sthetische Analyse der Kunst und ihre Probleme Bayreuth

Ästhetische Analyse der Kunst und ihre Probleme Bayreuth 2008 Sixto J. Castro sixto@fyl. uva. es

Where we come from History

What we understand by aesthetics • Different meanings of “aesthetic” – Greek sense: ai[sqhsi": knowledge through senses/ novhsi" : knowledge derived from reason and understanding. – Baumgarten’s sense (18 th c. ): study of (sensuous) beauty, specially beauty in art. • Descartes: clear and distinct ideas against dark and confused sensations.

What we understand by aesthetics • “Aesthetica (teoría liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulcre cogitandi, ars analogi rationis) est scientia cognitionis sensitivae”. Alexander Baumgarten, Aesthetica, Hildesheim, Georg Olms, Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1961, § 1 • Aesthetices finis est perfectio cognitionis sensitivae qua talis. Haec autem est pulchritudo”. Ibid. , § 14 – Rejection of beauty: rejection of the perfection of sensitive knowledge. – Beauty is the target of the sensuous knowledge searching its own perfection. Here is the birth of the aesthetics as a philosophical branch.

What we understand by aesthetics • Beauty related to proportio, accuteza (note the relationship between moral and aesthetics), mímesis (Aristotelian). • Eventually will appear the idea of genius (ingenium, possessed by nature). • But beauty remains in the realm of subjectivity, not in the object. – Beauty says nothing about the world itself, but it manifests the perfection of our sensible knowledge. – We can intuitively know the world, as we can by reason (beauty as the other face of truth)

What we understand by aesthetics • Beautiful art has tha task of reflecting on sensibility (outside the purely particular) • Aesthetics as a “sister” of logic, study of “lower” reason (at the level of sensations, giving order to them, as the reason does with ideas). • That means that beauty is not reducible to abstract and universal laws. It requieres its own treatise.

What we understand by aesthetics • Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft: a halfway between absolute rationality (duty in Kritik der praktischen Vernunft) and absolute subjectivity. • Universal law inside subjective faculties: lawless legality. • A kind of law inseparable of the individuality of the artifact.

What we understand by aesthetics • The understanding knows that we live according to impersonal laws; but in the aesthetic realm happens as if we forgot it, as if we gave form freely to the laws we are submitted to. • The aesthetic is the contemplation of the pure form of our knowledge: it is the state in which the common knowledge, instead of reaching its object, reflects on itself and on the way in which its structure appears to be adapted to the real. • The important is not what we know, but the very fact that we know. • The aesthetic does not provide with any knowledge, even though it is related to the cognitive powers. But it offers the consciousness that the world is adjusted to our cognitive capabilities, and from that we get a sensation of purposiveness and meaning.

What we understand by aesthetics • Terry Eagleton (The ideology of the aesthetic): it is as if in the aesthetic judgement we held in our hands an object we cannot see, not because we need to use it, but just because we enjoy its general predisposition to be held in the way in which its own convexity seems to adapt to our hands. • Martin Seel, Die Kunst der Entzweiung. Zum Begriff der ästhetischen Rationalität, Frankfurt a. M. , Suhrkamp, 1985, p. 69: the aesthetic phenomena are defined by having „the mening of a presented presence“.

What we understand by aesthetics • Kant: aesthetic judgements are subjective and universal. • To judge aesthetically is to declare that a subjective response is the one that every individual should necessarily experience and cause the spontaneous agreement of all. • A kind of epoché, the point of view of a universal subjectivity. • The world is not indifferent to us.

The world is not indifferent to us • Deep connection between kalón and agathón (kalokagathía) • Medieval ages: beauty and goodness are trascendental. • Santayana (The sense of beauty): beauty is truth, sensuous expression of the good. • Schiller developes Kant’s idea of purposiveness without purpose. • Mme. De Staël: platonist Kant. Free beauty=eternal; dependent beauty=time.

The world is not indifferent to us • Gautier: l’art pour l’art means that the only concern of art must be beauty in itself. • Baudelaire (The painter of modern life): beautiful is made out of an eternal and invariable element, and of a relative and circumstantial one (age, fashion, moral, passion…). – There are three faculties with different objects: pure intellect searches for truth; taste shows beauty to us and moral sense teaches us duty.

Art for art’s sake • Proudhon: there are only two realms: morality (consciousness) and logic (truth). Art must serve either of them. • Fichte: “I” gives itself its law (it’s aesthetic) • Schelling: art without sensuous objectivity=philosophy. Art belongs to the whole man. Philosophy just to a part. • Schopenhauer: aesthetics as a privileged way of knowledge. – Will, blind desire (Ding an sich).

