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6.1.1
DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS
The philosophy
of art is distinguished from art criticism,
which is concerned with the analysis and evaluation of particular works of art.
Critical activity may be primarily historical, as when a lecture is given on the
conventions of the Elizabethan theatre in order to explain some of the devices
used in Shakespeare's plays. It may be primarily analytical, as when a certain
passage of poetry is separated into its elements and its meaning or import
explained in relation to other passages and other poems in the tradition. Or it
may be primarily evaluative, as when reasons are given for saying that the work
of art in question is good or bad, or better or worse than another one.
Sometimes it is not a single work of art but an entire class of works in a
certain style or genre (such as pastoral poems or Baroque music) that is being
elucidated; and sometimes it is the art of an entire period (such as Romantic).
But in every case, the aim of art criticism is to achieve an increased
understanding or enjoyment of the work (or classes of works) of art, and its
statements are designed to achieve this end. (see also Index: aesthetics)
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The test of the
success of art criticism with a given person is: has this essay or book of art
criticism increased his understanding or enhanced his appreciation of the work
of art in question? Art criticism is particularly helpful and often necessary
for works of art that are more than usually difficult, so that the average
person would be unable adequately to understand or enjoy them if left to
himself. |
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The task of the
philosopher of art is more fundamental than that of the art critic in that the
critic's pronouncements presuppose answers to the questions set by the
philosopher of art. The critic says that a given work of music is expressive;
but the philosopher of art asks what is meant by saying that a work of art is
expressive and how one determines whether it is. In speaking and writing about
art, the critic presupposes that he is dealing with clear concepts, the
attainment of which is the task of the philosopher of art. |
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The task of the
philosopher of art is not to heighten understanding and appreciation of works of
art but to provide conceptual foundations for the critic by (1) examining the
basic concepts underlying the critic's activities to enable him to speak and
write more intelligibly about the arts, and by (2) arriving at true conclusions
about art, aesthetic value, expression, and the other concepts that the critic
employs. |
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Upon what does the
philosopher of art direct his attention? "Art," is the ready answer;
but what is art and what distinguishes it from all other things? The theorists
who have attempted to answer this question are many, and their answers differ
greatly. But there is one feature that virtually all of them have in common: a
work of art is a man-made thing, an artifact, as distinguished from an object in
nature. A sunset may be beautiful, but it is not a work of art. A piece of
driftwood may have aesthetic qualities, but it is not a work of art since it was
not made by man. On the other hand, a piece of wood that has been carved to look
like driftwood is not an object of nature but of art, even though the appearance
of the two may be exactly the same. This distinction is being challenged in the
20th century by artists who declare that objets
trouv? ("found objects") are works of art, since
the artist's perception of them as such makes them so, even if the objects were
not man-made and were not modified in any way (except by exhibition) from their
natural state. |
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Nevertheless,
according to the simplest and widest definition, art is anything that is
man-made. Within the scope of this definition, not only paintings and sculptures
but also buildings, furniture, automobiles, cities, and garbage dumps are all
works of art: every change that human activity has wrought upon the face of
nature is art, be it good or bad, beautiful or ugly, beneficial or destructive. |
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The ordinary usage
of the term is clearly less wide. In daily life when works of art are spoken of,
the intention is to denote a much narrower range of objects, namely, those
responded to aesthetically. Among the things in this narrower range, a
distinction, although not a precise one, is made between fine and useful art.
Fine art consists of those works designed to produce an aesthetic response or
that (regardless of design) function as objects of aesthetic appreciation (such
as paintings, sculptures, poems, musical compositions)--those man-made things
that are enjoyed for their own sake rather than as means to something else.
Useful art has both an aesthetic and a utilitarian dimension: automobiles, glass
tumblers, woven baskets, desk lamps, and a host of other handmade or
manufactured objects have a primarily useful function and are made for that
purpose, but they also have an aesthetic dimension: they can be enjoyed as
objects of beauty, so much so that a person often buys one brand of car rather
than another for aesthetic reasons even more than for mechanical reasons (of
which he may know nothing). A borderline case is architecture: many buildings
are useful objects the aesthetic function of which is marginal, and other
buildings are primarily objects of beauty the utility of which is incidental or
no longer existent (Greek temples were once places of worship, but today their
value is entirely aesthetic). The test in practice is not how they were intended
by their creators, but how they function in present-day experience. Many great
works of painting and sculpture, for example, were created to glorify a deity
and not, insofar as can be ascertained, for an aesthetic purpose (to be enjoyed
simply in the contemplation of them for their own sake). It should be added,
however, that many artists were undoubtedly concerned to satisfy their aesthetic
capabilities in the creation of their work, since they were highly
perfectionistic as artists; but in their time there was no such discipline as
aesthetics in which they could articulate their goals; in any case, they chose
to create "for the greater glory of God" by producing works that were
also worthwhile to contemplate for their own sake. |
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This aesthetic
sense of the word "art," whether applied to fine art or useful art, is
the one most employed by the majority of critics and philosophers of art today.
There are two other senses of "art," however, that are still narrower,
and, to avoid confusion, their use should be noted: (1) Sometimes the term
"art" is restricted to the visual arts alone or to some of the visual
arts. Thus, the art department in 20th-century colleges and universities is
usually the department of painting and sculpture (and sometimes architecture).
But as philosophers of art use the term (and as it is used here), art is not
limited to visual art; music and drama and poetry are as much arts as painting,
sculpture, and architecture. (2) Sometimes the term "art" is used in a
persuasive sense, to include only those works considered good art. "That's
not art!" exclaims the viewer at an art gallery as he examines a painting
he dislikes. But if the term "art" is to be used without confusion, it
must be possible for there to be bad art as well as good art; the viewer, then,
is not really denying that the work in question is art (it is a man-made object
presented to be contemplated for its own sake) but only that it is worthwhile. |
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The word
"art" is also ambiguous in another way: it is sometimes used to
designate the activity of creating a work of art, as in the slogan "Art is
expression"; but it is more often used to designate the product of that
process, the completed artwork or artifact itself, as in the remark "Art is
a source of great enjoyment to me." There will be occasion later to remark
on this ambiguity. |
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Countless proffered
definitions of "art" are not definitions at all but theories about the
nature of art that presuppose that the ability to identify certain things in the
world as works of art already exists. Most of them are highly unsatisfactory
even as theories. "Art is an exploration of reality through a sensuous
presentation"--but in what way is it an exploration? Is it always concerned
with reality (how is music concerned with reality, for example)? "Art is a
re-creation of reality"--but is all art re-creation, even music? (It would
seem likely that music is the creation of something, namely, a new set of tonal
relationships, but not that it is the re-creation of anything at all.) "Art
is an expression of feeling through a medium"--but is it always an
expression (see below Art as
expression ) and is it always
feeling that is expressed? And so on. It appears more certain that Shakespeare's
King Lear is a work of art than that these theories are true. All that
seems to be required for identifying something as a work of art in the wide
sense is that it is not a natural object but something made or transformed by
man; and all that is required for identifying it as art (not as good art but as
art) in the narrower sense is that it functions aesthetically in man's
experience, either wholly (fine art) or in part (useful art); it is not even
necessary, as has been shown, that it be intended by its creator to function in
this way. |
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Works of art
present problems of both interpretation and evaluation. Evaluation is not the
concern of this article (see AESTHETICS
); but one problem about interpretation deserves to be mentioned.
Works of art are often difficult, and how to interpret them properly is far from
obvious. The question then arises as to what factors should guide efforts at
interpretation. |
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At one extreme lies
the view known as isolationism, according to which a knowledge of the artist's
biography, historical background, and other factors is irrelevant to an
appreciation of the work of art and usually is harmful in that it gets in the
way, tending to substitute a recital of these facts for the more difficult
attempt to come to grips with the work of art itself. If the work of art is not
understood on first acquaintance, it should be read (or heard, or viewed) again
and yet again. Constant re-exposure to it, so that the recipient is totally
absorbed in and permeated by it, is the way to maximum appreciation. |
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At the other
extreme, contextualism holds
that the work of art should always be apprehended in its context or setting and
that not merely knowledge about it but total appreciation of it is much richer
if it is approached with this knowledge. According to the contextualists, not
only literature (ordinarily appreciated contextually) but also the other arts,
even nonrepresentational painting and music, should be apprehended in this way. |
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No critic or art
lover need hold to either position in its undiluted form: a person could well be
an isolationist about some kinds of art, such as music, a contextualist about
others, such as historical dramas and religious paintings. It is essential to be
more specific, however, about the factors--other than careful and repeated
perusal of the work of art itself--that the contextualist holds are either
necessary or extremely helpful in the appreciation of works of art: |
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1. Other works of
art by the same artist. If the artist has created other works, particularly in
the same genre, acquaintance with them may enhance appreciation of the work at
hand. Quantity of works has no particular merit in itself; but, when, say one of
the piano concertos of the 18th-century Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart is heard, the auditor may (often largely unconsciously) compare its mode,
thematic material, and method of development and resolution with some of
Mozart's 25 other piano concertos. Knowledge of the entire corpus of his work in
a certain genre may heighten enjoyment of a particular work. |
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2. Other works of
art in the same genre by other artists, particularly in the same style or
tradition. Appreciation of the pastoral poem "Lycidas,"
by the English poet John Milton,
is doubtless enhanced by a study of the pastoral tradition in poetry, with which
Milton supposed his readers to be acquainted. To study "Lycidas" in
isolation would needlessly deprive the reader of much of the richness of texture
of the poem and would even make some of the references in it unintelligible. |
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3. A study of
relevant facts about the artistic medium, such as the instrumental limitations
or advantages of pipe organs in the time of the German composer Johann Sebastian
Bach (1685-1750) or the modes of presentation of ancient Greek tragedies in the
Athenian theatre. An acquaintance with the artistic conventions and idioms in
which the artist operated often leads to better understanding of certain aspects
of his work and helps to avert misunderstandings of it. |
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4. A study of the
age in which the artist lived--the spirit of the time and its current ideas, the
complex influences that molded the artist, even the social, economic, and
political conditions of the time and place in which he worked. Sometimes such
knowledge is of dubious relevance: it can be argued that no aid to the study of
the 82 string quartets and 104 symphonies of the 18th-century Austrian composer
Joseph Haydn is provided by reading about the political and economic conditions
of his day. It is interesting to study the evolution of the string quartet or
symphony from its origin through Haydn to the present; but this would appear to
be an evolution traceable entirely within the art form and not dependent on
factors outside it. This, however, is not always so: particularly in literature,
where a study of such exterior factors seems to be of much more relevance. It
would seem important to know, for example, that Milton was aware of the new
Copernican astronomy but deliberately chose in Paradise Lost to make his
cosmos Ptolemaic, the antiquated astronomical system that was already steeped in
literature, mythology, and tradition. |
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5. A study of the
artist's life. Anthologists of literature constantly assume that this is an
important consideration, since they supply detailed biographies prior to their
selections by each author. It is true, of course, that knowledge of the artist's
life can distract attention from his work, as with those who cannot hear
Beethoven's late quartets without constantly thinking, "What a pity it was
that he was deaf at the time!" Yet such knowledge may also heighten
experience of a work; some would say, at any rate, that it helps to know that
Milton was blind when he wrote the sonnet "On His Blindness." It is
the relevance of this kind of knowledge to an appreciation of the poem, as a
poem, that is in dispute. In every case, however, it should be kept in mind that
acquaintance with the artist's biography is a means toward an end, the enhanced
appreciation and understanding of the work of art, and that otherwise it is
aesthetically irrelevant. The facts about the artist's life are the means and
the enhanced appreciation the end, not the other way around, as is often found,
for example in psychoanalytic essays attempting to infer facts about the
artist's subconscious conflicts from his work; in these cases the work is being
taken as the means and the study of his life as the end. |
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6. A study of the
artist's intentions. It is this factor that has prompted the principal
controversy in the mid-20th century. When difficulties arise as to what to make
of a work of art or when several conflicting interpretations come to mind, how
is the difficulty to be resolved? One obvious suggestion is to consult the
artist or his records or memoirs or the testimony of people who knew him, to
discover what his intentions were with regard to the work or the passage. It is
tempting to believe that whichever way he intended it this is the way the work
should be interpreted; for in regard to his own work, surely the author's own
word should be law. |
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This temptation is
hotly decried by other critics as "the intentional
fallacy"--the fallacy (if it is a fallacy) of believing that
whichever way the artist intended it is by definition the way it really is. A
work of art should stand on its own, without help from the artist; if he has not
sufficiently realized his intentions within the work, forcing the recipient to
go outside for help, this is held to be an artistic defect. Once the artist has
completed his work, moreover, and presented it to the world, it belongs to the
world and no longer exclusively to him: in the interpretation of it he now
becomes just one critic among many, whose word should be respected but not taken
as the final authority. Perhaps other critics can think of better
interpretations than he did, which give a greater aesthetic reward in subsequent
encounters with the work; perhaps there are even acceptable interpretations
(such as the Freudian interpretations of Shakespeare's Hamlet) that he
could not possibly have thought of himself at the time. |
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In the late 18th
and early 19th centuries, Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe set forth three criteria for critics to consider
in interpreting and evaluating a work of art: (1) What was the artist trying to
do? (2) Did he do it? (3) Was it worth doing? The first of the three is
intentionalistic; and, says the intentionalist, surely this is plausible: an
artist can hardly be blamed for failing to do what he had no intention of doing.
