ART, PHILOSOPHY OF

the study of the nature of art, including such concepts as interpretation, representation and expression, and form. Additional reading Paul Ziff, The Task of Defining a Work of Art, Phil. Rev., 62:5878 (1953); Dewitt Parker, The Analysis of Art (1926); Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (1953); John Dewey, Art As Experience (1934); Warren E. Steinkraus, Philosophy of Art, rev. ed. (1984); V.A. Howard, Artistry: The Work of Artists (1982); R.A. Sharpe, Contemporary Aesthetics: A Philosophical Analysis (1983); Patricia H. Werhane (ed.), Philosophical Issues in Art (1984); and Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art (1983).For a discussion of intention in art interpretation see first the classic attack on intention by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy, in The Verbal Icon (1954); for an opposed view see Leslie A. Fiedler, Archetype and Signature: A Study of the Relationship Between Biography and Poetry, Sewanee Rev., 60: 253273 (1952); and Henry D. Aiken, The Aesthetic Relevance of the Artist's Intentions, J. Phil., 52:742753 (1955). Classic sources on art as imitation (representation) are Aristotle, Poetics, and Longinus, On the Sublime. Modern works include Walter Abell, Representation and Form (1936), particularly in visual art; Theodore M. Greene, The Arts and the Art of Criticism (1940); and Stephen C. Pepper, The Work of Art (1955). See also Richard Kuhns, Psychoanalytic Theory of Art: A Philosophy of Art on Developmental Principles (1983); and Howard J. Smagula, Currents, Contemporary Directions in the Visual Arts (1983).A classic source on art as expression is Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? (1898; Aylmer Maude translation in Oxford World's Classic Library, 1930, reprinted 1960); defense of forms of expression theory are Robin G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1938); and Curt J. Ducasse, The Philosophy of Art, rev. ed. (1966). John Hospers (ed.), Artistic Expression (1971) is an anthology of readings on artistic expression. Marcia Muelder Eaton, Art and Nonart (1983), is also relevant.For a defense of art as form, see Clive Bell, Art (1914, reprinted 1958); Roger Fry, Transformations (1927); and Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schnen, 7th ed. rev. (1885; Eng. trans., The Beautiful in Music, 1891, reprinted 1957). Moral and social aspects of the subject are treated in George Santayana, Reason in Art (1910). Roger Taylor, Beyond Art: What Art Is and Might Become If Freed from Cultural Elitism (1981), is a discussion of art as an integral part of life; Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (1981), is an examination of the relationship between philosophy and art, and of the distinction between art works and commonplace objects. Dennis Dutton (ed.), The Forger's Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art (1983), is a collection of original essays on this special topic.Histories of the subject include Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (eds.), Philosophies of Art and Beauty (1964); Alexander Sesonske (ed.), What Is Art? (1965); and Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (1966). See also Eugenio Tras, The Artist and the City (1982; originally published in Spanish, 1976); Michael F. Palmer, Paul Tillich's Philosophy of Art (1984); Mikel Dufrenne, Main Trends in Aesthetics and the Science of Art (1979); and Stephen David Ross (ed.), Art and Its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory (1984). Art as imitation (representation) The view that art is imitation is at least as old as the Greek philosopher Plato (428347 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. 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 houseit cannot, since the real house is three-dimensional and the painting is two-dimensionalbut it looks enough like one to enable everyone unhesitatingly to identify it as a house. 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 leastat 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. Analysis of representation 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 personthough 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 abstractthat 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. 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. 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. 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 itselfwithout 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. 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. 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. 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? That art should be an outright duplication (incorrectly called imitation) of reality is a view that was put forward by the French novelist mile Zola in his book Le Roman exprimental (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. 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. 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 waythe 19th-century French painters Paul Czanne 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. Pragmatic theories of art 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 audiencewhether those effects be primarily sensory, cognitive, moral, religious, or social. Hedonistic theories of art 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. 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. In any case, the theory has often been amended to read aesthetic pleasure rather than simply pleasurethus 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 sakethat is, for no further end and without ulterior motivethen 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. 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. 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.