Mr. DA,
I'm not sure if I could collaborate with the discussions, so ask some reading references to equip me elements and data and be able to enjoy the subject, which at first interested me a lot.
When I developed research on training players and parti study of the myth of Don Juan, while translation of young readers profile (seekers) identified certain diagonality in reading experiences that showed me the mental theater ali.Naquele this time had no chance to explore some more knowledge of neuroscience in learning, but I understand that in speaking of aesthetic experience and reading, could have paths through both the literary myth as I did as well as deepening directed questions to the neurosciences.
Now, years later I see your proposition around the neuro-aesthetics, I think this may be a good intellectual investment for me.
Forgive me if still flee the focus you wish to discuss.
Cordially, I await your reading directions.
Angeli Rose

Hi Margaret

Sorry for the delay in replying. A bit snowed under.

First, I should make it clear that my present concerns do not relate to neuroscience per se. As a medical study carried out by properly qualified researchers, neuroscience may well, presumably, yield some useful information about the operations of the brain – and probably has already.

I am specifically challenging the value of neuroaesthetics.

Now, you say that neuroaesthetics is in “a gestation period, if not yet born”. In fact, though, there are, from what I gather, numbers of people – eg in universities – who take it very seriously and even claim that there are some useful “findings”. (You are probably more familiar with the names than I am.)  I don’t think, in other words that we can let neuroaesthetics off the hook just by saying it’s early days.

But I’d like to start even further back. What, to your mind, is the aim of neuroaesthetics? What is it setting out to prove/achieve? I haven’t yet seen a clear statement of that – though perhaps I have missed it. For example, are we trying to show that there is some necessary connection between brain patterns and art? If so, how would we define art for the purposes of the exercise? Or is neuroaesthetics perhaps about a connection between brain patterns and beauty? If so, what is meant by “beauty” in the context (e.g. a Poussin landscape or a photo of a semi-naked film star? )

I have lots of basic questions like that about the aims and objectives of neuroaesthetics. (I am assuming that it has aims and objectives.)  Do you have any thoughts on the matter?

DA

Art constitutes the immaterial sensory-emotional feelings we experience through its material forms. Iconicity provides a means for expressing the world of the senses, before the conceptualizing mind moves us toward abstraction. In the presence of art we experience its presentness of a reality that comes alive for us. Iconicity is not simply a linguistic feature that poets utilize in making words work, but a means whereby, in Susanne K. Langer's terms, art creates a semblance of felt, or experienced, life through forms symbolic of human feeling. That "semblance" is important: not copy, or representation, or even mimesis, but a dynamic process of putting us in touch with our subliminal feelings of being part of the world we live in.

That's where neuroaesthetics comes in. I have found neuroscience research into the emotions extremely helpful in understanding and hopefully modeling the process of poetic iconicity. I do not believe scientific methodology as practiced by the natural sciences can ever account for the individuality of the arts. However, I do believe that a "science of the individual" is possible; I don't believe in the black box theory of the (imaginative) arts. So neuroaesthetics is for me (I don't speak for anyone else) in its enquiries into how the cognitive (sensory-emotional-conceptual) brain functions in creating and responding to the arts could possibly at some future time provide some explicatory evidence for our human imaginative capabilities.

Apologies for the length of my response.

Hi Margaret

A bit hard to know where to start. I am not sure I understand you notion of iconicity (but I know it can be hard to explain a complex idea in a short space) so I’ll focus, for the time being, on what I think I more or less understand

In essence, you seem to be saying that art connects us with what you call the world of the senses giving us what you describe as the “presentness of a reality that comes alive for us”. And neuroaesthetics, you say, tells us “how the cognitive (sensory-emotional-conceptual) brain functions in creating and responding to the arts”. (Please excuse this rather abrupt summary.)

First comment might be that your focus on the senses is perhaps not as far from 18^th century aesthetics as you seem to suggest. Isn’t this one of the original meanings of that very hazy term “aesthetic” ?