It must first be known, then, what he was trying to do. |
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But the
anti-intentionalist points out that the intention makes no difference, only the
product does. If the ballerina excuses her fall in the middle of the dance by
saying that she intended it, the dance is just as marred aesthetically as if she
had fallen accidentally. And if a poet admits that he wrote rubbish and says
that this is just what he intended to write, one does not rate the poem any
higher because the poet's intention was fulfilled. |
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The persistent
questioner might ask, however, if there are not at least some works of art in
which the intentions of the artist have to be known? Suppose that a contemporary
critic reads a dull, stodgy, moralistic Victorian novel and says at the end,
"What an excellent parody of a Victorian novel!" But it was not a
parody; its intentions were deadly serious--and should not this be known in
order to interpret and evaluate it properly? Not at all, replies the
anti-intentionalist; all the critic has to say is, "As a Victorian novel,
this is deadly dull; as a parody of a Victorian novel, it is brilliant; if the
author intended it in the former way, so much the worse for him--his work can
still be praised for being brilliant parody, even if it wasn't intended as one.
He just achieved something better than he knew at the time." |
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Still, the
intentionalist has a point: sometimes the clue to unlock an otherwise
intransigent work may come from the author's statement of intention, and a
plausible interpretation might be unobtainable without it. Such a suggestion
might have come from a reader other than the author; but there is no point in
disdaining helpful hints, regardless of their source. If the suggestion does
come from the artist himself, that is nothing against it. Perhaps a work is less
aesthetically perfect because it requires outside clues to its interpretation,
but few works of art even approach perfection, and they may yet amply repay
attention, all the more if some plausible suggestion comes from the outside. The
20th-century Russian composer Sergey
Prokofiev intended his Classical Symphony to
be a parody of the classical symphonies of Mozart and Haydn--and regardless of
whether the suggestion that it be construed this way came from Prokofiev (as it
did) or from someone else, if it is rewarding to listen to it in this way, then
no one gains by refusing to accept the suggestion. A statement of intention is
not the only key to unlocking the secrets of works of art, but it is one key
among many, and there appears to be no good reason why it should not be used.
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In the context of
every work of art there are three items to consider: |
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1. The genesis of
the work of art. |
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2. The artifact, or
work of art, which is a publicly available object or thing made by the artist
and viewed by the audience. |
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3. The effects of
the work of art upon the audience. |
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The first item
comprises all the artist's mental states, both conscious and unconscious, in the
creation of the work, including his intention with regard to the work, as well
as all the factors that led to these states of mind: for example, the spirit of
the age, the socio-economic conditions of the times, his exchange of ideas with
other artists, and so forth. Whatever factors helped to form the work of art in
the artist's mind fall under this heading. The experiences undergone by the
artist in the creation of the work constitute the artistic experience. |
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The third item
includes all the effects of the work of art upon those who experience it,
including both aesthetic and nonaesthetic reactions, the influence of the work
of art upon the culture, on the state of knowledge, on current morality, and the
like. The experience that involves the observer's attention to the work of art
for its own sake and not for the sake of some ulterior end is called aesthetic,
but of course art has many effects that are not aesthetic. The aesthetic
experience belongs to the consumer of art, as opposed to the artistic
experience, which belongs to the creator of art. |
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The second item is
what is usually called the work of art itself. According to some writers, such
as the Italian philosopher Benedetto
Croce (1866-1952), the work of art exists only in the mind of the
artist, and the physical artifact then counts as an effect of the work of art.
But in ordinary usage, as well as the usage of most philosophers of art,the work
of art is identified with the physical artifact, as it exists in the physical
medium. What goes on in the creator's mind is already contained in the first
item. |
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Every work of art
occurs in a medium; that is, there is some physical object or series of events
by which the work is communicated to the recipient (listener, observer, reader)
by means of his senses. In painting, the medium is paint; in sculpture, such
materials as stone or wood or plastic. It might at first be thought that the
medium of music consists of the musical score on which the composer writes the
notes; but the written notes are not music, they are a set of visual cues for
the production of the tones to be emitted by the various instruments. If every
player had a perfect memory, he would have no need for the written score;
indeed, music existed long before there were any written scores and was played
or sung from memory from one year or generation to the next. It could be said
more plausibly that the medium of music consists of the physical sound waves by
means of which the sound sensations enter the consciousness of the listener. The
medium of literature can truly be said to be words, yet not words as abstract
entities conceived in the mind but words as spoken (in oral presentation) or
written. The physical medium of literature, then, is either auditory or visual,
although what is conveyed through the medium is not. |
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There are many ways
of classifying the arts--by
their purpose, by their intentions, by their effects. But the most usual and the
most fundamental method of classifying the arts is by their mediums: |
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6.1.3.1.1
Visual
art.
This includes
two-dimensional visual arts such as drawing and painting and also
three-dimensional visual arts such as sculpture and architecture. Some of these
should doubtless be called visuo-tactual art: buildings are ordinarily touched
as well as seen, sculptures could be more fully appreciated if touched as well
as seen, and even paintings may sometimes have enough three-dimensionality to
repay touch experience. At any rate, all these arts appeal first and foremost,
though not exclusively, to the sense of sight; and the artifact is an object in
the visual medium. |
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This includes music
in all its forms but not song, opera, and those arts that combine music with
literature (see below Mixed arts
). Just as the medium of visual art is sight, so the medium of
auditory art is sound. (see also music
theory) |
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In auditory art
there is--unlike visual art--no physical object (other than the score, which as
has been seen is not the music). There is only the temporally successive series
of sounds: sound waves emanating from the various instruments. While no such
tones are being emitted, no sounds exist; only the musical score exists (and the
memories of listeners, some of whom might enable the score to be reproduced if
it were lost), from which music can be reproduced. Unlike the existence of
paintings and sculptures, the existence of musical sounds is intermittent. In
what sense, then, does the music exist between performances? It exists only in
the sense that it is reproducible from the written score. |
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The art of literature
is clearly different from both visual and auditory art. There are sound values
in poetry, particularly when read aloud; but as sound alone, literature would be
the most poverty-stricken of arts: what makes the sounds of poetry effective is
(at least 99 percent) knowledge of the meanings of the words heard. Listening to
the sounds of a poem or play uttered in an unfamiliar language gives some idea
of the importance in literature of knowing the meanings of the words. Note that
"murmuring," one of the most pleasant sounding words in English, has
almost the same sounds as "murdering." It is almost exclusively a
knowledge of word meanings that makes it possible to appreciate the art of
literature. |
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Nor is literature a
visual art, although it is customary to read works of literature from a printed
page. A critic who said, "I think this poem is a bad one, because it is
written in unpleasant small type in double-column pages on yellowed paper,"
might be giving advice to typesetters and book designers (these two groups are
engaged in the practice of visual arts), but he would be saying nothing about
the merits of the poem. The printed or written word or for that matter the
spoken word is only a vehicle for the meanings. Literature, then, must be placed
in a separate class from either auditory or visual arts. |
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Other arts
variously combine the above three types of arts; this group includes all the
arts of performance. Drama combines the art of literature (verbal art) with the
visual arts of costuming, stage designing, and so on. Opera combines the art of
music (its predominant component) with the art of literature (the libretto) and
the visual arts of stage design. Dance combines the visual spectacle of moving
bodies (the principal component) with musical accompaniment, sometimes with
accompanying words and often with stage design. Song combines words with music.
The motion picture combines the visual component (a series of pictures presented
in such rapid succession that they appear to be moving) with the verbal
component (the script) and usually an intermittent musical background as well. |
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All the visual arts
are also spatial arts, or arts of space; music and literature are both temporal
arts, or arts of time. This leads to very great differences in the things each
can do. In temporal arts, the parts do not appear together before the audience
but appear successively in time, the second moment not beginning until the first
one has finished. In spatial arts, the entire work of art is present
simultaneously; attention to the parts of it is successive--it is impossible to
concentrate on the whole at once, at least on first viewing--but the entire
object is nevertheless there, and it is up to the viewer which part he shall
examine first. In three-dimensional art, such as sculpture and architecture, the
entire object is present, but it is impossible even to see (much less to look
at) all of it at once: the back of a statue cannot be seen at the same moment as
the front and the exterior of a cathedral cannot be viewed by someone inside it.
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Temporal arts must
be attended to in a certain order: it is impossible to hear the symphony played
backward, or the drama, or the movie; even when technically it can be done (as
in running a motion picture in reverse), the results usually are an aesthetic
catastrophe. The recipient is supposed to attend to the temporal work's various
parts in an order predetermined by the artist. For this reason, painting is not
capable of telling a story in the way that a novel is; for a story is a series
of temporally successive happenings, and a painting can at best take a series of
represented persons and objects and show them as they exist at one moment only,
one knife-edge of time; whereas a novel can depict the temporally successive
happenings in the order of their occurrence (or in a different order, such as
flashback). |
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The German
aesthetician and dramatist Gotthold
Lessing made this distinction the basis of his study Laokoon, contending
that the function of visual art is to create beautiful objects and that the
artist should select that stance or moment at which the person or object appears
most beautiful, to enable the viewer to continue looking at it with pleasure;
whereas literature, being temporal, is equipped to tell a story that includes
many moments other than pleasing ones (moreover, the scenes in literature are
not seen with the eyes but only imagined). Lessing's thesis that each art should
restrict itself to what it can do best or is peculiarly equipped by its medium
to do is a highly controversial one: it would virtually eliminate program music,
for example, and descriptions of nature in novels. The tendency of art today is
to attempt to curtail distinctions between time and space rather than to
preserve them. (see also "Laocoon,"
) |
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Very significant
differences among the arts occur because of the differences in their mediums: |
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6.1.3.2.1
Literary
and nonliterary.
The greatest
difference among the arts is between the literary and the nonliterary.
Literature consists of a system of symbols with assigned meanings. A word is not
simply a noise (or a mark on a printed page); a word is a noise or a printed
mark with an assigned meaning.In different languages, different noises have been
assigned meanings, and the language must be learned in order to understand what
is being said. To appreciate the work of the 11th-century novelist Lady Murasaki
Shikibu, one must learn Japanese; to fully appreciate Moli?e, the 17th-century
playwright, one must learn French. No other art has this problem: the Englishman
can appreciate German music as well as a German--or if he does not, it is not
for lack of learning a language. (see also symbolism)
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Shapes, colours,
and tones do not have
assigned meanings. That is not to say that these elements when present in art
cannot be said to have some sense of the term "meaning." There are
many meanings of the word "meaning," and a colour, for example, can
have meaning in that it may symbolize something, as red symbolizes courage; or
it may have strong emotional or other effects upon the viewer, evoking all
manner of strong associations. But a colour or a tone has no assigned meaning:
if the question were asked, "What does middle C mean?", the answer
would be, "It has no assigned meaning at all; in that sense, it means
nothing--it just has certain effects." But if the meaning of a certain word
in a poem is not known, the reader is to that extent prevented from appreciating
the poem; for the medium of poetry is not noises, not printed marks, but words,
and the difference between a noise and a word lies in the fact that a word is a
noise with a meaning. |
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This fact makes for
an enormous difference between literature and the other arts. A colour in a painting
may be the colour of an object represented; a colour may even "mean"
something; for example, the white of a white flag that a person depicted in a
battle painting is holding up as a sign of surrender. But a colour, as a colour,
has no meaning at all; and the same is true of musical tones. A pattern of
musical tones may occasionally acquire a meaning (the first four tones of
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony were used to symbolize victory in World War
II), but when this happens it really has very little to do with the music, and
in any case most music is appreciated without any such symbolism being present.
