long ago.) We need to focus on that object and not on the visual! way that it appears in a gallery, not in a grocery.

I myself don't see how beauty enters here, but I make a modest prediction: there will be a symposium devoted to comparing Nehamas' new book, which argues with Arthur.

On the Richter paintings, Michael very nicely asks: so how do they differ from police ID images, which are not works of art. He, I presume, is not happy with the easy answer: Richter is in the museum. But why not?

[davidcarrier]

Elisabeth Schellekens asks a great question: how does Arthur's analysis of art fit into a larger picture of mental activity? Writing as an art critic, I think that she is not right to say that we find great art beautiful at some times, but not at others. I find that mood swing plays an important role in everyday experience of art, and why not when we are concerned with response to sensuous objects? In that way, works of art are like sexy people, as she describes them.

In this spirit, I would add: I don't understand Sibnley's claim that we cannot or should not judge for idiosyncratic reasons. I don't think that this happens with contemporary art and I doubt, even, that it happens with grand masterpieces. Some days Bernini can be offputting, though of course art historians are trained not to say that in print. And so the distinction between jokes and ES's Bach example does not convince me. Why cannot I say: a joke is funny, but not right here and now funny to me? Think of how responses to jokes depend upon the audience. Gentiles can laugh at a Jewish joke if they see that Jews in the audience also find it funny, but they might hesitate to respond if they sense that Jews find it offensive. With art similarly, I do find often that my response is influenced by the people I am with.

Here I am conscious of only making fast comments about a well thought out answer. I hope that, for reasons Lydia discusses in her presentation, this is the way to go with this system.

[davidcarrier]

York Gunther takes up a question which has interested me, Arthur's definition. Arthur has allowed: the definition is incomplete. And so it's puzzling that no one has pressed him on this point. My own example, this from a forthcoming book, is fashion. An Armani suit satisfies the definition, but it is not art. The interesting suggestion here is that many things raise this problem. (Perhaps art criticism is not the best example, for it aspires to have the virtues of good literature. Else in WRITING ABOUT VISUAL ART I try to distinguish art writing from creative writing.) So what is to be done?

I am learning from YG's discussion of embodiment. This Hegelian idea is, need I say, hard to understand apart from hegel's system, and so it is fair to ask: how does Arthur understand it?

The idea of aesthetic force is interesting but puzzling. Since this word 'force' isn't a part of the everyday vocabulary of art history or criticism, we need some explanation. To ask a simple question: doesn't lots of bad art lack force? But we need a definition of art, not a definition of good art! It would help to have an example: what is the force of, say, Caravaggio's CALLING OF ST. MATTHEW?

[davidcarrier]

Kalle Puolakka wants to use RS's comment to reread Arthur. How, he asks, do we distinguish art from other forms of representation? Here we get to a part of TRANSFIGURATION which hasn't yet been much discussed, the account of metaphor. Like metaphors, works of art cannot be paraphrased without destroying their meaning. (On metaphor I have learned from the books of Mark Turner, which are rich in examples.)

What I don't understand, still, is how analysis of metaphor leads to a theory of aesthetic excperience. Many statements which are not literary works of art by any account still are unparaphrasable. Nor do I quite understand the remarks about the gap between art and reality, since Arthur has always insisted: there is a gap, defined by ontology. But here my lack of knowledge of RS' writings may be the problem.

[Lydia Goehr]

In keeping with my metaconference comments, I want to express my amusement and interest in the indecision the commentators so far have as to whether to address AD as Arthur or Danto, and others, by first or last name. Hopefully, after two weeks of the commentating, to which I hope many visitors to the site will contribute, many secrets of the society of art and aesthetics will have been inadvertantly revealed.

[Michalle Gal]

Michael, thank you for a most interesting paper.
One comment. I agree with your claim regarding the differentiation between indiscernibles, “that we have to conceptualize the non-perceptual inside of an artwork and thereby discover its content.”
I do not think, however, that having a ‘conceptual inside’ necessitates that “his [Danto’s] philosophical point here is not that art follows or even imitates reality because, as he convincingly shows in Transfiguration, the nature of representation (and thus of art) is too complex.”
I think that Danto does stay within a framework in which art is described as imitation of reality. True, the imitation is not perceptual, or visual, anymore. However, as Michael writes, Danto treats external properties of the artwork as internal to it. They are part of the real structure of the work. The work “ontologically” contains a concept. Danto claims in the transfiguration that the concept “penetrate” the artwork: “You cannot isolate these factors [intention, concept, thought] from the work since they penetrate, so to speak, to the essence of the work” (pp. 36)
So, if the work contains a concept as an internal element and refers to the concept, it imitates its referent, it is similar to it.
What do you think?

[Kalle Puolakka]

Before making a reply to Professor Carrier’s comments on my paper, I would also like to rise to a metalevel. Since English is not my mother tongue, I find this online form gratifyingly equalizing. I have always found responding to questions at foreign conferences extremely frightening and usually I just end up mumbling something. Now I have been able to make my reply in peace, trying to find the right words and checking them from my online dictionary. I doubt you would have waited that long, were this conference to take place in non-virtual reality.

