Aesthetics- Philosophy of Art - Essay Example

Academia Research Academia 27 April 2006 Philosophy Of Art "In aesthetics you have to see for yourself precisely because what you have to "see" is not a property: your knowledge that an aesthetic feature is "in" the object is given by the same criteria that show that you "see" it. To see the sadness in the music and to know that the music is sad are one and the same thing. To agree in the judgment that the music is sad is not to agree in a belief, but in something more like a response or an experience" (Eldridge 145: 2003). It has long been recognized that human beings find a variety of visual and auditory appearances to be extremely fascinating. Certain sunsets, flowers, birdsongs, and beautiful bodies, among natural things, and certain pots, carvings, vocalizations, and marked surfaces, among humanly made things, seem to engage eye or ear simultaneously with thoughtful mind. In experiencing such things, we feel we want the experience to continue for "its own sake, " at least for some further time. The Greek uses a phrase to kalon which means the fine, the good, or the beautiful, to describe many sorts of things that are attractive to mind and eye or ear, without sharply distinguishing natural beauty from artistic merit (or moral goodness). "In the Symposium, Socrates reports that the priestess Diotima once instructed him in how a lover who goes about this matter correctly must begin in his youth to devote himself to beautiful bodies, first loving one body, then many (as he comes to understand that they are alike in beauty), next beautiful minds, beautiful laws and customs, beautiful ideas and theories, until finally he will come to love the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality." (Eldridge 47: 2003) In pleasing us, natural and artistic beauty, according to Kant, serve no outer purpose. The experience of beauty does not yield knowledge, and it does not of itself enable the satisfaction of desires for material goods. Yet it is not nonetheless merely agreeable or pleasant; instead, the experience of beauty matters. Beauty in nature makes us feel as though the natural world were congenial to our purposes and projects. In feeling the beautiful natural object to be "as it were" intelligible or made for us to apprehend it, we further feel that nature as a whole, which seems to "shine forth" in beauty, is favorable to our cognitive and practical interests as subjects. To experience a beautiful sunset, according to Kant, is to feel (though not to know theoretically) that nature makes sense. Kant's terminology may be difficult, the experience he is describing is a familiar one. Beautiful objects of nature or art engage our attention. We love them by paying active, cognitive attention to them, even if we do not get anything from them or even if it brings out the inner most emotions from us. The above discussion brings us to compare art with emotions, the reason why identifications with artists and imaginative participation in experiences and emotions are available to us is that works of art are made things, products or instances of human action. To understand an action, including actions of artistic making, is to understand its suitable motivation by reasons in contexts. Actions of artistic making, including the making of both narrative art and non-narrative art, are concerned with the shaping of materials to hold attention on a presented subject matter. (In abstract work, the presented subject matters are often centrally the perception and gestural action of the artist and the possibility of the audience's imaginative participation in that perception and gestural action.) Whatever emotions figure in attention to this subject matter are emotions that members of the audience are solicited to experience and explore, as they participate in the attention that is embodied in the work. The understanding of art is much related to exploring, to understand art critically is to explore it imaginatively, guided by a range of relevant comparisons and conceptions of rational action and focused on how a work presents its subject matter as a focus for thought and emotion. When we thus explore works imaginatively, we can understand them differently, more deeply, and yet in sound explanation of our prior understandings, as the complex results of over determined human action that they really are. The identification and evaluation of objects or performances as works pf art is a process full with passion and difficulty. We care about some favorite works that we regard as successful, certain books or movies or paintings, in the way we care about our friends. They appeal to us both immediately and deeply. We often remember them, revisit them, reread them, or rehear them. We recommend them to others, and we are then pleased if the work engages them and sometimes disappointed or troubled if it does not. Prices in the art market and publishing industry depend on what people respond to, as does support by governments and foundations for work in progress. Sometimes the topic of identifying and evaluating works of art is made the focus of the philosophy of art, particularly in the discussion of the objectivity of judgments of taste. In many cases, it does not matter much which identifications and evaluations we ourselves or other people settle on. Here it is useful to compare the term art to the term educated person. In different cultural and historical settings, as different skills are valued and taught, it will be natural to call different sorts of persons educated. The case is similar with art, like educated person, art is a status concept. Artistic value can be demonstrated to various degrees in many different domains. Becoming accomplished at making art and at understanding art requires practice on many exercises. No one will be fully expert in works in all media and traditions of art. Practice works and experiments in artistic making can and should be accepted as having a degree of artistic value without worrying over their status as masterpieces or failures, as long as the aims in view in making and for audiences are those that define the practice of art. There is no reason not to regard