The problem posed by feminist art history for defining art, especially for Danto

"In this hierarchy [a hierarchy of art forms based on art history's organizing of art into categories] the arts of painting and sculpture enjoy an elevated status while other arts that adorn people, homes or utensils are relegated to a lesser cultural sphere under such terms as 'applied,' 'decorative' or 'lesser' arts."  Rozsika Parker and Griselda Polock  "Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts

Danto in his famous paper "The Artword" says that what he calls "the is of artistic identification" is needed to constitute something as a work of art.  So, the presence of the "is" appears to be at least a necessary condition for art.  The "is of artistic identification" is poorly explained by Danto, although one can eek out basically what he meant by it.  He says that it is featured prominently in statements about artworks, that it is not the is of identity nor that of predication or existence, and that children use it when they say of a drawn circle "that is me."  Obviously, however, this is not enough to make such a circle art.  So the is of artistic identification, although necessary, is not sufficient for something to be art.  Danto does make clear that the is of artistic identification, when it indicates that something is art (unlike the drawn circle case), contains within it some reference to things beyond the physical object apprehended, such things including the presence of the Brillo boxes in an art gallery, the way in which the paint is inseparable from the bed in Rauschenberg's Bed, and the way in which the title, and all of its implications, are inseparable from each of the imagined pair of otherwise identical paintings called Newton's First Law and Newton's Third Law.  I want to keep in mind that the is of artistic identification, in a sense, contains within it the way in which the physical object, what Danto calls the mere real object, is situated within an artworld context, i.e. the gallery, the history of art up to that point, the title, and the intentions of the artist.

Now, when reading this in conjunction of "Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts" by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, the question is whether, among all of these other matters, a certain patriarchal stance is also included within the is of artistic identification.  In short, does this feminist critique of art history (rather dated, I admit) pose a problem for the definition of art and also for Danto's definition of art in particular?

One way that the project of defining art can play out is in terms of making distinctions between art and craft.  Another version of this, slightly off center from the first, involves the distinction between fine and decorative art.  The problem that "Crafty Women" poses is not so much that of destroying these distinctions entirely as that it raises some interesting questions about them.  The first thought that comes to mind is that if, as Danto suggests, something is art if it can be seen as art by someone with appropriate art historical knowledge, i.e. someone versed in the ways of the artworld, then how do we deal with embroidery, quilts and Navajo blankets?  It is not at all clear that the women who were so prominent in these various art forms as makers were necessarily able to see these things as art with appropriate art historical knowledge.  And, perhaps more interestingly, when some of these things were moved into the art museums in the 1970s the manner by which they were moved, and the explanation of this, was open to question by such feminist art historians as Parker and Pollock (PP).  So, as PP observe, Ralph Pomeroy (1974) introduced his appreciative understanding of Navajo blankets by saying that he intends to forget certain things about these blankets:  to consider them as "Art with a capital 'A'" he is going to look at them "as paintings - created...by several nameless masters of abstract art." PP write "several manoeuvres are necessary in order to see these works as art."  (50)  For Pomeroy to see them as art requires, as PP puts it, these maneuvers:  "the geometric becomes abstract, woven blankets become paintings and women weavers become nameless masters." That is, although from Danto's perspective, these things become art because they can be seen as art under an appropriate theory, there is a problem of misrepresentation based on certain sexist and probably also racist assumptions.  To be fair to Danto, in later writings, and perhaps even in the artworld essay, he stressed the intentions of the artist, and so the feminist approach to this (of PP) which stresses giving honor to the actual originator might agree with Danto in that the originator is not honored if the work is only seen as art if she and the originating context are abstracted out of the picture.  (An additional feature here is that the original material out of which it is also seen as something else, i.e. dye on unpainted fabric as a kind of painting).  Focusing on the term "nameless masters" which seems to imply that the makers were men since "master" is a male term, even though it is obvious to all that women have produced these works.  So, in order to see them as art Pomeroy had to see them as produced not by women but by men. There does seem something unfair going on when a blanket only is seen as art if these changes are made. Is patriarchy then contained within the is of artistic identification?  Probably today this work can be seen as art without making all of these transformations, and perhaps patriarchy is not now included in the is of artistic identification. However, distinctions between art and craft and between fine and decorative art still hold sway.  

