How important is positive aesthetic value in making photography art?

Louise Lawler Monogram -- Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Termaine, New York City
1984

Sherri Irvin says it is not very important. She admits (in "Artwork and Document in the Photography of Louise Lawler" Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70:1 Winter 2012 79-90) that it was crucial to photography's gaining acceptance as an art form:  the photographs of Julia Cameron being "formally stunning."  Irvin denies however that "aesthetic value is necessary" for photographs to be art.  Although I do not know whether positive aesthetic value is necessary, I was somewhat surprised (actually, rather stunned) by Irvin's key example for her case, Louise Lawler's photography of artworks by famous artists in various contexts (i.e. in collections, storage spaces, etc.).  She says "a number of Lawler's photographs do not even tempt us to think that they might be art by virtue of their formal or aesthetic features.  Some of her photographs of artworks in corporate or auction settings are, in my judgment, aesthetically ordinary, even drab or depressing.  An example is Who Says Who Shows Who Counts (1989), which shows Warhol's Wicked Witch on the wall of a boardroom... This is not a criticism of Lawler's photographs as artworks: they are designed to make us attend to and reflect on the institutional framework within which artworks circulate, and sometimes that institutional framework is a very drab and ordinary one."  (86)  You can see a good image of this work here.  What struck me when looking at Lawler's photograph was that it has strong aesthetic qualities.  The terms "visually powerful" and "striking" come to mind.  "Aesthetically ordinary" seems, in my judgment, to be way out of place.  Of course if I walked into the boardroom portrayed I would probably think it was drab (but for the prominent Warhol).  But this photograph strikes me as rich in meaning in a way that the boardroom itself could not be (for example:  the single marker pen standing up on the table seems to reverberate with the Wicked Witch theme.)  So I would opt out of the "us" in Irvin's phrase "do not even tempt us."  Perhaps Irvin and I have very different understandings of the term "aesthetic."  By her combining it with "formal" one gets the sense that she believes that the only aesthetic values are formal values, for example harmony or symmetry (I am never quite sure what falls into the category of formal values.)

Irvin goes on to give a second reason why positive aesthetic qualities are not important in making Lawler's photographs art: :  "even when her photographs clearly do traffic in positive aesthetic value, as many do, very often it is the kind of aesthetic value that creates an association with nonartistic forms of professional photography" for example evoking interior design photography.  The example she gives for this is  Monogram -- Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Termaine, New York City 1984I could not find an internet copy of the black and white version of this work, the one that  Irvin gives in her essay.  This is a shame since that version is much better than the color version I got from Artnet.com above. Although the colored version given above does look almost indistinguishable from something in an interior design magazine, the black and white version shows the hanging ropes above and the air duct grating also above the artwork (which is a Jasper Johns flag painting).  Those elements make the work far more interesting formally, especially in juxtaposition with the bed below.  In neither photograph is the aesthetic value of the work the same as the aesthetic value one would find in a very similar looking design magazine photograph.  The aesthetic value of the illustrated version for example is influenced by the title as well as by its presentation to the world as art.  Irvin thinks that the important thing that makes art art is what brings it into the institution:  "when a set of objects was created by a person who is clearly aware of and engaged with the artworld, that engagement should be the focus of our inquiry"....presumably our inquiry into how it comes to be art.  So Irvin's conclusion is "at least with regard to works of our contemporaries, positive aesthetic value is not normally a key criterion in determining that they are art."  (86)  I should also add that Irvin has no problem with outsider art being entered into the realm of art because of positive aesthetic qualities, but only as a last resort if there is nothing that connects such art to an artworld institutional context.

Is Perception Necessary for Aesthetic Experience?

Amir Konigsberg has published an article, "The Acquaintance Principle, Aesthetic Autonomy, and Aesthetic Appreciation"  British Journal of Aesthetics 52:2 (2012) 153-168  in which he argues that perception is not necessary for aesthetic experience.  This is not a controversial view when it comes to aesthetic properties of scientific laws or mathematical theorems.  However Konigsberg's interest focuses on conceptual art.  Part of the issue is whether we can trust the testimony of others with respect to aesthetic qualities.  Here, I would agree with Konigsberg that if someone I respect tells me that a movie or a work of visual art is aesthetically good then I will have some reason to believe it is aesthetically good.  If the film critics on the Rotten Tomatoes web site tell me I should see a particular film, I will take them seriously.  I will assume they know what they are talking about and will therefore assume that it is probably a good film.  Since I tend to like the same sorts of films film critics like then I'll probably like this one too.