All right, enough chitchat. Professor Carrier is puzzled by my claim that there ultimately is no gap between art and reality in Danto’s theory, even though Danto himself has repeatedly insisted on it. I admit that it was a small remark, perhaps made only in passing, for what reason I might seem to have got carried away a bit too much with my reply. Anyway, here goes. In order to address this problem more thoroughly, I think we must be clearer on how the notion of reality should be understood in the art/reality distinction made by Danto. I have always addressed it through Danto’s conception of philosophy and the other philosophical problems that Danto believes to emerge from cases involving indiscernibles. I think this approach reveals the sense in which art works are not removed from reality in his theory, and, thus, why there is no gap between art and reality either, at least as I understand the notion of gap.

As Michael Kelly points out in his paper, Danto addresses actions in a similar way. An action is distinguished from its indiscernible mere bodily movement counterpart in that the former has some kind of content. In this respect, the distinction between actions and bodily movements resembles the distinction between art works and mere real things. Presumably, in both cases the outcome should be some kind of distinction or gap between something and reality. However, does the former distinction imply that there is some sort of fundamental gap between actions and reality? I think not. But why should the situation be any different in the case of the art work/mere thing distinction?

The point I’m aiming at, and which actually just occurred to me, is that the distinction between art and reality in Danto’s theory should really be framed as the question between art works and mere real things, since, for me at least, it has always been extremely hard to properly grasp what the notion of reality is meant to encompass and what art is being contrasted to, when the distinction is made in the other way. But ones it is addressed through the latter distinction, that is between the more “modest” art work/mere real thing distinction, the matter becomes clear; art works turn out to be removed from reality merely in the sense that they can be about reality in ways in which mere real things cannot. However, I do not see that making this distinction leads to the kind of fundamental gap between art and reality that is implied by the formulation of the first distinction. Besides, the very relationship of aboutness seems to imply that there is no gap between art and reality, because the condition maintains that art works can be about reality. That is basically what I mean by saying that art works are not removed from reality, because if the artwork is about reality, which of course isn’t always the case, responding to it requires that one understands what it is about. I admit this is rather bluntly put. The relation of aboutness ultimately serves as the connection between art and reality. In the Abuse of Beauty, Danto makes the same exact point by saying that “the meaning of an art work is a connection to the world” (xii).

In conclusion let me take a quote from The Transfiguration that hopefully illuminates my admittedly fussy point: “In any case, the art lover is not like Plato’s cavedweller, who cannot mark a difference between reality and appearance: the art lover’s pleasure is exactly based upon a difference he is logically required to be able to mark” (15-16). Good news for all of us.

[davidcarrier]

On names, I too was puzzled initially. My convention: people I know by first name, others by initials in caps. But no doubt others have other conventions.

I love the idea that this system levels the playing feeling between native speaks and others. It's democratic, like Arthur's philosophy of art.

I agree that the whole question, so well discussed by KP, about the relation of art to reality is really puzzling. As Arthur makes clear, it's not an issue about representation, for many of his examples are not works of art which represent. Here without yet answering KP's questions, is one thought: imagine a world just like ours but without any art. That is possible I think. What would these people be missing? They would only have mere things! Arthur really needs the reality/appearance distinction because at all costs he needs to prevent BRILLO BOX from collapsing into a mere brillo box. Revealing that we say 'mere' here, showing that work of art is to honor that thing. He needs, that is, to avoid saying that only convention makes BRILLO BOX something more than just a box.

[Lydia Goehr]

David: I don't think Arthur's commitment to representation is reducible, as your last comment suggests, to an artwork's being a resentational-picture of the world. That would only be right if picturing were made to suggest a very complex sense of representation that far surpasses mere copying.

ps. Just for your information, David Carrier is on sabbatical this year, which accounts perhaps for his having time to comment. My point being that this sort of conference raises all sorts of issues/questions/problems about free time - who has it and who does not.

pps. And apologies for my spelling mistake in my last comment. Being a native speaker I forgot to do a spell check before I zapped the message off into space!

[Regina Wenninger]