But a noise, however pleasing to the ear, is only a noise and not a word unless
it has an assigned meaning; and one must know what that meaning is in order to
appreciate a poem or any other work of literature. |
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Because literature
consists of conventional symbols, there exists in literature the problem of
translation, which does not exist in the other arts. When one seeks to make a
work of literature available to a wider audience than that composed of only the
native speakers of the language in which the work was written, the process of
translation must be resorted to, and, in this process, a great deal of the
work's original character is lost. |
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In a poem there are
(1) the sounds, (2) the dictionary meanings of the words, and (3) the
connotations of the words--the manifold associations that they evoke (sensory,
intellectual, and emotional) in the minds of readers. The sounds are the least
important of the three, and many a great poem as sheer sound is hardly even
pleasing. The finding of like dictionary meanings is usually a simple matter,
and when there is a word that has no rough equivalent in the other language, it
may be simply retained in the original language (for example, the German word Weltanschauung,
meaning something like "world outlook," is often retained in
English translations of German works). As for the associations that hover about
a word, they may vary from language to language, so that if a work is translated
rather literally, the associative values of the words are lost. Thus, "My
God!" is a much stronger expletive in English than "mon dieu" is
in French, so that if the French expression is translated into the English one,
it is, though literally correct, quite unfaithful to the weaker emotive force of
the French expression. Words can often be found in the second language that have
a roughly equivalent associative value to the original one, but these will
usually not provide a literal translation; thus, the translator is faced with
the dilemma of being able to provide a literal-meaning translation or a
translation that renders the spirit or "feel" of the original but not
both. (see also poetry) |
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The arts also
differ from one another, according to their mediums, in whether the items in the
medium correspond to items in the world. Objects with colours and shapes are
represented on canvas, and objects with colours and shapes also exist in the
outside world. Even when a painting is nonrepresentational, it consists of
colours and shapes, which are items in the outside world (even though certain
individual colours and shapes in the painting may not exist in the outside
world). But the case with music is different: though the visual arts may (to
varying degrees) convey the sights of nature, music does not convey the sounds
of nature. Even when a work of music attempts to represent the sound of an iron
foundry or the clattering of horses' hooves, it really does not sound like these
things: musical instruments emit tones, and in nature are found largely noises,
and between the two there is an enormous auditory difference. Some rhythms of
nature can be duplicated by musical instruments but hardly the sounds
themselves. |
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The medium of
literature, words, is indeed man created; but of course this feature is far from
unique to literature. Words were devised and employed in countless situations of
daily life before they were ever embodied in literature; so in literature, as in
visual art, a medium is being employed that existed before the art itself. |
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The view that
"art is imitation"
is at least as old as the Greek philosopher Plato (428-347 BC), and, although
not widely held today, its long and distinguished history is evidence of its
continuing hold on human beings as an account of the distinctive function of
art. A terminological point, however, is in order here: in the interests of
clarity, an artist should be spoken of as representing in his work the persons and things and scenes of
the world but as imitating the work of other artists. Thus, "In this
painting he represents a barn and some wheat fields, and in his style he is
imitative of Vincent van Gogh." This distinction will be employed here,
with the result that these traditional theories of art will be spoken of as
theories of representation rather than of imitation. |
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At some period in
the history of art, aestheticians and critics wrote as if nature should be
recorded by the artist with photographic fidelity. The invention of photography
(which can do this better than any painter) could plausibly be said to have
relieved the artist of any such responsibility. Still, art can represent
reality: the representation of a house in a painting may not look exactly like a
house--it cannot, since the real house is three-dimensional and the painting is
two-dimensional--but it looks enough like one to enable everyone unhesitatingly
to identify it as a house. |
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A distinction
should be made between depiction and portrayal. A painting may be said to depict
a house if it looks more like a house than like anything else. Thus, most
persons unhesitatingly classify this as a man, that as a tree, and so on; only
when the painter has distorted or abstracted so much that a thing looks somewhat
like a wolf and also somewhat like a bobcat, do they hesitate in saying what the
object represented is. A picture may depict a rather short man in a French
general's uniform of the early 19th century; but it may, in addition, portray
Napoleon. It portrays Napoleon if (1) the artist intended it to represent
Napoleon (for example, if the title of the painting is "Napoleon") and
(2) the painting does look like Napoleon to some degree at least--at any rate it
contains no important characteristics known to be incompatible with those of
Napoleon. Clearly, if it is a painting that depicts a tree in someone's yard, it
cannot be considered a portrait of Napoleon, no matter how much the artist said
he intended it to be one. Depiction subjects can ordinarily be recognized at
once with a little knowledge of the world and the names of the things in it.
Portrayal subjects require knowledge of whomever the artist intended to portray;
even when that seems obvious, as in the case of Napoleon (who would be instantly
recognized, unlike the portrait of a private in his army), the viewer would have
to be told, by the title or otherwise, that not only does the painting depict a
man in a French general's uniform but that it was intended by the artist to be a
portrait of this particular man. Otherwise, how would the viewer know that it
did not actually portray his double, or his stand-in? The word represent, as
used in connection with art, can mean either "depict" or
"portray." |
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Representation
always involves a certain degree of abstraction; that is, the taking away of one
characteristic or more of the original. Even a fairly realistic painting of a
person, for example, lacks some features that characterize actual persons: the
painting is two-dimensional, whereas every actual person is three-dimensional;
the surface of a painting is paint, but not so the person; the actual person has
very numerous pores and other marks on his face that are lacking (in whole or in
part) in the painting, and so on. The depiction of a person in a painting is
usually sufficient to enable human viewers to recognize the figure as a
person--though it is apparently not sufficient for an animal, who sees only a
coloured canvas where people see on the coloured canvas a representation. When
the degree of abstraction is so great that it is no longer possible to recognize
this shape as a human shape or as the shape of any identifiable object, the
painting is then spoken of as non-representational. (In popular parlance such
paintings are called abstract;
but this is misleading, for abstraction is a matter of degree, and, as has just
been shown, all depictions are necessarily abstract--that is, abstracted from
reality to some degree.) The actual object with all its millions of qualities is
at one end of the spectrum, and the painting so abstracted that a depiction
subject is unrecognizable is at the other end; between the two extremes lie all
the possible degrees of abstraction. |
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Literature can be
representational but not in the same way as visual art. It is quite natural to
say that in a novel or drama a number of characters and actions are represented.
The representation is, of course, not a visual one; it is representation through
language. The painter portrays Napoleon by making a portrait of him; the writer
does so by describing him in words. The writer, unlike the painter, can also
depict action. Not all literature, of course, is representational in this way: a
sonnet may contain no characters at all and no action, consisting solely of an
expression of feeling by some unspecified speaker. |
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Any of the mixed
arts that include words as part of their medium, such as drama or film, can be,
like literature, representational. Indeed, they have a further advantage: they
can depict action not only through words but also by showing the characters and
exhibiting the action before the spectator. These arts are visual as well as
verbal, and since they are not limited to one moment in time, as painting and
sculpture are, they are temporal arts as well as spatial. These mixed arts,
then, can be doubly representational. |
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Is it possible for
music, too, to be representational? Music cannot visually show characters or
objects, nor can it describe them in words; can it "depict them in
tones"? Program notes at concerts usually assume without question that it
can. The audience is told about the tone
poem Don Quixote, by the Austrian composer Richard Strauss, "The composer has given us a
musical representation of the Don's adventures. The 17th-century Spanish writer
Miguel de Cervantes has described them in words, and Strauss has done so in
tones." But the claim to representation in music is, to say the least,
quite dubious. Without the title, with the music alone, would there be any clue
that the music was supposed to be "about" the adventures of Don
Quixote? True, there is a passage that resembles the bleating of sheep
sufficiently for that much to be guessed; but even to conjecture that this
passage is a representation of sheep bleating is a far cry from being able to
reconstruct the entire story. Suppose that Strauss had left every note in the
score just as it was but changed the title; would the piece then have been a
representation of something else? The very fact that this question can be asked
shows how different music is from visual art: if a painter has drawn a house but
indicated in the title that it was supposed to be a tree, the viewer could still
say, on the basis of what he saw in the picture, that it was not a tree but a
house. But in music the listener is never in this situation: if he says that
this series of tones represents the adventures of Don Quixote, he says this
because of the title Strauss used. If the composer had given it no programmatic
title, one listener might think of one represented subject, another a different
one, and a third none at all, and there would be no way of showing who was right
or even whose opinion was to be preferred. The conclusion seems to be that music
by itself--without title, without words, without depicted action (as in a
combination of music and drama such as opera)--is incapable of representing
anything. There is simply a series of musical tones that may suggest differing
associations, programmatic or otherwise; but the musical tones by themselves
cannot be said to represent anything at all. |
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This might be
objected to as an overstatement. If a picture can represent a house by looking
more like a house than anything else, cannot a work of music represent the sea
by sounding more like the sea than any alternative? And is this not the case in,
for example, the French composer Claude Debussy's tone poem La Mer?
Even this, however, is highly questionable; almost no one guesses the title
to Debussy's tone poem without first knowing what it is; it may seem obvious
enough after the composer has channelled the listener's response by means of his
title but not beforehand. And surely this is because the sounds in the tone poem
do not sound more like the sea than like anything else: the tone poem consists,
after all, of a series of complex musical tones, emitted by violins, cellos,
clarinets, flutes, trumpets, and so on; and it would be difficult indeed for
these sounds, which are musical tones, to sound very much like the sea, whose
sounds consist after all of a series of complex noises. There is no great
similarity between any one series of musical tones and any one series of
nature's noises. Hence, the first cannot be said to constitute a representation
of the second.
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The matter is even
more obvious in the case of those numerous programmatic titles in which the
supposedly represented subject contains no sounds at all. Debussy's Reflets
dans l'eau (Reflections in the Water) is taken by some as a
musical representation of reflections in the water. But reflections in the water
emit no sounds at all, not even noises. No one, then, could say that the sounds
in Debussy's piano composition resemble the sounds of reflections in water. The
resemblance, if there is any, is much more remote: it may be that the feeling
obtained when Debussy's composition is heard is somewhat like the feeling that
arises when reflections in water are seen. This is highly improbable without
knowledge of the title, but at most it would provide a mood resemblance, which
is far removed from a representation by music of things in the world. The
conclusion seems inescapable that music is not to be classified as a
representational art, at least not in the same straightforward meaning of
"representation" that applies to the other arts.
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So much, then, for
the capacities of the various arts as far as representation is concerned. But
the question remains: in those arts that are properly called representational,
what should be the nature of the representation? |
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That art should be
an outright duplication (incorrectly called "imitation") of reality
is a view that was put forward by the French novelist ?ile
Zola in his book Le Roman exp?imental (The Experimental
Novel) and has been occasionally held (though not practiced) by
painters reacting against Romanticism, such as the 19th-century French artist
Gustave Courbet. Zola advocated a novel
that resembled a scientific investigation into reality. Plot
was to be of no importance, rather an aspect of reality was to be examined
searchingly, and from this the story would unfold without imaginative effort.
Persons or groups of persons would be depicted, and from them the action would
evolve. (see also "Experimental
Novel, The," ) |
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It would be
impossible, of course, to carry out such an ideal of art as "report"
and undesirable even if it were possible. First, the author or painter must
select a subject; and, within the subject, he must select which details to
treat, for he cannot in a hundred lifetimes describe them all: since every
object and event has an indefinitely large array of qualities, there is no point
at which a description of it would be completed. Besides, the very language used
(no matter how neutral a description is attempted) will colour the account. Even
if the words were colourless, the mode of putting them together would yield a
style, which would colour the account once again. Indeed, should such an ideal
be achieved (as in the verbatim transcription of an actual trial) it would be
the deadliest possible bore. |
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Art, even
representational art, is not a reproduction of reality; it is a transformation
of reality. How, specifically, is reality transformed in being represented in
art? There is probably no general satisfactory answer to this question. Each
art, each style of art, and each work of art transforms reality in its own
way--the 19th-century French painters Paul C?anne in one way, Pierre-Auguste
Renoir in another; the 19th-century Russian writers Fyodor Dostoyevsky in one
way, Leo Tolstoy in another. No set of rules can lead to predictions as to what
transformation of reality will be conceived in the mind of the next creative
artist. Reality is the common base, but each artist deals with it in his own
unique way. |
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Do all works of art
have a subject matter? The answer to this depends on what is meant by the term
subject matter, which signifies basically what the work is about. There are
several senses of being "about" that may be referred to: |
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1. "What is
the subject matter of the Odyssey by the ancient Greek poet Homer?"
The most natural answer would be: "The wanderings of Odysseus." This
is the "representational content" of the work. A person who read it
simply for the story could easily give this answer. There is contained in the
work itself an account of the wanderings of a character named Odysseus, who has
no counterpart in the outside world (that is, he is a fictional character) but
who does resemble people in the outside world in that he is a man, he is away
from home, he is beset by many vicissitudes, and so on. If the subject matter
were stated in greater detail, the result would be an account of the plot. |
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Does painting have
subject matter in this sense? If "subject matter" is taken to mean
representational content, the answer is often yes; representations of people and
trees and the like are easily identifiable in the painting. Sometimes the
subject could not be ascertained except for the title, which is not strictly a
part of the painting (the title is not a piece of visual art, consisting as it
does of words). But quite clearly it cannot be said that the subject matter of
the painting is whatever the title says it is: if the title says
"Clouds" and the painting is obviously a still life with pears and
grapes, it can hardly be said that the painting has clouds as its subject matter
simply because the title says so. It was long said that the painting called "Sacred
and Profane Love" by the 16th-century Italian artist Titian had
sacred and profane love as its subject matter; but Titian himself gave it no
such title--the title was added more than a century later by someone else. It
cannot be said that the subject matter is what whatever title it came to be
given says it is (it could be given numerous incompatible titles); the subject
matter, in this sense, must be evident from--or at least not incompatible
with--what is seen in the painting itself. The same remarks apply to music:
music cannot be "about" anything that the composer happens to seize on
as a title; if it were, and he changed the title without changing a note of the
music, would the subject matter of the music have changed? Strong reasons
already have been given to doubt that music can have a subject matter at all. |
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2. In addition to a
subject matter in the sense of representational content, a work of art may have
subject matter in the sense of theme,
or underlying idea. The subject matter in the sense of representational content
of Jude the Obscure, by English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, is the intellectual ambitions of
the main character, Jude, and the vicissitudes befalling him along the way; but
the subject matter in the sense of theme or underlying idea is man's struggle to
realize his ambitions; and the thesis (implicit message) of the novel is (or may
be) that man's highest ambitions are doomed to frustration. Not all novels and
dramas and poems have a theme or thesis; they may simply tell a story and
nothing more. Works of literature do sometimes operate in both dimensions: a
story and a theme or thesis underlying the story. Works of representational
visual art may also do so: one might allege that the theme of
"Guernica," by the 20th-century Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, is the
horror of war. Again, it is doubtful whether works of music can be said to have
a theme at all (indeed, the term theme applied to music has a very different
meaning: it refers to a set of tones around which variations or developments are
composed). If someone were to say that the theme of a work of music was the
human condition or man's fear of death, how would such a view be supported?