Second comment: I have always been dubious about the idea that art is essentially about “the world of the senses”. Take a novel like Crime and Punishment. It seems to me that the reader is also called upon to think as he or she reads the work - e.g. to try to understand Raskolnikov’s motive for murder. And even such an apparently sensuous art form as music seems to me to involve more than just the senses. As I listen to a Mozart sonata, for example, I find myself concentrating and “following” the music, not merely blindly “emoting” in some way. That is, there is an effort of the mind involved, or so it seems to me.

Third thought:  If, for argument’s sake, you are right, would your analysis not apply equally well to, say, Mozart and a syrupy pop song? That is, does it provide us with any account of what art specifically is?

Final thought: I assume from what you say that you would decide in advance what is, and what is not, art for the purposes of the neuroaesthetics experiments? I mean, does neuroaesthetics, in your view, have any role in telling us what is and what is not art?

I hope all this is vaguely relevant…

DA

Hi Jacob

Thanks for your comments and welcome to the thread.

Phenomenology is not my strong suit so forgive me if I seem to miss the point.

You say at one point that “… the work of art becomes a complete perceptual transparency of the meaning(s) being represented. To my mind, saying that the aesthetic object belongs to the world of the senses, or that it is essentially perceived, is to say that it has an essence (its individually represented meaningfulness) and that what is perceived by the witness is completely transparent to it. In other words, art is perceived meaning.”

I have a problem with equating “belongs to the world of the senses” with “essentially perceived”. Perception, at least in one sense, seems to me to involve more than the senses – i.e. it involves the mind. Doubtless this brings up a larger question about the nature of human consciousness but without opening up that can of worms, I would still tend to have a problem with the equivalence you suggest. Especially since you go on to say that “saying that the aesthetic object belongs to the world of the senses … is to say that it has an essence (its individually represented meaningfulness)”. Can “meaning” be grasped just by the senses?

I’m not sure how this all relates to neuroaesthetics, but since I am not at all clear what neuroaesthetics is, or seeks to do, that’s not surprising, I guess.

DA

Hi Eric

Welcome to the conversation.

Yes, even though I don’t follow developments closely, I get the impression that there is a lot of hype going on. It’s a sad commentary on academia, I always feel, that so much of what happens is dictated by fashion. That’s partly why I started this thread – in a tiny way, I wanted to subject the thinking behind this particular fashion to a little scrutiny. A little “let’s-pause-and-reflect-for-a-moment” opportunity, if you will.

You say also that “the field is in its infancy and therefore cannot yet be expected to produce conclusive results”. Well, yes, though it has been around for a while now (and I am reminded of the fad for Skinnerian behavioural psychology that used to say the same thing before it slowly sank into the dustbin of intellectual history.)

But I am less interested in “results” per se than what those results might be about. It is by no means clear to me what neuroaesthetics is trying to achieve – and nothing I’ve read (which admittedly is not a lot) suggests to me that neuroaesthetics itself is clear about that either. Is it about art? Is it about beauty (by no means the same things). Does it eventually expect to be able to say “Yes, the brain scans show that X must be a work of art” (that would be a turn up for the books!) or “the brain scans show that Y is beautiful”. If not, what is  the aim? Because unless that is more or less clear – unless there is some kind of identifiable hypothesis here – the whole field has a very large question mark over it, does it not?

DA

Hi Bryan

Actually there is a strong push in aesthetics today to include that curiously named creature called “popular culture.” So much so that the very notion of art has more or less lost all meaning (in my view at least).

But as you suggest this does raise an interesting point. If neuroaesthetics  is about art (Is it? I’m not sure) what does it mean by the term? Who decides what gets scanned for and on what criteria? A huge can of worm there.

DA

Hi Bryan

Sorry I’m answering your posts out of order.

As I mentioned to Margaret, I’m not questioning neuroscience itself – at least as an area of medical research. (What philosophers are currently doing with it is a different matter…)

On neuroaesthetics:  Yes "preliminary data", if you like. But again, as I said, to Eric, data about what? What bothers me about the field is that it seems to me to be drastically under-theorised – or in less fancy language, the aims and the hypotheses strike me as ill-thought-out, not to say half-baked.

Now I may be quite wrong about that – as I’ve said I’m not well read in the field - but that is my distinct impression from the little I have read. If I am mistaken, someone might like to put me right ?