This is a comment both on Kalle Puolakka’s and on Richard Shusterman’s paper. [How can I actually post cross-section comments? Just post them twice? – Also, I cannot make up my mind which convention of using names and abbreviations to follow …]
I tend to share Kalle’s view that the gap between art and life in Danto’s conception is not as unsurmountable as Shusterman interprets it, though for somewhat different reasons. The very notion and possibility of transfiguration suggests, after all, that the two spheres can be bridged (if only one-way). But this makes the idea of two ontologically distinct realms even more puzzling.
Shusterman seems to dislike Danto’s strong, "Catholic,” ontological picture in the first place for its separating “art and life”. To my mind, the most problematic thing is not so much the idea of two distinct realms (which I find difficult enough to grasp) but of the relation between the two, and Kalle’s paper has fruitfully increased my puzzlement about it.
It concerns not only the question: how can an ordinary object be transfigured (ontologically) into a work of art, but, more specifically: how can it be transfigured BY THE TOOLS PROPOSED IN ToC? And how does the PROCESS (or enactment?) of transfiguration actually work?
Maybe I can put my problem with Danto's conception in that way:
On the one hand, the transfiguration is supposed to take place within, and in virtue of, an established artworld, by means of interpretation, an “atmosphere of artistic theory,” etc. However, these seem to be rather mundane equipments; so mundane, indeed, that they may seduce one to misread Danto as a sober institutional theorist of art. So, how can such worldly tools bring about a transfiguration that amounts to a metaphysical or ontological shift? (It reminds one of the problem how Cartesian Dualism can possibly account for the interaction between mind and body?)
On the other hand, as Shusterman in his Introductory essay points out, quoting Danto’s Artworld article, the artworld is itself something like a transfigured everyday world, or in any case has a different ontological status than the latter: it relates to the ordinary world as the City of God relates to the earthly world. But if the transfiguration of an ordinary object into an artwork requires the context of an artworld, and if this artworld itself has an such an ontologcally elevated status, how are we to account for that ontological status of the ARTWOLD(without running into either regresses or circles)?
There is a third option: if we draw the intriguing analogy to Catholicism further, it may suggest that, ultimately, the transfiguration of the ordinary is something one has to believe in in order to understand it (or instead of understanding it), rather than the other way round. But this is hardly a philosophically satisfying option.
This seems to make a strong case for a more modest conception of transfiguration along the immanent, pragmatist, Zen inspired lines advocated by Shusterman. But since I somehow sympathize with Danto’s ontological picture I would like to understand it better before leaving it to itself.

[Regina Wenninger]

A few short comments on Elizabeth Schelleken’s paper.
Comparing aesthetic sense to sense of humor is an extremely stimulating and intriguing issue, to my mind, and I very much enjoyed reading ES’s paper on it. However, I cannot follow the analogies drawn by ES (and Danto) in all points, I am afraid.

1. My main problem is that I have no idea what aesthetic response actually might be (if it’s not aesthetic experience). I have an idea of what a typical response to a joke is that one finds comical (laughter and its kins). But what is a typical aesthetic response? (if one does not want to reduce it to “oh, it’s so beautiful!” or “ugh!”?) I have difficulties with the very notion of “response” here since it suggests a certain kind of expressive behavior, like laughing. But there does not seem to be something analogous in the realm of aesthetic experience.

2. It strikes me less problematic to draw an analogy between aesthetic sense and sense of humor. But then, again, sense of humor one the one hand and the ability or disposition to laugh about a joke on the other hand seem to be different things. As both ES and Danto point out, “sense of humor” is something like a general view of or attitude toward life; laughing about a joke is more a local matter and, I think, does not require a general sense of humor.
I’d prefer keeping these two things apart; maybe it helps to get clearer into view the analogies and disanalogies to the aesthetic realm.

3. ES suggests that the relevant analogy between humor and aesthetic perception/judgments, in contrast to mere sight, concerns the element of response. My intuition is that the more significant and crucial similarity between aesthetic judgments and humor is the cognitive element. But I have no argument here. Maybe I simply do not understand the notion of aesthetic response.

One thing I found particularly interesting to learn from ES’s paper is that one can interpret Danto as holding a projection theory with regard to aesthetic properties. I always thought of Danto as having the strongest realist inclinations throughout. But maybe there need not be a conflict.

[A meta-conference note: I REALLY miss the possibility of using Italics in these comments.]

[Julie Kuhlken]

I have to admit that the title of Michael’s essay led to me expect some discussion of the political aspect of the Brillo Boxes or of TC. As it turns out, my original expectation was met in a way that I had not foreseen. With the “Red, White and Blue” mentioned in the title, I had expected some sort of American angle, perhaps relating Arthur’s philosophy to the more obviously nationalist theory of Clement Greenberg (who was explicitly searching for an American art to rival the European), or perhaps looking at the American popular culture Warhol himself drew upon to create his art. However, instead the politics Michael refers to is that of Germany of the 1960’s and ‘70’s. At first this seemed distant from Arthur’s theory of transfiguration, but in another way I wonder if Michael isn’t giving the theory a kind of new life by opening it up to the kind of politically oriented painting undertaken by Richter with October 18, 1977. Like most analytic philosophy, TC is resolutely aloof from the political sphere (in this respect Arthur’s philosophy completely deviates from his life); however, as Michael points out, the theory of transfiguration suggests a certain notion of the aesthetic that is very amenable to the public sphere and its political concerns. To the extent that the aesthetic concerns the relation between subject(s) and object, painting such as that of Richter opens a space where those relations can be reconsidered, and their failures mourned. I think, like Michael, I wonder why Arthur hasn’t developed his theory of embodied meanings in such a way as to better capture this political aspect of aesthetics.

