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Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration
Philosophers have discussed art – or artistic practices such as poetry – since ancient times. But systems of art and entertainment appeared only in the modern era – in the West, during the 18th and 19th centuries. And philosophers have largely neglected the concept of entertainment. In this book Andy Hamilton explores art and entertainment from a philosophical standpoint. He argues, against modernist theory, that art and entertainment are not opposites, but form a loosely connected conceptual system. Against postmodernism, however, he insists on their vital differences.
Hamilton begins by questioning the received modernist view, examining artist-entertainers including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. Entertainment, he argues, is by nature audience-centred – but so is art, in a different way. Thus while art should pass thetestoftime, entertainment must pass the test ofits own time – it has to entertain at the time it is produced. Art and entertainment are inter-dependent concepts, and must be understood together with other aesthetic concepts including criticism, genius, canons and design. These concepts form the subject of later chapters of this book, where Hamilton develops a meritocratic position that is neither elitist nor populist. He also addresses the contemporary charge of cultural appropriation, and qualifies it.
An innovative feature of the book is the inclusion of dialogues with artists, critics and academics that help to recast or reformulate the debate. Art and Entertainment: A Philosophical Exploration is essential reading for those working in art and aesthetics, and will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as cultural studies, music and film studies, with an interest in entertainment.
Andy Hamilton teaches at Durham University, UK. He has published books and articles on aesthetics, Wittgenstein and philosophy of mind. He is the biographer of Lee Konitz, and writes for The Wire and other magazines on jazz and contemporary composition. He is a jazz pianist.
ART AND ENTERTAINMENT
A Philosophical Exploration
AndyHamilton
Designed cover image: Brighton Pierrots, 1915. By Walter Sickert (1860–1942). Image courtesy of Tate Images.
First published 2024 by Routledge
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Names: Hamilton, Andy, 1957– author.
Title: Art and entertainment: a philosophical exploration / Andy Hamilton.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023038715 (print) | LCCN 2023038716 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138599925 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138599949 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429485435 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Amusements Philosophy. | Art Philosophy.
8.3. Ownership, the artist as appropriator , and aestheticversusmoralcriticismofart
References Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My first debt is to my Aesthetics students at Durham University, especially those from academic year 2020–2021, in particular: Samuel Abel, Robbie Bell, Alexander Cohen, Paige George, Ruan Hughes, Laurent Noyon and Naledi Odiseng. I am also indebted to students from other years, including Ruby Main, Dominik Mitterer, Bayley Moreton, Ali Shakib and Michael Wee. I am also indebted to my discussants, Molly Barnes, Mark Carroll, Mandhira de Saram, Louise Gibbs, James Parakilas and James Young. Lewis Porter, who was series editor for my first book, on Lee Konitz, has continued to comment very helpfully on my work. Jason Gaiger made invaluable corrections of some over-conservative statements. In the concluding stages, the following friends provided generous hospitality: Byoungjae Kim, Sunny Yang, James Page and Liane Judd, Joel and Nancy Poznansky, David Macarthur and Talia Morag, and Philippa and Damian Byers.
Finally, I am grateful for comments from Chris Ballantine, Molly Barnes, Larissa Berger, Paul Bream, Damian Byers, Charles Coatsworth, Andrew Cooper, Chris Cowie, Víctor Durà-Vilà, Pauline Fairclough, Adam Fairhall, Niels Falch, Luke Farey, Daniel Feige, Jason Gaiger, Alex Gesswein, Lisa Giombini, Ben Givan, Philip Goff, Britt Harrison, Julian Horton, Phillip Horky, James Kirwan, Rob Lee, Dave Lloyd, David Macarthur, Clare MacCumhaill, James McGuiggan, Martin Mayes, Peter Nelson, David Over, Anthony Parton, Lara Pearson, Andrzej Poloczek, Richard Read, John Skorupski, James Shelley, Ben Smith, Dave Spurrett, Cain Todd, Sarah Weiss, Dawn Wilson, Mick Wright, James Young, Nick Zangwill and Patrick Zuk. I am much indebted to the experienced editorial advice and expertise of Adam Johnson and Jenny Guildford at Routledge, and the editorial assistance of Laura Dearlove and Diana James. The excellent Sam Horlor again helped me to produce the index. Finally, I am
particularly indebted to Bayley Moreton, who helped with final editing and offered many helpful comments.