However Konigsberg also argues that "in some domains the perception of the aesthetic object appears to be inconsequential to its aesthetic appreciation" and he believes that Conceptual Art is such a domain.  He starts with Robert Rauschenberg's "Erased De Kooning" (1953) (and I will limit my comments to this example) in which Rauschenberg spent a month erasing a work by the famous painter De Kooning and then presented the result as his own work.  The canvas, as Konigsberg observes, is almost white with faint traces of ink and crayon.  I have observed this work, which is owned by the San Francisco Museum of Art.  I should note that the work is also recognizable as a De Kooning. (You might just be able to see this if you look at the highest resolution reproduction available on the internet.)  Konigsberg thinks that we do not have to see this work to properly appreciate it.  It only needs to be described.  I feel uncomfortable with this position.  I do think that having a work of conceptual art described to me can induce in me an appreciation of the thought behind the work.  However, I am hesitant to say that I could really appreciate the work as a work of visual art without actually seeing it.  Konigsberg thinks the entire content of "Erased de Kooning" is non-perceptual.  It is true that in order to appreciate "Erased de Kooning" properly I need to know something about it.  It is also true that as I learn more about this work it comes to look different to me.  But this is true for a Rembrandt as well.  The fact is that whenever I experience a work of art the perceptual aspect of my experience is going to be influenced by what I know about it as well as what I am prompted by it to imagine.  So I do not understand Konigsberg's idea that one inquires into background knowledge to get the "non-perceptual meaning...of the perceptual object."  The background information informs the perceptual meaning of the object.  Moreover, it is a perceptual object....so to say that it has "non-perceptual meaning" does not make much sense.  So I wonder whether it is true that "there are aesthetic experiences [of works of art] in which perception is unimportant."  Konigsberg thinks that "no important information about Rauschenberg's piece is presented in the way it looks..."  But it seems to me that getting information about the piece is not the same as appreciating it.  It is important to see the piece because the way it looks (including how it looks to us when we have a lot of knowledge about its origins) is essential to the piece.  I suspect that Konigsberg has not even seen this piece since he does not mention, for example, that it looks like an erased de Kooning.  He probably thinks there is no point in actually seeing the piece.  But isn't this a problem?  I say you cannot appreciate "Erased de Kooning" until you have seen it:  just having it described to you provides nothing more than appreciation of the thought behind it.  Here is where our intuitions (Konigsberg's and mine) diverge radically.  Whereas Konigsberg thinks it would be "bizarre" to "come up close and appreciate" this work, I think it would be bizarre not to do this:  if you are really going to apprehend the artwork you need to actually spend some time looking at it...and since it is a small work, and the effects are subtle, then coming up close is necessary in this case.  That's at least what I did when I saw the work.  Konigsberg thinks it is a matter of choice between "considering the patterns left over" after the erasure and "appreciating the painting's absence."  He chooses the latter.  However, I believe it is not a choice at all:  you should consider the erasure of the original painting by de Kooning as your look at and consider the patterns left over after Rauschenberg's act of erasure.  Konigsberg thinks I am "missing the point" but in fact he is missing the point.  "Erased de Kooning" is, after all, a work of art put on display in a museum. It is related intimately to a body of work of Rauschenberg all of which is made with the intention that people perceptually contemplated it.  Such works are intended to be looked at, not just thought about.  Konigsberg says "if there is aesthetic value to de Kooning's piece, it resides in the background knowledge we have about it, not in what we see in it."  (164)  This strikes me as doubly bizarre:  first, this is not de Kooning's piece, but Rauschenberg's piece, a piece based on a former piece by de Kooning. (I suspect that this is just an editorial mistake...but it is one that reveals a lot.)  Second, if the aesthetic value would just be in the background knowledge then reading about the piece, say in Konigsberg's article, would be sufficient... but it is not.  Konigsberg asks his readers to say whether what he has said about the piece elicits an aesthetic experience of the piece and whether the aesthetic experience would be the same kind as they would get through perceptual experience of the piece.  Perhaps there would be an aesthetic experience (we can find thoughts beautiful for example) but it would not be the same kind of experience since it would not be an experience of a visual work of art.