[Julie Kuhlken]

Since there has been a running debate on names, I thought I’d put two cents in. I have to admit that I always prefer the first name approach unless it seems widely inappropriate. However, and this relates to Kalle’s points about the nature of rhetoric, I expect the use of a first name to have a very different effect for those I know than those I do not. In this sense, the democratizing tendencies of the internet—its open informality—also hides a potential social “indiscernible.”

That said, I really liked Kalle’s paper and willingness to take on Richard’s critique of Arthur as regards aesthetic experience. As I have already said this is one of the topics I hoped the conference would address. My thought while reading the paper was that this repeated distinction between art and life (or art and reality) obscures distinctions within life and reality. Even once one rephrases it as a distinction between art object/mere thing as Kalle does in his comments, the problem remains: Which mere things? For instance, Kalle mentions Richard’s work in pragmatic aesthetics, where he takes on the aesthetics of the body, on the one hand, and rap-music on the other. However, even given all of the ways in which the body can be thought of as a cultural product, it is also a natural product in a way rap-music is not. As such, when comparisons are made between the aesthetics of art on the one hand, and of “life,” on the other, don’t they ignore (or at least underplay) the fact that art must distinguish itself simultaneously from natural phenomenon (trees, waves, etc) and cultural phenomena (rap-music, country-western music, talk shows, etc)? Part of what makes for the paradoxical nature of the aesthetic appreciation of art—that one must know it is art to appreciate it properly, and that one only knows it is art by appreciating it—would seem related to its odd (even dialectical) relation to these two other potential realms of aesthetic experience, nature and popular culture.

[Robert Stecker]

Michael Kelly says that in Danto's phlosophy of art aesthetic properties are [purely] perceptual, while in fact they are both perceptual and conceptual. This seem to be a misinterpretation of Danto. Danto thinks (at least in Transfiguration) that one cannot even recognize the aesthetic properties of artworks until one knows they are artworks and something about the meaning that makes them the artworks they are. This is why the possession of aesthetic properties plays no role in the definition of art.The dependency goes the other way. But this is implies that the aesthetic properties of artworks can't simply be accessed perceptually.
York Gunther argues for an additional condition to Danto's definition of art in terms of embodied meaning. That is a plausible project, but before undertaking it one had better understand the conditions Danto actually gives. I wonder if anyone understands the embodiment condition. (Genuine query.)Gunther seems to construe embodiment as consisting of a meaning being conveyed in a medium or system of representation. So English sentences (or utterences) embody meaning as much as artworks. But I suspect Danto means more by embodiment or he wouldn't have thought that, with his two condition, he was even giving interesting necessary conditions.I am curious what a better account would be. One possible account would an aesthetic account - embodied meaning would be meaning conveyed in an aesthetically effective way (form 'appropriate to' content) but this possibility seems precluded by the aesthetic properties being excluded from a role in defining art.

[Richard Shusterman]

I am very grateful for the careful attention that Kalle Puolakka gives to the critical discussions of Danto’s work in my previous books. I happily recognize another excellent product of the Finnish training in aesthetics that I have encountered in Helsinki and elsewhere. “Is There Room for Aesthetic Experience in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace?” asks KP, who vigorously takes me to task for denying this. My view, quite to the contrary, is that this book leaves ample room for aesthetic experience, because AD gives very little theoretical attention to this important but vexed and messy concept. (For its complexity and confusions, see my analyses in JAAC, 1997 and 2006). Transfiguration contains some fascinating brief comments on aesthetic sense, aesthetic response, and aesthetic appreciation, but the concept of “aesthetic experience” does not seem to be one that AD is keen to employ in his philosophy of art. Perhaps this is partly because the notion of aesthetic experience was familiarly championed in murky or unsatisfactory ways by the likes of Dewey and Beardsley, and AD felt he needed to take a new and very different tack to distinguish his own central project of defining art. Perhaps he disliked the sloppy, oozing multivalence of the concept of experience that blends subject and object, process and product, cognitive and non-cognitive, doing and being done to. Was “experience” also a term too suggestive of the radical movements (and limit-experiences) of ’68 that terrorized the Columbia campus, or of the perceived aggressive invasion of one’s experience by works of what AD calls disturbational art?

I never asked AD about this. There were always other interesting things to talk about, and I was convinced that the main reason why AD did not concern himself much with the concept of aesthetic experience was that he was primarily interested in a philosophy of art (the subtitle of his Transfiguration book) and that he conceived of such philosophy in terms of the goal of a universal definition of art that captured art’s special essence. Aesthetic experience, as I have argued, is pretty hopeless for such demarcational projects, because it occurs widely and powerfully outside the realm of art as defined by the artworld (and very often fails to occur in a robust sense with respect to many artworks within the artworld). I maintain, nonetheless, that it is useful in what I call transformational projects of broadening the scope of what we regard as worthy of aesthetic attention and artful fashioning, and of what might even be included in an extended field of art beyond the space conventionally defined by the artworld. For his demarcational definitional project, AD was wise not to tie his project to the notion of experience. But my projects, as KP notes, differed.