Since music is not representational, what musical passages would he take as
evidence for his theory, and why? A composer might indeed title his work
"The Human Condition," but this would no more show that the music was
about the human condition (had the human condition as its subject matter) than
giving the programmatic title "Clouds" to a musical composition shows
that the composition actually is about clouds. |
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Works of art may
not only have subject matter, they may also contain symbols. Certain elements in
a work of art may represent, say, a whale; but the whale thus represented may be
(as it is in Moby Dick by the 19th-century U.S. writer Herman Melville) a
symbol of evil. In Tolstoy's Anna
Karenina is represented a gallery of characters dominated
by Anna herself, and a tremendous number of actions in which these characters
engage; but there is a constantly recurring item in the representational
content, namely, the train. Time and again the train causes or accompanies
frustration, disaster, betrayal, and other evils--so much so that before the
novel is ended it becomes apparent that the train here is a symbol of the iron
forces of material progress toward which Tolstoy had such great antipathy. (see
also symbolism) |
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What is it that
makes an item in a work of art a symbol? It is something represented in the work
of art--an object, an action, or a pattern of objects and actions, or even (less
frequently) simply a nonrepresentational item such as a colour or a line--that
does the symbolizing; what is symbolized is a characteristic, such as evil or
progress or courage. But by virtue of what does the first (A) become a symbol of
the second (B)? |
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The answer is not
the same for all symbols, since some are conventional and some are natural. The cross
is a symbol of Christianity, and it is a conventional symbol of suffering; in
order for it to become a symbol, people had to adopt or accept the cross as
standing for suffering. Other symbols are natural--the sun as the symbol of life
and strength, a river as the symbol of eternal change and flowing, and so forth;
in these cases there was no agreement (convention) as to what would stand for
what, for the relation is too obvious--the symbolism is much the same in the
tradition of all nations and civilizations. |
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Various symbols
have, to varying degrees, elements of both the conventional and the natural: the
eagle on the standard of the United
States of America symbolizes strength--this is natural, because the
eagle is strong, and conventional, because the eagle was officially adopted as
the symbol of the United States. In the case of many symbols, the natural
relation between symbol and thing symbolized is not strong enough by itself to
achieve the symbolism, and the conventional relation was entered into in order
to effect a symbolism that already had a certain natural basis. When A is a
symbol of B, there must be some relation, either natural or conventional,
between the symbol and what is symbolized. When the natural relation is strong,
the conventional is minimal or nonexistent, and vice versa. |
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But there is
another element to symbolism if it is to function with full-bodied effectiveness
in a work of art, and that is what has been called a "vital basis"
provided by history and tradition. In the U.S. flag there is very little natural
basis for symbolism; it is almost wholly conventional. But the fact that it has
been saluted for so long, that it has been present on battlefields, that the
bodies of military dead have been wrapped in it, and so on--that is, the fact
that it has acquired a life, a history--have given it an "affect"
(human emotion or mood) it did not have before. Melville and Tolstoy not only
represented the whale and the train: they invested these representations with
such strong emotional affect that the reader is much more inclined than he would
be otherwise to say that these objects are the symbols of the qualities he
ascribes to them. |
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When some item in a
work of art is construed as a symbol, it is always infused with these vital
qualities. Clearly, not every case of one thing standing for something else is a
symbol in this sense: a carrot in a painting does not, just by itself, symbolize
growth. But barbed-wire fences do symbolize tyranny, not only because many
prisoners have been enclosed in barbed-wire fences (this is the natural basis
for the symbolism) but also because of concentration camps and the countless
tragic events of recent history that have provided the "vital basis"
for the symbolism. |
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Do works of art
have meaning? The answer depends once again on how the question is construed:
the word "meaning" is an equivocal term that can itself mean many
different things. |
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Clouds mean rain, a
falling barometer means that a storm is coming, a twister in the sky means an
approaching tornado--that is, the one is a sign
of the other; these relations exist in nature and were discovered, not invented,
by man. On the other hand, a bell ringing means the end of class, this note on
the score means that D sharp is to be played on a certain instrument, and the
word cat to someone who knows English means a certain species of domesticated
quadruped; these relations are conventional, established by man. But both the
natural and the conventional items are examples of meaning in its most general
sense--one thing (A) standing for another (B). |
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Since the medium of
literature is words, and words are conventional vehicles of meaning, literature
has meaning in a way that the other arts do not, since every word, to be a word
at all, must have a meaning. In the sense in which the word cat means something,
middle C and an ellipse do not have meanings at all. |
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When the question
is asked about meaning in art, however, it is not usually the individual
ingredients in it that are being referred to: if it were, the answer could
simply be, "Yes, this word has a meaning and that word has; so does the
sentence as a whole; and items in paintings sometimes have meaning; for example,
the halo over the Madonna's head symbolizes holiness." What is being asked
is whether the work of art as a whole has a meaning. But what does the question
itself mean? Several different things can be meant: (1) The inquirer may be
asking, "What is it about?" in which case the question is about
subject matter, already discussed. (2) He may be asking, "What is its
theme?"--for example, is the motion picture He Who Must Die really a
parable about the life of Christ? (3) He may be asking, "What is its
thesis?" For example, what is the message of the Anglo-Irish author
Jonathan Swift to the reader in "A Modest Proposal"? (4) The inquiry
may be about the effects of a work of art on the recipient--either what these
effects are or what they could or should be. In this sense, all works of art
have meaning, since they all have effects (whether there is one type of effect
that a given work of art should have is another question). This is, however, an
extremely misleading use of the word "meaning." Indeed, the entire
discussion of "meaning in art" is a most confusing one--and the fault
does not lie in art, but in the human users of words. Endless unnecessary
mysteries can be created by using such nebulous words as "meaning" as
if they were simple, straightforward, and susceptible to one interpretation. It
would contribute greatly to the clarification of discussions of philosophy of
art if the word meaning were not used in them at all but some conception clearer
and more specific. |
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The view that
"art is imitation (representation)" has not only been challenged, it
has been moribund in at least some of the arts for more than a century. It has
largely been replaced by thetheory that art is expression.
Instead of reflecting states of the external world, art is held to reflect the
inner state of the artist. This, at least, seems to be implicit in the core
meaning of "expression": the outer manifestation of an inner state.
Art as a representation of outer existence (admittedly "seen through a
temperament") has been replaced by art as an expression of man's inner
life. |
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But the terms
"express" and "expression" are ambiguous and do not always
denote the same thing. Like so many other terms, "express" is subject
to the process-product ambiguity: the same word is used for a process and for
the product that results from that process. "The music expresses
feeling" may mean that the composer expressed his feeling in writing the
music or that the music when heard is expressive (in some way yet to be defined)
of human feeling. Based on the first sense are theories about the creation of
art; founded on the second are theories about the content of art and the
completion of its creation. |
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The creation of a
work of art is the bringing about of a new combination of elements in the medium
(tones in music, words in literature, paints on canvas, and so on). The elements
existed beforehand but not in the same combination; creation is the re-formation
of these pre-existing materials. Pre-existence of materials holds true of
creation quite apart from art: in the creation of a scientific theory or the
creation of a disturbance. It applies even to creation in most theologies,
except some versions of Christian theology, in which creation is ex nihilo; that
is, without pre-existing matter. (see also creativity)
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That creation
occurs in various art mediums is an obvious truth. But once this is granted,
nothing has yet been said about expression; and the expressionist would say that
the foregoing statement about creation is too mild to cover what he wants to say
about the process of artistic creation. The creative process, he wants to say,
is (or is also) an expressive process; and for expression something more is
necessary than that the artist be creating something. Great care must be taken
at this stage: some say that the creation of art is (or involves)
self-expression; others say that it is the expression of feeling, though not
necessarily of one's own feeling (or perhaps that and something more, such as
the feeling of one's race, or of one's nation, or of all men); others say that
it is not necessarily limited to feelings, but that ideas or thoughts can be
expressed, as they clearly are in essays. But the distinctively expressionist
view of artistic creation is the product of the Romantic
movement, according to which the expression of feelings constitutes
the creation of art, just as philosophy and other disciplines are the expression
of ideas. It is, at any rate, the theory of art as the expression of feelings
(which here shall be taken to include emotions
and attitudes) that has been historically significant and developed: art as
specially connected with the life of feeling. |
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When a person is
said to be expressing a feeling, what specifically is he doing? In a perfectly
ordinary sense, expressing is "letting go" or "letting off
steam": man expresses his anger by throwing things or by cursing or by
striking the person who has angered him. But, as many writers have pointed out,
this kind of "expressing" has little to do with art; as the U.S.
philosopher John Dewey said, it is more of a "spilling over" or a
"spewing forth" than expression. In art at least, expression requires
a medium, a medium that is recalcitrant and that the artist must bend to his
will. In throwing things to express anger, there is no medium--or, if the man's
body is called the medium, then it is something he does not have to study to use
for that purpose. It is still necessary to distinguish a "natural
release" from an expression. If poetry were literally "the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings," as William
Wordsworth said, it would consist largely of things like tears and
incoherent babblings. If artistic creation can plausibly be said to be a process
of expression, something different from and more specific than natural release
or discharge must be meant. |
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One view of
emotional expression in art is that it is preceded by a perturbation or
excitement from a vague cause about which the artist is uncertain and therefore
anxious. He then proceeds to express his feelings and ideas in words or paint or
stone or the like, clarifying them and achieving a release of tension. The point
of this theory seems to be that the artist, having been perturbed at the
inarticulateness of his "ideas," now feels relieved because he has
"expressed what he wanted to express." This phenomenon, indeed a
familiar one (for everyone has felt relieved when a job is done), must still be
examined for its relevance. Is it the emotion being expressed that counts or the
relief at having expressed it? If the concern here is with art as therapy or
doing art to provide revelations for a psychiatrist, then the latter is what
counts; but the critic or consumer of the art is surely not concerned with such
details of the artist's biography. This is an objection to all accounts of
expression as process: how is any light at all cast upon the work of art by
saying that the artist went through any expressive process or through any
process whatever in the genesis of it? If the artist was relieved at the end of
it, so much the better for him; but this fact is as aesthetically irrelevant as
it would be if he had committed suicide at the end of it or taken to drink or
composed another work immediately thereafter. |
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Another problem
should be noted: assuming that the artist does relieve his oppressed state of
mind through creating, what connection has this with the exact words or score or
brushstrokes that he puts on paper or canvas? Feelings are one thing, words and
visual shapes and tones are quite another; it is these latter that constitute
the art medium, and in it that works of art are created. There is doubtless a
causal connection between the feelings of the artist and the words he writes in
his poem; but the expression theory of creation talks only about the artist's
feelings, while creation occurs within the art mediums themselves; and to speak
only of the former is not to tell anything about the work of art--anything, that
is, that would be of interest other than to the artist's psychiatrist or
biographer. Through what paroxysms of emotion the artist passed does not matter
anymore, insofar as one's insight into his work is concerned, than knowing that
a given engineer had had a quarrel with his wife the night before he began
building his bridge. To speak of anything revelatory of works of art, it is
necessary to stop talking about the artist's emotions and talk about the genesis
of words, tones, and so on--items in the specific art mediums. |
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The expressionists
have indeed brought out and emphasized one important distinction: between the
processes involved in art and in craft.
