It’s Sunday, so I’m going to try pitching you some heavy-duty, but, I think, very interesting reading. All of it is from the Art and Cognition workshops web site. I’ve picked those papers that I think are most relevant and readable. The chosen titles are linked, followed by one brief extract/sample from the article. The first two are particularly recommended.
Ambiguity and Intention by David Cohen
“”Is it art?”, ubiquitous in the experience of much innovative art of the last century, places ambiguity center-stage in the appreciation of modern and contemporary art. The critic Harold Rosenberg coined the phrase “the anxious object” to describe this situation.
Ambiguity is equally the hallmark of very fine and very poor art, and knowing this in itself breeds ambivalence. What I am looking at could be very fine, it could be very poor. …. My contention is that, more than any other characteristic of art, ambiguity brings into question the notion of intentional fallacy. “
Art and Neuroscience by John Hyman
“Up to now, most of the people studying art have been historians, some of whom can read Latin, but hardly any of whom have mastered even the rudiments of brain science. And aesthetics has been in the hands of philosophers, who still disagree among themselves about ideas that were stated in the fourth century BC. Neuro-aesthetics is different. As Ramachandran says:
“These ideas have the advantage that, unlike the vague notions of philosophers and art historians, they can be tested experimentally.”
So, is neuro-aesthetics the next big thing?” [the answer is "no!" Read it; it's good.]
Authenticity in Art by Denis Dutton
“This explains why aesthetic theories that hold that works of art are just aesthetically appealing objects — to be enjoyed without regard to any notion of their origins — are unsatisfactory. If works of art appealed only to our formal or decorative aesthetic sense, there would indeed be little point in establishing their human contexts by tracing their development, or even in distinguishing them from similarly appealing natural objects — flowers or seashells. But works of art of all societies express and embody both cultural beliefs general to a people and personal character and feeling specific to an individual. Moreover, this fact accounts for a large part, though not all, of our interest in works of art. To deny this would be implicitly to endorse precisely the concept of the eighteenth-century curiosity cabinet, in which Assyrian shards, tropical seashells, a piece of Olmec jade, geodes, netsuke, an Attic oil lamp, bird of paradise feathers, and a Maori patu might lay side by side in indifferent splendour. The propriety of the curiosity cabinet approach to art has been rejected in contemporary thought in favour of a desire to establish provenance and cultural meaning precisely because intra- and inter-cultural relationships among artworks help to constitute their meaning and identity.”
Any Way You Slice It: The Viewpoint Independence of Pictorial Content by John Kulvicki
“… Thought of in this way, there is a sense in which pictures represent quite indeterminate states of affairs. If one takes this to its extreme, as John Haugeland does, “…all the photos ‘strictly’ represent is certain variations of incident light with respect to direction….” (1991, 189) Haugeland calls this minimal kind of content the “bare bones” content of a picture.
Bare bones content is a far cry from the “fleshed out” content that we usually ascribe to pictures: relatives, chairs, and so on. In fact, we rarely if ever ascribe bare bones content to pictures. For Haugeland, “The point is…to distinguish, within the undeniable contents of everyday representations, a substructure that is skeletal…” (1991, 189) Bare bones content and fleshed out content are not just two contents that pictures have. The former, though usually unnoticed, constrains the latter: all fleshed out contents must be consistent with a picture’s bare bones content. And though one can flesh out a picture’s content in a myriad of fashions, each picture has only one bare bones content.”
====================
I hope you will at least take a look, even if it is to just skim the contents and jump to the conclusions. Also, note the comments in the column to the right of the given articles.
-Julie