An earlier version of Ch. 1 recently appeared in the BritishJournalof Aesthetics;this chapter develops its ideas. Ch. 4 develops the article “Kant And The Romantic Conception Of Genius”, in Art and Knowledge in Classical German Philosophy, ed. Francesco Campana and Gabriele Tomasi, 2021, Milan: Mimesis, and appearing in AestheticaPreprint, journal of the Italian Society for Aesthetics. Ch. 7 develops the article “Design as Fashion and As Problem-Solving", in FashionandPhilosophyed. J. Kennett, Blackwell, 2011.
Roger Squires died before this book was completed. He was my tutor at St Andrews and one of my most important philosophical mentors. He had little time for Kant, and loathed Adorno, so he did not fully appreciate the direction of my aesthetics. Nonetheless, his comments were always insightful and engaging. He was a rare and true philosopher, whose ego never distracted him from the pursuit of truth. He is much missed. This book is dedicated to him.
Three other mentors have passed away while this book was in preparation. Of all contemporary thinkers on aesthetics, the work of Roger Scruton has had the greatest effect on me. He was a complex figure, and it is sad that his colleagues in the humanities found it so hard to disentangle the contrasting elements in his thought. They would have learned much as a result. Lee Konitz was one of the greatest jazz musicians of the last century, and one of the most insightful thinkers on the subject of improvisation. It was an immense privilege to know him. Finally, Conrad Cork was a humane theorist of jazz, whose insights have had a great impact on my thinking about the music.
INTRODUCTION
DOI: 10.4324/9780429485435-1
Many ideas that inform this book have been fermenting over my career teaching aesthetics – and I am greatly indebted to the excellent students I have been privileged to teach at Durham. However, it is only more recently that I have been thinking about entertainment. Philosophical aesthetics has had less to say about it, and what it does say is usually under the heading of popular culture rather than in its own right. This volume claims that what makes something entertainment rather than art is not that it is part of popular as opposed to high culture. Art and entertainment are overlapping concepts and not polar opposites, I argue. They show similarities and contrasts. Thus while art should pass the test of time, entertainment must pass the test of its own time – it has to entertain at the time it is produced. Art and entertainment contribute to human wellbeing in different ways, so the contrast between them is not simply a normative one according to which art is superior. Art and entertainment are inter-dependent concepts that must be understood in conjunction with other aesthetic concepts including criticism, genius, canons, and design. These concepts form the subject of later chapters of this book.
0.1. “Real Aesthetics”
Meta-philosophy – the method of philosophy – should not be encouraged, because philosophy is already abstract enough. But readers and audiences have challenged me, so I should offer a few
observations on my approach. Possibly its most distinctive feature is what I call RealAesthetics, echoing the famous British campaign of the last century, the Campaign for Real Ale (CamRA).1 The Campaign for Real Aesthetics (CamRA2) puts discussion of actual examples – from art, entertainment, design, nature or everyday life – centre-stage in philosophical aesthetics, drawing on what artists and critics say about their work. Thus I agree with Eric Lewis’s “practical guiding principle” in his recent book on improvisation, that “the thoughts of musicians concerning their own creative activities must be taken very seriously”. The approach is also found in Gover’s Art and Authority, while Aaron Meskin advocates the importance of practice.2 But other philosophers seem averse to Real Aesthetics, perhaps because they do not feel professionally qualified – or because they insist too rigidly on the demarcation of conceptual and empirical that has characterised 20th century philosophy since Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Indeed, the tendency may go back to Kant. It is hard to combine analysis of particular artworks with philosophical discussion, and writers who can do this convincingly –Adorno, Wollheim, Danto, Scruton, Pippin, Goehr – are few. Hence Adorno’s motto for AestheticTheory: “One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called philosophy of art: either philosophy or art”.3 But the attempt must be made. Philosophers should abandon philosophical caution, and respond to art as an artlover and critic. Another motivation for Real Aesthetics is that it seeks an audience beyond the academy. As a result, some debates in this book – for instance that concerning humane art and unempathetic film-makers – may seem too philosophical for critics and writers on the arts, but too substantive for philosophers. My chapter on criticism argues that all artlovers are, or should be, critics, if only amateur ones. Aesthetic questions are not decided by experts. But as the chapter on criticism argues, while aesthetic judgments are in some sense subjective they should not be made in isolation from the critics. Aesthetics, like ethics, exhibits the twin poles of spontaneity and dialogue. Hence
my crucial qualification of subjectivism: we decide aesthetic questionsforourselves,butnotbyourselves.According to the claim that I call the democracy of taste, any serious aesthetic judgment has standing in the discourse on art – aesthetic judgments are essentially democratic. A critical judgment is an aesthetic judgment, and contrasts with expert scholarly judgments that are nonaesthetic.
