Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 3, December 2002
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Gaut,
Berys, and Lopes, Dominic McIver Lopes, editors.
The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics.
London: Routledge, 2001. pp.
xviii + 581. ISBN 0-415-2-737-1 £60 hbk
Reviewed by
Andy Hamilton
This
Routledge Companion takes the form of 46 short article-length pieces on
"The History of Aesthetics", "Aesthetic Theory",
"Issues and challenges" and "The individual arts".
It is a very worthwhile collection, with a number of outstanding
contributions, some covering undeservedly neglected topics.
The first section covers individual philosophers from Plato to
Postmodernism (Barthes and Derrida). Michael
Inwood's "Hegel" offers a pellucid discussion of Hegel's treatment of
the history of art, the five fine arts, and the end of art; Simon Glendinning's
discussion of Heidegger is pellucid. The
contributors here as elsewhere have clearly been instructed to keep their
articles to around twelve pages, though the resulting uniformity means that Kant
receives an article little longer than those about Frank Sibley or Medieval
Aesthetics. Hume gets an even briefer treatment because he is discussed
together with Hutcheson under the heading of Empiricism - an excellent piece by
James Shelley, but a dense and original interpretation rather than a
student-directed exposition. The
omission of an entry on Adorno, the most considerable thinker on aesthetics in
the last century, is bizarre but characteristic of analytic aesthetics.
Part
2 on "Aesthetic Theory" includes articles by Carolyn Korsmeyer on
Taste, Matthew Kieran on Value of art, and Stephen Davies on Definitions of art.
Alan Goldman reprises the persuasive arguments of his book Aesthetic
Value (1995, Westview Press) in his very sane article on "The
Aesthetic", offering a partial defence of Sibley, and considering the views
of Dewey and Beardsley. Part 3, on
"Issues and Challenges", includes a model article by Roger Seamon on
"Criticism" - clear and informative for undergraduates, but providing
an original contribution to aesthetics, in both respects superior to the
comparable entry in Michael Kelly's Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (1998,
Oxford). Certainly I learned much from it concerning the historical development
of criticism. Seamon discusses
"legislative criticism" as exemplified by Aristotle's Poetics,
which declined towards the end of the 17th century in favour of
"appreciative description": "the function of the critic changed
from legislating artistic practices to filtering increasing artistic production
and educating a public in the appreciation of art...although the earlier role
lingered on in the imperiously judgmental tone that much early reviewing
took", he comments.
Appreciative
description is "'discourse grounding evaluation'...and evaluation is
implicit in the description itself. One
cannot properly describe a performance without implicit evaluation, since the
very point of the performance is to do something well that is worth doing".
"Criticism is itself a performance, not a science or an academic
discipline", he argues; "criticism [is] itself an art" (Seamon's
use of "performance" as a fundamental concept is something one might
take issue with). Seamon sees criticism in this sense as "a branch of
rhetoric not logic", and rightly comments on how a critic who
misunderstands - as William James did Impressionist painting - may nonetheless
be illuminating. Seamon goes on to
further distinguish attempts at "analytic criticism", connected with
formalist theories of the arts, and "interpretative" and
"cultural criticism".
Other
articles in this section include Berys Gaut on Art and ethics, Alex Neill on
tragedy and John A. Fisher on "High art versus low art".
As in the case of other discussions, I wonder who apart from philosophers
actually uses the term "low art", or even "mass art";
"popular art" seems preferable even though it is itself a problematic
term. Fisher comments against some
theorists who argue that the "high/low" distinction is a 20th century
invention, that there has always been a tendency to rank arts as higher and
lower; but I would argue that this tendency was transformed in the 20th century,
since there are higher and more popular versions of each artform. Fisher approves of Kaplan's comment that there "is a
time and place even for popular art. Champagne
and Napoleon brandy are admittedly the best of beverages; but on a Sunday
afternoon in the ballpark we want a coke or maybe a glass of beer" (A.
Kaplan (1972), "The Aesthetics of the Popular Arts", in J. Hall et al
eds Modern Culture and the Arts, McGraw-Hill, p. 62).
But there is a need for a gloss on the claim that "the former is
superior to the latter" - perhaps that a life without the former is more
impoverished than one without the latter. Finally,
I think effort would have been better spent examining Adorno rather than Noel
Carroll on popular culture.
The
final section includes Peter Lamarque on literature, Murray Smith on film and
Mark DeBellis on music. Ed
Winters's piece on Architecture raises some central issues in this rather
neglected area of aesthetics. He
contrasts content theories both with functionalism, and with Scruton's
communitarian conception. The
representational theory is an example of the first, and claims that "the
classical building and its elements refer to the primitive building and its
elements" (the column refers to the cut-down tree, the capital to the pad
that sits the wooden beam atop it, and so on).
On this view, classicism "is not a style.
It is, supposedly, the only intelligible form of architecture".
"Aesthetic functionalism", in contrast, holds that "the
form of the building is aesthetically conceived as being appropriate to the
utility for which the building was designed", and defines architecture as
"the art of building". Austere
functionalism holds that a building is a product of its function if it best
facilitates the activity for which it is designed; it regards the conception of
function as that used in engineering. Winters comments that "whatever the claims of [austere
functionalist] designers...the look of the works is aesthetically estimable and
it seems incredible that this is mere caprice".
James
R. Hamilton's piece on theatre covers an even more
philosophically neglected artform. He
is concerned to undermine the traditional, Aristotelian, text-based view of
theatre as enacted poetry or literature; in particular through what he regards
as the promising "creation-of-observation-spaces" strategy. He draws out the interesting asymmetry between theatre on the
one hand, and music and dance on the other, in that the latter has a
non-audience practice while the former does not.
It would, however, have been good to have some discussion of the views of
such as Artaud and Brecht on actor and role (in this respect, the entry in
Kelly's Encyclopedia of Aesthetics is superior).
But the criticisms I have made of this volume have been relatively minor;
in general it is an excellent collection. I
will be recommending many of the articles for my undergraduate Aesthetics
course.