Can an ordinary good conversation be an aesthetic experience?

Noel Carroll in "Recent Approaches to Aesthetic Experience" just published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70:2 (Spring 2012) 165-177 puts pretty serious limits on appreciating conversations aesthetically.  In an argument against Gary Iseminger, who stresses that experiencing something aesthetically is appreciating it for its own sake, Carroll argues Iseminger would hold the following type of convivial conversation between friends would be aesthetic: "Perhaps it is a conversation about some event in the past; maybe it is about the time when they all toured Frankfurt together on their senior year abroad in college.  Suppose the conversation moves smoothly.  Suppose everyone has something interesting to recall.  Suppose that the spirit or feeling of their adolescent companionship is rekindled in the retelling of these youthful adventures, although not because they are artfully narrated, but only because they are honestly spoken." (p. 167). He thinks this is not an aesthetic experience on his "ordinary construal" of that idea.  This seems obvious to Carroll, but not to me.  From the quote Carroll seems to assume that for the conversation to produce an aesthetic experience it must be "artfully narrated."  Or at least, being artfully narrated would do the trick. Although I am not a big fan of the phrase "for its own sake" I do think that a conversation does not need to be artful in any way to be aesthetic.  The conversation Carroll suggests has many aesthetic properties.  Moreover, it fits Dewey's concept of "an experience" as described in Art as Experience.  This seems like another example of separating the aesthetics of everyday life from the aesthetics of art, or subordinating one to the other.

The Aesthetics of Fashion

I just read a delightful article by Nickolas Pappas, "Fashion Seen as Something Imitative and Foreign."  British Journal of Aesthetics 48:1  Jan. 2008 1-19.  Pappas doesn't actually discuss the aesthetics of fashion very much.  But he does speak of "the impulse towards differentiation, improvisation, variation, the free play with fashion's rules that in real life generates those new styles that wind up being imitated."  So on his view Philosophy has often been opposed to fashion because it involves imitation, but then neglects the creative dimension of fashion.  It is this creative dimension that is aesthetic.  Someone tries a new combination because it looks good to him, not in some small way, but has a certain aura of significance.  I also like the point that "fashionability begins in the home, people really can be at home in their clothes."  Pappas ends by saying that fashion will be understood better if we being with people "engaged in the self-conscious task of dressing themselves..."  (all quotes page 19).  Pappas explains the lack of interest in the inventive aspect of fashion by noting that the inventors of fashion are often seen as foreign.

Another intriguing article on this topic is  Rémy G. Saisselin, “From Baudelaire to Christian Dior: The Poetics of Fashion,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , 18: 1 (Sep., 1959) 109-115. He writes "a dress may be at some moment of its existence, a poem of form, color, and motion, and that at such a privileged instant the dress may transform the wearer into a poetic apparition." (114)

Kant on Genius

My comment here is going to be just based on the material in the textbook I am using, Goldblatt and Brown's Aesthetics, pp. 408-410. I'm sure whatever I'll say will be pretty limited, but given this material I would say that Kant has an interesting theory of genius insofar as, unlike many other aesthetic theories, it emphasizes the teacher/student relationship and stresses the idea that each of us is potentially a genius. A genius is going to be someone who is both capable of producing something original and is academically trained, i.e. trained in the skills necessary for the field. The talent needs to be trained to produce works that can be judged good. The product can't be original nonsense: it must be original but in the the sense of "original" we use when we expect a good philosophical paper to be original, i.e. to be a contribution to a tradition. In addition, the genius is someone who is in a student/teacher relationship in which "following" rather than "imitation" is the rule. The student does not imitate the teacher. Rather, the student follows the teacher by being inspired by the teacher's work, that is assuming that the student has similar abilities to the teacher's. (There are some areas in which we just don't have talent. However, it is quite possible on Kant's view that everyone is talented in some area. Since we all have the faculties of imagination and undertanding, we are all basically equal, thus capable of genius.) The good teacher then would be someone who gets the student to discover the genius within. When the student finds his or her own genius he or she using the imagination and the understanding in free play to create rules for his or her art. These rules basically constitute the style of the genius. In addition, they allow the genius to create of world of her own, as for example, when Van Gogh creates his own world in "Starry Night," one that follows his own rules.