DA

Hi Margaret

You write at one point: I don't think it [neuroaesthetics] can tell us what is or is not art. Its potential lies in further understanding how our brain processes reveal our conscious and subliminal responses to the experience of art.

My problem here is this: Given that the data neuroaesthetics provides will always – I assume – be in the form of scans – i.e. purely physical objects – in what way could they help describe our “conscious responses” to anything, whether art or not?

Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that we show a photo of an object to 1000 subjects. Let’s suppose – to make the argument as favourable as we can for neuroscience – that there is a striking similarity in the resulting brain scans of all the subjects: they’re all in the same region of the brain, and they are all the same size and shape. What do we know from that – from that alone? If the object is a beautiful sunset, we might say: “See, that’s what beauty does to the brain.” If it’s a squashed cockroach we might say: “See, that’s what nasty-looking things do to the brain.” But unless we already know what the object is, and unless we know how most people react to it, the brain scan by itself will tell us nothing, will it?  That is, if we were only shown the scan and were asked what it was a reaction to, we wouldn’t have any idea, would we?

So my question is: What useful additional knowledge does the brain scan give us about our conscious experience – i.e. knowledge about that experience that we didn’t have already?

DA

Interdisciplinarity is inherently, constitutionally, unstable. It comes into existence as new world views begin to emerge and moves toward the formation of a new discipline. It is characterized by the temporary adoption of terminology from concepts developed in various disciplines, terminology which inevitably loses the rigor of its original formulation as it embraces phenomena from environments different from those in which it was first employed. During this stage, meanings themselves become unstable, a condition which marks Simon Penny’s (2014) first stage in the life history of a discipline. Penny’s five stages are as follows:

1.     the stage of half-formed vocabulary and vague promises;

2.     the stage in which ideas from various fields are interfaced, and new relationships and distinctions are built, out of which, assiduously and incisively, a new vocabulary, reflective of a new world view, is built;

3.     the stage when this vocabulary is deployed by members of the group in order to conduct sophisticated and dense discourse(s). In this stage the epistemological history of these terms is shared knowledge and the terms operate as shorthand;

4.     these terms, rather than standing for a history of research and debate become reified, and, for instance, are written about in textbooks and taught, to a new generation of students who take these ideas as axiomatic ground-level realities. As a result, terminology so rigorously developed in 2+3 become like magical incantations full of presumed meaning;

5.     the stage of paradigmatic failure, where problems arise which often appear to need, i.e., only technical or methodological tweaks, but as problems progress, turn out to be problems in principle. The explanatory power of the paradigm comes into question and interrogation, internal and external begins. Return to 1 and repeat.

Hi Eric

Thanks for your post.

I am not a Schopenhauer expert so I won’t venture onto that terrain.

But I confess I am a little puzzled about where you’re coming from (as they say). You seem to be saying – and forgive if I’m misreading you – that you are sympathetic to physicalist thinking – to some degree anyway; but on the other hand you say you found Tallis’s book useful; and as I read that book, he is sharply critical of physicalist approaches.

I am sure I must be losing the plot here, so feel free to put me back on track.

DA

Hi  Bryan

I’ll do a fuller response to your posts a little later but in the meantime I was interested in your question: “Are some people genetically predisposed to be stuffy and exclusive and others to be eclectic in their aesthetic appreciation?"

I, for example, love Mozart (and lots of other so-called “classical” music) and I abhor pop, rock and everything of that ilk. (I even wear earphones in shopping malls to muffle the awful wailing that masquerades as music). Do you think this makes me “stuffy and exclusive”? Do you think I might have some kind of genetic predisposition – perhaps a genetic flaw? Do you think neuroaesthetics will eventually be able to demonstrate scientifically (because it does seem to want to be a science) that my preferences indicate an unfortunate stuffiness and exclusiveness, and a lack of “aesthetic eclecticism”?

DA

Hi Bryan

A further reply to your posts.