Convinced that aesthetic fashioning and artful stylization so deeply pervades our lifeworld and consciousness (including our sorrowful politics), I wanted a broader, albeit, cruder tool to make my philosophical interventions. My critical coaxing of AD to put aside his preoccupation with the quest for absolute definition and the art/reality gap (a very complicated, problematic notion as KP helps us to see) so that AD (with his legion of disciples, myself included) could help affect a fuller and more potent reenfranchisement of art in which art, in a more fluid, expanded sense, could more fully engage in praxis (and not just rhetorical praxis). I never denied that AD’s theories leave room for art’s engagement with the world, how could they not with his insistent on art’s “aboutness” and his complaint of art’s disenfranchisement? Indeed, in “Art in a Box” (1993) I suggest that AD’s work in some ways encourages us to take further steps to extend the realm and power of art. I described him there as my “prophet,” and I here reaffirm this. KP notes how my work with hip hop and somaesthetics differs from Danto’s concerns. But without my realizing it initially, I am now increasingly convinced that Danto – through the exemplary way in which he engaged the contemporary artworld and continental and Asian philosophy in ways then unconventional for analytic philosophers – was the towering figure who created a potential space and legitimating precedent for my own explorations of contemporary culture. Wherever I go philosophically, I find instruction from his genial spirit, even when I go off in a different way – usually with his indulgently encouraging blessing.

Rather than leave this comment with a cloying image of unifying love, let me return to KP’s text which displays great ingenuity both in making distinctions and minimizing differences. His claim that Danto’s view is “rather close to John Dewey’s account of aesthetic experience” took my breath away. Of course, from a certain perspective, KP is right, just as one can rightly affirm that the Goethals Bridge is just like Le Pont des Arts -- they are both man-made constructions helping people to go from one side to the other, over a body of water. The question is whether such an assertion of identity is useful. I think both Dewey and Danto (and the clarification of the philosophical issues they treat) are better served by not trying to schmooze their differences away. (The contextual value of discriminating an artwork from other real things is, by the way, part – though not the only part -- of the residual power that the art/reality distinction still has for us). Even the unifying efforts of Hegel insisted on preserving Differenz, or, to put it in a cultural and somaesthetic register more congenial to my philosophical libido, Vive la différence!!

[Michalle Gal]

Regarding Danto and aesthetic experience: I agree with Shusterman.
Danto’s theory is an ontological theory—he said it, by the way, in his lecture in the last meeting of the ASA. His main question (like Goodman’s by the way) is “what kind of an object the artwork is?”—what properties belong and what are external to it. The Transfiguration’s main project is describing the artwork as an intellectual object whose essence is the concept possessed by it as an internal property (thus he inverts the formalist perception of the status given to the concept by formalist theories). Aesthetic experience is, in this respect, foreign to Danto’s project. Experience, for him, has no bearing on the structure of the artwork.

[Robert Kraut]

Here is a concern prompted by Michalle Gal's recent posting.

Quite apart from specifics of Danto scholarship, I don't think we should make too much of the contrast stressed by Gal between "the artwork as an intellectual object" and the artwork as a source of "aesthetic experience." Gal says "Experience, for [Danto], has no bearing on the structure of the artwork."

This is misleading: it assumes an untenable contrast between matters "intellectual" and matters "experiential". The way we experience an artwork--or anything else--is determined, in part, by the theories we bring to bear upon it. Much of the latter 20th century dismantling of empiricism rests on various challenges to the "innocent eye," and the idea that observation--and the experiences that flow from it--are "theory neutral" (think of Gombrich's seminal work in this area). Once we allow that experience is permeated with theory in various ways, any effort to contrast matters intellectual with matters experiential--aesthetic or otherwise--is suspect.

Aesthetic experience is not foreign to Danto's project. One way to understand Danto's earlier claims is that the way we experience Duchamp's Fountain or Warhol's Brillo Boxes must be mediated by relevant portions of the history of art. Jasper Johns' work fills me with a genuine sense of desolation and loss; the reason it prompts such experience is that I bring to bear certain portions of art history and theory which I believe (rightly or wrongly) to be relevant to that particular body of work (portions of theory I learned from art historian Leo Steinberg). I see Duchamp's Fountain as a commentary upon commodification of art because a certain chunk of art theory permeates my experience of the work. And so on.

It is a profoundly difficult question in aesthetic theory--and elsewhere--precisely how theory relates to experience. But a theory of art that stresses the role played by social/institutional and/or art historical factors in constituting artworks does not thereby draw attention away from aesthetic experience; it rather foregrounds some of the factors constitutive of correct experience.

[Derek Allan]

I read Robert Kraut’s comments with interest, especially the statement that ‘Once we allow that experience is permeated with theory in various ways, any effort to contrast matters intellectual with matters experiential--aesthetic or otherwise--is suspect.’

Given that no culture prior to Renaissance Europe had a notion (and thus a theory) of ‘art’, should we conclude that large numbers of the objects from other cultures we now regard as art (such as those currently drawing huge crowds to the Musée Quai Branly in Paris) have somehow ‘become art’ in the last century or so?

