Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 3, December 2006
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Davies, Stephen, The Philosophy of Art, Oxford,
Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 256 pages, ISBN 1405120231, $24.95 (Paperback)
Reviewed by
Centre for Art and New Technologies in Prague (CIANT)
Which are the core subjects and questions in contemporary philosophy of art? Is it a “distanced” contemplation of Western art, or rather the challenges posed by varieties of art over time and across cultures? Stephen Davies focuses on the latter and he is doing his job with clarity, wit, and rigor. In the first volume in the new Foundations of the Philosophy of the Arts series by Blackwell, which is designed to provide crisp introductions to the fundamental general questions about art, as well as to questions about the several arts, Davies presents an insightful introduction to central topics and on-going debates in the philosophy of art. The book is divided in two parts: a theoretical one and a practical (though still pretty general) one. Readers may enjoy questions that close each of the 8 chapters and follow up-to-date suggested readings.
Why study the philosophy of art? Because we are not sure what are is and what it does. Art is a puzzle which comes in a bewildering variety of kinds. It claims importance but its production and consumption does not directly enhance our survival. “And even if art is a source of knowledge and experience, it often provides such an indirect and complicated route to these that we should wonder what they have to do with its importance.” (vii) Also, the individual artworks provoke different and often conflicting interpretation. So when it comes to values, can we be serious about our judgements? These are just a few perplexing aspects to art.
Davies teaches philosophy at the University of Auckland and is well known e.g. for his 1991 book Definitions of Art or Art and Essence volume which he edited in 2003. In his newest book he is said (by Susan Feagin) to set new standards for introductory books in aesthetics and philosophy art. It is especially so because Davies is doing his best not to give in to one particular “school” which is unfortunately and often the case with continental philosophers who author “universal” introductions with strong opinions in mind.
Before asking how art is to be understood, and before asking what art is, Davies tells two divergent stories of art’s foundations first. The chapter one entitled Evolution and Culture emphasizes both the biological and cultural dimensions of art making, and is a perfect start for art definition debate that follows. According to the “biological” view, “the activities involved in making and appreciating art are products of human evolution. As such, they are universal and old. The second view sees art as the product of a particular time and culture, that of eighteenth-century Europe. It maintains that the concept familiar to us today first emerged then and there. According to this account, the appearance of art was comparatively recent and initially localized.” (1) The two stories are introduced without a critical ambition. They are meant, however, to demonstrate two distinct views which affect human understanding of art’s nature. Whether one leans really to the view that assigns a biological role for human nature in art or, rather, to the idea that art as we understand it is purely and arbitrarily cultural, we ought to approach critically the question if a single culture (or period) can claim exclusive ownership of the concept. Davies explicitly doubts that.
A lasting temptation to see art solely in aesthetic terms has, so to say, slowly become an expression of Western languor. Or is it still possible today to feel comfortable with distancing ourselves from all “interested” concerns? It feels like we have been seeing a bit too many of those who prefer make themselves available to the experience which requests “the pleasurable contemplation of the work’s beauty and other aesthetic properties viewed only for the sake of their contribution to its overall aesthetic effect.” (5) Any time we position art in a global perspective the cultural historian might easily find herself caught in flagranti by the evolutionary biologist.
The same applies when Davies focuses in chapter two on the possibilities of defining art. Starting with characteristics of and concluding with refusal of essential definitions, the author deals in analytical detail with leading attempts to define art (aesthetic functionalism, the institutional theory, historicism), in order to arrive back at the central and now persistent question: “Is art universal in its occurrence, or solely a product of European culture that now occurs globally only because that culture has come to dominate others? If the latter is the case, there is no artworld relativity problem, but if art is indigenous to many different cultures, the definitions mentioned above may be inadequate. Can they accommodate the existence of non-Western art?” (41) Again, the strategy is to introduce in a reader-friendly fashion various theoretical positions with the framework objectives to foster cross-cultural references and to promote an idea that art indeed has a wider constituency.
“Art sometimes can have an aesthetic purpose and perhaps this was characteristic in its historically early forms. Art sometimes relies for its creation, presentation, recognition, acceptance, and proper appreciation on a background of informally institutionalized practices and conventions. Art sometimes is shaped by its own history, with the result that its functions and forms can be modified over time through bootstrapping process relying on self-reflection, self-reference, and self-repudiation.” (43) However, “there is no clear winner here.” (43) And it would hardly make sense nowadays to be optimistic in a situation when a definition must be exhaustive of all art and exclusive of all that is not art. Check it out before you go and support your own definition of art!
An important follow up of the first chapter is also a discussion entitled Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. In his third chapter Davies looks at the mid-twentieth century repudiation of earlier aesthetic theories. He claims that it is not true after all, that our current concept of art can be revealed through the tradition of aesthetic philosophizing that began in European Enlightenment. “We are now in a position to characterize the clash between aesthetic theory and the philosophy of art. The former maintains that consideration of the aesthetic in art is adequate for art’s appreciation as art. Reflection on a work’s artistic properties is not relevant to its proper reception. The latter view denies this. Indeed, it maintains that awareness of a work’s artistic properties is crucial not only to understanding it but also to identifying it as the artwork it is.” (55) Davies is a philosopher of art that may drive some of the surviving representatives of the aesthetic theory crazy. Fortunately, aesthetic theory has been challenged by so many of powerful artworks and by so many of emerging cultural practices that its purpose turns now to be completely historical.
Davies maintains that “the relationship of the artwork to the context of its production plays a role in determining its identity and content. Among the contextual features that are likely to be relevant are the identity and intentions of the artist, the work’s genre, style, and media, the artworld tradition that it assumes, draws on, or reacts against, and wider social elements and factors to which it makes reference or some other connection.” (71) The author explores his position of ontological contextualism further in chapter four which he named Varieties of Art, and develops it in detail in the following, more practically oriented sections devoted to traditional topics of interpretation, expression, pictorial representation and last but not least artistic evaluation.