The activity of building a bridge from the architect's blueprint or constructing
a brick wall or putting together a table just like a thousand others the artisan
has already made is a craft and not an art. The craftsman knows at the beginning
of the processes exactly what sort of end product is wanted: for example, a
chair of specific dimensions made of particular materials. He knows at the
beginning how much material it will take to do the job, which tools, and so
forth, and, if he does not know these things, he is not a good (efficient)
craftsman. But the creative artist cannot work in this manner: "The artist
doesn't know what he is going to express until he has expressed it" is a
watchword of the expressionist. He cannot state in advance what the completed
work of art will be like: the poet cannot say what words will constitute the
completed poem or how many times the word "the" will occur in it or
what the order of the words will be--when he knows that, he has completed the
creation of the poem, and until then he cannot say. Nor could he set about
working with such a plan: "I shall compose a poem that contains the word
'the' 563 times, the word 'rose' 47 times," and so on. What distinguishes
art from craft is that the artist, unlike the craftsman, "does not know the
end in the beginning"; he cannot state until his work is finished what the
completed product will be like--if he could, he would not have to undergo the
"divine agonies" of creation in order to produce it. |
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The distinction
seems valid enough, but whether it supports the expressionist's view is more
dubious; for it can be held regardless of the attitude assumed toward the theory
of expression. The open-ended process described as art rather than craft
characterizes all kinds of creation: of mathematical hypotheses and of
scientific theory, as well as art. What distinguishes creation from all other
things is that it results in a new combination of elements, and it is not known
in advance what this combination will be. Thus, one may speak of creating a work
of sculpture or creating a new theory, but rarely of creating a bridge (unless
the builder was also the architect who designed it, and then it is to the
genesis of the idea for the bridge, not to its execution, that the word creation
applies). This, then, is a feature of creation; it is not clear that it is a
feature of expression (whatever is being done in expressing that is not already
being done in creating). Is it necessary to talk about expression, as opposed to
creation, to bring out the distinction between art and craft? |
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There does not seem
to be any true generalization about the creative processes of all artists nor
even of great artists. Some follow their "intuitions," letting their
artistic work grow "as the spirit moves" and being comparatively
passive in the process (that is, the conscious mind is passive, and the
unconscious takes over). Others are consciously active, knowing very much what
they want in advance and figuring out exactly how to do it (for example, the
19th-century U.S. writer Edgar Allan Poe in his essay "The Philosophy of
Composition"). Some artists go through extended agonies of creation (the
19th-century German composer Johannes Brahms, weeping and groaning to give birth
to one of his symphonies), whereas for others it seems to be comparatively easy
(Mozart, who could write an entire overture in one evening for the next day's
performance). Some artists create only while having physical contact with the
medium (for example, composers who must compose at the piano, painters who must
"play about" in the medium in order to get painterly ideas), and
others prefer to create in their minds only (Mozart, it is said, visualized
every note in his mind before he wrote the score). There appears to be no true
generalization that can be made about the process of artistic
creation--certainly not that it is always a process of expression. For the
appreciation of the work of art, no such uniformity, of course, is necessary,
greatly though it may be desired by theorists of artistic creation. |
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The main
difficulties in the way of accepting conclusions about the creative process in
art are (1) that artists differ so much from one another in their creative
processes that no generalizations can be arrived at that are both true and
interesting or of any significance; and (2) that in the present stage of
psychology and neurology very little is known about the creative process--it is
surely the most staggeringly complex of all the mental processes in man, and
even his simpler mental processes are shrouded in mystery. In every arena
hypotheses are rife, none of them substantiated sufficiently to compel assent
over other and conflicting hypotheses. Some say--for example, Graham Wallas in
his book The Art of Thought--that in the creation of
every work of art there are four successive stages: preparation, incubation,
inspiration, and elaboration; others say that these stages are not successive at
all but are going on throughout the entire creative process, while still others
would produce a different list of stages. Some say that the artist begins with a
state of mental confusion, with a few fragments of words or melody gradually
becoming clear in his mind and the rest starting from there, working gradually
toward clarity and articulation; whereas others hold that the artist sets
himself a problem, which he gradually works out during the process of creation,
but his vision of the whole guides his creative process from its inception. The
first view would be a surprise to the dramatist who sets himself from the
beginning to write a drama in five acts about the life and assassination of
Julius Caesar; and the second would be a surprise to artists like the
20th-century English artist Henry Moore,
who has said he sometimes begins a drawing with no conscious aim but only the
wish to use pencil on paper and make tones, lines, and shapes. Again, as to
psychological theories about the unconscious motivations of artists during
creation, an early Freudian view is that the artist is working out in his
creation his unconscious wish fulfillments; a later Freudian
view is that he is engaged in working out defenses against superego charges,
"proving something to himself." Views based on the ideas of the
20th-century Swiss psychologist Carl
Jung reject both these alternatives, substituting an account of the unconscious
symbol-making process. Until a great deal more is known about the empirical
sciences that bear on the issue, there is little point in attempting to defend
one view of artistic creation against another.
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Although talk about
expression as a process is hedged with difficulties and in any case seems
irrelevant to the philosophy of art (as opposed to the psychology of art), there
is another way in which talk about expression may be both true and important to
the philosophy of art. Mention is made about expressive properties as belonging
to works of art: for example, it is said that a certain melody expresses
sadness, that there is a feeling of great calm expressed in a particular
painting, or that tension is expressed in the thrusts of a tower or the
development of the plot of a novel or drama. |
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The question arises
at once of what it means to say such things. Melodies and sentences are not
joyous or tense or melancholy; only persons have these qualities. The artist can
have them, but how can the work of art? Clearly, to speak of a work of art as
having emotions, if it is not to be utter nonsense, must be metaphorical. But
what is the meaning of this metaphor? What does it mean to say that the music
expresses sadness, if not in the sense of process; i.e., that in writing
it the composer expressed his sadness? |
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The music is heard,
the painting is seen; each presents itself to the senses. But there is much more
involved in music than simply hearing (or even listening to) the sounds and in
visual art than simply seeing (or even looking at) the colours and shapes. Even
very simple combinations of sounds and shapes and colours seem to express
certain qualities of life: a curved line, it is said, is graceful or sprightly;
the drooping willow tree is sad, as are certain passages in music. It is
virtually impossible for most persons to view art as a series of sensory stimuli
only. Even when a picture contains no story, no plot, no program, the viewer
"reads into the script": he attributes to works of art qualities of
human moods, feelings, emotions--in short, "affects." It would be safe
to say that in all art, every percept is suffused with affect. The problem is:
What is it that makes certain percepts expressive of certain affects? (see also perception)
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The simplest
answer, that "The melody is sad" means no more or less than
"Hearing the melody makes me (or other listeners, or most listeners) feel
sad," is surely inadequate. (This would be a theory of evocation, not of
expression.) "The music expresses whatever feelings it arouses in me when I
hear it." But often the listener does not feel emotions at all (he may
imagine them), or, if he does, he feels very different emotions from the ones he
believes to be expressed in the music. He may consider the rondo delirious with
joy, but if he is grief stricken on a given day he hears it without feeling joy;
and if he has heard the same rondo 30 times that day he feels only boredom or
fatigue, while still believing that the piece is expressive of joy. Nor is it an
adequate analysis to say that "The melody expresses joy" means "I
am disposed to (or inclined to) feel joy when I hear it," for many people
seem to recognize joy as a quality of the music without feeling it at all: or
they may imagine it or just recognize the emotion without feeling it or believe
that what they hear sounds the way joy feels--or any of a number of other
accounts. |
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The true analysis
of expressiveness in art must be more complex than this: it is not that the
melody evokes emotion X, but that emotion X is somehow embodied in the music.
But this leads back again to the question, how can an emotional quality be in a
work of art? There is no single answer to this question that would be accepted
by all philosophers of art, but most accounts begin by noting certain
similarities, or analogies, between features of music and features of human
feeling; so that when X (a passage of music, for example) is said to express Y
(a state of feeling), there are certain similarities (for example, of structure)
between X and Y. The physical accompaniments to a mood, say, of restlessness,
such as rapid breathing and drumming fingers, have their musical equivalents:
trills, quavers, increases in tempo, and the like. |
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When a listener
says that a certain melody is sad, he is saying that the music literally has
certain qualities A, B, C, D that can be perceived in the music. Slowness is
surely one such quality (the same melody played fast would not be called sad);
another is the absence of large intervals between tones; another is that the
sounds tend to be hushed rather than, for example, strident; another is that the
tendency of the musical movement is downward rather than rising. When a listener
says that the music is sad, he is saying that it has these qualities. |
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But why these
qualities rather than others? Why is it said that the music is sad when it has
A, B, C, D rather than when it has M, N, O, and P? Because A, B, C, D are the
qualities that also characterize people when they are sad, such as slowness and
soft and low speaking voices. If this theory or anything like it is true, it
explains how emotional characteristics can be attributed to works of art--why it
can be said that the melody is sad, that the horizontal lines in a painting make
it calm (horizontal being the position of rest and peace, sleep and maximum
relaxation, and from which one does not fall), why the lines in a painting are
droopy (they are lines similar in shape to that of, say, an old woman with
hunched shoulders), and so on. These qualities, it should be noted, are
qualities of the work of art, not of the artist (whether he was sad when he
wrote sad music is a separate question, to which the answer may sometimes be no)
and not of the listener or observer (the melody is sad even if I am not sad when
I hear it). They are, so to speak, embodied in the music, quite independently of
the state of the artist or of the observer, or listener, though of course it
requires the presence of a listener to recognize them and be moved by them. |
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Talk about artistic
expressiveness, then, can be justified. But there is no need to resort to the
language of expression in order to state it: instead of saying, "The music
expresses sadness," it can simply be said, "The music is sad."
But regardless of the terminology employed, it is important to have justified
this conclusion. |
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6.1.6.1
The formalist position.
Against all the
foregoing accounts of the function of art stands another, which belongs
distinctively to the 20th century--the theory of art as form, or formalism.
The import of formalism can best be seen by noting what it was reacting against:
art as representation, art as expression, art as a vehicle of truth or knowledge
or moral betterment or social improvement. Formalists do not deny that art is
capable of doing these things, but they believe that the true purpose of art is
subverted by its being made to do these things. "Art for art's sake, not
art for life's sake" is the watchword of formalism. Art is there to be
enjoyed, to be savoured, for the perception of the intricate arrangements of
lines and colours, of musical tones, of words, and combinations of these. By
means of these mediums it is true that objects in the world can be represented,
scenes from life depicted, and emotions from life expressed; but these are
irrelevant to the principal purpose of art--indeed, art is much less adapted to
the telling of a story or the representation of the world than it is to the
presentation of colours, sounds, and other items in the art medium simply for
their own sake. |
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Most people who
claim to enjoy paintings,
for example, enjoy them not as presentations but as representations of things
and situations in life; and thus their response is not of a kind that is unique
to art, but one that takes them back to the emotions of life, from which they
came. They could use art to take them into a realm of pure form unknown to
anyone who is unacquainted with art; but instead they use it to direct them back
to the feelings and situations of life. Thus, according to the formalists, these
viewers miss the opportunity of being taken into a fresh world of purely
aesthetic experience and get from a work only what they bring to it: familiar
experiences and emotions they employ the work to recall. |
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What, then, should
be brought from life to art? Knowledge of life's struggles and emotions?
Knowledge at least of what people are like, and what visual objects look like?
Not even these things, for even they get in the way. Representation is not bad
in itself, it is merely irrelevant. Only if the representation is satisfactory
as form and contributes to the general abstract design can it be said to matter
aesthetically. |
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Most formalists
have directed their attention primarily to visual art. The prerequisite for
appreciating this, they believe, is a sense of form and colour and a knowledge
of three-dimensional space (the last required because otherwise a cube, for
example, would appear in a painting as a flat pattern and would be unable to
play the architectural role intended for it). Armed with this bit of knowledge
from life, they have all they need (as far as knowledge of the world outside art
is concerned) for appreciating visual art. Armed with more than this, they would
find their attention drawn away from the sublimities of art to the more
approachable concerns of humanity (such as representation). Shorn of this
extraneous knowledge and coming to painting with eyes innocent of extraneous
concepts, the viewer could then be in a position to look at what painting
presents directly to his vision--complex arrangements of forms and
colours--which, for reasons thus far unexplained, have the capacity to move the
recipient deeply with emotions utterly alien to the emotions of life. |
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The formalist's
account of music runs along similar lines: not only representation (program
music) is excluded but so is the entire realm of human feeling--not the feeling
that the contemplation of pure form can give but only the feelings of life, such
as love or terror. As to literature and all those arts in which words play a
part (song, opera, drama, cinema), the formalist position would seem to be
impossible; and indeed formalists have seldom attempted to extend their theory
to literature. The medium of literature is words and sentences; and words and
sentences are not merely noises but noises with meanings; and these meanings
inevitably have to do with the objects, actions, qualities, and situations of
life. As sound, literature is a poor thing--as a complex of meanings, it can be
profound and beautiful. Take these away, and literature could cease to be.
Literature does have formal properties--a drama can be as tightly knit as a
fugue or a symphony--but the appreciation of it can never consist of these
formal properties alone; and the reason lies in the very nature of the medium.