I referred to philosophy’s demarcation of empirical and conceptual, but it is not just philosophy that considers conceptual and therefore aesthetic questions. All disciplines exhibit a continuum between empirical and conceptual. Philosophy is the most selfconsciously conceptual discipline, but philosophers need knowledge of relevant first-order subject-matter. Thus writers in aesthetics should bring to bear as much critical awareness and practical knowledge of artistic and cultural practices as possible. Crossfertilisation with artistic disciplines is essential to philosophical aesthetics, and encourages contributions from arts practitioners themselves. What follows is therefore a synthesis of conceptual analysis, reflection on presuppositions underlying ordinary language, and argument based on social, cultural and historical evidence. I leave it to readers to decide whether this synthesis carries conviction. One thing I would stress, however: our language-game of art and entertainment is deeply unsatisfactory, and one struggles to express required distinctions by means of its vocabulary. That is because it raises contested issues concerning fundamental aspects of our social and political lives, reflected for instance in the debate between elitism and populism which underlies talk of high and popular art.
0.2. Wittgenstein
Other general aspects of my approach can be elucidated through the philosophers that have informed it. Wittgenstein is my main philosophical influence. Thus I generally outline salient features for key concepts such as art and entertainment, rather than offering a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Also like him, I reject science-fictional philosophy, and examine the real world presuppositions underlying our concepts. Thus I argue that there could not be an artworld consisting entirely of readymades or conceptual art, since aesthetic judgment concerning art rests on experience of more traditional artworks. Finally, I reject scientism, and so I am sceptical about theories of aesthetics that assume it, including evolutionary theories.4
In a 1933 lecture, Wittgenstein agreed with Schopenhauer that “a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. [In philosophy] we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.”5 I sympathise with this view, and my book is not “through-argued” on an Analytic model – it does not present explicit cumulative argument that aims to demonstrate a main thesis. Rather, the book is unified by certain leitmotifs or themes. It is closer to “through-composition" in music, where large-scale forms have cross-connections between elements or movements that foster a sense of continuity throughout the work. Wittgenstein was often unsure what he thought, and often wrote in a many-voiced or implicitly dialogue form. This form, I believe, is particularly appropriate for opening up debate, and I use it here and elsewhere.6 Thus, although essentially a monograph, my book is broken up by dialogues with artists, critics and academics, that help to recast or reformulate the debate. I am uncertain about some of my central claims. Analytic philosophy has disdain for such candid uncertainty, and makes a fetish of impregnability. Thus for Nozick, “No philosopher says: ‘That’s where I started, here’s where I ended up; the major weakness in my work is . . . here are the most notable
distortions . . . ’” . 7 Nozick exaggerates here. Philosophers rarely say this, but perhaps they ought to. Wittgenstein, in his less crafted material, does.
Although Wittgenstein did not make a substantive contribution to aesthetics, he had an interesting view of the nature of aesthetic reasons. He comments that
Reasons . . . in Aesthetics, are “of the nature of further descriptions” . . . and all that Aesthetics does is “to draw your attention to a thing”, to “place things side by side”. He said that if, by giving “reasons” of this sort, you make another person “see what you see” but it still “doesn’t appeal to him”, that is “an end” of the discussion.8
Wittgenstein is too categorical here; “the discussion” can continue, as further such reasons are adduced. Hence, for instance, my brief discussion of emotionally cold film auteurs such as Hitchcock and Cronenberg, in the chapter on criticism, could be debated at length. Aesthetic judgments cannot be subjective expressions of the agreeable, as Wittgenstein seems to suggest. A judgment of the beautiful is like a cognitive judgment in aiming at universality. It is made in the context of a debate, and is intended to persuade –which it will not do unless it is regarded as disinterested.
Philosophers will hardly deny that philosophicalaesthetics involves argument, but seem reluctant to recognise that aesthetic judgment itself does – that artistic criticism involves making aesthetic judgments based on argument. The domain of aesthetics cannot be defined, as it sometimes is, through a list of properties: beautiful, sublime, ugly, elegant, garish . . . which are held to feature in judgments of the form “X is beautiful”, “X is sublime” and so on. “Aesthetic properties” are at most the beginning of an account of philosophical aesthetics.
