Denis Dutton’s
effort to give a naturalist definition of art provides some interesting
material for our effort to understand everyday aesthetics, particularly those
aspects that are very close in character to art.[1]
Dutton gives a list of criteria for something to be art, none of, and no set of
which, are necessary. He adds that if something meets none of the criteria it
is not art, and if it meets all of them it must be art. It is also part of
Dutton’s scheme that none of the criteria are sufficient for something to be
art. Because of this, at the end of each discussion of a criterion he speaks of
phenomena which are not art but which meet the criterion. This gives a nice
list of properties of non-art phenomena that are worth paying attention to
aesthetically.
It is useful for
the purposes of developing a theory of everyday aesthetics to go through his
discussion of each term in his list and observe each of his comments about
non-art applications of these terms. The
reader should understand that, unlike Dutton, I do not intend to say anything
here about the nature of art. Rather, I am using Dutton’s criteria of art as a
way of mapping the field of everyday aesthetics. This may seem off if one feels
that art aesthetics is radically different from everyday aesthetics, but less
so if one believes that aesthetics is a general field of which art aesthetics,
natural aesthetics and everyday aesthetics are parts, and that there is a
continuity between art aesthetics and everyday aesthetics in that many features
of art depend on aspects of the world that would exist even without art. In what follows, Dutton’s name for each
property is in italics.
Here then is
Dutton’s list of features of art connected with his comments about non-art
applications of these features. (1) The art object is typically valued as a
source of immediate pleasure, and
this is also true for sports and play. (2) High
skill is valued not only in art but in other areas, for example in sports.
(3) Style is found not only in art
but in most other human activities that are not merely reflexive. (4) Novelty and creativity are admired in
plumbing and dentistry as well as in art. (5) Criticism is found wherever the activity is complex. (6) Realistic representation is found in
scientific illustration (not mentioned by Dutton) as well as in art. (7)
Religious rite, ceremonial pomp, political activity and advertizing all try to make something special by giving it a
theatrical character. (8) Any activity with a creative element, including
designing a company newsletter, may have expressive
individuality. (9) Many non-art activities are saturated with emotion. (10) Like art, puzzles and many games give
us intellectual challenge. (11) All
organized activities have institutional
and traditional backgrounds. Finally, (12) there is an imaginative experience dimension of much that is non-art, although
Dutton agrees with Kant that art takes imagination to another level, away from
practical concerns, logic and “rational understanding.” However, it could be
argued that art is not the only thing that can do this. Everyday aesthetic
experience also often takes imagination to a new level.
It seems, in short,
that one could map the aesthetics of everyday life precisely in terms of the various
criteria of art each of which, Dutton has observed, art shares with other
aspects of life. There is another way that Dutton’s call for a naturalistic
aesthetics of art can be helpful in the construction of an aesthetics of
everyday life. Drawing from the writings
of various anthropologists and linguists, Dutton makes a list of “innate,
universal features and capabilities of the human mind.” Each one of the items in the list is something
that one can take pleasure in. When we
do this we see that the list can be of primal human pleasures that can provide
the basis of aesthetics. I will add the term “pleasure” to the items on this
list:
- pleasure in keeping track of how objects fall, bounce, or bend
- pleasure in taking an interest in plants and animals in their species division
- pleasure in making tools, in flaking things, in attaching objects to one another
- pleasure in observing the operations of the minds of others
- pleasure in imaginative mapping and spatial understanding
- pleasure in body adornment
- pleasure in manipulating numbers
- pleasure in estimating probabilities
- pleasure in reading facial expressions
- pleasure in being able to throw objects precisely
- pleasure in organized pitched sounds, rhythmically produced by the human voice or by instruments
- pleasure in exchange of goods and favors
- pleasure in a sense of justice
- pleasure in the operations of logic
- pleasure in learning and using language[2]
Not all of these are aesthetic
pleasures if such pleasure must be sensuous.
For example pleasure in a sense of justice, in the operations of logic,
in manipulating numbers, in estimating probabilities, and in exchange of goods
and favors are not aesthetic in that sense.
However, it is hardly new to suggest that these things can have
aesthetic properties, for example beauty.
To that extent they belong to the aesthetics of everyday life.
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