It is the role of words to indicate images and meanings and emotions, and these
are the stuff of life--therefore verbal art is inescapably humanistic. Whatever
sensory beauty words have in their sounds is slight and secondary; not so with
painting, where colour, line, and space have a beauty all their own and need
stand for nothing outside themselves to satisfy the eye. |
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What, then, are the
specific qualities in works of art that the formalist is seeking? Most
formalists have held that a partial account can be given of these but that, in
the end, the presence of the qualities must be felt intuitively and cannot be
described. Accounts of formal qualities in works of art go back as far as Aristotle's
Poetics, written
in the 4th century BC, and usually include (though sometimes in different
terminology) the following as principal ingredients: |
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A work of art must
have what Aristotle called "a beginning, a middle, and an end"; it
must be unified, it must "hang together" as one entity. Everything, of
course, has some degree of unity or other; even a collection of things, such as
a woodpile, has some unity inasmuch as it can correctly be called one thing: it
is a collection, but it is a single collection. But the unity desired in works
of art is much greater than this: it is more like the unity of the higher
organisms in which every part functions not independently of the others but
interdependently with them; and it is this interdependency of the parts that
constitutes an organic unity. Take away one part, and the remainder of the parts
fail to function as before. This is only approximately true of organisms:
without a heart or a brain a person could not continue to exist, and the
activity of the other organs would cease; but without an ear or a toe they
surely would. Philosophers of art have often noted that the purest examples of
organic unity in the universe are not organisms but works of art: here the
interdependency of parts often achieves a state of such perfection that it could
often be said, of a melody or a sonnet, that if this note (or word) were not
there, in just the place that it is, the effect on the entire remainder of the
melody or poem would be disastrous. |
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This principle is
the natural accompaniment of the first one. A blank wall has unity but no
variety and is not long worth contemplating. Nor is there any triumph in
achieving unity at so small a price. The work of art must hold in suspension (as
it were) a great diversity of elements and unify them--the greater the
complexity that is integrated into a unity, the greater the achievement. This
fact is so universally recognized that the two criteria are often stated as one,
unity-in-diversity, or variety-in-unity. |
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Very many great
works of art are much less than perfect organic unities (which is another way of
saying that unity-in-variety is not the only criterion for excellence in works
of art). Particularly in long poems or novels or operas, some parts are clearly
more important than the others, though contributing to the whole, and some parts
may be simply "padding." One could hardly allege that the entire
ancient Greek epic the Iliad is an organic unity and that if (for
example) the catalog of ships were removed the entire epic would be ruined (some
even say it would be improved). In Dostoyevsky's novels there are whole chapters
that are unnecessary from the point of view of relevance to the rest of the
story, and, aesthetically (though perhaps not in other ways), these are a pure
excrescence. In most works of art there are high spots and low spots, and there
is a great deal of elasticity as to what could follow what. But in spite of
this, unity-in-variety is quite universally recognized as a criterion for
artistic excellence. If a drama consisted of two plots that never connected with
one another, even at the end, such a play would be condemned at once for lack of
unity; and a work of art is never praised for being disjointed or disunified,
though it might be praised in spite of being disunified. |
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In many works of
art there is a dominant theme, or motif, which stands out and upon which the
other portions are centred. This theme is then varied in different ways in other
portions of the work. This is a special case of unity-in-variety: if every line
in a work of music or literature were entirely novel and different from the
other ones, there would be enormous diversity but no unifying connecting links;
whereas if there were simply a repetition of the initial theme or of entire
sections of the work (as sometimes happens when a composer does not know how to
develop the thematic material with which he has begun) there is unity but no
variety. Both unity and variety are preserved by having central themes, with
other material that is related to them (unity) but not identical with them
(variety). |
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In works of
temporal art, each part develops or evolves into the next, each part being
necessary to the succeeding part, so that if an earlier part were altered or
deleted, all the subsequent parts would have to be altered in consequence. If a
portion of Act IV could be interchanged with a portion of Act II without loss of
effect, the principle of development has not been observed, for then the
material occurring in between would not have made any difference. |
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The arrangement of
the various parts should be balanced, usually in contrasting ways (the adagio
movement coming between two faster movements, for example). In painting, there
should be a balance between the right and left halves of the canvas. The many
ways, other than simple mechanical symmetry ("for every item on the left
there should be an item on the right," which soon becomes monotonous), in
which a painting may have variety and yet retain balance are too complex to be
discussed other than in a book of art criticism. But inits simplest essentials,
the principle is acknowledged by everyone: the housewife who places all the
furniture on one half of the living room while leaving the other half empty
finds the arrangement aesthetically displeasing because the room lacks balance. |
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There are many
descriptions of principles of form in art, which differ from one another in
their terminology more than in their final outcome. In general, however, few if
any of these principles would be denied (only the detail of their formulations
might be) by most philosophers of art. Why certain principles of form are found
satisfactory and others are not is a fascinating psychological question, leading
back to a discussion (necessarily vague in the present state of knowledge) of
the nature of the human organism and the discriminatory powers of the human
mind. But however obscure the explanation, the facts of the case seem clear
enough: certain formal principles in art must be observed, and, to the degree
that they are ignored or violated, aesthetic catastrophe occurs: the work of art
cannot evoke our interest or sustain it long once it is initiated. |
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Though a discussion
of these formal principles is helpful particularly to those who have little
native sense of form and who want "to know what to look for" in art,
they are sufficiently vague so that many critics can agree on a formal
principle, such as unity, and yet disagree on the degree to which a specific
work possesses it. |
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In addition, these
principles are far from complete: a work of art can possess unity and the other
requirements in high degree and yet be unsuccessful even as form. The
requirements listed seem only to have skimmed the surface. Yet what more is
required to distinguish a formally correct but dull work of art from a brilliant
one seems to defy precise analysis. Moreover, the majority of critics who have
assented to these principles are not formalists: they have acknowledged and even
insisted on the great importance of form in works of art, but they have not
alleged, as formalists do, that these principles constitute the sole criteria of
excellence in works of art. They have held that the fulfillment of formal
criteria counts as a necessary condition for artistic excellence but not a
sufficient condition. |
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There are theories
of art that differ from one another in what they allege to be the real purpose
or function of art but are at one with each other in the belief that art is a
means to some end, whether that end be the titillation of the senses or the
communization of the nations of the world or the conversion of mankind to belief
in God or the improved moral beliefs or moral tone of the reader or viewer. In
every case, the work of art is considered as a means to some end beyond itself,
and hence what counts in the final analysis is not the nature of the work of art
itself but its effects upon the audience--whether those effects be primarily
sensory, cognitive, moral, religious, or social. |
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According to one
kind of theory, the function of art is to produce just one kind of effect upon
its audience: pleasure. It may also inform or instruct, represent or express,
but first and foremost it must please. The more pleasure it gives, the better
the art. (see also hedonism)
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If the theory is
left in this simple form, it yields the result that glossy and superficial works
and those containing nothing difficult or obscure are the best works of art:
thus, on the hedonistic account, King Lear might come out far behind
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha, or Joyce Kilmer's
"Trees," in view of the difficulty of comprehending Shakespeare by
many people and the pleasant, easy lilting quality of Longfellow's poem; and
similarly a simple ditty might come out ahead of Bach's Mass in B Minor. True,
Shakespeare and Bach might produce more pleasure in the long run since their
works have endured through more centuries. But on the other hand, the simple
works can be apprehended and enjoyed by vastly more people. |
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In any case, the
theory has often been amended to read "aesthetic pleasure" rather than
simply "pleasure"--thus placing great importance on exactly how the
term "aesthetic" is to be defined. The definition of this troublesome
term is beyond the scope of this article (see AESTHETICS
); it will simply be said here that no quick and easy way of
distinguishing aesthetic pleasures from other pleasures will suffice for the
task at hand. If it is said, for example, that aesthetic pleasure consists in
satisfaction taken in the contemplation of sensuous particulars (tones, colours,
shapes, smells, tastes) for their own sake--that is, for no further end and
without ulterior motive--then one confronts the fact that as much pleasure may
be taken in single smells and tastes for their own sakes, without any reference
beyond them, as may be taken in the most complex works of art. For that matter,
pleasure in playing a game (one not played for money) is pleasure in doing
something for its own sake, as is the pleasure of robbing a house if it is done
not for money but for "kicks." If something is found pleasurable,
ordinarily the pleasure is what one wants from it, not something else beyond it.
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Moreover, if it is
said that a work of art should be a means toward pleasure, that is treading
suspiciously near to the opposed view that art should not be a means to an end
but an end in itself. If someone says, "Why do you go jogging every morning
for three miles? Because you feel the exercise is good for you?" and
another person answers, "No, not that at all, I just enjoy doing it,"
this would ordinarily and quite sensibly be taken as saying that he did not do
exercise as a means toward an end but as an end in itself. If something is done
just because it is enjoyed, in common parlance this would be taken to be
"doing it as an end in itself"; and if one objected, "No, I'm not
doing it as an end in itself, I'm doing it as a means toward the enjoyment I'll
get out of it," his reply would be considered sophistical, for doing it for
enjoyment's sake is precisely what is ordinarily meant (or one thing that is
ordinarily meant) by the statement that a thing is being done for its own sake. |
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In any case, the
effect of great works of art upon a reader or viewer or listener can hardly be
described as merely hedonistic. No one would presumably wish to deny that art
can and should give us pleasure; but few would wish to assert that pleasure is
all that it should give us. If one were to ask, "How did viewing Picasso's
'Guernica' affect you?" and the reply was, "I found it pleasant,"
we would conclude that his reaction to the painting was, to say the least,
inadequate. Great art may please; it may also move, shock, challenge, or change
the lives of those who experience it deeply. Pleasure is only one of many kinds
of effects it produces. |
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One of the things
that has been alleged to be the purpose of art is its cognitive function: art as
a means to the acquisition of truth.
Art has even been called the avenue to the highest knowledge
available to man and to a kind of knowledge impossible of attainment by any
other means. |
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Knowledge in the
most usual sense of that word takes the form of a proposition, knowing that
so-and-so is the case. Thus, it can be learned from sense observation that the
sun is setting, and this is knowledge. Is knowledge acquired in this same sense
from acquaintance with works of art? There is no doubt that there are some
propositions (statements) that can be made after acquaintance with works of art
that could not be made before: for example, that this performance of Beethoven's
Eroica Symphony was 47 minutes long, that this painting predominates in
green, that this piece of sculpture originated around 350 BC. The question is
whether there is anything that can be called truth or knowledge (presumably
knowledge is of truths, or true propositions) that can be found in works of art.
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Literature is
surely the most obvious candidate; for literature consists of words, and words
are combined into sentences, and sentences (at least declarative sentences) are
used to convey propositions; that is, to make assertions that are either true or
false. And works of literature do certainly contain many true statements: a
novel about the French Revolution conveys facts about the series of events; in a
verse of the English scholar and poet A.E. Housman (1859-1936), it is said that
"The tears of all that be/ Help not the primal fault." Since
literature contains statements, it would be surprising indeed if at least some
of them were not true. |
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But the relevance
of this fact to literature as an art is extremely dubious. If an 18th-century
novel gives a true picture of English country life of that time, this makes it
useful to read as history; does it also make it a better novel? Many, at any
rate, would say that it does not: that a tenth-rate novel might give more facts
about 18th-century life than a first-rate novel of the same century. For that
matter, many of the propositions in a novel are, taken at face value, false; it
is false, for example, that there was a foundling named Tom Jones who had an
uncle named Squire Western. The thousands of pages of description in novels of
fictional characters, ascribing to them thoughts and actions, are all false,
since these characters never actually existed. Yet this fact in no way impugns
their value as literature. Shakespeare, in The Winter's Tale, sets part
of the action on the seacoast of Bohemia; but the fact that Bohemia has no
seacoast does not damage The Winter's Tale as literature, though it would
as geography. The fact that Milton used the outdated Ptolemaic astronomy does
not make Paradise Lost less valuable, nor does the nonexistence of the
lands described in Gulliver's Travels in any way diminish Swift's work.
There is no doubt, then, that works of literature can contain true statements
and false ones; but it is tempting to ask, what does their truth or falsity
matter? Literature is not astronomy or geography or history or any branch of
knowledge, particular or general. |
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Many would hold
that the above statements are indeed irrelevant, as are any that encroach upon
the domain of science; but, they would add, there are other assertions that
matter a great deal: for example, the statements in which a world view is
presented in a poem or drama or novel. The main burden of the ancient Latin poet
Lucretius' De rerum natura ("On
the Nature of Things") is a presentation of the materialism of
the Greek philosopher Democritus; and an embodiment of the world view of
medieval Catholicism is the very warp and woof of Dante's Divine Comedy--and
such considerations (it would be contended) are relevant to these works as
literature. |
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In reply, however,
it might be said that while it is true that these world views must be understood
and taken into consideration in the reading of these poems and that they cannot
be understood or appreciated without knowing them, the truth or falsity of these
views still does matter aesthetically. If Lucretius' view is true, then Dante's
must be false, and vice versa, since they are incompatible; but in order to
appreciate the poem it is not necessary to know which (if either) is true.