I am not a scientist so I would, of course, defer to your views in that field. But are you not overstating things a bit when you play down the importance of hypotheses so strongly. After all, the very act of designing of an experiment in a particular way implies an hypothesis, doesn’t it? How else would one proceed at all? And when you say “What to observe? Anything!” that also seems an overstatement. If I’m conducting an experiment in neuroaesthetics (perish the thought!), I assume that what I had for breakfast and the position of the planets are not relevant? Those are extreme examples, of course, but my point is that there is surely a basic sifting process even at initial stages. One does not in fact observe just “anything”.

Which leads me back to my original point about neuroaesthetics being under-theorised. What would be your comment, Bryan, on the case I put to Margaret, viz:

Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that we show a photo of an object to 1000 subjects. Let’s suppose – to make the argument as favourable as we can for neuroscience – that there is a striking similarity in the resulting brain scans of all the subjects: they’re all in the same region of the brain, and they are all the same size and shape. What do we know from that – from that alone? If the object is a beautiful sunset, we might say: “See, that’s what beauty does to the brain.” If it’s a squashed cockroach we might say: “See, that’s what nasty-looking things do to the brain.” But unless we already know what the object is, and unless we know how most people react to it, the brain scan by itself will tell us nothing, will it?  That is, if we were only shown the scan and were asked what it was a reaction to, we wouldn’t have any idea, would we?

My basic point here is that neuroaesthetics, to my mind, cannot proceed at all without some basic assumptions (at the very least, basic) about art and beauty. And that's a hugely contested area of philosophical debate where opinions differ enormously and where there are large numbers of conflicting arguments. So, which position would the aspiring experimental neuroaesthete choose and why? How in short can he/she escape underlying philosophical assumptions about art, beauty and so on? And if he/she can’t, how will the “results” not end up simply being reflections of those assumptions?

DA

Hi Margaret

I thought I might comment on one of the points that you say is of special interest to you, viz: the possibility that neuroaesthetics might give us insights into “why poets and artists since the beginning of recorded history have claimed art accesses "reality" (whatever that means) in a way inaccessible to conventional thinking; and so on?”

Have artists always claimed this in fact? Romantic artists often did, and some modern artists do as well (perhaps it helps sales…), but I’m not sure it was the case earlier. Certainly, the sculptors of the Middle Ages – who created such wonderful things as the statues at Chartres – would not have done so (a) because the notion of art itself did not exist (except as signifying a skill) and (b) because such a claim would, I think, have been seen as sacrilegious – the only reality higher than everyday reality being God.

This is the kind of historical problem that neuroaesthetics, to my mind, has not even begun to address. (Not surprisingly: it stems from “analytic” aesthetics which is more or less tone deaf to history).

Suppose, for example, (I’m being generous to neuroaesthetics again) that 90% of “subjects” shown photos of the sculptures at Chartres had identical scans, and that scans of this kind had been previously established as signifying “art” (a crazy assumption, but I’m being very kind). If this were the case, then all those subjects would disagree completely with everyone who had ever thought about said statues for hundreds of years until about 1900. No medieval sculpture had ever been regarded as art until about then: it was seen as clumsy and primitive, carried out by humble workmen who did not really know what they were doing. And the same, of course, is true of thousands of works from other cultures which we now welcome into our art museums – e.g. from ancient Egypt, Africa, India, China, etc etc.

A huge problem for “neuroaesthetics”, don’t you think? A problem which, as far as I'm aware, none of its aficionados has as yet even recognized, let alone addressed.

DA

Hi Eric

RE: "I hope that you do not include classic Rhythm and Blues on your list of music-masquerading 'awful wailing(s)'."

No, that's not awful wailing but musically it has no interest for me at all. An enormous amount of music over the last century has degenerated to little more than monotonous rhythm and/or sugary melodies. A good name for it might be anti-music – rather than "popular" music. It's the equivalent of detective stories or “true-romance" in literature – which is a kind of anti-literature.

All this is directly relevant to "neuro-aesthetics” by the way. At some point in its “experiments” it will need to choose what it experiments with, and how it categorizes what it chooses. How will it decide what falls into the category “art” – or even “beauty” (the two not being necessarily related of course)? Aesthetics itself has fought over these questions for a very long time - with not the least sign of resolution. And as you can see from my position, there are widely differing views. No “neuro-aesthetician”, even armed with a boatload of ”experimental results”, is ever going to find me agreeing that Mozart is not good music and that the stuff that’s rammed down my throat in shopping malls is.

