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THE MEANING OF ART.
Term Paper ID:29703
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Essay Subject:
Individual responses to art.... More...
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5 Pages / 1125 Words
2 sources, 15 Citations,
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Paper Abstract:
Individual responses to art. Aesthetic value. Artistic meanings, designative and embodied. Discusses views of two art critics. Danto's emphasis on artistic intention as primary agency of meaning. Hickey's emphasis on the experience of the completed artwork. Example of Raphael's
"Transfiguration." Artistic traditions and beauty.
Paper Introduction:
When Danto considers the dominant aesthetic measure of art to be the artist's intention or thought and Hickey considers it as the complement of value judgments that the viewer of art brings to the enterprise of response to the work, one effect of their respective approaches to understanding what constitutes art and why is to set up a seemingly intractable dialectic. The intractability is all the more intense because each critic develops his argument by reaching back as far as the Renaissance to identify attributes of its visual-arts culture that support the conclusion he draws.
Danto (51-2) valorizes the intent that the artist Raphael brought to his Transfiguration as the explanation for the choices made--irrespective of the admiration that Hegel or the contempt that the pre-Raphaelites might have brought to analysis of the same
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Equally, however, an artistic idea may control the evocation ofclarity or commentary, and not at all of beauty. is known with reference to other words"(84). The importance that Hickey and Danto assign to the nexus of art andmeaning becomes the basis on which their dialectic can be resolved into asynthesis even if it cannot be wholly reconciled. Yet Dadaism must survive as exemplar of the wayavant-garde art, which may not be immediately accessible as a thing ofbeauty, assigns moral and aesthetic weight to artistic intent. In Danto's view, artistic meaning relies for coherence specificallyand programmatically on authorial intent, however difficult it may be todiscern, and though the importance and meanings attached to a work maydiffer from age to age. To put it another way, Dadaism was, way down deep, really superficial;to paraphrase Dadaist Gertrude Stein, it turned out that there was noparticular there there. The intractability is all the more intense because each criticdevelops his argument by reaching back as far as the Renaissance toidentify attributes of its visual-arts culture that support the conclusionhe draws. He cautions thatthere is no shortage of bureaucratic/academic/aesthetic interpreters toexplain what art means. "The Abuse of Beauty." Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 131 (Fall 2 2): 35-56.Hickey, Dave. Individual responses to art, says Hickey, navigate between what hecalls designative meanings, or references in a work to things that areunlike themselves, and embodied meanings, which "reference things that arelike themselves--as a word . "Buying the World." Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 131 (Fall 2 2): 69-87. According to Hickey, modern consumers of art, as consumers, also exerta species of aesthetic authority in their responses to art. But shifting levels of importance do not preventartworks from having explanatory powers for the varieties of humanexperience from age to age. Danto cites with approval thedeliberate efforts of the early 2 th-century avant-garde "to dislodgebeauty from its mistaken place in the philosophy of art" (39). Thus aesthetic sensibilities of post-Renaissance viewers of artprovided meanings that might have intersected with the artists' originalintent, and Hegel's response to (and decoding of) such intent in respect ofthe Transfiguration that Danto quotes could be considered an example ofsuch an interpretation. That is rather different from Hickey's observation that those whorespond to art feel, for good or ill, a sense not of obligation but ratherof entitlement to the quality and content of their response. He cites the"ideological consistency" (78) that the Church imposed on religiouslythemed paintings it that it commissioned from the Renaissance masters andthe artistic (and, oddly enough, envelope-pushing) innovation that derivedfrom the imposition of limits on the artists. Danto's theme emphasizes the idea of art as"an intellectual product" that must "express the thought the art embodies"(Danto 52). Inother words, the sensibility of the responder provides a context forarguing, against the opinion of the previous critics to whom Hegel is alsoresponding, the aesthetic unity of the artifact, and in the processimplying that Raphael himself contemplated the artifact as an instance ofaesthetic unity. For Danto, the importance of Hegel's analysis is that it identifiesthe original intent, or "design," that Raphael as the artist must havebrought to the Transfiguration. . For example,today's reasons for admiring Renaissance religious art are bound to bedifferent from what the Churchmen or even the artist originally intended.Indeed, Hickey locates the origins of the beaux-arts tradition in the actof profanation, or "willfully misinterpreting masterworks of sacred andphilosophical art as icons of private desire and personal enthusiasm" (79-8 ). Danto gives the example of the Dadaists, whodeliberately "dissociat[ed] the artists from the society they held incontempt" (46)--and who, despite their claims of "total subversion" and anegative attitude toward the fusion of art and beauty, can be seen inhistorical perspective as having