Art for art’s sake • Art reproduces eternal (platonic) ideas. – Goes beyond the principle of sufficient reason, causality, space, time. – Knowledge is not at the service of will anymore. – Temporary suspension of will (suffering). – No different beauties (nature/art). • Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer: art shows a world absolutely indifferent to us. – Just a temporary release. • Important: aesthetic attitude. Is there something like that? No for Goodman and Dickie.

Die Ästhetisierung der Lebenswelt • That’s the program of F. Schlegel (Athenäum). – No frontiers between genres; creative process is endless. Defence of artistic dignity of all everyday objects. Confidence in children’s creativity, absolute sovereignty of the artist. – Romantic irony: distance of the artist regarding his/her work. Nothing is ever finished

Die Ästhetisierung der Lebenswelt • Kierkegaard: aesthetics=phenomenology of everyday existence. – Empty immediacy, instant. Sensuous joy. • Hegel: art is commited to truth (Absolute Spirit). Kunst ist etwas vergangenes. – – The end of art What about philosophy of art? Interpretation constitutes artwork (Danto) Interpretation changes the value of the previously uninterpreted or differently interpreted (Groys)

Die Ästhetisierung der Lebenswelt • What is interpretation? – Multiplicism/singularism (optimal interpretations/only one: author´s? – Danto: intensional structure of metaphor: water (blood) boils. Artwork cannot be paraphrased. – Are there any limits? – Lyotard: presentation of what cannot be presented (sublime).

Die Ästhetisierung der Lebenswelt • Die Äd. L (Rüdiger Bubner) is not exactly the dissapearing of frontiers. It’s the presence of design, Straβenkunst… • Extinction of art (if art is related to aura)? – Ästhetisierung der Wissenschaften • www. sciencephoto. com • http: //microscopy. fsu. edu • www. nationalgeographic. com

Somaesthetics • Stressing the body: Marx (working body), Nietzsche (body as power), Freud (desiring body). • Marx: economical categories are aesthetic ones. Merchandise, final stage are aesthetic ones. Reading of Vischer before Contribution to the critic of the political economy • Nietzsche: Apolo/Dioniso. – The world can be justified only aesthetically – Will to power is aesthetic: end in itself. – Interest in life (against Kant).

Somaesthetics – Art expresses lack of meaning of the will, but hides it by giving form. So, the world seems to have a meaningful form, and so it fulfills the task of the Kantian imagination. – Art must come back from idealists to the body, which is the judge. Art is a question of surfaces (deepness is a veil put on the banality of things). • Freud: unconscious works following aesthetic categories (condensation, displacement) – Art follows the economy of libido – Art is childish and regressive (no neurotic way of substituting satisfaction)

Somaesthetics – Art: sublimation of sexual desires in culturally accepted ways. – Regression – Robert Fleiss: Freudian model of aesthetic experience. • Aesthetic experience as early perceptive relationship. • Experience of regression to maternal experiences. – Deleuze: art as a clinic of civilization. • From passion to their noematic attribute • Art is a metaphysical diagnostics (fleeing from beauty: if the elaboration of symptom is not painful, it is false).

Art as criticism • Lukács: art in XVIII achieves an important ideological importance. – Importance of form (still life) – Importance of theory • Benjamin: disappearing of aura. Value of exhibition instead of value of cult. • Adorno: art must criticize its conditions of possibility. – The more dissociated, the more subversive and the more absurd. – By postulating the object criticized and negated, art collaborates with it. – The greatest political commitment: silence.

Art as criticism – Art contains a moment of utopy: it should be different. An embodied contradiction. – But when art becomes merchandising, it is a part of the problem. – Avant-garde as resistance to cultural industry. – Form as sedimentary content (Eco, Ortega) – Truth of the artwork is that of the philosophical concept.

Where we are Post-history

Saved by interpretation • It seems there are no legitimizing narratives, no hierarchies, no metaphysical commitments in art. • Interpretation of reality receives a higher value than reality. • Susan Sontag (Against interpretation): Interpretation is the revenge of intellect over art. – Is there a evident meaning? – Cab there be a brute experience? – Instead of hermeneutics we need a erotic of art (see mre, listen more, touch more…)

Saved by interpretation • The problem of emotions: are they sentimental or intentional states? (Cf. Robert C. Solomon) • The problem of emotions in fiction: – are they irrational? – Do we forget we are in a fiction? Coleridge: voluntary suspension of disbelief. – And the fictional pact? – We stay within the realm of belief.