DA

Hi Bryan

Sorry to butt in to your exchange with Margaret but I couldn't help noticing your comment: ‘I would be far more interested in what happens to the nervous system due to exposure to "the arts"’.

How would you define “arts” for the purposes of your experiments? What would be in, and what would be out? You’d have to make those decisions, wouldn’t you – and presumably, since you are a scientist, you would want them to be grounded on solid reasons and clear definitions?

(See also my reply to Eric today which is relevant)

DA

Hi Bryan

RE: “Since neuroscience is, like nearly all science, about finding a "typical spread", extreme outliers get shunted to the side in terms of overall conclusions.”

I wonder how many artists were “extreme outliers’ who got “shunted aside” at some point,? Take your pick: Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Pisarro, Monet (believe it or not), Picasso (to begin with), Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Georges de la Tour, Bizet (he died without knowing how famous he would become), Stravinsky (his magnificent ballet music howled down)…  the list could go on and on. Rembrandt for quite some time was an “outlier”. And Mozart as we know was buried in a pauper’s grave.

And I wonder how many artists today who are “extreme outliers” may yet become famous?  

In fact, it has been the “typical” – the imitators – who have usually dropped off the radar. Still if neuroscience says it’s only the”typical” who matter, that must be right. After all, who would want to quarrel with science and its technique of the "typical spread"?

DA

Hi Bryan

Re: “when it comes to so-called 'art' music”.

Oh dear, what on earth is “art” music? The term reminds me of that ridiculous phrase “high art”.

There is good music and there’s the other kind.  Just as there’s good literature and visual art, and the other kinds.

DA

Hi Bryan

Re: “I would like you to cite a single paper from any peer-reviewed source in which any neuroscientist is claiming to be able to define "art" from "scans" of subjects' brains”

Ah, Bryan, as I said in my opening comment I’m not well read in the field so I can’t cite you such a paper. You certainly have me there.

On the other hand, if there is no such paper, I can’t understand – as I’ve pointed out – how neuroaesthetics would conduct experiments that relate to art. If it doesn’t want to – or can’t – say what is art and what is not, how would it decide to choose painting A, rather than painting B, C or D (for example), in its experiments? (And the same would go for “beauty”, if that’s what the subject of the experiment was.)

It’s really just an elementary matter of scientific procedure – something I thought you might have an interest in.

Hi Bryan

RE: "But neuroscience is not interested in defining "art" in terms of biology."

What is neuroaesthetics* interested in doing in your view? That is, what, in your view, is its central aim? (Please try to be concise...)

(* As I made clear earlier, I am interested in talking about neuroaesthetics. Neuroscience, at least in the professional medical sense, is not the issue here.)

DA

Hi Bryan

RE: You obviously have an enormous chip on your shoulder about science.

On the contrary, I greatly admire many of the achievements of science. I would not like to have lived in the world before modern medicine – antibiotics etc – and in all sorts of ways, science has made the world a much more liveable and interesting place. Of course, it has also been responsible for nuclear weapons etc, so as well as improving the conditions of human of life, it may also one day destroy us. But nonetheless, I am not anti-science

What I do question is the importation of the scientific mindset into areas in which it is not – in my opinion – relevant, and art is one example. Which is one of the reasons why I started this thread: I was interested to see if anyone could argue a lucid case in favour of neuroaesthetics which, whatever it is exactly, appears to be an attempt to deal with art through the prism of science.

A good place to start, it seems to me, would be for someone who is a supporter of neuroaesthetics to say what they think its aim is. I’ve suggested this a couple of times but no one seems willing to put up their hand. Yet, surely, neuroaesthetics* must have an aim, even if it’s only a provisional one. Otherwise, what is it there for, and why are so many people spending their precious time and brain power on it? Is it just because it's a current fad? Surely not...

Of course, as you say, Bryan, I could read more articles about neuroaesthetics, but seriously I can’t bear the thought.  As I said at the beginning, some intellectual movements, in my view, have folly written all over them from the outset so I really can’t muster the energy to read articles or books about it. Nevertheless, if someone on this thread can provide a lucid defence – explain the aims etc – I am very willing to listen. Philpapers threads can be quite educational at times.