the paintings of children, students, and Sunday painters, however less distinctive and absorbing they may be than the paintings of Hockney or Matisse, as genuine works of art, as long as the work of making them is done within an acknowledged medium of art and with some attention to its aims, as is generally the case. Talking of art in comparison with education why not discuss someone who is a showpiece of the glass art. Dale Chihuly is perhaps the most creative and experimental artists and educators working in this field of art today. Right from the beginning, he worked together with many other artists, challenging the traditional Italian glassblowing, which encouraged privacy and confidentiality. After he lost an eye in a car accident in 1976, he worked jointly with a team. He believed the idea of working as a team to be one of his most important contributions to glassmaking. Chihuly's Violet Persian Set with Yellow Lip Wraps is a spectacular sculpture with multiple parts and exciting colors. Chihuly's sculpture looks like two large purple shells surrounding a bowl and smaller forms. It reminds the observer not only of sea forms, but also of flowers. Chihuly grew up on the Pacific Western Coast and worked there as a fisherman to put himself through graduate school. He was always exposed to sea forms. He also loved flowers and was influenced by his mother's colorful garden. All the forms in Violet Persian Set with Yellow Lip Wraps are united by purple and the yellow rim on each piece, which eventually becomes a rolling line. This line repeats the patterns of the transparent yellow striations within the purple glass. The imbedded patterns appear mysterious in their ambiguity between color and light. Violet Persian Set with Yellow Lip Wraps recalls a world of sensuous excitement. The artist's marriage to playwright Sylvia Peto the year after he started the Persian series may have influenced his work. "The open forms, sometimes spilling out smaller containers, are unmistakably female. The warm colors and undulating shapes and patterns contribute to this idea. This sculpture celebrates life" (Kit Basquin 27, Vol 91: 1992). There are various theories of art as well, we would be discussing briefly few of them, first the representation theory of art. The relation of representation to art is an enduring one. In the earliest philosophies of art in the West, representation was taken to be an essential feature of art. This view persisted for centuries and was involved in the formation of what we think of as the modern system of the arts. However, the development of nonrepresentational art in the nineteenth and twentieth century turn into the representational theory of art. Lets discuss the theory of expression. This conception of expression involves several things. First, the artist must have some feelings or emotions. Perhaps it is directed at scenery or an event, like a military victory. But whatever the emotion is directed at, the expression theory of art requires that the artist experience some emotional state. The artist expresses this state, brings it outside himself, so to speak, by trying to find some configuration of lines, shapes, colors, sounds, actions, and/or words that are appropriate to or that match that feeling. Then, these configurations stimulate the same kind of emotional state in the audience. The main idea of expression theories is that all art is expressive of emotions. The transmission theory and the solo expression theory are two of the leading versions of the expression approach. Both theories see art as essentially involved with the expression of emotions. In this, expression theories of art provided a useful corrective to general representational theories of art. However, like representational theorists, expression theorists overstated their case. Much art is expressive, but it is not the case that all art is expressive of emotion. A great deal of twentieth-century art is preoccupied with ideas, rather than emotions. And a great deal of art, past and present, is aimed at provoking perceptual pleasure, rather than exploring emotional possibilities. Lets now discuss the aesthetic theory of art, the aesthetic definition of art can be in several forms, depending on its conception of aesthetic experience. Such definitions may assume a content-oriented account or an affect-oriented account of aesthetic experience. However, neither version provides necessary or sufficient conditions for art. These theories are generally too broad, including many human works of art, and too narrow, excluding anti-aesthetic art from the order of art. Thus, aesthetic theories of art are not adequate and comprehensive theories of art. Nevertheless, the conception of aesthetic experience is still an important one. Even if it cannot be used to define all the art, it is frequently used to describe certain of our commonly returning responses to art. So it seems advisable to come up with some characterization of aesthetic experience. The most popular characterizations of it are affect-oriented and rely on the concept of disinterested attention. But upon scrutiny, this concept appears disallowed, since it confuses motivation with attention. This suggests that the affect-oriented account of aesthetic experience is a dead end. Throughout the twentieth century especially, philosophers of art have attempted to define art. Probably one reason that Western philosophers have been thoughtful with defining art for the last century or so is that it is during this period that we have found ourselves confronted with a dazzling collection of different kinds of arts whose sheer variety is exceptional. On the one hand, there have been the diverse creations of the ultramodern which, from Romanticism onwards, have consistently challenged settled ideas of art with their essential departures from straight practices. References Richard Eldridge (2003), "An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art", Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England. Kit Basquin (1992), "Dale Chihuly: Reflections in Glass", School Arts. Noel Carroll (1999), "philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction", Routledge: London. Read More