Saved by interpretation • Stimmungen: no object. • Make-believe (K. Walton): thought (it might not be the case) vs. Belief (it has ought to be the case). • Different types of emotions: primitive (e. g. , upset, fear) and complex (jealousy).

Saved by interpretation • Intentions – Danto: correct interpretation of an artwork is the coinciding with the artist’s one (intentionalism). Criticism would be just a retrieval. The thinness of the work allows; the thickness of rhe artist restricts. Funny, isn’t it? – Anti-intentionalism: the meanings of a work are the meanings of the work (not what the artist wanted it to mean). – Moderate (hypothetical )intentionalism

Saved by interpretation • The constitutive theory of art. – Danto against aesthetic theories. • We don’t look for the perceptible difference if before we don’t know the ontological difference of two indiscernibles. • Need of an atmosphere of theory: Pot people and Basket folk. – Clifford Geertz: Bali cockfights, an artwork? – Danto’s theological position (consecration) needs also a tradition (Ur-arts). – But we need some difference between art and the rest (Nehamas). – Has exception become rule?

Saved by interpretation – Some contemporaries: economy of attention (Richard A. Lanham: maximum commentary with minimum effort): Duchamp, Marinetti, Warhol, etc. • Traps for imagination; the customer is always right; mass production instead of skill; mass audience instead of experts; today, not eternity; repetition, not oddity; create objects that can be sold. – Non-existing Bastillas (Amédée Ozenfant ): fictions created to justify. – What was tradition for avantgardists? Example of music.

Saved by interpretation • Excess of theory – Sein und Zeit § 32: constitutive interpretation. – Overinterpretation leads again to the domination of art by philosophy. – Danto: Warhol’s Brillo Boxes are about the end of art. – Epicurean Clinamen: hypothesis ad hoc to save the phenomena (but it makes the whole teory suspicious).

Saved by interpretation • The sublime of theory: – Pseudo-Longinus (Boileau) and 18 th century (Addison, Shaftesbury, Jacob, Baillie, Burke, Gerard, Priestley, Beattie). – gods, devils, hells, ghosts, miracles, enchantments, witchcraft, thunders, storms, powerful seas, floods, earthquakes, volcanos, monsters, snakes, wars, plagues, famines. – Effect; elevatión, exaltation, ecstasy, horror, astonishment, fear, etc. – In 18 th c. sublime has to do with moral philosophy (site of passions and feelings). – Pain followed by pleasure.

Saved by interpretation – Psychoanalysis: experience of sublime caused for the coming of the father into the pair mother-child. – Nothing to do with ugliness. – Santayana: sublime is the maximum beauty. – Not to do with unability of beauty.

Saved by interpretation • Today’s relics: cult, tradition, back to aura (stars). • Luc Ferry, Lidia Goehr, Gianni Vattimo, Roger Scruton, Jean-Marie Schaeffer: eclipse of the sacred, end of a society based on religion, substitution of faith for beauty and of religion by aesthetics, temples by museums, priests by artists, religious attitude by aesthetics one. New rituals.

Über das Neue • Greenberg: avant-garde vs. kitsch – Medium (painting=flatness) vs. Imitation of literature. • Ortega y Gasset: The dehumanization of art. – The artwork makes two groups. The one of those who understand it and the one of those who don’t. That causes pain to a mass used to Romantic art (naturalistic, realistic, human). Art concentrates in its own forms, without external reference. – So, best men recognize each other.

Über das Neue • The self-reference of art – Analitical statement: I’m a work of art. No external references. – Rejection of the audicence (in the sense of Greece, where there are no onlookers). – Letting the work be (as we do when we contemplate nature). – Avoiding any connotation in a world in which everything (except art, e. g. , minimal) connotes.

Über das Neue • A. Julius: trangression in art: 1) infring its own rules; 2) violate taboo; 3) political opposition. • Borys Groys: hierarchy: cultural archive vs. Profane space. Exchange between them. – The cultural rethoric inverts values, not the artist. • • Are the profane resources already exhausted. Everything is culture: are we short of profanity? Massive difussion of culture turns it into profane. Cultural memory is the secularized version of the divine one. » Religious destruction of culture (Iconoclasm)

Aesthetic properties and value • Is worth a Pollock $ 100 mill. ? Yes, if someone is ready to pay. • Speculation in art (new markets, investment). • Matthew J. Salganik, Peter Sheridan Dodds, Duncan J. Watts, “Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market”, en Science Vol. 311. nº 5762 (10 February 2006) 854 -856: social influence in judgement (of music). • http: //www. nymag. com/arts/art/season 2007/38983: 20 NY artists whose art changed art. • Santayana: the purpose of aesthetics is the perception of values.