DA

* NB, Bryan: neuroaesthetics, not neuroscience generally. I have explained my position re this.

Hi Margaret

Thanks for your post. Glad you’re still with us.

I’d just like to comment on one aspect where you say:

First, I'd like to say that words like taste and beauty have become unfortunate synonyms for "aesthetics" and are therefore misleading.

I certainly agree. I remember once at an aesthetics conference in the US suggesting that there be a moratorium on the word “aesthetic” and its cognates for about ten years because it is ambiguous and therefore misleading. My comment was in jest of course – I hardly expected it to happen. To my great surprise, though, there were a number of murmurs of approval from those present.

The problem infects neuroaesthetics too, of course. Is it about beauty? Is it about art? (By no means the same things.) Is it about sensory perception – which, as you rightly point out, is one of the meanings of the term. So, quite apart from the methodological problems I have been drawing attention to, there is this basic definitional issue.

PS Thank you for your comment re ad hominem remarks comments?  I fully agree.

DA

Hi Eric

My point about sunsets and cockroaches (!) was perhaps not as clear as it should have been. I wasn’t wanting to argue that art can be ugly. (I actually think the dichotomy beautiful/ugly helps us very little with understanding art. Same goes for beautiful/disgusting. I mention this because I notice that “ugly” and “disgusting” are enjoying something of a vogue in aesthetics circles at the moment. People seem to be doing all kinds of intellectual gymnastics to convince themselves that the ugly and disgusting can be pleasing, and therefore art – or something to that effect).

But I digress. The point I intended to make was that brain scans by themselves tell us nothing. It is only when we know what they are in response to that we start giving them a significance. So as I said, neuroaesthetics cannot proceed at all without some basic assumptions about art and beauty. It would have to say, for example, that a squashed cockroach is repulsive. (Which might be a problem for the current aficionados of the disgusting who seem to be arriving at the conclusion that, looked at in the right way, (!) the disgusting is pleasing.)

I’ve read very little Deleuze so I can’t comment on the refrain thing. Though I must say I’m sceptical. Refrains are not necessarily bad music. Medieval music for example has some delightful refrains.

As for detective fiction, yes, there are doubtless good writers among them. But the category is very broad (in a sense Crime and Punishment might be termed detective fiction) and I was thinking of the “pulp” end of the scale.  

My basic point is that the last century or so has seen an enormous growth of what I would call anti-arts: music, visual stuff and literature that uses the means available to art for ends that have nothing to do with art.  A great deal of modern so-called “popular culture”, to my mind, is of this kind. Of course, my view is very much in the minority and enormous numbers of people would disagree. (Bryan has solved the problem by labelling me a snob). But it does point to a problem for the budding neuro-aesthetician, don’t you think?: if the category “art” is so deeply contested, how will he or she choose what to experiment with when seeking to arrive at conclusions about responses to “art”? In visual art, there’s little sign of general agreement beyond the Mona Lisa, and even then…. (I recall standing in the crowd around the Mona Lisa in the Louvre and hearing one young woman say to her friend in a very disappointed voice: “She doesn’t do anything! She just sits there!” Clearly she wasn't impressed.)

DA

Hi Luc

Thank you for taking the trouble to reply at some length.

I have to say, though, that the information you provide increases, rather than diminishes, my concerns. I’ll be as succinct as possible.

A number of the statements you give define the aims of neuroaesthetics in terms of the word "aesthetic”. Eg “[Sémir Zeki ]…defines it as the neurology of the aesthetic.”

Definitions of this kind are quite inadequate in my view. The term “aesthetic” has at least three main meanings (as even most dictionaries acknowledge): relating to beauty, relating to art, and relating to the sensuous. Now, these are clearly not the same things. Art is not necessarily beautiful, and the sensuous may be neither beautiful nor art. This is not a mere philosopher’s quibble. It would have direct implications for any experimentation. On the “art” definition, one would be perfectly entitled to choose, (e.g.) Goya’s Saturn devouring his children. But one could hardly choose it as an example of beauty – or the sensuous (though that’s a slippery word). The word “aesthetic”, in short, is far too ambiguous to serve as a basis of the definition of the aims of neuroaesthetics (which, seen in this light, is not well named).  