Perhaps the larger issues, particularly relevant to everyday aesthetics, is the one raised by PP when they say that "the feminine spirit in art is ...linked with the domestic sphere."  If an art form is linked to the domestic sphere and particularly to the activities of women within that sphere then it is more likely to be seen (in a sexist society) as non-art, mere craft, or decorative as opposed to fine art.  Moreover, it may well be that women are seen as closer to Nature than to Culture, and that even though, unlike animals, they do participate in the human making of "means of subsistence" transforming "materials into tools, houses, clothes and utensils" they have secondary status because, as Sherry Ortner argued, their activities occupy a position between Nature and Culture, their activities of cooking and sewing being cultural but taking place in the home.  Cooking in the home, as Ortner argues, is seen as closer to nature than haute cuisine which is seen as "real" cooking, and this is done usually by men. Thus, women "perform lower level conversions from nature to culture."  (This may pose a problem for my own arguing forthcoming at the ASA that food can be art based on the work of great chefs.  The feminist claim could be that the very notion of "great chef" degrades home cooking and forces women into the realm of culture, and that my not intending that effect is irrelevant.)

Now the conversion of nature to culture can be seen as something like the conversion Danto posits of a mere thing to an artwork under the application of the "is" of artistic representation.  The place or location of the activity is central here too.  The actual Brillo box does not just appear in a warehouse, but also in the grocery store and in the home, as involved in domestic chores.  The Brillo box as artwork appears however in an art gallery. Warhol in creating "Brillo Box" has taken something from everyday life associated with the traditional domain of women and has brought it into the City of Art through his act of construction (which, interestingly, Danto seriously under-emphasizes:  as far as he is concerned, Warhol could have just made these objects out of cardboard or could have even just appropriated one from the warehouse, since the physical manifestation is not important here...is the very act of making art too close to the natural and is the Dantoian rejection of the act of making as insignificant a manifestation of the patriarchal place of the "is" of artistic identification?).   

Much has been written about the danger of everyday aesthetics setting up the trivial as equal to the masterwork.  Perhaps as PP argue, the endless assertion of the superiority of the distal senses and of the fine arts insofar as they are subject to reflection and judgment is also a function of an anthropological reality, i.e. the endless assertion of feminine stereotype in art history which, they argue, is needed to provide an opposite against which male art can find meaning and sustain dominance.

I don't think that all of this comes down to saying that Danto was somehow unconsciously sexist, or at least not just that.  That would be boring even if true.  What is interesting here is the idea that Carolyn Korsmeyer, a well known philosopher of art (and a feminist), has placed these two articles together in a textbook such that anyone who reads carefully would naturally ask whether the claims made by PP can not only undercut traditional masculinist history of art but also pose problems for Danto's theory of art.  It is not that Danto is guilty of the same thing Pomoroy was when talking about Novaho blankets.  Pomoroy was clearly a formalist much in the tradition of Clive Bell in his transformation of the women's work into abstractions by nameless masters.  Danto would not abide by that, nor would his theory.  The formalist theory of Bell and Greenberg might well be the model for what Danto called Reality Theory of art which, for Danto, is replaced by his own theory of art.  In arguing against what he called purists he was obviously also arguing against formalists.  For Danto the content and context is essential to the artwork's being an artwork.  So when something enters into the realm of art it carries with it the intentions of the artist, including for example the intentions of the women who wove the blankets that are now treated as art.  That said, there may be a residual acceptance of the ideology.   There is certainly a similarity with Pomoroy in that seeing something as art by someone with art historical knowledge brings it into the world of art.  One could say that Danto to make himself clear must add a condition or two, i.e. that the seeing x as art must be constrained not only by art history but also by history of the context and intended content of the item under consideration.  This is undercut a bit however by the way that the history and content of the original designing of the Brillo boxes was undercut by replacement of those ideas by Warhol's own.

PP are mainly criticizing the acceptance of a duality and therefore of an opposition, in this case between the feminine and the masculine, between the domestic and the public, and in the way that we treat the transformation from Nature into Culture (the Nature/Culture opposition is not itself overcome).  And so they say:  "The important questions concern women artists' relationship to an ideology of sexual difference in which the notions of masculine and feminine are meaningful only in relation to each other. What accounts for the endless assertion of a feminine stereotype, a feminine sensibility, a feminine art in criticism and art history?  Precisely the necessity to provide an opposite against which male art and the male artist fine meaning and sustain their dominance."  What I am suggesting is that the opposition between Nature and Culture as understood in terms of an opposition between mere things of the home (e.g. Brillo boxes, etc.) and things in the artworld where the artworld things gain more status reproduces the feminine/masculine opposition that is the grounding of patriarchal dominance.  "Ideology is not a conscious process, its effects are manifest but it works unconsciously, reproducing the values and systems of belief of the dominant group it serves."  

