Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 12 Number 3, December 2011
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Gracyk,Theodore, The Philosophy of Art, Cambridge, Polity, 2011, 216 pages, Paperback ISBN -13:978-0-7456-4915-3,Hardback £55. Paperback £16.99
Reviewed by
London Metropolitan University
Theodore Gracyk’s The Philosophy of Art an Introduction, is a text which aims to provide a way of introducing students who have no previous experience of philosophy to the concerns of the discipline in relation to their studies in practical artistic forms. Gracyk’s efforts are devoted to lucid exposition and the justification of a classical set of issues to a new generation who inhabit a very different world from the classic thinkers. The very first question students may ask is why such a subject has been chosen for them. Gracyk’s approach is to begin with some of the most common assumptions that make students believe that this is a set of issues they can easily dismiss. A frequent interruption in his text poses rhetorical and sometimes genuine questions for the reader to relate to more immediate experience. In relation to mimesis, he suggests ‘the natural pleasure of imitation’ which Aristotle gives as the reason for admiring Art, might explain why we like paintings of people long ago and yet we find it hard to examine photographs of friends’ holidays. The implicit point here that although the friends’ photographs may be accurate records of their experiences, distaste for such representations of others’ intimate personal experiences, seems to show that imitation alone cannot capture the impact of art we find pleasurable. ‘Mimesis cannot be a full explanation if some Art like that of Kandinsky, is purely abstract. In considering ‘indiscernible counterparts’ such as Warhol’s artificially created Brillo boxes, which appear to be fully accurate representation only, Gracyk introduces the reader to the idea that the object alone cannot yield its full meaning without understanding the context in which it was produced. This is what gives it a meaning such as ‘In today’s America, Art is a consumer product. ‘ ( p.16) Arthur C. Danto’s claim that context is, therefore, a necessary condition of Art, is, however, shown to have counter-examples . Some Art needs no interpretation and other theory-dependent images that remain open to contextual interpretation are not art. Gracyk’s head-on confrontation with the apparent paradigm of Fine Art, is intended to show that a close resemblance to reality may be as a result of conventions of representation. The conclusion suggests that an artists’s rendering of a police suspect may be no different from any other depiction if all involve subtle conventions. An image which is simply a truthful reflection of the appearance of a subject may, nonetheless need to be seen as appealing to a set of ideological presumptions. At the end of each section are a series of practical suggestion for exploratory work that lead students of the Philosophy of Art to follow up the preceding chapter . The rhetorical exclamations in the text are sudden and often thoughtful in ways that contemporary students might find stimulating as a means of involving themselves in aesthetics and their own artistic work.
Nelson Goodman’s arguments that visual art is a form of conventionalism, however, similar, is then used to show how some theorists retaliated by arguing that Art can give the same experience as the real thing. Gracyk’s next approach is to subject the main defining characteristic of art that students propose to scrutiny. If art is a form of expression, than any confusion about the failure to be transparent, could be overcome by arguing that art conveys feeling not things.
A swift and highly competent dismissal of Tolstoy’s infection theory leads to the retaliatory theory that art arouses anticipated feelings in the audience through effective construction. Collingwood is again shown to fail to explain how an identical experience can be transferred from creator to audience. However, the view that art enables us to find expressive form for our feelings in the mechanism that the creator uses. Gracyk makes an appeal to popular culture here to substantiate his point. The film Juno (2007) about a young girl giving up her baby for adoption suppresses our natural uncomfortableness at this decision, hence failing to define a feeling more carefully for us. With the example of sad art, however, Gracyk encourages the reader to begin to make a distinction between the audience’s reactions and the nature of art itself. Not only do we not need to identify an emotion that the creator expressed or the artwork clarifies for us, we may even be able to recognize emotions cognitively without experiencing any emotion at all. At this point further resources for study are added to the list of exploratory activities, perhaps as this is the point where the counter-intuitive conclusions of philosophy develop into mysterious phenomena in search of an answer. References to film, for example, may become tantalising here as the suggestion that some contain relevant clues.