Kant's Sublime

"Vue de la montagne du Nant d'Arpenaz" in De Saussure 

•"Voyages dans les Alpes..."

•1779 à 1796 mentioned by Kant in the Critique of Judgment  #29 (Meredith trans., 115) More images and text on de Saussure

Does Kant's concept of the sublime have any relevance to us today?  It is really rather odd.  He thinks it is not the objects of nature or art that are sublime but rather the subject who experiences the sublime.  Our imagination tries to represent something absolutely great to us, but then fails, and this is painful.  In failing, however, it recognizes that there is something supersensible (transcendent) that causes it to engage in this effort, thus giving it pleasure in the thought of its own freedom.  The feeling of freedom I know, and I can also comprehend some of what Kant is saying when I take a hike in the Sierras.  However, I do not find myself thinking about myself or my incredible power in relation to nature when I experience something which seems sublime to me.  Whereas Kant really does believe in the noumenal or supersensible realm in which resides God and our own eternal soul (the source of our freedom) I cannot buy into this.  Simon Morley in his introduction to The Sublime (Documents of Contemporary Art, 2010) thinks that most contemporary artists interested in the sublime are interested in an immanent sublime.  That sounds intriguing, although isn't it an oxymoron?  The sublime by its nature seems to be transcendent.  My thought here is that when we experience the sublime we experience something as if it intimates a transcendent realm, as if there were a god, as if I had a soul which allowed me to act with total freedom.  These are all illusions -- yet needed to make life meaningful.  They give mythological meaning to an experience which is itself real.  Nietzsche uses the necessary illusion in a number of contexts.  He sees truth as a  necessary illusion in his “Truth and Lies” paper. The doctrine of eternal recurrence (found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) has been referred to as a necessary illusion. (See Nietzsche: disciple of Dionysus by Rose Pfeffer, 176)  In The Birth of Tragedy he even sees the phenomenal world as a necessary illusion.  Paul Rée, who influenced Nietzsche, saw moral consciousness and freedom as necessary illusions.  Religion itself can be seen as a necessary illusion.  It is arguable that Nietzsche saw his key religious figure, Dionysus, as a necessary illusion.  That humanity is something extra-special in the universe is a necessary illusion too, as is also the idea that we have free will. William James also thought we should act as if the free will were real...thus seemingly holding it to be a necessary illusion.  Vaihinger also develops Nietzsche's idea of necessary illusion in his book The Philosophy of As If.  Although Kant definitely did not believe in necessary illusions he did believe that we should act as if God exists, etc..  Pfeffer correctly points out that Nietzsche really gets the idea, contra Vaihinger, from Kant's Critique of Judgment.