Shusterman on Living Phllosophically

 

"It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.  To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.  Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour."  Thoreau, Walden, quoted in Thinking Through the Body (288) (This and the next two quotes are taken from “Chapter 13:  Somaesthetic Awakening and the Art of Living:  Everyday Aesthetics in American Transcendentalism and Japanese Zen Practice.”) 

"to live philosophically means living in a waking rather than sleeping state...the discipline of awakened life can provide everyday experience with deep aesthetic enrichment and even spiritual enlightenment"  Shusterman (288-9)

"We fail to see things as they really are with the rich, sensuous resplendence of their full being because we see them through eyes heavy with conventional habits of viewing them and blinded by stereotypes of meaning."  Shusterman (291)

"But apart from … sublime, quasi-mystical moments of grasping a timeless now, there is the simpler yet significant value of attentive awareness of our mundane experience, of being fully present in what we do and where we are so that we can more fully profit from what our surroundings actually offer."  Shusterman (299).  

"Through...heightened, appreciative awareness and the mindful movements and actions that emerge from it, one can achieve extraordinary aesthetic experience in everyday living"  Shusterman (302)

It is only in the context of deep sympathy for these quotes that I made the following interrogatory comments.  Both Shusterman and I see the task of living philosophically partly in terms of Socrates.  (See his Chapter 3 “Self-Knowledge and Its Discontents:  From Socrates to Somaesthetics.”)  This is not surprising.  Socrates was one of my earliest philosophical heroes, and that is probably true for most Western philosophers.  He taught that the unexamined life is not worth living, and I still believe that to be true, taking it to mean something like:  to make life worth living (to enhance value in one's life) one needs to (at the very least) reflect on the key concepts that guide one's perception and action, reflect deeply, constantly questioning, constantly coming up with hypothesis to test, never accepting one of these as the final answer, recognizing that the only thing worthy of the name "wisdom" comes out of this process.  But this does not, on the face of it, seem to be the same as the aesthetic life.  Can the philosophical life as exemplified by Socrates and the aesthetic life work together?  (Shusterman, as inventor and promoter of somaesthetics, would, of course, add that the examined life should also include examination and improvement of one’s bodily sensations.)

Socrates also plays a leading role in Plato's Symposium where we get a different take on the philosophical life, one that sees it ultimately as aesthetic.  As one engages in philosophical examination one is also in search of beauty.  One travels up a ladder of love, where the object of love is always something of beauty.  The final stage is apprehension of Beauty itself, the eternal Form of Beauty, which holds roughly the same place in the metaphysics of the Symposium as the Form of the Good does in The Republic.  Recognition of Beauty itself is seeing the vast sea of beauty in the world as we experience it:  it is being able to recognize when beauty is present.  I take this to mean that close attention to the aesthetic dimension of human existence can be one path to an awakened state of being, which, in Plato’s account, happens when one grasps the eternal Form of Beauty or the Good.

The issue that Shusterman has raised concerning how to live philosophically is an important one for everyday aesthetics.  In response to the question "what is the point of everyday aesthetics" his answer would be, not to simply open up and explore a new field of inquiry in philosophy but to help us learn how to live philosophically where living philosophically is not just a matter of examining concepts and arguments but is also of paying attention to the phenomena so that rich sensuous qualities are revealed.  Much more is involved as well, particularly related to somatic self-improvement.  The question remains how these two things, examining concepts and paying attention for somatic self-improvement, can fit together.  How can you both examine life in Socrates’ sense and also live life with the intensity of perception and orientation to somatic self-improvement required by, for instance, Zen practice? (292).   (A high point in Shusterman's book is his discussion of his aesthetic experience at a Zen monastery.)

Shusterman's Zen-influenced recommendation for living the philosophical life of heightened awareness is simplicity, slowness, and focusing on the here and now.  Let us first consider the issue of simplicity.  It is hard to understand what exactly simplicity means in the context of “the examined life,” especially when we reflect on the life and activity of Socrates.  When we engage in Socratic dialogue (which is pretty much how Socratic characters examine life under the direction of Socrates or some other Socrates-like character, for example Parmenides in Plato's Parmenides) things become increasingly complex:  simple things are no longer so simple.  We thought we knew what, for example, piety was, and then we discover that we are ignorant (the result of Plato's Euthyphro).  Instead of one definition for a concept we have several, none of which are fully adequate, even though the later, more complex ones, are taken as better.  So where is simplicity in all of this?  A possible answer is that grasping Beauty itself, or any Form, is not a matter of grasping a complex proposition but grasping something that is simple, although this can only come at the end of a process that is itself complex.