0.3. Kant, Adorno and historicism
Wittgenstein wrote little on aesthetics, and my approach in that area is indebted to major figures who did – in particular, Kant and Adorno. Kant was the founder of modern aesthetics. The 18th century heritage of Western aesthetics – the work of Shaftesbury, Baumgarten, Lessing, Hutcheson, Hume, Kant and Schiller – is foundational to this branch of philosophy. Kant is the most important of these figures, and the radical changes in the world of the arts during the 18th century were expressed, in some ways incompletely, in his work. Hegel only slightly exaggerated when he said that Kant spoke the first rational word on aesthetics. Hume is an important presence also, particularly for his account of criticism. It was a great loss to aesthetics that he never wrote his intended book on art and criticism, as part of the Treatise.9
Kant, to some extent anticipated by Hume, founded aesthetics as a branch of philosophical enquiry when he unified a class of judgments – “aesthetic judgments” or judgments of the beautiful –that had not till then been recognised as a unity. In doing so, Kant carefully separated the value-spheres of the cognitive, moral and aesthetic. For him, morality must recognise aesthetic autonomy, expressed through pure judgments of taste. The Ancient Greeks, in contrast, did not recognise aesthetic autonomy and the separation of the value spheres. As Keats’s Grecian Urn tells us, “Beauty is Truth, and Truth Beauty/That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”.10
For Kant, the domain of aesthetic judgments involves both understanding and experience. They are distinct from ordinary cognitive judgments, from moral judgments, and from purely subjective likings and dislikings. That is, for Kant, they are subjectively universal. This involves a crucial qualification of subjectivism, which – to reiterate – can expressed by saying that we
decide aesthetic questions for ourselves, but not by ourselves. For instance, we read the critics. Kant expressed the qualification by saying that aesthetic judgment are disinterested, in the sense of being devoid of practical interest. My account rests on a broadly Kantian conception of philosophical aesthetics, which treats it as the philosophy of art and beauty, including natural beauty, and that of artefacts that are not art – a sub-division of philosophy that considers fundamental questions about the arts and concepts related to beauty.
A central question is whether the 18th century developments, in which Kant’s work was central, served to re-orient an existing aesthetic realm, or whether they created that realm. I believe that aesthetic judgment is ubiquitous and non-esoteric, and has always existed. Whenever someone is attracted to a person’s or object’s beauty, aesthetic judgment is involved. It is not an 18th century invention, as philosophers sometimes suggest, and does not involve a rarefied attitude of passive contemplation.11 There was philosophical work on the nature of beauty from ancient times. Plato took Beauty to be a Form, allied to the Good, whose instances were objects of love. But for him, poetry was possibly pernicious and should be tightly controlled. Aristotle took a less exalted view of beauty, but treated the arts – insofar as for him they form a category – more liberally. However, Kant grasped the nature of the aesthetic in a way that previous writers had not. For Kantians such as the present writer, the 18th century saw the true foundation of philosophical aesthetics, which brings together philosophy of art and philosophy of beauty, and includes an aesthetic attitude to nature.
My second major influence in aesthetics is Adorno, who made the most important contribution to the subject in the 20th century. He is known for his highly original understanding of the social situation of art, and like Hegel, attempted to unify philosophical aesthetics with criticism and history of art – the central idea of what I called Real Aesthetics. Adorno, unlike Kant, was an historicist. My account is
historicist in that it recognises that artistic and aesthetic concepts have an ahistorical core but are historically conditioned – and that philosophers should have some understanding of these features.
In aesthetics, of all areas of philosophy, it seems futile to attempt to write ahistorically. A genius like Kant or Wittgenstein could perhaps do so. However, Kant acknowledged that judgments of dependent beauty are culturally relative, and thus recognised historical relativity; it is puzzling why Wittgenstein's conceptual analysis was not more historical or genealogical.12 What is historicism? Marx, and Christianity, have a radically historicist teleological theory of history. Moderate historicism, in contrast, recognises that concepts change, and that philosophers need to understand the broad contours of their evolution. Concepts of art, beauty, design, criticism and the aesthetic are changing and dynamic. Despite the Analytic demarcation of conceptual and empirical referred to earlier, historical knowledge is necessary to philosophy, and philosophical aesthetics in particular. Historicism does not transgress that demarcation; it does not say that philosophers should become historians. But it does imply that one needs general historical knowledge to understand how concepts have developed.
