Aesthetics is that part of philosophy that looks at art and examines questions of taste and quality and what makes an artwork art, that sort of thing. In both music and visual art we have examples of artists who have gone out of their way to create something to challenge even the possibility of asking these sorts of questions. In visual art the locus classicus is "Fountain" (actually a urinal) by Marcel Duchamp using the pseudonym "R. Mutt."
Beauty is, of course, in the eye or ear of the beholder, but what this means is that beauty is something perceived that is consequent or instigated by an art object (at least artistic beauty, leaving aside sunsets and beautiful humans). As something perceived by individuals it is perceived in various ways which is why we can disagree on whether something is beautiful. The art object itself is something real and fixed in itself (leaving aside musical interpretations for the moment), but the way it is perceived is variable, though there can also be considerable agreement.
Theoretical analyses of music offer some interesting examples of how this works. Musical works can be very complex, of course, but that does not mean that they are beyond understanding--at least in most cases. What a theorist discusses or points out in a piece of music is something that we can all see (in the score) and hear, though we might not hear it until it is pointed out. The more we notice in the score, the more we might like the piece--or dislike it, I suppose. The music is what it is, how we feel about it is a different thing, but most certainly related to the music itself.
But I am leaving out all sorts of aspects and some of them exactly what we would want to call "aesthetic." For example, in a masterclass when the maestro stops you and says "play that phrase more poetically," what could that possibly mean? It almost certainly relates to the use of rubato, tone-color, phrasing, that sort of thing. Very crucial to a good performance, but unquantifiable, though we can all hear the application of these things. Tempo and the variation and adjustment of it is another important aspect. Some of this is notated, but most of it is not, but again, we can certainly hear when a passage is played "poetically" and when it is just delivered like cold porridge.
So those are a couple of ideas relating to basic aesthetics.
6 comments:
Nicholas Wolterstoff described The Fountain as "art-reflexive art". Similar things could be said about Cage's 4'33". The way Wolterstorff put it was that Duchamp's urinal didn't flout the conventional definitions of aesthetic contemplation so much as flouted the norms of reception. I.e. Duchamp jumped through all the appropriate hoops and filled out the proper forms and THEN submitted the urinal as a work. In that sense art-reflexive art, as Wolterstorff put it in Art Rethought: the Social Practices of Art, is the gambit works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work it's not regarded as art and nobody talks about it afterward. When the gambit DOES work, as it obviously did with The Fountain, then Duchamp's effrontery becomes art and therefore art that redefines what is regarded as acceptable within the realm of museum culture.
Wolterstorff, however, has argued that museum culture and the reception history of how works get designated as fit for aesthetic interest tends to skip over the social practices to which arts may be used (memorial art, social protest art [murals in Ireland], and music to commemorate the dead). Something can succeed in those social functions that fails to fit the museum culture standards of art and Wolterstorff sort of argued that we can keep social practices in mind without forgetting that the concept of disinterested aesthetic contemplation is more an invention of the 18th through long 19th centuries rather than the way people interacted with what we call the arts in earlier settings.
Oh yes, much of the history of the arts focusses on the production of art and hence on technical innovation, while neglecting the reception of art and, as you say, its social functions.
The urinal depicted does actually have a pleasing shape. Design is that middle ground between art and more ordinary acts of creation for utilitarian purposes, but sometimes with an aesthetic dimension, whether in ornamentation or simply in shape, texture or other inherent quality fashioned for subjective response rather than bare function. There can be aesthetic elements in "design" but it is ultimately a practical creation, wherein it's use-value does not include expression (or, perhaps also or alternately, provocation of emotional reaction) in the way that "art" does. All that said, I like the urinal more as a urinal than as art, because that is the more authentic purpose of the specimen. Fountain is thus horrible art, though the piece is a very fine urinal, with a pleasing shape and overall coherency of design and function.
I think that Marcel Duchamp's urinal is an early example of what we now call "concept art"--art that is making a statement about the social context of art which is a rather oblique approach to aesthetics. Same with the Cage.
since "concept art" can also be shorthand for "proof of concept" art for set design, etc, I find I like Nicholas Wolterstorff's use of "art-reflexive art". One of his proposals was/is that art works that succeed in questioning or reframing the parameters of accepted definitions of artworks get assimilated into the art canons. He specifically focused on Duchamp and Warhol. Whether or not their work can even function, now canonized, in the way that it functioned in the social contexts within Duchamp and Warhol worked is an unsettled question. Clearly conservatives like Scruton regarded Duchamp as a charlatan and Cage as being a charlatan, too, but Wolterstorff has floated an idea that it was only within museum culture and gallery culture that Duchamp's stunt could even have been accomplished.
The paradox of art-reflexive art is it is a "works once" thing. There can never be another Duchamp Fountain just like there can't be another Cage 4'33". Once the conceptual boundaries of what is accepted as art are broken open by art-reflexive art then it becomes, perhaps, an option for what is subsequently "concept art". I.e. the "concept" of art-reflexive art, once understood, becomes another of the humdrum options available.
Into this sort of thing I'm reminded of Tom Wolfe's withering take-down of the role arts critics and historians play in this kind of stuff with his quip that he saw arts journalists and scholars saying that if you don't have a theory of seeing you can't even see a painting. Some have relatively recently claimed that to break down the contingent elements of sight and cognition is to cast doubt on the very idea of the viability of sight (John Borstlap has claimed this in response to some pedestrian boilerplate stumping for Cezanne allegedly anticipating concepts in the cognitive sciences that I really doubted even existed circa 1905). Anyone who takes a drawing class or a painting class will soon hear that you have to train your mind and body to draw what you're actually seeing rather than what you think you see. It's literally drawing 101. But some seem to think that highlighting the discrepancies that can exist between the biology of the eye's sight and the cognitive processes of interpreting visual stimuli amounts to some kind of epic epistlemological nihilism.
I wonder, actually, whether there's an obsession with reception history and criticism in contemporary literature. It may be that what is taught to undergrads is the history of innovation in production but past that level there seems to be a fixation on the ways in which critical reception makes or breaks reputations. I'm working through a monograph on the invention of Beethoven and Rossini as supposedly polar opposites in 19th century critical and journalistic discussion of the two composers, for instance, and, wow, some of the prolix grandstanding people did back then is a reminder that prolix grandstanding will never go out of style when people write about the arts. :)
Thanks Wenatchee for some brilliant observations. "Concept art" is a variety of what has been called "patent-office modernism", i.e. art that is all about being first to the market with a new idea. As you say, the limitation of this is that it only works once and then you have to come up with a new idea, something that Cage managed to do several times.
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