Although accepting the project of examining life, Shusterman rejects the Socratic search for definition as found in the dialogues.  In doing so, he seems to reject the project of the philosophical life as a life of concept-examination.  In the end, though, I think that these two approaches to the philosophical life can be reconciled.  In aesthetics, the Socratic quest for definition is most discussed in relation to the definitions of art, beauty and aesthetic experience.  In “Somaesthetics and the Limits of Aesthetics” Shusterman attacks the “wrapper model of theory” (134), i.e. the belief that one should construct theory by way of a definition of X in terms of necessary and sufficient definitions, for example in trying to define are.  This is largely because such a theory, with regards to art, attempts to “conserve the conventional limits of art” (134). I agree with this critique of contemporary attempts to define art.  However, Socrates himself (or, as portrayed by Plato) never tries to preserve the conventional limits of the concept under consideration.  He questions, for example, Euthyphro’s conventional definition of piety.  In rejecting the wrapper model, Shusterman appears to reject the Socratic quest itself, although perhaps he wouldn’t if he accepted my analysis of the result of that quest as grasping something that is both complex in one respect and simple in another.  I agree with Morris Weitz that, although a “real definition” of “art” in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions will never be found (and is impossible), the process of seeking and coming up with what he called “honorific definitions” of art is immensely valuable.  Moreover, previous attempts to define art, rather than simply being failures at real definition, were unconsciously exactly that.^[1]  Hence, unlike Shusterman, I value the Socratic project of trying to come up with definitions as long we do not take seriously the idea usually (perhaps falsely, as I have suggested) attributed to Plato that the end product of this quest is description of an eternal unchanging object, i.e. a definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.^[2] 

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[1] Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no. 1 (1956): 27-35. Weitz’s strategy can be applied to all philosophical debates, but this need not be argued for here. 

[2] See my “The Socratic Quest in Art and Philosophy,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 3 (1993): 399-410 for a more positive approach to Socratic dialogue and its relevance to the quest for essences.  See also my “Metaphor and Metaphysics,” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity (Special Issue on Metaphor and Philosophy) 10. no. 3 (1995): 205-222.

Beyond Art by Dominic Mciver Lopes

Dominic McIver Lopes' new book, Beyond Art (Oxford, 2014) is a hot item in small world of analytic aesthetics.  After attending a session on it at the American Society for Aesthetics conference at Asilomar, California, I thought I would see what all the fuss was about.  Lopes is the current President of the American Society for Aesthetics, and this is probably the highest distinction someone can receive in contemporary Anglo-American aesthetics.  So one should take his new book very seriously if you care about the future of aesthetics.

I find myself in deep disagreement with Lopes from the very start.  He writes that "the ambition of this book is to show that it is not mandatory to centre the philosophical study of art on the question 'what is art?'" and even further, that the question is "the wrong question for philosophy."  I am OK with the notion that asking the question is not mandatory:  why should anything be mandatory in philosophy beyond blatantly contradicting yourself?  More disturbing is "the wrong question for philosophy."  What is philosophy but a series of "what is" questions: "what is knowledge?" "what is truth?" "what is beauty?" and "what is art?"?  There are some other types of questions, but Plato's Socrates led the way in showing how philosophy works through asking such questions and trying to answer them.  If you are going to have a "philosophy of" (e.g. "philosophy of psychology") the key question in that philosophy of will be the "what is" question.  For example the key question in philosophy of science is "what is science?"  Sure, there are some slight problems with this.  The most important question in philosophy of religion is not "what is God?" but "is there a God?"  Then again, one cannot begin to ask whether God exists without asking about what is meant by the word "God."  Lopes does not deny that the question "what is art?" can be useful:  he thinks that it can "help us to appreciate some works of art by prompting thoughts that are suited to...appreciation of the work...but not to the task of theorizing."  (2)  He will have to work  hard to convince me that what is good for appreciation of art should be cut off so completely from what is good for theorizing about art.  