In developing an historicist standpoint, I apply G.E.R. Lloyd’s broad/narrow distinction to concepts such as art, entertainment and design.13 All societies have art, but not all have a conceptof art – a concept that probably implies a system of the arts. On the view of art historian Oscar Kristeller, Plato and the Greeks – and other premodern societies – did not think of poetry and drama, music, painting, sculpture and architecture as species of the same genus, practised by “artists” in our current overarching sense.14 I am inclined to follow Kristeller in holding that a modernsystem of the arts appeared only in the 18th century, a system that I wish to extend to entertainment (Chapter 2). With the modern system of the arts appeared autonomous art, that lacks a direct social function.
However, I am less sure than Kristeller that systems of art before the European Renaissance were fragmentary. It is possible, for instance, that the Ancient Greeks had a system of mimetic art, though this had disappeared by the medieval period; while Japan had a system of The Four Accomplishments. The modern self-conscious conception of art appeared only from the Renaissance, manifesting itself in different eras depending on the artform. What must be recognised is that not all societies have a systemof art, and not all those that do have the modern Western system. These are questions for art historians, musicologists, intellectual historians, anthropologists and others – here, the philosopher is largely a consumer of their ideas, though analysing them conceptually.
Kristeller’s thesis helps us discern a continuity between two senses or forms of art, and an analogous one between two senses or forms of entertainment. Thus a central assumption of this volume is that in the pre-modern era, art was often produced without either a concept of the artist, or a self-conscious conception. I call this “art” with a small “a” – the broad concept – and it is now subsumed in a system of the arts that did not exist when it was produced. The selfconscious artistic creations of modernity, in contrast, are “Art” with a capital “a” – the narrow concept. The same arguments apply to entertainment. My account therefore combines universal and historically conditioned features of both art and entertainment. My view is that the categories of art and entertainment are not eternal, and that to understand them, one must consider their historical contexts and development.
To reiterate, like many, perhaps all fundamental concepts – selfconsciousness, memory and perception are other examples – art has an ahistorical core, and a historically evolving periphery. That ahistorical core treats art as an audience-directed practice or performance normallyinvolvingskill,witha consciousaestheticend, that in central cases pleasurably rewards aesthetic attention. Although I generally propose salient features rather than necessary
and sufficient conditions for concepts, this almost tautological characterisation seems essential, otherwise the contrasting systems found in different societies would not be systems of art; likewise one could not say that in medieval society, for instance, there was art without a self-conscious conception and thus a system. Aesthetics needs to understand art’s changing features, to avoid mistaking them as essential.
The later 18th century saw other revolutionary developments in the world of the arts. In addition to the development of the modern system of the arts, these include the appearance of Romantic ideals of genius and self-expression, and the developing autonomy and associated commodification of art, linked with a developing bourgeois public sphere of taste. It also includes the appearance of the modern meaning of “aesthetic” and “aesthetic judgment" through the work of Kant, in which it is concerned with beauty and cognate concepts, rather than generally referring to the senses. The practice of criticism, and development of a canon, were also central, and together with genius, form the topics of chapters 4 to 6. My position is therefore more historicist than Kant’s or Wittgenstein’s. This volume also addresses Adorno’s application of Kant’s doctrine of purposivenesswithoutapurpose— originally directed at nature – to art, a development vital to the history of aesthetics. Adorno developed Kant’s notion into a concept of autonomous art, which I have argued lacks direct or subservient social function.15
The contentious concept of uselessworkis developed in Chapter 7 on product design. I argue that this paradoxical concept is a feature of all artistic production, and helps cash out the concept of the aesthetic. As design theorist David Pye writes: “whenever humans design and make a useful thing they invariably expend a good deal of unnecessary and easily avoidable work on it which contributes nothing to its usefulness”.