Aesthetic properties and value • Thomas Jacobsen, et al. , “Brain correlates of aesthetic judgment of beauty”, en Neuro. Image 29 (2006) 276– 285: aesthetic judgements of beauty activate a neuron net that underlies also the value judgements (common substratum). • Model of judgement: a pure syllogism: if A has x and it’s good, everything having x will be good. But it never works. • Problem of inference: how we pass from “red” to “good”.

Aesthetic properties and value • Two meanings of artwork: evaluative/descriptive. • Two approaches to value: – Essentialism: there are essential properties that create value. They can be aesthetic properties, aesthetic experience raised by the work or special value of art. – Instrumentalism

Aesthetic properties and value • This is meta-aesthetics: what do we claim when we make statements about the value of art or when we evaluate a specific artwork? Are these subjective or objective? Are they dependent on tastes or are they general? Are these judgements true or false or cannot we say this? How can we know whether these claims are right? • Objectivism: afirmations are true or false independently of sujective states • Subjectivism: – Evaluations are true depending on subjective states of mind. – They only express feelings or attitudes.

Aesthetic properties and value • Is there something that we can find only in artworks? Maybe some kind of aesthetic properties (again supervenience). – Robert Morris: Litanies (1963). • James English, The Economy of Prestige: protest against awards contributes to hold the belief that true art has nothing to do with politics, money… So, we believe that creative achievements are something special, and we can complain about awards.

Legitimizing narratives • What kind of morality? – Richard Long (www. richardlong. org). Walking as a form of art. Can we judge it morally? • Platonism, utipism, autonomism, moderate moralism. – E. g. Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph des Willens.

Legitimizing narratives • The philosophican disenfranchisement of art (Danto). – Suspicion that art is dangerous, so history of art is the history of abolition of art. – Two theories of disenfranchisement: • Kant’s ephemeralization (disinterest) • Hegel’s relief (end of art) – Victory of philosophy over art • If art was not dangerous, what victory? • If art was dangerous, now it is philosophy • Or maybe philosophy makes nothing happen either.

Legitimizing narratives – Mimetic theory in Plato’s Republic gives art “ontological holidays” – Marxism moves art away fromn deep history: it cannot do anything happen. – Art cannot save the whales, but can communicate indirectly. Cf. Hamlet. • Is that essential to art? – Plato’s attack against art is like his attack to (sofist) rethoric.

Legitimizing narratives • Historical narratives (J. Levinson, N. Carroll). – – Manet’s Olympia and C. Schneeman’s/R. Morris’ Site. Hirst shark, in MET or in NHM? Ars non facit saltus, or does it? Ortega y Gasset: past art “is” not art; it “was” art. SO we must conjugate the name art. In present it means something, and in perfect something different. – Tradition as criterium of authenticity and legitimation (as in religion).

The essence of the artwork • Originality – Plato: image (ei[[dwlon) in Sofist: 235 c 9236 d 3 its two forms: icon (eijkwvn) and phantasma (fantavsma); in 239 c 9 -240 c 5 studies it in relation with non-being; in 266 a 8 -267 a 8 in the context of divine an human production. – The mimetic production of image is subject to falsity (yeu''do") and delusion (ajpavth) so it involves a non-being. – In Plato it is clear what an original is. What about today?

The essence of the artwork – Nominal authenticity: correct identification of the origins. – Fake/forgery is an artwork whose history of production is changed by someone for a public, usually in order to get an economic benefit. – Intention to deceive is the difference with copies or wrongly atrributed works. • The case van Meegeren • Should we get rid of his works once we know are forgeries?

The essence of the artwork – – – – Nelson Goodman: indiscernible for whom? Retrospectively the images seem really “modern”. Growing of the corpus of the author. Only when we know something is a work of art we grasp the differences. There is more to see in a picture than we perceive with the senses (against Tingle-Immersion theory). F for fake, 1973, Orson Welles. Abduction: we think that we find in a museum is art (best hypothesis: probabilism vs. Probabiliorism). Supposed Pollock’s example: http: //www. cbsnews. com/sections/i_video/main 500251. shtml? id= 2757716 n Fractal algorithm in Pollock determines its authenticity.

The essence of the artwork – Problem of Igorot (Philipines): Which is the original one? – What does the Recihstag wrapped by Christo consist of?

The essence of the artwork • The idea of creation: – Out of nothingness: Malevich – Emanation (neoplatonic): Kandinsky. – Unconscious life: dreams, revelations. – Intertextuality without any origin. – Every process is different: just artist and community.