Why do we disagree so much.  Maybe it is because Lopes begins his discussion with something Monroe Beardsley said in 1983 about why the problem is so important.  Beardsley gave four reasons for the importance of the "what is art?" question.  First, philosophers should be curious to know what they are philosophizing about.  This strikes me as a strange way of putting things since philosophizing about art, on the Socratic view, just is asking the "what is" question.  They are not two different projects.  Beardsley's second reason was that it would be important for cases of import duties and censorship.  It is true that lawyers and politicians concern themselves with defining key terms:  however, asking "what is art?" in the context of philosophy is very different from doing so in these other contexts.  It is not at all clear that one can be very helpful for the other.  In philosophy, "what is art?" has to do with all of the other central issues in philosophy:  what is man?  what is reality? what is value?  It is a philosophical question.  Thirdly, Beardsley thought that answering the question would help out people in the social sciences who need a definition.  I don't much like this idea of treating philosophers as providers of nice definitions for other sciences, as though the question of the nature of knowledge is not more deeply shared than that.  Sometimes the Europeans have a better idea about this.  Someone like Bourdieu, who is interested in the sociology of art, is hardly going to accept any definition of art, or of sociology for that matter, that we might come up with, at least not without a philosophical fight.  Asking the "what is" question in a philosophical way is "doing philosophy" regardless of what department one happens to reside in.  Finally, Beardsley thought that answering the "what is art" question could provide criteria for critics to decide what to criticize.  Again,  I do not think this is needed by critics any more than by sociologists.  Beardsley just failed to see how philosophy pervades all aspects of our society and not just philosophy departments.  Critics like Clive Bell figure prominently in aesthetics textbooks.  Why should such a critic look to professional philosophers to solve this deep human problem. 

Of course Lopes does not accept Beardsley's ideas, but he uses Beardsley to set the agenda.  If this is what the Socratic quest is all about then it is a trivial thing, and this leads to it making sense to stop asking the "what is" question in philosophy...what Lopes recommends.  [On reading the entire book now, this may not be fair. Sometimes it seems the Lopes just thinks that "what is art?" is a bad question and that it should be replaced by other "what is" questions, like "what is music?" and "what is architecture?" although there are other times in which he seems to reject this as well.  He just thinks there is not enough common between the various arts to make the "what is art" question useful.]  I am not arguing that Lopes has Socrates wrong, or is wrong about philosophy, because his view is different from Socrates' view, but I do believe that Plato's Socrates' has a much richer, interesting and more powerful idea about what philosophy can be than I have seen so far in this discussion.  

But perhaps I am unfair to Lopes because he does say one right thing here:  "Philosophy is not taxonomy.  It does not take phenomena fixed in advanced [sic] and then answer, for each phenomenon X, 'what is X?" (4)  He is right:  nothing is fixed in advance:  categories of interest to philosophy shift and change over history.  On the other hand, as soon as you fix on a term, for example, "piety," then you can engage in a philosophical debate for the essence of that term, and the result is going to be something called "the philosophy of piety" which itself is probably closely allied to "the philosophy of religion."  If, however, Lopes is simply recommending that we back off from the "what is art?" question and ask other philosophical questions like "what is painting?" or "what is improvisation?" there is nothing wrong with that (although I do think that once one has fiddled with these more particular questions for awhile one should try moving up the ladder a bit and ask the 'what is art?' question again).   

Lopes' worry about "art" is summed up in the phrase "grab bag of phenomena that are not illuminated by lumping them together as a unity" (4).  What "induces queasiness" in him is the idea of placing "Chardin's still lifes alongside John Coltrane's improvisations, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Mies van der Rohe's office towers."  (3)  One begins to see what he finds problematic:  how can there be something that these diverse things have in common?  I wouldn't put it past Plato to pick three very different things called "pious" and asking Euthyphro what he thinks they all share in common.  It might be that "art" is a more hodge-podge concept than most, and that because of this we should avoid queasiness and go for collections of things that have a more plausible unity. In the next post I will discuss the actual theory posed.  My own view of defining art can be found in this post.

Defining Art: The Positive View

In my last post I argued that Morris Weitz's famous essay on the role of theory in aesthetics points the way to a more positive approach to the issue of defining art.  He offers us a way of reinterpreting the great theories of art so that they are seen as successes, i.e. as what he called honorific definitions of art.  This was the main point of this truly seminal essay, and yet oddly, in the course of history, it has been ignored.  
 
Joseph Margolis in "The Importance of Being Ernest about the Definition and Metaphysics of Art," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68:3 (2010) returns to Weitz's essay but seems sometimes more interested in the question of whether Weitz misinterpreted Wittgenstein than in whether or not he was right about the role of theory in aesthetics.  I do not even think we should judge essays of this sort on the basis of whether or not they interpret a great philosopher correctly:  such works should not be judged as though they intended to be mere examples of "secondary literature."  Important philosophers tend to misinterpret other important philosophers:  creative mis-interpretation is part of what goes into thinking great thoughts.  Margolis, ironically, is guilty of this too:  a truly great thinker (certainly one of the finest mind in aesthetics) who often reads others insensitively.