Complicating Heidegger and Architecture

I am thinking about two articles in the Winter 2011 issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 69 no. 1, "Complicating Heidegger and the Truth of Architecture," by Travis T. Anderson, and "The 'Urban Photogenie' of Architainment" by Jennifer Burris.  The two articles go in very different directions but in interesting ways.  Anderson takes us through the development of Heidegger's ideas of architecture, beginning with Being and Time, going through "The Origins of the Work of Art" and ending with the period of Building, Dwelling, Thinking."  The architectural hero of the story is Frank Gehry, who, Anderson thinks, "demonstrates that architecture presents the truth and beauty of the elemental and natural as foundational to our being and our world." (78) Anderson had already spoken of Frank Lloyd Wright as fitting Heidegger's philosophy of architecture in that it reveals "the beauty and truth of brick, stone, concrete, wood, and glass" and also the beauty and truth of the landscape in which it is situated.  Gehry's buildings, he thinks, does something similar with respect to "the sheen of titanium, the plasticity of cement, the translucency of glass, the strength of steel, and the flexibility of chain-link."  He even thinks that Gehry goes further than Wright by awakening "our imagination to the organic, irregular, and fluctuating forms of nature as a living, evolving life-world" and also by complicating the relations between architecture and sculpture.  What draws me to contrast Anderson to Burris is when he says "unlike representational arts, works of architecture attune us to the truths and beauty of the elemental itself, completely undiluted by an image that would divert our attention from the matter out of which it is composed." (78)  Burris by contrast talks about the New American Urbanism, a movement that began in the 1990s and consisted of "film-set architecture modeled on the cinematic vision of pre-sprawl America"  using architectural facades using "unnecessary awnings and front porches meant to evoke the idealized topography of early twentieth-century small-town America." (96)  Celebration is a Disney-developed town in this tradition.  New American Urbanism seems like the opposite of Heideggerian architecture:  it is much more concerned with images that are precisely intended to divert our attention from the matter.  In a way, this is just the old debate between modernism and postmodernism, except in this case Gehry is associated with modernism (whereas he is usually associated with deconstructivism...but then deconstructivism is a kind of modernist response to postmodernism).  Burris ends her article with a discussion of three photographers who are responding to, or are inspired by, New American Urbanism, i.e. Peter Granser, Andreas Gefeller and Thomas Demand.  Although I agree with the critics of the New American Urbanism (that it is superficial and obsessed with commodity consumption) I also feel ambiguous towards it, and on two fronts.  First, I find myself enjoying the artificial Disneyland atmosphere of Santana Row, our own version of New Urbanist pastiche in San Jose.  Sometimes I tell myself that the artificial old-time small-town streets are almost as good as the real thing:  it is just nice to sit in front of a fake French cafe and watch people strolling by. (Sure this is false consciousness...but)  Second, I really like the New American Urbanist-influenced photography in which, as Burris says "The theatrical lighting and smooth lines recast this world as an eerily perfect stage set, primed for the projection of an individual's imagined story." (98)  Of course, the photography is commenting on our surface-oriented world (and thus it is not exactly promoting it):  but I cannot deny that it looks good, interesting, and right, much like the photography-based work of Palo Alto artist Kathryn Dunlevie. Also, returning to Wright and Gehry, isn't there something stage-set-like about their architecture too? 

How does this related to the aesthetics of everyday life?  First, architecture creates the everyday insofar as it makes the world in which we live our everyday lives:  or at least it makes some sites of that world (since not all buildings are architecture.).   Of course it doesn't create the everyday alone:  photography helps (as do many other things).   Second, the relationship between aesthetics of nature and aesthetics of the everyday is stressed by architecture:  we appreciate the stone in Wright's building as enhanced through transformation into something useful, hence everyday. Here, nature is appreciated, but so too the everyday.  Third, following Burris, the everyday transforms through history, for example in its relation to photography.  Burris writes "Beginning in the late 1960s, a strand of urban landscape photography seemed to translate [the] critical understanding of photography's indexicality [it is an objective imprint of the real] into the image's formal characteristics" (94) moving from street-level, humanist, social oriented photography of Cartier-Bresson to a "topographical approach" in which the urban landscape is deserted.  The new topographical photography was exemplified by Ed Ruscha, and in particular, his Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963).    In my forthcoming book (The Extraordinary in the Ordinary) I refer to Ruscha's work as exemplifying the transformation of the ordinariness of the ordinary into something extraordinary.  What I am thinking now is that this is a matter of a transformation of the constitution of the everyday and of everyday aesthetics over time:  Ruscha's move being one that gives us a new appreciation of the everyday different from that of Cartier-Bresson, but like that of (as Burris observes) Robert Venturi in Learning from Las Vegas.  One might speak of an evolving field in which there are new competing positions, a new field of possibilities, for example the competing pulls (in my own consciousness) between the Heideggerian and the postmodernist photographers cited by Burris.  Earlier I had defended Cartier-Bresson against criticisms that he took us away from the aesthetics of everyday life:  but now I think that the aesthetics of everyday life moves on and that Cartier-Bresson, although a wonderful photographer, represents, as is inevitable, a stage, but not statically, but rather as a position in the evolving chessboard, still there, but now in opposition to the newer topographical photographers.  (I am not endorsing here Burris's typology or photography which seems simplistic if intended to cover the history of photography as a whole...but that's not relevant here.)