The essence of the artwork • • Carole Schneeman’s Eye/Body (1963). Yves Klein, ’s Anthropometry (1960). Shigeko Kubota, Vagina Painting (1965). Ana Mendieta, Death of a Chicken (1972). Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, The class (2005). Guerrilla girls. Are they aesthetic? Are they empty without an interpretation?

The essence of the artwork • Constitutive openness. – Eco’s open work and Werktreue. – Every artwork must be open. Heidegger’s world and earth. – Roman Ingarden: empty places.

The essence of the artwork • The essence of art – Wittgenstein: What do get from a definition of art? They are just words that send us to other words. – Do we need a definition of chair? It’s enough with knowing the grammar. – Culture and value: Sometimes we need to take an expression out of the language and have it cleaned; later we can use it again. – Brancusi: Bird in space and law. – Lévi-Strauss against solipsistic art. Importance of the community. – Just Wittgenstein’s “family resemblances” (Mandelbaum, Weitz).

The essence of the artwork – The anomic fallacy • There are rules in every human activity • Wittgenstein: regulative rules can change; constitutive ones cannot. • Feeling for the rules can determine what changes will work (artists, critics) • If I hadn’t learnt the rules, I wouldn’t be able to make the aesthetic judgement (LC I 15). • Example of tennis.

Is beauty important in art? • Necessary but not sufficient condition • Beauty in Greece linked to goodness and divinity. • Plato – Importance of form and pythagorean proportion. – Erotism (Symp. ) – But it is also a value, as justice. • Aristotle – Beauty related to proportion, to a quality in the object. – There is not just a type of beauty (as in Plato). There are different categories.

Is beauty important in art? • Plotinus: Beauty as ideal. – Sometimes seems to be identified with the Good. • Medieval age – Platonic tradition: Augustine (aequalitas numerosa), Boethius and Dyonisus. – Aristotelian tradition: Albert the Great and Aquinas (Summa Theol. I, q. 39, a. 8: integrity or perfection, proportion or harmony and clarity) – Beauty as trascendental. – Pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent (Summa Theol. I, q. 5, a. 4 ad 1). • 18 th c. : beauty and taste (subjectivity). – Knowledge of the natural world is objective. Beauty is not.

Is beauty important in art? • Kant (KU): 1) beatiful is the object ot taste (disinterested satusfaction); 2) pleases universally without a concept; 3) purposiveness without a purpose; 4) necessary satisfaction • Wittgenstein (Notebooks): There is something in the conception that the end of art is the beautiful. And the beautiful is what makes happy. • Barnett Newman (The sublime is here): the boost of modern art is to destroy beauty. • Historic-artistic properties in fieri. Aesthetic properties in esse.

Is beauty important in art? • Can beauty be recognized? The case of Joshua Bell. http: //www. washingtonpost. com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR 20070404017 21. html • Ortega y Gasset (Adán en el paraíso) : The one in front of a picture without preconceptions is like an orangutan. • Beauty as a promise of happiness (Nehamas) and as a medial state (metaxy). • Santayana: beauty is the pleasure considered as the quality of a thing, objectified pleasure.

The science of beauty • Psychoanalysis: beauty is the regression to the experience of perfection in the state mother-child. • Neurology: Hideaki Kawabata y Semir Zeki, “Neural correlates of beauty”, en JNeurophysiol 91 (2004) 1699 -1705: importance of the neocortex. • Face: Average character (computer-generated), symmetry, skin texture, sexual dimorphism (maturity and reproductive potential, as well as a good immune system). • In art: V. S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein, “The Science of Art. A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience”, en Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, nº 6 -7 (1999) 15 -51; Semir Zeki, “Art and the Brain”, en Daedalus 127, nº 2 (1998) 71 -103; S. Zeki and M. Lamb, “The Neurology of Kinetic Art”, en Brain 117 (1994) 607 -636: peak shift effect.

The science of beauty • Sociology: relationship between beauty and goodnes. Cf. Stepehn M. Smith et al. , “Are the Beautiful Good in Hollywood? An Investigation of the Beauty-and. Goodness Stereotype on Film”, en Basic And Applied Social Psychology 21, nº 1 (1999) 69– 80; Alice H. Eagly et al, “What Is Beautiful Is Good, But…: A Meta-Anatytic Review of Research on the Physical Attractiveness Stereotype”, en Psychological Bulletin, 110, nº 1 (1991) 109 -128; sobre las ventajas sociales de las que disfrutan los individuos atractivos, véase Murray Webster, Jr. ; James E. Driskell, Jr. “Beauty as Status”, en The American Journal of Sociology, 89, nº 1. (Jul. , 1983) 140165.