(I also note, by the way, that you second Margaret's comment re beauty and taste. This would seem to imply that you rule out the "beauty" meaning of the term – which just leaves art and “the sensuous”…)

This kind of objection would apply equally to a definition such as “the study of the neurophysiological processes of the human body in order to understand the sensory and perceptual experiences when in an aesthetic situation”. What is an aesthetic situation?”

I see the word “creative” also crops in as in “the study of the human creative brain”.

But this will clearly not do. Creativity is not necessarily limited to “aesthetic” aims (whatever that means...)  

You also say that “We can debate the meaning of the term aesthetic since it had had so many definitions across time. I would refer to the Ancient Greek vocabulary to understand it.”

Two problems here. First the Greeks don’t have a monopoly on the meaning of words and the cultural differences are so large anyway that there are bound to be problems (for example, they had no word equivalent to our term “art”). But just as importantly, the mere fact that the meaning of the term “aesthetic” is  debatable is a huge problem in itself. How can a science proceed on the basis of concepts whose meaning is not clear? And as I’ve pointed out, this would have direct implications in any attempt at experimentation.

I'll leave it there for now. I would of course be interested in your reply. I should perhaps add that the views I'm expressing here are by no means just my own. There is a lot of debate in aesthetics about whether art and beauty are necessarily related, And I am certainly not the first to point out that the word "aesthetic" is ambiguous.

DA

The products of art are not the works of art. The works of art are the aesthetic activity. Artistic products are physical objects on which the aesthetic activity stamps its intuitions of sensations and impressions.                                                                                       Benedetto Croce

“Poetics is everywhere in human communication, and certainly in prosody, paralinguistic elements (sighs, laughter),resonance, interruption, suprasegmentals, pauses, and gesture (including body stance).  Not to mention singing, chants, imitations, impersonations, quotation and quasi-quotation, reported speech, enactment, embodiment.”                                                      Mark Turner

Hi Luc

I’ll just comment on a couple of points and maybe come back to others in another post.

You say: “My understanding of your post is that you are questioning science more the definition of some terms.”

No, I am not questioning science. As I mentioned in a post a while back, I am in no sense anti-science. In fact, there are probably various philosophers of science impressed by the Kuhnian paradigm thing who would find my belief in science rather naïve because I tend to question it so little

But it’s a matter of horses for courses, if you’ll forgive the colloquialism, and I do question whether science can be applied to aesthetics.

To begin with, there is a basic problem of definition of aims. Now, I’m in no sense looking for what you call the “Platonic idea behind a word” etc. The issue here is very practical – quite down to earth.

What is the aim of neuroaesthetics? Is it about beauty? Art? Or the “sensuous? Those are not the same things – by a long stretch. As I’ve said, something can easily be art without being beautiful, and something can be sensuous without being either.

Here are a couple of little imaginary examples showing some of the practical implications.

Suppose I am budding neuroaesthetician and I conduct an experiment where I show my subjects Goya’s “black paintings” and the Christ in the Isenheim altarpiece. Fred comes in and says: “Why did you show them those?” I reply: “Because I think they’re examples of art?” “But they’re not beautiful!” says Fred. “Oh, I fully agree,” say I. “But is neuroaesthetics only about beauty, not about art? Someone had better make up their mind…”

Next day, undaunted, I return to the fray and conduct another experiment. This time, I show my subjects photos of rotting corpses. Fred comes in and says: “What are you doing now? They’re not beautiful and they’re certainly not art!” “I agree,” say I.”But someone (in fact it was Luc Delannoy) put me right about aesthetics and told me that it ‘deals with the senses, with sensation and perception’. These photos are definitely relevant to that, don’t you think? I’m going to show my subjects photos of filthy sewers next…”

I won’t go on. But you can see how horribly confused all this gets unless, somehow, there’s a clear definition of what the aim of neuroaesthetics is, and what it’s experimenting about. That’s not a problem with science; that’s simply a problem of knowing what one is doing.

(There are other issues but I’ll leave it there for now.)