The question of how great art is created and what unique properties it has, leads inevitably to Plato and Kant. The idea of special inspiration or creative genius are debated and easily dismissed due to the bewildering complexity of the things that we term ‘art’.By using Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978) as an example of how creativity can be identified and attributed, the text enables us to see the meaning and value of the work of well-known creative artists can be found. However, this elitist theory of art is also a highly restrictive definition which dismisses many examples we would normally want to include. Feminist theories of art are also employed to show how some evaluation implicitly excludes gendered work. Marxist theory is used to argue this kind of more formal theory can ignore the social significance of art deemed ‘great’. Gracyk also takes this theme to examine material bases of creativity in line with much Marxist thinking and interestingly gives the example of film. His brief but highly condensed account of the relationship between the medium of film and its creative potential concludes that it would be wrong to stipulate what film can do in advance of experiencing is multitudinous creativity. His example of the same theme occurring in both the ancient Greek story of Achilles and the film Troy (2004), however, is a highly debatable comparison, despite making the point that a medium can accommodate any content.
So far, the book has taken a fairly predictable tour of the perennial issues in the Philosophy of Art and the figures who have been responsible for the main theories. The author states that his sequence of chapters is not intended to be definitive and here makes an unpredictable turn to explore the issue of fakes. We might question at this point whether this is really an explanation of ontology or whether it is a philosophical cul-de-sac which ruminates on a problem which fascinates philosophers. The consequence of this section is that it finds too many varied examples of art to make generalising easy or possible. Walter Benjamin’s conclusion that the work of art had become the work of art produced for reproducibility might have introduced the status contemporary artworks to the intended audience of the book more swiftly. Is a virtual image produced by software conceptual art if it does not involve artistic skill ? If so can we all now be artists ? The one area which is not explored in detail is computer artwork
The book develops a very interesting approach to the importance of the historical and reception context of artworks and raises the issue of how borrowings and cultural changes can modify the ontology of art, making it a much more fluid concept. The conclusion on authenticity, that an authentic film based on historical sources will not find its way to cinemas without some cultural modification, raises the possibility that art has broken free from its cultural roots with time.
The burning question of what at is, then is the next subject and various theories are expounded to make this a synoptic chapter drawing on examples from contemporary culture and the previous parts of the book .This teaches the danger of making any claims that are too prescriptive and rehearses the skills of delivering a powerful counter-example
Gracyk finds a more clear path through the tangled web of aesthetics by arguing that it must be a response to human intentions. Clarification may be needed here for the novice student who yearns for direction on the correct way to address issues in art without falling foul of a theory. Despite this, however, some theories such as Levinson’s meta-reponse to art can help in structuring responses in such a way that they are clarified and a technique emerges.
The discussion of High versus popular art is perhaps left a little late here. The issue of whether for example, popular art has less to offer an audience than fine art is explored via a number of theories, but the issue of the competing world-views of the mass audience and the elite artlover is left untouched. It would be possible to see whether, for example, the criteria for Fine Art can be met by some popular works. Dewey’s argument is explained that we must first know what kinds of experiences we value in everyday life before we can properly evaluate art, but a fundamental response to the whole book’s approach may be that this is a good idea to begin with. A different way of starting might be not to use the films mentioned as afterthoughts, but as the material for eliciting the students’ view on the scenes which defy categorisation and stand in need of explanation. If art has become such a mobile and elusive concept grounded in history and human struggles, then it may need to be unravelled as such . The theories of philosophers collectively point in this direction.
The final part of this book looks at the question of aesthetic value and consider the issue of whether art is valuable intrinsically of for other reasons such as its use-value or its moral consequences. A useful aspect of the book’s construction is that it often refers back to previous sections to, for example, compare the aesthetic appreciation of nature, which can be intrinsically valuable with the aesthetic appreciation of art which may have similar virtues. The elusive essence of art is again emphasied. Gracyk takes us to the point of recent research by Gary Iseminger whose fundamental conclusion, ‘Appreciation is a question of the value of the resulting total experience’, (p. 177) leads to a consideration of art as consciousness. However, it also obviates the need to discover a unique property of art itself. Although this solves philosophical difficulties, its ramifications for student readers may be to accept the line that appreciation of the reasons why artworks cause the experience they encounter is irrelevant. This may be philosophically respectable, but it might lead away from developing the questions of aesthetics as Gracyk hopes.
On the whole, despite some objections to the style of what the author himself describes as a ‘smorgasbord’ structure, this is a valuable introduction which is unusual in both offering students extremely clear accounts of philosophers’ efforts in the field and also highly provocative and relevant questions for them to use as ways of digesting the material. It also provides a good account of recent developments in the field for more advanced work. Ironically the book points a way forward for contemporary introductions that it could develop still further itself.