Zangwill ReplyToFarellAndCompton
Zangwill ReplyToFarellAndCompton
Zangwill ReplyToFarellAndCompton
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Jonathan Farrell1 engages with the view of art that I articulate in my book Aesthetic Creation.2
Farrell considers my strategies for accommodating avant-garde works within the Aesthetic
Creation Theory—and for our purposes here, our discussion can include any aesthetic theory of
art. My motive was not the defensive one of saving a definition from counterexamples. That’s not
a game I find very interesting. Instead, I was pursuing an adequate understanding of the works in
question.
I claimed that Duane Hanson’s sculptures have a second-order status. They are deviant
sculptures. Kendall Walton is right about these cases.3 These sculptures ought to be seen as
second-order works; and that is essential to what they are. (Farrell worries about art-critical
essays on sculptures; but presumably, those essays are not meant to be seen as sculptures.) I am
unsure whether this strategy should count as disjunctive; for the second-order works essentially
involve first-order works—it is part of the essence of those second-order works. And the first-
order works essentially involve aesthetic functions or properties. Therefore the second-order
works essentially involve aesthetic functions or properties.
Farrell prefers a different strategy for treating works such as Hanson’s sculptures and also
Duchamp’s anti-aesthetic works. He suggests that we broaden the notion of the aesthetic so that
properties such as wittiness turn out to be aesthetic characteristics. Well, we can use the word
‘aesthetic’ however we like. There is no firmly established ordinary usage to which we must
defer. Given a broader notion of the aesthetic, perhaps Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm
and similar artworks will turn out to be aesthetic works, since they have aesthetic characteristics,
such as wittiness, that supervene in part on their context.
My worry is that the notion of the aesthetic thus widened will no longer be a useful and
interesting category. I ask: is there an interesting unity to the faculties of mind that are involved
when something is judged to have an aesthetic feature in the wider sense? I am skeptical. Farrell
supplies nothing to ease this concern. In my first book, The Metaphysics of Beauty,4 I supply an
account of what ‘aesthetic’ might usefully mean, which gave it a narrow sense, one that is likely
to exclude some avant-garde works. I stapled the notion of the aesthetic to beauty and ugliness,
not just to any features that works of art happen to have. There is surely no interesting category of
the aesthetic corresponding to the latter. We could just call those ‘artistic’ properties. However, a
definition of art in such terms would be patently unilluminating. I proposed a beauty-centered
account of the aesthetic, and if that is to be rejected another must be put in its place. What we
cannot do is operate with a casual and tacit notion of the aesthetic. Farrell says that he wants to
show that a view of art that deploys a broader notion of the aesthetic “warrants further
investigation.” I concede that. I am not saying that it is certain that an account of art in terms of
American Society for Aesthetics Graduate E-journal 1:1 Fall 2008 / Winter 2009
2 American Society for Aesthetics Graduate E-journal
some broader notion of the aesthetic cannot be maintained. But I would say that Farrell has a lot
of work to do.
NICK ZANGWILL
Professor
Philosophy Department
Durham University
Durham DH1 3HP United Kingdom
EMAIL: [email protected]
1. Jonathan Farrell, “Must Aesthetic Definitions of Art be Disjunctive?,” American Society for
Aesthetics Graduate E-journal 1 (Fall 2008 / Winter 2009).
2. Nick Zangwill, Aesthetic Creation (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007).
3. Kendall Walton, “Categories of Art,” The Philosophical Review 79, no. 3 (1970), 334–67.
4. Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
5. Elizabeth Zeron Compton, “Varieties of Response-Dependence: A Critique of Zangwill,”
American Society for Aesthetics Graduate E-journal 1 (Fall 2008 / Winter 2009).
6. Zangwill, Metaphysics of Beauty, chapter 11.
7. Ibid., 195.
8. Ibid., 196.
9. Ibid., 195–200.
10. Ibid., 186.
11. Margaret Wilson, “Berkeley on the Mind-Dependence of Color,” in Ideas and Mechanism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
12. Zangwill, Metaphysics of Beauty, 189.
13. Compton, 4.