Margolis begins his essay with the traditional negativism about definition:  "The philosophy of art may be doomed, again and again but always once and for all, to define what it is to be 'a work of art'..."  (215) In my last post I argued that the history of efforts to define art has been a history of successes if one interprets these efforts as presenting us with honorific definitions of art that participate in various multidisciplinary efforts at self-understanding understood in terms of their original place at particular times in history.  My take on this is something like what Hegel referred to by saying that in a culture Spirit comes to self-understanding through dialectic, but without the transcendent metaphysics or any notion of progress towards an end-point (there is progress, but it is relative.)  Oddly, in Margolis's effort to show how Weitz misinterprets Wittgenstein, he reconstructs, by accident, Weitz's own discovery, i.e. that definition of art in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions is not going to happen, but that supposed definitions of this sort are best seen as honorific definitions that focus our attention on one central property or type of property.  I argued that this is done through definition as metaphor.  Margolis observes that Wittgenstein is "plainly open to admitting a great many different kinds of definitions," is willing to impose limitations on open concepts such as "game" for some limited purposes, and that Aristotle's definition of tragedy, which is an attempt to capture the essence of tragedy, would not therefore be problematic for Wittgenstein.  Again, I am not interested here in Wittgenstein interpretation:  if Margolis is right, however, about Wittgenstein, so much the better, since the position is, I am convinced, right.  More interesting is that Margolis misinterprets Weitz since he says "what Weitz might regard as failed essential definitions of the realist kind may, in Wittgenstein's tolerant sense, actually be successful in their own way..." (319)  The point attributed to Wittgenstein was exactly Weitz's point when he brought up that these failed essential definitions of the realist kind should be seen as honorific definitions and therefore successful in their own way!  Margolis thinks that Aristotle's definition is successful in this way, and so do I, and so, as I read Weitz, does Weitz.  Well, as it turns out, once we get past all of this silliness about correct readings of Wittgenstein and Weitz, Margolis is deeply right about definition, and right when he goes on to say that Stephen Davies (and many other contemporary philosophers of art) makes a serious mistake when he insists that a definition of art must be in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.  Margolis says that Davies "agrees with Weitz about what a proper definition requires" (219) which is not quite right since, although Weitz believes that a proper "real" definition of art would be of this sort, a proper honorific definition of art does not have to meet this standard.  As Margolis observes, Wittgenstein is tolerant of many different kinds of definitions. (219).  Further, "a 'defective' definition of the essentialist sort...may, nevertheless, be a complete success in terms of a reasonable reading of its philosophical contribution."  (219)  Weitz (and I) would agree with this point, although I would say that there is another, more valuable, kind of essentialism, in which essences are quasi-fictional and changing objects that can actually be captured quite well by honorific definitions.  Aristotle's definition of tragedy is one of these!  So, where Margolis speaks of the skewed influence of Weitz's misinterpretation of Wittgenstein, I would speak of the skewed influence of misreadings of Weitz himself.  Margolis' take on this is that "real" definitions need not be "essentialist" i.e. in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.  I would make almost the same point using different language, namely that essentialist definitions of art need not be "real" definitions, i.e. definitions in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

In the end, I am not opposed to Margolis' idea that a definition is "realist" if it addresses the "nature" of a thing, although I find it odd when he says that a "real" definition (in his sense of "real," not in Weitz's) "needs only to be 'usable' in the way ordinary usage tolerates." (220) Well, that would make it "real," I suppose, but not particularly good or true, even in a pragmatist sense of "true."  A good definition must not only be usable and tolerable to ordinary usage (actually, that might be a serious disadvantage!):  it should be true in the sense of powerful and fruitful in the realm of reasoned discourse.  Aristotle's definition of tragedy, again, fits the bill (sometimes more successfully, sometimes  less so at different times in history), but so too does Clive Bell's formalist definition of art and Tolstoy's expressionist definition of art, and so also Collingwood's Crocean "intuitionist" version of expressionism. 

Margolis is right on the mark in my view when he says that Berys Gaut's cluster account view of defining art does not show how it is "genuinely serviceable as a replacement for a definition."  (220), although one could say, to be fair to Gaut, that cluster accounts could serve as one kind of definition among the many kinds that Margolis, through Wittgenstein, is otherwise allowing.  Margolis also thinks that the cluster account really only captures the kind of usage of terms we find in the teaching of those terms to children.