Appreciating art, unlike taking a stand for or against a cause in life, does not
require a yes or no to statements. It requires only that the viewer look and
appreciate, that he experience as richly and fully as possible the feeling and
attitudes involved in the world view that is presented. Philosophers and
scientists are concerned with whether the Democritean materialism of Lucretius
is true; appreciators of art are concerned only to capture the feeling
appropriate to the world view in question. |
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Many statements in
works of literature are not explicitly made at all but are implicit: Hardy never
tells in his novels what his world view is, but it emerges rather clearly before
the reader is halfway through any of them. Probably the most important points
made in works of literature that contain a central thesis are implicit rather
than explicit. How, in that case, can it be determined what thesis it is that is
implied? In a court of law, if someone says, "He didn't say it exactly, he
just implied it," the judge would be likely to rule that this was
insufficient evidence of slander, since the person did not actually say it.
Still, many statements in daily life are not stated but implied--in the sense
that they are intended; the trouble lies in proving that the speaker intended
them, since no one else is in a comparable position to say what his intentions
were; and, in the case of deceased authors, there is no evidence of their
intentions other than what they said. One is doubtless on safer ground,
therefore, saying that many statements are implied in the sense that they are
suggested (whether the speaker intended to do so or not) by the tone of voice
and the juxtaposition of the words used. Thus, "They had children and got
married" suggests, though it does not state, that they had the children
before they were married; any normal user of the English language would tend to
construe it thus. And it is surely no overstatement to say that Swift's Gulliver's
Travels suggests that the author was misanthropic or that the novels of the
French author Marcel Proust (1871-1922) suggest a pessimistic view of love and
other human relationships close to that of the German philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer (1788-1860). A serious reader of literature will become
increasingly sensitive to what is suggested in the works he is reading. |
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But, once again,
the importance of the suggested statements, even when they are true, in no way
shows that they must be accepted as true by the reader if he is to value them as
works of art. Is the sincere Roman Catholic who finds Dante's world view
congenial and Lucretius' repellent committed to saying that Dante's is the
better poem? If so, he may be accused of confusing his moral and theological
judgments with his aesthetic ones. Still, it should be noted that there are some
critics who believe that if two works of literature are both equal in excellence
on all counts, yet one presents a true view of reality and the other fails to,
the one presenting a true view is better--better even as a work of art--than is
the other one. |
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There is, however,
another way of talking about truth in literature that is not or is not as
obviously connected to propositions. A characterization in a novel or drama is
spoken of as being true to human nature, true to the way people actually speak
or behave or feel. No matter that Becky Sharp--in the English novelist William
Thackeray's Vanity Fair--is a fictional character, it would be said, as
long as she is depicted as a person of a certain type would behave, she is being
depicted truly; truth in fiction does not mean truth of the statements (for the
statements in Thackeray's novel describing her are false), but truth to human
nature. |
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But what exactly
does "truth to human nature" mean? The criterion is as old as Aristotle,
who wrote that poetry is more true than history because it presents universal
truths whereas history gives only particular truths and that poetry (dramatic
fiction) shows how a person of this or that kind probably or necessarily would
behave (or think, or feel). This criterion, however, is too vague as it stands:
what is probable or plausible behaviour in one person is not in another, and
what is probable in one set of circumstances is not so in another. The test of
truth to human nature would be roughly as follows: Would a person such as has
been described thus far (in the novel or drama) behave (or think or feel or be
motivated) in the way that the author depicts this character as behaving in the
circumstances described? It is often very difficult to decide this question,
because knowledge of human beings is insufficient or because the dramatist
himself has not provided enough clues. Still, once readers or critics are
convinced that the character described would not have behaved as the novelist
depicts him as behaving, they may criticize the characterization
(at least with regard to this bit of behaviour or motivation) as implausible. If
a character who has been described as spending years working toward a certain
goal is represented by the novelist as abandoning it once he is within sight of
it, the reader will have considerable reservations about this delineation unless
the author has depicted the character as being unstable or masochistic or in
some way as being the kind of person who might in these circumstances do this
kind of thing. It is true that there are people in the world who abandon their
goals within sight of them after years of labour, but the conviction must be
implanted that the character already presented by the novelist belongs to this
classification or the behaviour will seem reasonless and unmotivated. |
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Is truth to human
nature aesthetically relevant? That is, when present does it make the work of
literature better and when absent or flawed does it make the work worse as
literature? Here again there would be some difference of opinion, but a very
large number of critics and aestheticians, in the tradition of Aristotle, would
say that it matters aesthetically a great deal. The novelist
does not have to be true to geography or history or astronomy, but he must be,
as the 19th-century U.S. author Nathaniel
Hawthorne said of all literary artists, true to the human heart. A
literary artist may tamper with all the other truths with impunity, but not this
one: his characters must be convincing, and they will not be convincing if they
are not depicted as having anger, love, jealousy, and other human emotions that
real people have and in pretty much the contexts in which real people have them.
If a novelist's characters were not motivated in much the way that human beings
are motivated, the reader would not even be able to understand them--they would
be alien and unintelligible to him. Even when a writer (such as the Englishman
Kenneth Grahame in The Wind in the
Willows) depicts animals as central characters in novels, however
much they may differ from human beings in external appearance, they must
psychologically be presented as human beings--how else and in what other terms
could their behaviour and their motivation be understood? Such, then, are the
reasons for saying that whatever else a literary artist does, his depictions
must be truthful to human nature. |
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Can works of art
other than literature possess truth to human nature? It would seem that in a
limited degree they can. Motion pictures and operas and other mixed arts clearly
can, but they employ words, and literature is a principal ingredient in them.
But what of arts that employ no words at all? Painting and sculpture, not being
temporal arts, cannot depict action, and action is all-important in the
representation of human character. These arts contain depictions of persons
(real or imaginary) only on a knife-edge of time. Still, sometimes something may
be inferred even from a knife-edge. The late self-portraits of the 17th-century
Dutch artist Rembrandt do seem to reveal an agonized yet sometimes serene inner
spirit, suggesting that there are flashes of human insight to be found in
depictions of human beings in visual art. As for musical art (music without the
accompaniment of words), it contains nothing that could be called depiction, not
even depiction on a knife-edge of time; and, if this is so, there can be no such
thing here as true depiction or false depiction. Music may be expressive of
human feelings, in the sense already described, but this is a far cry from
saying that it contains depictions that are true to human nature. (see also music
theory) |
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Even if truth to
human nature in the depiction of character is aesthetically relevant (which many
would question), to say this is still far from saying that it is the only
criterion for excellence in works of art, or even that this is the principal
thing that art gives or its main excuse for being. To go so far would be to
discount colour and form and expressiveness as criteria for excellence in art;
and this virtually no one is willing to do. It would seem, then, that in no case
is truth (even truth to human nature) necessary in works of art, seeing that
entire genres of art, such as music, exist without it; and that even when it is
present and when its presence increases the merit of a work of art (which again
many would deny), it is only one virtue among many. Thus, the view that the
purpose or function of art is to provide truth is quite surely mistaken; perhaps
the person who wants truth and is indifferent to the presence of anything else
had better turn to science or philosophy rather than to the arts. |
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To say that a work
of art is aesthetically good or has aesthetic value is one thing; to say that it
is morally good or has a capacity to influence people so as to make them morally
better is another. Yet, though the two kinds of judgments differ from one
another, they are not entirely unrelated. Three views on the relation of art to
morality can be distinguished: |
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According to this
view, the primary or exclusive function of art is as a handmaiden to
morality--which means, usually, whatever system of morality is adhered to by the
theorist in question. Art that does not promote moral influence of the desired
kind is viewed by the moralist with suspicion and sometimes with grudging
tolerance of its existence. For art implants in people unorthodox ideas; it
breaks the molds of provincialism in which people have been brought up; it
disturbs and disquiets, since it tends to emphasize individuality rather than
conformity; and works of art are often created out of rebellion or
disenchantment with the established order. Thus, art may undermine beliefs and
attitudes on which, it is thought, the welfare of society rests and so may be
viewed with suspicion by the guardians of custom. When art does not affect
people morally one way or the other (for example, much nonrepresentational
painting), it is considered a harmless pleasure that can be tolerated if it does
not take up too much of the viewer's time; but, when it promotes questioning and
defies established attitudes, it is viewed by the moralist as insidious and
subversive. It is viewed with approval only if it promotes or reinforces the
moral beliefs and attitudes
adhered to by the moralist. |
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Plato
is the first champion in the Western world of the moralistic view of art--at
least in The Republic and Laws.
Plato
admired the poets and was himself something of a poet; but, when he was founding
(on paper) his ideal state, he was convinced that much art, even some passages
in Homer, tended to have an evil influence upon the young and impressionable,
and accordingly he decided that they must be banned. Passages that spoke ill or
questioningly of the gods, passages containing excessive sexual passion (and all
works that would today be described as pornographic), and even passages of music
that were disturbing to the soul or the senses were all condemned to the same
fate. Plato's concern here was with the purity of soul of the men who would
become members of the council of rulers of the state; he was not concerned with censorship
for the masses, but, since one could not predict which young people would pass
the series of examinations required for membership in the council of rulers and
since it was (and is) practically impossible to restrict access to works of art
to a certain group, the censorship, he decided, would have to be universal. The
objection might be raised, to be sure, that rulers to be should not be hothouse
plants separated from the influences of the outside world and that they would be
better off facing all of reality, including its evils. But Plato's view was that
these influences should be kept from them during their formative years--that
during this critical time, when the whole tenor of their lives was being shaped,
art could be an influence for evil and had to be sacrificed in the interests of
morality. In other dialogues of Plato, such as the Ion and the Phaedrus,
when he was not concerned with building a state, he extolled the virtues of
art and even held the artist to be divine (although madly divine); but when it
came to a conflict between art and morality, it was art that would have to go. |
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The most famous
champion of the moralistic view of art in modern times is Tolstoy.
Long after he had finished writing his novels, he fell under the influence of
primitive (prechurch) Christianity, the principal tenet of which was the
brotherhood of all mankind. This one idea became such an obsession with him that
everything else, including the pursuit of art to which he had devoted his life,
became subordinate to it. Almost all the literature of his own time, including
all his own novels, he condemned as inimical to the brotherhood of man by
emphasizing class distinction and pitting one group of mankind against another.
Even art that appealed primarily (in his opinion) to "upper class"
tastes, such as the symphonies of Beethoven and the operas of Richard Wagner,
both 19th-century German composers, were condemned as "false art." The
art that remained after these colossal excisions included such items as folk
songs that peasants might sing in the fields as they worked and pictures and
stories either illustrating the tenets of primitive Christianity or fostering
the spirit of Christianity by promoting the brotherhood of all mankind. |
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The moralistic view
of art is still, on the whole, the unarticulated view of art held by the masses,
particularly when they are under the sway of a dominant religious or political
doctrine. Historically, Christianity
has been suspicious of all art except those works that depicted some aspects of
biblical history or that could be used to further the spread of Christian belief
and practice (although this is no longer strictly true). It would probably be
fair to say that the view of art held by the former Soviet government was a
moralistic one: works of fiction and poems had to praise Communism or further
its doctrines, and works of music had to be melodic and singable (Soviet
composers such as Dmitry Shostakovich
were often condemned by the official hierarchy as "too German" or
"too materialistic"). Whenever a culture or nation is under the sway
of a dominant view, whether moral or religious or political, the tendency of the
rulers of that nation is to promote it at all costs--and one of the casualties
in the process is art, at any rate that great body of art that is either
indifferent or hostile to the reigning dogma. (see also Index: Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics, ) |
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Diametrically
opposed to the moralistic view is aestheticism, the view that, instead of art
(and everything else) being the handmaiden of morality, morality (and everything
else) should be the handmaiden of art. The proponents of this view hold that the
experience of art is the most intense and pervasive experience available in
human life and that nothing should be allowed to interfere with it. If it
conflicts with morality, so much the worse for morality; and, if the masses fail
to appreciate it or receive the experience it has to offer, so much the worse
for the masses. The vital intensity of the aesthetic experience is the paramount
goal in human life. If there are morally undesirable effects of art, they do not
really matter in comparison to this all-important experience which art can give.