This metamorphosis is surely more striking than Duchamp’s or Warhol’s, is it not? These objects did not become art by being placed in art museums. They were placed in art museums because they had become art.

[Liliana Coutinho]

Derek, like that, you are saying that there is an experience which, in what concernes art, happens before art institution, or outside art institution? And this can be close to say that Art is one of the possible historical constructions? And, in giving the example of Quai Branly, do you think that it happens because through art institutions, we are translating (I miss the italic, also) live experiences which in different cultures - namely, the african - have a different placement in what concerns the relationship between art and life? To be more specific: a placement that deeply influenciates and helps to create in those communities their plan of reality?

The question for me is also, what are we doing (and here cames the pragmatism again) in what concerns intercultural communication and exchange, when we focus all that rich cultural, politic and aesthetic experiences in the field of art – tradicionally in occident, a field of fiction and representation. And also, I will be gratefull if we can speak a little bit more about what happens to an essencialist project of art’s definition, when it crosses such kind of objects – objects which, even if most of the time we use them in order to make them representative of different cultures, in their historical life as objects, they started not as representational objects, but as performative ones?

(p.s.: I’m sorry Lydia, for the mistake in your name! And thank you for your remark but, I don’t think that we all drink the same essencial water (even if its base is H2O). Sometimes I remember Heraclito and his flowing river. In what concerns my previous remarks about religion, what interests to me is, not only the moment of reality, but the plan of reality – the plan of real and active existence - and what I think its necessary to fully understand it’s richness is to see the differences that we find living in that plan. Sometimes in conflit, but not always.)

[Derek Allan]

Thank you for your response, Liliana. I won’t try to reply to all the issues you raise because it might take too long.

But yes, in the case of African art, and the art of other non-Western cultures, I would say that the change from non-art to art has clearly not waited for the institution. Indeed, one could argue that some art museums are still catching up. (Even Quai Branly was only established in the face of some opposition.)

Someone might say: What has this to do with Danto? Well, it doesn’t hurt, I feel, to see the Brillo Box question in some kind of context. And that context has been, over the past several decades, a huge expansion in the scope of what is regarded as art. A Baudelaire, a Ruskin, a Walter Pater, or even a Collingwood simply would not recognise the world of art as we know it today – a world in which post-Renaissance Western works (including contemporary art) are just one element among many others. Visual art today begins somewhere back in prehistoric times and takes in cultures from the four corners of the earth. And to make it even more amazing, none of the cultures from which this art has come had the slightest inkling of what we mean by ‘art’.

Seen in that context, one could surely argue that our art world today *as a whole* is the outcome of a vast metamorphosis compared to which the Brillo Box metamorphosis is a relatively small blip on the radar screen.

Danto, as I recall, doesn’t have much to say about non-Western art or Western pre-Renaissance art, which is perhaps a pity.

[Stephen Snyder]

I’m puzzled by Michalle Gal’s claim that Danto’s ontological definition doesn’t include experience. Can the notion of embodied meaning even make sense outside of experience? Isn’t part of Danto’s essential definition of art that it be experienced through interpretation? An artwork that is not interpreted remains outside of the atmosphere of theory, and thus is not art. It doesn’t seem that Danto’s ontological focus necessarily precludes the experience of the artwork.

Michael Kelly’s discussion of aesthetic properties is interesting because, if I read him correctly, he wants to combine Danto’s ontology with the Modern notion of an aesthetic property as subjective experience. It is not apparent why the subjective effect that the artwork must produce to be art should be excluded from the artwork’s essential list of attributes. The artwork’s performative capability is what evokes its interpretation, without it the work would not be art. I agree, though, with Kelly that Danto’s notion of how the artist manifests the art object with aboutness cannot explain the performative and transformative power that the art object possesses. Danto’s account of artistic creation and reception does not tell us how the shared community of artists, theorists, etc. engages to form an “atmosphere of theory.”

Kelly’s claim that Danto separates the conceptual from the perceptual in his notion of the aesthetic brings up another good point. Danto bases the claim that a new era of art is initiated when the question of what an artwork is is no longer answerable through visual cues on this separation. Hence, the meaning of art must be discerned through a body of theory. On one hand, Danto’s theory is validated by the path art history has taken, for it does explain art’s shifting morphology. But Kelly is correct in questioning why the aesthetic is constrained by the visual attribute of beauty. Certainly, this is a Modern notion of the aesthetic. But if one looks further back in history, as Danto does, beauty was not always associated with the visual. Plato, who initiates philosophy’s disenfranchisement of art, held the Beautiful to be the apprehension of the Forms. For Plato, the artist’s corrupt sensual images could play no part in the depiction of beauty. Danto turns this inside out, so to speak, by seeing the conceptual in the essence of the artwork. Yet he maintains a notion of beauty that is perceptual. Kelly is right to argue that removing the opposition of the aesthetic-as-perceptual-beauty and the conceptual would achieve the same theoretical goal of explaining how one definition of art accounts for art’s historical development without excluding the aesthetic from art’s definition in what Danto calls the post-historical era. If Danto removed this opposition, then his theory would not be contradicted by the return of sensual beauty to the arts.