Despite my criticisms I think this essay to be one of the most insightful (could we expect less from Margolis?) in recent aesthetics.  Margolis is dead right when he says "I see no reason why one must choose, disjunctively, between Aristotle and Nietzsche...":  the rest of the paragraph is wonderful, but I have no time to type it out in full.

What is the point to defining art? Heck, what is the point of philosophy?

This post will not be an attempt to define art.  Based on the theory I am about to propose I do not even think I am in a very good position to provide a definition of art, at least not this year.  My theory about defining art is more a theory about philosophy, about philosophical definition in general, with the question "what is art?" being my paradigm of a philosophical question.  Although I think that the project of defining art goes well beyond the task of distinguishing art from non-art objects I will begin with the quote from Robert Stecker's Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art:  An Introduction  (Rowman and Middlefield, 2010.)  In the summary of his chapter titled "What is Art?" Stecker says that there are three groups of proposals for distinguishing art from nonart.  Begin with the first: "First, simple functionalist proposals identify one valuable property that many artworks share, and claim that this is the defining feature, the essence of art.  Whether representation, expression, form, or the aesthetic is put forward as the relevant property, simple functionalism is never able to cover the whole extension of art, struggles to accommodate bad art, and to exclude all instances of nonart."  (120)  The functionalist theories are the great classical definitions of art, often expressed in terms of "art as" as much as "art is," for example "art as imitation" or "art is expression," or "art as experience."  There is the Imitation theory, the Expression theory, the Formalist theory, and so forth.  These are traditionally associated with specific philosophers.  The usual view of these theories, as expressed in this passage by Stecker is that they are failures.  My view of this is very different.  It derives from Morris Weitz's famous article of 1956  "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,"  The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15:  27-35.  Everyone in aesthetics remembers Weitz's attack on essentialism and thus on the functionalist theories of art.  Few however remember his actual main point, that although a "real" definition of art (i.e. one in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, like the definition of "triangle") will never be forthcoming, theory is still important since the great functionalist definitions of art in the past, when seen as honorific definitions of art, were actually immensely valuable.  What makes them valuable is the "debates over the reasons for changing the criteria of the concept of art" i.e. the reasons given for "the chosen or preferred criterion of excellence and evaluation."  It is these debates, Weitz argues, that make the history of aesthetics an important study:  "The value of each of the theories resides in its attempt to state and to justify certain criteria which are either neglected or distorted by previous theories."  He gives, as an example, the Clive Bell/Robert Fry theory that "Art is significant form."  He takes this not as a "real" definition of art but as a "redefinition of art in terms of the chosen condition of significant form."  The definition is taken by Weitz to have a pragmatic dimension.  It is a recommendation for a certain set of actions.  It also involves the notion that sometimes that has a current definition can be redefined.  This is also neglected in discussions of Weitz.  That it is neglected is important since all of aesthetic theory since Weitz's article has been based on a certain reading of Weitz.  So to go back and reread Weitz is to reread the last sixty years of aesthetics in the analytic tradition..actually to reread the analytic tradition itself. What does "Art is significant form" mean?  It means, "In an age in which literary and representational elements have become paramount in painting, return to the" formalist ones since these are native to painting.  Thus, he concludes:  "the role of the theory is not to define anything but to use the definitional form, almost epigrammatically, to pinpoint a crucial recommendation to turn our attention once again" to formalist elements.  When the great theories of art are taken as honorific definitions Stecker's objections become irrelevant.  The objection that there are things that are art that do not serve the essential function proposed simply treats an honorific definition as a real definition.  This is also true for the objection that they may include things that are not art but serve a similar function.  It is true that the honorific theories do not handle bad art, but that is also a virtue of the theory since it recognizes that the great definitions of art were interested in telling us something essential about the value of art and not simply in telling us how to sort things properly called art from things not properly called art, say in W. E. Kennick's classical example of the warehouse.  Honorific definitions of art are therefore relatively immune to counterexamples.  You can come up with an example of something most would consider art that has no interesting formal properties, but this is not argument against the idea that one ought to concentrate on making and appreciating art with such properties. 