provided "babbling in place of beauty,silliness instead of sublimity. When Danto considers the dominant aesthetic measure of art to be theartist's intention or thought and Hickey considers it as the complement ofvalue judgments that the viewer of art brings to the enterprise of responseto the work, one effect of their respective approaches to understandingwhat constitutes art and why is to set up a seemingly intractabledialectic. Thus those who respond to the painting are obliged by thechallenge of identifying artistic intention and reasoning their way towardmeaning, which may yield the perception of beauty. Danto (51-2) valorizes the intent that the artist Raphael brought tohis Transfiguration as the explanation for the choices made--irrespectiveof the admiration that Hegel or the contempt that the pre-Raphaelites mighthave brought to analysis of the same work. Notice thatthe dislodging is between beauty and philosophy, not between beauty andart, though the artist may intend to create not beauty but ratherdeliberately (philosophical) provocative end product that is also ugly.That is what calls for "critical explanation. Works CitedDanto, Arthur C. However, he holds out the possibility that theindividual, bringing to the artistic experience the full range ofbackground, education, and openness to the prospect of aesthetic pleasure,may yet achieve a kind of independence from the approved rhetoric of artcriticism and appropriate [the work's] embodied mastery to our own purposesand invest it with new social meaning" (Hickey 86). For Danto explains that,especially in the modern period, there is plenty of disagreement aboutwhether a given presentation of art is in fact beautiful or was everintended by the artist to be beautiful. Just beneath this perplexing challenge is the unavoidable sense thatto the degree avant-garde art is provocative, ambiguous, and/or ugly, itderives from social critique. People have to be brought tounderstand the work, and the way in which it is actually beautiful" (Danto41; emphasis added). Meanwhile, Hickey's confidence in thespectator's interpretive competence is not unbounded. Meanings that flow from the object thoughtfully discerned couldbecome the very source of the experience of beauty in the given work; thusdoes beauty distinguished from art become beauty re-fused with art, byreason of the originating thought that occasioned the work (where workrefers to the range of sensibilities and craftsmanship brought to bear onthe project) of art. Hickeydeplores "'cultural' regimes of correct interpretation" that "stand as coldevidence of a culture morbidly obsessed with the longevity of its own ideasand morbidly fearful of the perpetual re-allegorization that ensures worksof art their longevity" (Hickey 8 ). . For Danto the primaryagency of meaning is the artistic intention, while for Hickey it is theexperience of the completed artwork. However, in Hickey's formulation, Hegel would havebeen less about the business of decoding original intent than of conformingthe Transfiguration to his own master philosophical thesis about theineluctable working of the World-Spirit in a World-Historical painting. According to Hickey, the quest foraesthetic pleasure may exert as much authority on the response to a work ofart as the dicta of aesthetic arbiters, and irrespective of whether artcritics have accurately or presciently divined artistic meanings. Danto notes that "whole artistic traditions have existed in whichbeauty was never the point at all" (45). The notionof providing a deliberate antithesis to art generated in a societyperceived by the Dadaists as descending into stupid wars and stupidersocial reasons for them illustrates the primacy that the artists placed onpenetrating human consciousness and inserting their vision into socialexperience. These are not competing andantithetical but overlapping and converging features of art. The two kinds of meanings may intersect; what is crucial about themis that they are "unbound by authorial intention" (84). But for both, meaning is a function ofthe junction of an artist's original concept with what the artist uses togo from concept to execution of the work and the viewing of the finalproduct, or its ultimate shape or form. Hickey identifies thecentrality, so to speak, of wildly diverse artistic responses to works ofart as the determinant of aesthetic value and links them with art patronswho were positioned authoritatively over the content of works. A seemingly opposite, but equallyauthoritarian, mode of criticism can be discerned in the ranks of critics(and artists) "concerned with making art less aesthetically appealing andless surprising--lest it be misunderstood" (83). If it injured beauty, it was through a kindof punitive clownishness" (Danto 49). Hickeypoints out that there has arisen a kind of bureaucracy of aesthetics,represented by cultural institutions such as museums, which explainmeanings so that spectators either don't have to work them out on their ownor are forestalled from doing so by "official" interpretation. The artistic idea, which is "internal to the work" (55), is forDanto what controls the evocation of beauty. But for Hickey, the operative action would be thesensibility that Hegel brings with him to the Transfiguration. Thecommodification of the art market is one explanation for this, and Hickeydoes not have to endorse inchoate responses to art to recognize that theyinevitable in a pluralistic culture. Meaning, rather than beauty, hasbeen the point. Explanation, or clarity,may by itself be a pathway to the experience of beauty, clarity about suchworks as Marcel Duchamp's readymades or the controversial presentationsmade by Mapplethorpe may be elusive.
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