[Ewa Bogusz-Boltuc]

I am puzzled by the connection between the aesthetic and the perceptual. Is the aesthetic equivalent of the perceptual? Arthur Danto admitted recently that there is a difference between the aesthetic fragility and the non-aesthetic fragility. (A. C. Danto, "Unnatural Wonders", New York: Farrar-Straus-Giroux, 2005, pp. 329-330). I wonder whether we can employ the same distinction to the other aesthetic properties. Does the aesthetic red differ from the non-aesthetic red? Is there any non-aesthetic way of being red? But we can go even further: Does the aesthetic beauty differ from the non-aesthetic beauty? Could there be any non-aesthetic way of being beautiful? … this seems peculiarly puzzling.

Let me move on to the problem of whether "The Transfiguration …" supports or dismisses the aesthetic experience.

Michalle Gal's claims that Aesthetic experience is… foreign to Danto’s project. Kalle Puolakka makes a statement to the contrary that "...Danto's emphasis on the metaphorical nature of artistic representation, actually implies a notion of aesthetic experience." But "The Transfiguration …" seems to support the claim that there is a structural difference between the aesthetic experience of art and the aesthetic experience of non-art, rather than the view that the aesthetic is irrelevant (or on the contrary, essential) to experiencing art.

The case of three Brillo boxes rather than two, may better illustrate the difference between aesthetic experience of art and the aesthetic experience of non-art. The three Brillo boxes are: (a) the supermarket’s Brillo boxes, although designed by Harvey, are treated here as non-art; (b) commonly known Warhol’s Brillo boxes, and finally (c) Bidlo’s 'Not Andy Warhol' Brillo boxes (the last two Brillos are works of art.) This structural difference among our aesthetic experiences of those Brillos seems to relay on the distinction and the relation between the two aspects of perceptual experience: the phenomenal character of perceptual experience and the representational aspect of perceptual experience. The phenomenal character of perceptual experience refers to looking-in-a-certain-way and the representational content of perceptual experience refers to being-in-a-certain-way.

What - if any - is a phenomenological difference among our perception of supermarket's Brillos' Warhol's Brillos, and Bidlo's Brillos? All the three Brillos do not differ phenomenologically, they appear to be alike. Yet, if we rephrase the question - Is there any difference among representational contents of perceptual experience of supermarket's Brillos, Warhol's Brillos and Bidlo's Brillos, the answer would not be so obvious. It looks like it partly depends on our view on the extent to which the conceptual is relevant to the representational aspect of the perceptual experience. Danto argues that art works consist partly (and necessarily) on abstract properties. The full consideration of the issue needs to be further explored. For now, roughly speaking, seeing and recognizing Brillos cannot be simply identified with sensing Brillos. Danto's account on aesthetic experience should be viewed in the context of philosophical debates about perceptual experience.

[Kalle Puolakka]

First of all, I would like to thank Richard Shusterman not only for his insightful remarks concerning my paper but also for the kind remarks on the position of Finnish aesthetics. Since there is already so much interesting material to read on the conference web-page, I shall try to keep my response as brief as possible. In fact, most of my comments that I would like to present after reading RS’s reply would primarily concern pragmatist aesthetics. However, since this conference is primarily on Danto’s philosophy of art, I try to confine myself to comments that have at least an indirect connection to it. Having read my reply, I notice that I have failed.

I totally agree with RS’s claim that I’m on rather thin ice with my claim that Danto’s analysis of aesthetic experience is rather close to Dewey’s. Although TC contains analysis of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic response it is debatable, whether these add up to the kind of fully developed conception of aesthetic experience that one can find in the work of Dewey. However, to what extent is this a drawback on Danto’s part? Perhaps there is something wrong with me, which is the most likely option, but I rarely have the kinds of experiences that Dewey describes as aesthetic, at least in so far as its characteristic features are expressed in his most exciting lines. That is, a form of experience that can be described, to borrow RS’s description, as blending the subject and object, process and product, cognitive and non-cognitive, doing and being done to. For example, staying with the religious theme that has emerged here and there during this conference, I pass a neo-Gothic cathedral everyday on my way to work, but the only time the building has elicited an aesthetic experience in me was when I heard Bruckner’s 5th symphony performed in it a couple of weeks ago. (I notice that this remark somewhat diminishes the force of Danto's example of Beauvais Cathedral that I used in my paper) The point I’m aiming at is that once the uniqueness of aesthetic experience is understood in too qualitative terms, that is, by referring to its intensity or strength, I think it becomes a problematic concept, because it seems to encompass only a small fraction of our experiences, or at least those of mine. However, if it is understood in a more mundane way, as an experience (Dewey’s term), it is in danger of becoming over inclusive.