The only problem I can see with Weitz's approach is that he misconceives the nature of essences.  If essences are patterns in experience that are real but changing (as I have argued in various writings) then honorific definitions can be paired with them so that the recommendation to focus on this property could be based on the claim that this is the essence as it has emerged at this time in history.  An honorific definition can be true in the sense of "true" in which truth is something that emerges historically, something that happens.  Honorific definitions of true on the pragmatist theory of truth, which is the one I follow.  Thus, on this view, the history of aesthetics is not a history of failure but rather a history of successes in which different honorific definitions are successively offered.  Each great theory of art is actually a manifestation of the spirit of its time (in the sense that artists, philosophers, and others in the culture share certain questions and attempt to resolve certain burning issues of the time) and is paired with at least some of the great artworks of the time.  

An excellent example of this process working in a practical context and a specific art form is Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's idea that "architecture is a decorated shed."  This theory captures the essence of architecture for them at a particular time in history and also exemplifies an entire theory and practice of architecture, i.e. their version of postmodern architecture, one that is not intended just to cover their own buildings but also to reinterpret the best buildings of the past and provide a framework for future architectural work.  Great definitions are epigrams of this sort, to use Weitz's term.  "Decorated shed" is itself a concentrated metaphor that needs a lot of theoretical and historical knowledge in order to fully understand. 

So the future of theory for each person who believes with Socrates that the unexamined life is the only one worth living (i.e. for each human who is a philosopher in the sense of being a lover of wisdom) is to create one's own honorific definition of art, one that gives the function of art now, and also for the future as an object of personal or group vision. 

As time goes on, great definitions of art (and of subgroups like architecture) lose their liveliness, richness, and creative force, and need to be replaced by new definitions.  They may however be revived a new in a new context, and this is why we have new versions of the expression theory or the imitation theory popping up again in history.

Stecker then gives the second strategy:  "Second, there are proposals derived from the view that our classificatory practice is best captured by something other than a definition:  by similarity to various paradigms (family resemblance), by clusters of properties forming several sufficient conditions, by prototypes."  This is how Weitz's lesson (he used the term "family resemblance") has been interpreted.  But, as I have shown, the point is to avoid trying to capture classificatory practices.

However, Weitz was right that paradigms are important.  To go back to Clive Bell, he took the paintings of Giotto and Cezanne as his paradigms of art (Giotto representing values to be recovered, Cezanne representing a radical new interpretation of those values, i.e. "significant form" that  that gives new life).  I argue that these paradigms flesh out the meaning of the metaphor "significant form."  They are the practical real-world basis for the honorific definition proffered.  By saying that art is essentially significant form Bell is saying (unconsciously, since he did not realize he was offering an honorific definition, unlike Venturi and Brown) that this is the new center of art, and that everything else in art is art to the extent that it shares in this.  Unfortunately, Weitz's insight has been taken to mean something very different; that we can only have real definitions as clusters of sufficient conditions.  This is a form, I believe, of opting out of the Socratic quest, of not taking a stand, of providing a merely formal solution to the problem of defining art.  The question is whether something essentially resembles the paradigms, and if it does it partakes in the creative power of art at that particular moment in this history of spirit.  

The third approach to definition mention by Stecker consists of "relational definitions comparing the institutional and historical views" and I will discuss these in some later posts.  I'll just say here that the great institutional theories of art were also paired with paradigmatic works, for example Duchamp's Fountain in the case of George Dickie and Warhol's Brillo Boxes in the case of Arthur Danto.   So there is reason to believe that these theories too were honorific definitions of art pretending to be real definitions of art in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

Stecker concludes that "the concept of art is a vague concept, and this means that any proposed definition either has to capture this vagueness or be considered to some extent an idealization of the actual concept."  (121)  The concept of art, I argue, is not a vague concept:  it is a philosophically contested concept.  Any proposed definition that makes the concept vague loses out on the importance Weitz saw for theory in art.  Redefinition, which is essential to honorific definitions, is a matter of idealization, to be sure.  We create new definitions based on a vision of a fiction (a rich and deep metaphor like "significant form" or "decorated shed") grounded on chosen paradigms and values and expressed in a metaphor ("art is significant form") elaborated by a philosophical narrative and also by practice itself (for example in the work of Venturi and Brown, or any other seminal architectural firm).  These fictions, when successful in encouraging creative work, are what make life meaningful.  

Unlike Weitz, however, I do not think that new powerful definitions simply recover things that are neglected:  rather they are truly creative in addition to this.  Architecture as decorated shed was neglected by modernist architecture, but the idea is not just a recovery of something that was always there:  it also carries a projection into the future, a vision of what can be, an "idealization" as Stecker put it. 

Interested in learning more?  See my book:  Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary:  The Aesthetics of Everyday Life.  Broadview Press, 2012.  Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents.  You can also buy it fro  Broadview.