When the son-in-law of the 20th-century Italian dictator Benito Mussolini waxed
lyrical in his description of the beauty of a bomb exploding in the midst of a
crowd of unarmed Ethiopians, he was carrying to its fullest extent the
aestheticist's view of art. |
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Few persons would
wish to go so far. Even the most ardent lovers of art would stop short of saying
that the value of art holds a monopoly over all other values. It may well be
that the experience of works of art is the greatest experience available to
human beings (though this, too, could be questioned), but at any rate it is not
the only one available, and, this being the case, the others should be
considered as well. There is a plurality of values; and aesthetic values,
although far greater, admittedly, than most persons realize, are still just a
few among many. It is therefore necessary to consider the relation of the values
derived from art to the values derived from other things, such as the conduct of
life apart from art: no one can devote every waking hour to the pursuit of art,
even if for no other reason than the need for survival, and thus the values of
such mundane things as food and shelter have also to be considered. (see also Index:
axiology) |
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The moralistic and
aesthetic positions are extremes, and the truth is likely to be found somewhere
between them. Indeed, art and morality are intimately related, and neither
functions wholly without the other. But to trace the precise relations between
art and morality is far from easy; for want of a better term,
"interactionism" could be used to label the view that aesthetic and
moral values each have distinctive roles to play in the world but that neither
operates independently of the other. |
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It would be
admitted, first of all, that works of literature
(which will be examined first, since of all the arts the relation of literature
to morality is most obvious) can teach valuable moral lessons through explicit
presentation: the genre that has this as its aim is didactic
literature, as exemplified by Pilgrim's Progress by the
English Puritan John Bunyan and Back to Methuselah by the Irish dramatist
George Bernard Shaw. But most works of literature do not exist to teach a moral
lesson: possibly, Shakespeare did not write Othello merely to attack
racial prejudice or Macbeth to prove that crime does not pay. Literature
does teach but in a far more important way than by explicit preachment: it
teaches, as John Dewey said, by being, not by express intent. |
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How does literature
achieve this moral effect? It presents characters and situations (usually
situations of difficult moral decision) through which the reader can deepen his
own moral perspectives by reflecting on other people's problems and conflicts,
which usually have a complexity that his own daily situations do not possess. He
can learn from them without himself having to undergo in his personal life the
same moral conflicts or make the same moral decisions. The reader can view such
situations with a detachment that he can seldom achieve in daily life when he is
immersed in the stream of action. By viewing these situations objectively and
reflecting on them, he is enabled to make his own moral decisions more wisely
when life calls on him in turn to make them. Literature can be a stimulus to
moral reflection unequalled perhaps by any other, for it presents the moral
choice in its total context with nothing of relevance omitted. |
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Perhaps the chief
moral potency of literature lies in its unique power to stimulate and develop
the faculty of the imagination.
Through literature the reader is carried beyond the confines of the narrow world
that most persons inhabit into a world of thought and feeling more profound and
more varied than his own, a world in which he can share the experiences of human
beings (real or fictitious) who are far removed from him in space and time and
in attitude and way of life. Literature enables him to enter directly into the
affective processes of other human beings, and, having done this, no perceptive
reader can any longer condemn or dismiss en masse a large segment of humanity as
"foreigners" or "wastrels," for a successful work of
literature brings them to life as individuals, animated by the same passions as
he is, facing the same conflicts, and tried in the same crucible of bitter
experience. Through such an exercise of the sympathetic imagination, literature
tends to draw all men together instead of setting them apart from one another in
groups or types with convenient labels for each. Far more than preaching or
moralizing, more even than the descriptive and scientific discourses of
psychology or sociology, literature tends to unite mankind and reveal the common
human nature that exists in everyone behind the facade of divisive doctrines,
political ideologies, and religious beliefs. |
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This is not to say,
of course, that those who read great works of literature are necessarily
tolerant or sympathetic human beings. Reading literature alone is not a cure for
human ills, and people who are neurotically grasping or selfish in their private
lives will hardly cease to be so as a result of reading works of literature.
Still, wide and serious reading of literature has an observable effect: people
who do this kind of reading, no matter what their other characteristics may be,
do tend to be more understanding of other people's conflicts, to have more
sympathy with their problems, and to be able to empathize more with them as
human beings than do people who have never broadened their horizons by reading
literature at all. No one who has read great literature widely and for a
considerable period, so as to make it an integral part of his life, can any
longer share the same provincialism and be dominated by the same narrow
prejudices that seem to characterize most people most of the time. Literature,
perhaps more than anything else, exercises a leavening influence on the temper
of a man's moral life. It looses him from the bonds of his own position in space
and time; it releases him from exclusive involvement with his own struggles from
day to day; it enables him to see his own local problems and trials from the
perspective of eternity--he can now view them as if from an enormous height. |
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To have moral
effects, it is not necessary that a work of literature present a system of
morality. Its moral potency is perhaps greatest when it presents not systems but
human beings in action, so that through the exercise of the imagination the
reader can see his own customs and philosophies as he sees theirs: as some among
many of the countless adjustments and solutions to human problems that different
circumstances and man's endlessly varied and resourceful nature have produced. |
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Works of
literature, then, develop more than anything else the human faculty of the
imagination; and the 19th-century English poet Percy
Bysshe Shelley said that the imagination is the greatest single
instrument of moral good. Perhaps this sounds like an absurd overstatement, but
consider what morality is like without the imagination. Consider the average
morality of a small community, relatively isolated from centres of culture and
unacquainted with any artistic tradition. Its morality is rigid and
circumscribed; the details of each member's personal life are hedged about with
constant annoyances, and everyone's life is open to the prying eyes of others
who are unfailingly quick to judge, with or without evidence. Outsiders are
looked upon askance; people of a different religion, race, or culture are viewed
with suspicion and distrust; and anyone who does not subscribe to whatever moral
code is dominant in the community is condemned or ostracized. No doubt these
people are sincere--they are dreadfully sincere, deadly sincere. But sincerity
without enlightenment can be as harmful to the achievement of good as
intelligence without wisdom when that intelligence is possessed by political
leaders playing with hydrogen bombs. Generally speaking, the people of a small
community have not known the leavening influence of literature. Their morality
is rigid, cramped, and arid. If these same people had been exposed from early
youth to great masterpieces of literature and had learned through them to
appreciate the tremendous diversity of human mores and beliefs held by other
groups, with the same degree of sincerity that they themselves possess, they
would be less likely to be as harsh, intolerant, and rigid as they are. |
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People are usually
inclined to separate art and morality into two hermetically sealed compartments.
They talk as if morality were already complete and self-sufficient without art,
and that art, if it is to be tolerated at all, can grudgingly be permitted,
provided that it conforms to the moral customs of the time and place of those
judging it. But this view is surely to conceive the relation between art and
morality in far too one-sided a manner. If art must take cognizance of morality,
equally morality must take cognizance of art. Almost everything that is alive
and imaginative about morality comes from the leavening influence of art. |
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To consider
examples from ancient Greece alone, what would morality be today without the
influence of the dramatists Aeschylus and Sophocles, without Socrates as
described in Plato's dialogues, even without the historians Herodotus and
Thucydides with their quiet humour, gentle prodding skepticism, and tolerance
for other customs and views? It is through great works of art that the most
vivid conceptions of various ways of life are obtained. What is it about other
times and places that people most remember? Is it their political squabbles,
their wars, their economic upheavals? These events are known in general to
intelligent laymen and in detail to historians, but even then such events do not
usually make much of a dent in peoples' personal lives in the way that art does.
What is alive today about ancient Greece is its sculpture, its poetry, its epic
and drama; what is alive today about the Elizabethan period, even more than the
defeat of the Spanish Armada and the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, is its poetic
drama, with its vivid characterizations and boundless energy. Other
civilizations and cultures may be sources of facts and theories that enlighten
modern understanding, but what enables contemporary man to share directly their
feelings and attitudes toward life is not their politics nor even their religion
but their art. Art alone is never out of date. Science is cumulative; even the
science textbooks of ten years ago are now discarded as obsolete; the science of
the ancient Greeks and the
Elizabethans is studied today primarily for its historical value. But great art
is never obsolete; it can still present to modern man its full impact,
undiminished by time. Shakespeare will not be out of date as long as human
beings continue to feel love, jealousy, and conflict in a troubled world. A
biblical statement might be paraphrased and applied to past cultures: "By
their arts shall ye know them." The artists whose works are now revered may
have died unsung; most of them, even those who were appreciated during their
lifetimes, were considered far less important than the latest naval victories or
the accession of the current king; yet today these things have all passed into
history, but art survives with undiminished vigour. The art of the past molds in
countless ways the attitudes, responses, and dispositions of modern man's daily
life. Most of what is perceptive and imaginative in morality owes its origin to
art, and, when morality loses contact with the tradition of art, it becomes dead
and sterile. Yet, in spite of this, some people tell us that art is merely the
salve of morality, to soothe its stringency. |
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Already, in the
preceding paragraph, mention has begun of arts other than literature. How, it
could be asked, can they have any moral effects on those who view them or listen
to them? Yet there are effects of these arts on the observer that, in a broad
sense, are moral (as opposed to nonmoral) and that account for the attempts of
many people to censor them. |
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Historically, the
most famous supposition about the moral effect of art on its audience is
Aristotle's theory of catharsis;
Aristotle applied the theory to tragedy only, but many since his day have
applied it to art in general. According to this view, art acts as an emotional
cathartic and achieves a "purgation of the emotions." Certain emotions
man would be better off without (Aristotle limited them to pity and fear, but
they could easily be extended) are generated during the course of daily life.
Art is the principal agency that should help to dispel these emotions. By
observing works of art (witnessing a drama, listening to a powerful symphony,
looking at certain works of sculpture or painting) the recipient can work off
these emotions rather than let them fester inside him or take them out in
unpleasant ways on his fellow men. Art siphons off these disturbing inner states
rather than letting them grow rancid within man. |
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As it stands, this
view is undoubtedly somewhat crude, especially in the light of modern
psychology; and fault could be found in many respects with the Aristotelian
doctrine of catharsis. Yet the experience of reading, viewing, or listening to a
work of art does give a peculiar release, a feeling of freedom from inner
turbulence. The mere act of plunging, for a few hours, into an entirely
different world when attending a play or a concert is often enough to transform,
however temporarily, the tone of people's daily lives. It is not merely that for
a few hours they can forget their troubles--any form of entertainment, however
worthless, might do this. It is not merely that art provides a break or
interruption in the course of people's lives at the end of which they are
exactly what they were before. It is that through the aesthetic process itself,
in the very act of concentrating energies on an art object of great unity and
complexity and depth, a kind of inner clarification is achieved that was not
present before. |
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It is not true,
therefore, that reading novels of crime and detection leads people to indulge in
a life of crime; on the whole, those who read such novels are law-abiding
people, and, if anything, the reading of such novels is a substitute for
aggressive activity (it is aggression vicariously experienced) rather than an
incitement to it. Nor do works of art of a licentious nature usually incite
people to rape or adultery; far from acting as incitements to action, they are
safety valves against action by providing a kind of substitute gratification. It
has been said, for example, that Shakespeare's Antony
and Cleopatra is an immoral work because it celebrates the
passionate surrender to an illicit love and the victory of this love over
practical, political, and moral concerns. But is there any evidence that people
who read this play will behave like the lovers in question because they read the
play? On the contrary: it could be argued that reading the play has an
instrumental value in that it presents another example of a complex moral
situation, the perusal of which provides many avenues for moral reflection, and
that the play also possesses the intrinsic value of acute characterization,
dramatic power, and poetry whose imagery and intensity are among the most
splendid in the English language. Again, it is said that American youth has been
demoralized by such 20th-century U.S. writers as Ernest Hemingway and William
Faulkner in that these writers set an example of bad behaviour. But to say that
they are capable of demoralizing an entire generation is certainly to attribute
to them too much moral power, especially over people who have never even heard
of them. Even among those who do read serious literature, the effects are
probably more beneficial than harmful: through books the horizons of such
readers have been expanded to include other ways of life than they would have
previously known. (see also crime
fiction, detective story,
aggressive behaviour) |
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Quite apart from
the ultimate effect of a work of art on a man's emotions, it would appear that
the very act of experiencing the work may itself have a moral effect. If he is
really concentrating on the details of a work of art and not just passively
letting it play upon his senses, this effect--the heightening of his
sensibilities and the refining of his capacities for perceptual
discrimination--will make him more receptive to the world around him, thus
raising the tone of his daily life and making his experience of the world richer
than before. |
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Most of what passes
for aesthetic appreciation
does not begin to have this effect; but its failure is only because it is not
aesthetic appreciation at all--it is a kind of tired reverie rather than an
intense absorption in the aesthetic object. Most people, when they hear music,
simply allow themselves to be inundated by the sheer flow of sound. Such people
do not actively listen to the music and are not even aware of the most
elementary kind of ebb and flow occurring within it; they only receive it
passively, perhaps using it as a springboard for a private reverie or an
emotional debauch of their own. Music has for them not an aesthetic effect but
an anesthetic effect. It is not just hearing music that will have the required
effect. The aesthetic experience, which involves nothing less than a total
concentration on the perceptual details of the aesthetic object, is an
experience that heightens consciousness, exercises man's capacity for perceptual
awareness and discrimination, and helps him come alive to the sight and texture
of the world around him. After a viewer has seen an exhibition of landscapes by
C?anne, the entire world may seem to him to have changed its structure and
complexion: it may, indeed, take on the look of C?anne's landscapes. And is not
anything that increases awareness and subtlety of discernment and discrimination
a potentially moral agent? Art provides the most intense, concentrated, and
sharply focussed of the experiences available to man. Because of this, art can
have an enormous influence on the tenor of a person's life, more influential no
doubt than any particular system of morality. In its ability to do this, it has
an effect on man's life that, in an extended sense at least, can surely be
called moral. Morality transcends particular systems of morality; and art, by
being for many persons the dominant influence in their lives, thus transcends
them also. (Jo.Ho.) |
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