Now, RS might object that this kind of criticism misunderstands the nature of the concept. Here, it is evaluated in analytic, demarcational terms, although it should be understood in a more pragmatic fashion. Its evaluation should be based on assessing the concept’s potential fruitful consequences for culture and life. However, it remains unclear to what extent this reorientation truly manages to call for a re-evaluation in the terms by which the success of the notion of aesthetic experience should be evaluated. After all, for RS, aesthetic experience remains a normative concept in the sense that it implies ways of improving our culture or even insists on it. However, if the concept of aesthetic experience continues to be murky, as I think it does, it is unclear, how well the notion can serve those purposes that RS has outlined for it. After all, in order for reasons to operate in a normative way, requires some sort of possibility for sharability. Otherwise the domain of discourse is in danger of turning into a private language. Any concept that is intended to serve a normative purpose must have, to use Richard Rorty’s terminology, the power to persuade.

[Liliana Coutinho]

I would like to comment on Kalle’s observations and questions. I think that intensity has its quantitative points of reference, anchors or motors, even if they are not absolutly determined in one single point. For instance, and using your example of the gothic Cathedral, the mere perception of the built cenary it’s not enough for the aesthetic experience of the theatre piece or of the religious ritual, was you already noticed, and its existence isn’t even an absolut necessity (the sames goes for an art object and its museums and galleries to be perceived as art and in that A. Danto helps when writing about the necessity of the presence of a theory of art in the reception of an object as an art object). But with going there and hear a music concert with others, surelly we can start to build a commun experience of the place (even if it’s only usefull to some extent to understand if that experience is exactly the same that my friend is having and a quantitative justification for it can lay, for instance, in fisiological and mnemonic diferences – different brain circuits, different auditive capacities, different past experiences, present conditions and future expectations…) Perhaps, for understanding things related with intensity it would be usefull to think about the aesthetic differences on hearing the same music in our houses, in the churches or in the concert halls to understand the implications of institutional and mental framing. Personnally, one of my best musical experiences was an experimental electronic music concert, at night, for 30-40 people on the top of a small mountain (it was open for everyone but you needed to have the patience to drive some hours in the middle of the week, after working time, in order to go there), having as background a line of mountains: a natural place, with no institutional art frame at all, other than that given by some flyers previously distributed but that was just a way of gathering people together. What I think it happened that day is that, the “mise-en-scéne” didn’t framed the object as an art object, but the art object organized reality – a natural setting, in this case - as a “mise-en-scéne”. We can say that it’s only an illusion but, for the reality of that moment, the landscape was a supporting scenary for the music. In a more mundane and inexpected way, a similar thing happened in a New York subway station with a metal drum player. All the buzzy people around and the noises that I was getting used to because I was using that overcrowded station often, became a “mise-en-scéne”, not of the music or of the musician, but of a certain way of organizing the life of a community. It was as if that music that he was playing introduced a kind of critical distance into the flow of things. In order to provide that sort of close critical distance (the one that can be felt if we are part of the flow that we are observing at the same time), the aesthetic experience can’t persuade me. It needs to have the capacity of opening diferent possibilities of experience: an open and multiple provocation (if we go to its latin roots, it means “calling for”, “to evoke”) perhaps, not a persuasion. Otherwise, it’s norm would be one working towards induction and propaganda and not an aesthetic one, in the sense that I think it’s still usefull to understand the aesthetic experience, not just as a perceptive and intensive experience but also in what that intensity and perception can raise in us critical instances of embodied thought (those that can allow us to participate in the construction of something like a sharable thruth(s) and not only accepting one because the form in which it was delivered was a persuasive one; perhaps here we can connect to last comment on “interpretation”, made by Jerome Langguth). So, I’m not very familiar with Rorty’s work but if we are speaking about an objective analytic norm that allow us to define a minimal, shared, cognitive truth, why that truth needs to be understood by persuasion? Or critical introspection and reflexion on/during experience can also be a way that doesn't imply necessarily the removal of aesthetic experience, in what concerns language, thruth and community, towards a realm of a solipsist existence? In this last case, can that objective norm, be just a definition point (and perhaps a temporary one and open to development) in order for aesthetic experience to develop itself (like the anchors from the begging of this comment)?

And about definition, and making here a connection with some last comments by Derek Allan (to whom I thanks a lot for the answer to some of my working questions), I think that it’s precisely the accuracy of Danto’s work in finding definition in philosophy of art that allow us to be here now speaking about all of this. A body of work is alive if we can work with it, raise questions to it and, in this case, one way of doing that is working in close proximity with the experience of contemporary art practices – the same Danto did as an art philosopher when doing his “Transfiguration…”. When you said, Derek, that it was a pity that Danto didn’t speak about non-western art or pre-Renaissance art, I think that Danto is doing his work and what cames clear to me in format conferences like this is that the philosophical work can also be a participative and colaborative entreprise. And perhaps it’s not an useless thing to say that, the first time I heard about Danto’s work was by a portuguese professor of art anthropology who worked a lot in curatorial projects concerning the connections between the Ocidental culture and Africa, through contemporary art practices. As far as I remember, Danto’s philosophy was for him a usefull tool to think and do.