Their crafting goes beyond the strictly functional, to create ornament and excellent finish:
“workmanship”, “design for appearance”, “decoration” . . . are part of [a universal] pattern of behaviour . . . doing useless work on useful things . . . The essential bases of good design . . . are largely useless and, unfortunately, avoidable . . . few people realise how nastily things can be made and still work well enough.16
Thus a nail on a door would be nearly as effective as a coat-hook. The concept of useless work, like all aesthetic concepts, must be located historically. For Adorno, the concept of autonomous art is an ideological construct, but he was an aesthete or artlover nonetheless. Hence my thumbnailhistory of art, as follows: People have always produced useless work on useful things, but in the modern era, theybegan toproduce useless work on uselessthings thatis,artworks.So, the small table I am now using in Cafédral in Durham is varnished underneath; this is not generally visible and so seems to be useless work. That underneath surface is smoother than it needs to be to avoid snagging or splintering. Such useless work seems to be a natural human tendency.
0.4. Defining “aesthetic”
My thumbnail history of art as useless work contributes to an analysis of the aesthetic – it is one way of cashing out the concept. One cannot make progress on the issues covered in this volume without analysing that concept. “Aesthetic” is a semi-technical term – like “self-consciousness” and perhaps “perception” – which now denotes a philosophical sub-discipline. But aesthetics is not simply a sub-discipline of philosophy. Every first-order discipline should have a philosophical dimension, and aesthetics has a broad remit as part of musicology, art history and so on. Although “aesthetic” is a term of art in more than one sense, what it describes is ordinary and
unmysterious: an attitude of intensified or enriched experience which, as Kant explained, is devoid of practical interest. (This is a meaning that became dominant from the later 18th century.) Aesthetic experience should be contrasted not with ordinary experience, but with practical concern – it is not the preserve of an elite of “aesthetes” or “connoisseurs”. Aesthetic judgments are ubiquitous – that is, anything can be regarded aesthetically, whether natural, artefactual or artwork. But although one can pay aesthetic attention to anything, not everything rewards it, let alone richly rewards it, as the greatest art does.17 Aesthetic judgments are democratic, in that anyone’s serious judgment is worthy of attention; the chapter on criticism defines what I termed the democracy of taste. Finally, aesthetic judgements are irreducibly perceptual, hence Kant’s Acquaintance Principle: judgements of aesthetic value must be based on first-hand experience of their objects (discussed in chapters 4 and 6).
The preceding Kantian characterisation is quite commonly accepted in philosophical aesthetics. It is disputed by postmodernists (who reject it entirely) and by proponents of everyday aesthetics (who dilute it). In other respects, however, this volume defends a conception of the aesthetic that is unusual and possibly unique – an inter-definition of art and the aesthetic that seems almost tautological, but which as far as I am aware has had no previous defenders. My view is that “art” and “aesthetic” are inter-dependent concepts that cannot be understood independently – taking “art” to include pre-modern “art” with a small “a”. The inter-dependence of concepts has been neglected by analytic philosophy. But philosophy should be synthetic as well as analytic, and should recognise that groups of concepts become wholes. The result is anaesthetic theory of art, though not theaesthetic theory of art – because on my view, dependence between art and the aesthetic is two-way, not one-way as in “the” aesthetic theory. Art essentially has an aesthetic aim. To say “I’m interested in the aesthetics of art” would be bizarrely
tautological; not so with “aesthetics of nature” or “aesthetics of sport”. A common objection to this view is that there could be a society with a pure aesthetics of nature, that did not produce art. But this seems inconceivable.
The inter-dependence of art and the aesthetic helps us to grasp what the concept of the aesthetic involves – making a very difficult task somewhat less difficult (see Chapter 3). Thus I suggest that the aesthetic:
(1) Involves beauty and cognate concepts.
(2) Involves making a judgment rather than expressing a mere liking, and so involves some notion of disinterestedness.
(3) Involves useless work.
(4) Is inter-dependent with the concept of art, in the manner just described.
To reiterate, aesthetic concepts are perceptual and concern appearance – aesthetics is about seeing or hearing things in a certain way – but reasons can be given for such judgments. “Aesthetic pleasure” is a kind of pleasure or liking distinctive of the appreciation of art (small “a” or capital “A”). Proponents of everyday aesthetics and environmental aesthetics are inclined to overlook the conceptual holism with art. On their view, aesthetics is about individual, subjective experience. However, I would argue, that is not sufficient to characterise aesthetic pleasure. To reiterate, we decide aesthetic questions for ourselves, but not by ourselves. The agreeable is not an aesthetic category, though it is close to one. This is not to deny that aesthetics concerns everyday life – this is what I have termed theubiquity oftheaesthetic,that anything can reward aesthetic attention. Since ancient times, and more directly since the 17th century, artists have been concerned with everyday life. Hence still life painting, which portrays everyday items such as fruit and vegetables, or pots and pans.
As Adorno recognised, one cannot address the concept of the aesthetic independently of its social and political context, and to that I now turn.
0.5. A dialectical alternative to aesthetic purism and postmodernism
The intersection of aesthetics and politics is an important but rather neglected area. Concerning that intersection, this book advocates subjectiveuniversalitywithoutelitismorpopulism. My view is neither strongly objectivist in assuming independent aesthetic facts, nor purely subjectivist in the sense of “Anyone’s judgment is as good as anyone else’s”. It allows for better or worse aesthetic judgment, and for variation in that judgment depending on contextual factors, both in the production of art and in critical judgment. This conclusion follows from the characterisation of subjective universality earlier, which involved a crucial qualification of subjectivism: that we decide aesthetic questions for ourselves, but not by ourselves. That is, we seek the assistance of others, for instance by reading the critics. This position is neither elitist nor populist, and I label it meritocratic. Elitism is not the only alternative to populism, therefore.
Populists allow that neuro-surgeons, physicists and sports professionals should possess genuine skill or expertise – no one objects to elitism in brain surgery, or in Olympic team selection. What populists deny are elitist claims that moral, cultural, and spiritual ends and values invite substantive and not merely instrumental deliberation, and that some individuals are more penetrating judges of these questions than others. Populists target
high culture, and the aesthetic judgment which underlies its canons. For populists, the artworld of curators, connoisseurs and critics possesses the illusion of expertise, purporting to legislate on what are purely subjective matters of taste and opinion. Populists reject critical authority and the development of taste; for them, taste changes but does not develop. According to populists, critics inhibit the individual’s aesthetic response, undermining their trust in their own opinions. In contrast, this volume proposes a meritocratic account that rejects both populism and elitism. This account holds that one develops one’s aesthetic sensibility with the help of the critics, but also recognises the democracy of taste, which as we saw holds that anyone’s considered judgment has status in the critical discourse.
On the question of the political content and critique of art, I also pursue a distinctive position that avoids both what I call aesthetic purism, and postmodern ideological critique. The latter standpoint regards aesthetic and artistic value as the product of a dominant (Western, bourgeois, male) ideology, that enforces ethnic and sexist oppression. Postmodern theorists argue that a work endures at first for contingent reasons arising from hegemonic power, which assigns it a niche in the canon. The work ensures its own canonicity by defining the values by which it will be judged. In TheWesternCanon Harold Bloom opposes ideological critique, insisting on “the autonomy of the aesthetic” against those who regard the canon as an instrument of cultural and political hegemony. He holds that artworks must be judged on their own terms, independent of social or political concerns. In my view, in contrast, a humane aesthetics must take regard of social and political realities, without being reduced to them. My position is “Not Harold Bloom, but let a hundred flowers bloom”. That difficult balancing act underlies many of the discussions in this volume.
Finally, a stylistic note – with the exception of commonly understood examples like NATO and BBC, there are no TOFLAs in
this book. A TOFLA is a three or four-letter acronym or initialism, often coined by the author; acronyms unlike initialisms form a word, but the distinction is neglected. Thus “aesthetics of imperfection” becomes “AOI”, and “single distinguishing factor" becomes “SDF”. Many philosophers seem to assume that a phenomenon does not exist until it has been awarded a TOFLA, and so their work is peppered with them. The result is a literary barbarism that should be avoided.
Notes
1. That campaign apparently continues: https://camra.org.uk.
2. Lewis (2019), p. 10; Gover (2017).
3. Schlegel (1991), p. 2 (no. 12).
4. Examples include Dissanayake (1990) and Dutton (2009).
5. Ambrose (1979), p. 43.
6. “Dialogue on Rhythm”, in Cheyne, Hamilton and Paddison (2019).
7. Nozick (1974), p. xiii.
8. Moore (1959), p. 19.
9. In the “Advertisement” to Book I of the Treatise, Hume announced that if the publication met with success, “I shall proceed to the examination of Morals,Politics,andCriticism”. Sadly it did not. For some writers, aesthetics was founded by the pre-Kantian rationalists (see https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-founding-ofaesthetics-inthe-german-enlightenment-the-art-of-invention-and-theinventionof-art/). But unlike Kant, these were not great philosophers.
10. What the unity or separation of the value spheres amounts to is addressed in Brozzo and Hamilton (2022).
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