 DA

Hi Margaret

Thanks for your response.

I’m not sure the Chinese quote you gave me really addresses the problem.

A basic difficulty in quoting other cultures in relation to art is that the Western idea “art” existed in no other culture – including Chinese. Our notion "art” is quite specific to us – and has not even stayed the same for us either. (What Michelangelo meant by “art” is a far cry from what Picasso meant by it. I mean the very concept).

Modern aesthetics – which steers clear of anthropology whenever possible – likes to assume that all cultures thought and felt the way we do about painting, sculpture etc. But the historical evidence is all against any such assumption. One searches in vain, for example, in the language of ancient Egypt for a word equivalent to our word art – and the same is even true for ancient Greece. This is not of course to say that painting and sculpture (etc) did not fulfil a vital purpose in those cultures, but it was not as “art”. (Can you imagine an art museum in ancient Egypt? Or Greece, for that matter? Or ancient China?)

In nearly every other culture, sculpture and painting etc performed a religious purpose - or something closely related. Thus, as I said, to say that “art accesses ‘reality’ in a way inaccessible to conventional thinking” would simply have made no sense in such contexts, (a) because “art” did not exist, and (b) because the claim would have been sacrilegious – the only reality higher than everyday reality being God, or the gods.

One can, of course, try to argue, as aesthetics does when it addresses this issue (which is very rarely: modern aesthetics detests anthropology and cultural history) that although other cultures may not have said they saw their sculpture etc as “art”, in fact they “really did” . Which is as sensible as saying that although they didn’t worship the Christian God, in fact they “really did “ – i.e. it is anthropological gibberish.

Of course, this raises many other issues, as I am aware, but one thing at a time.

DA

Hi Christy

Well, I think your claim (1) is a bit strong (and I presume you would not make it since you write about aesthetics, don't you?). I do think aesthetics is in a serious pickle these days for a number of reasons, one of which is that it has no “core” – no clear, central aim – and therefore tends to wander around aimlessly.  (But do I gather from your post that you think its central aim is to consider “the nature of beauty”?)

As for claim (2) well, I do think neuro-aesthetics is bunkum, as I said at the start, but not because of claim (1). I think so for a number of reasons, one of which I’ve been discussing in recent posts: since the term “aesthetic” and its cognates is so seriously ambiguous, and its subject matter so seriously ill-defined, any “science”  based on it seems almost bound to end in confusion.

I’m not sure I follow your final statement where, if I follow, you suggest that neuroscience might eliminate questions such as the nature of beauty from our ontology. Could you perhaps enlarge a little?

DA

Hi Christy

Thanks for your comment.

However, I’m a bit puzzled by your “narrow” construal of aesthetics. In fact, it sounds very broad to me. The only part that seems to narrow it down at all is where you say “usually of a broadly artistic/creative variety”. But even here, the “usually” seems to imply there can be other kinds, which would broaden things out again. And “creative” need not relate to art of course. The invention of the wheelbarrow or the lawn sprinkler was creative.

This is the kind of thing I was getting at when I said that aesthetics no longer has any clear, central aim. The formula you give here might surely underpin a wide variety of philosophical inquiries on a wide variety of subjects?

Re your second bit. You speak here of what neuroscience might do with respect to aesthetics. But again, unless and until we know what aesthetics is, and is about, this is surely premature?  You speak of “the aesthetic”, for example. What is that? That which relates to art? That which relates to beauty? That which relates to the senses? Something else? These are threshold questions one would need to answer before any experiments relating to aesthetics could get underway. (See my post above of 2015-06-23 where I also made this point – in an informal way certainly, but clearly enough, I think.)

None of this is philosophical quibbling, I should stress. If neuroaesthetics is to produce anything at all – even the nil return you seem to imagine it might produce – it would have to clarify this basic issue. What is it trying to do? Is it about beauty? Art? The senses? What? As I say, this is a threshold matter. (Others questions would follow but this has to be clarified first).

DA

Hi Christy

I seem to have misunderstood your previous post somewhat. Thanks for the further explanation.

However, I do have a problem with what you’re arguing, particularly where you say that “What I'm suggesting is not that we must get clear on just what the Aesthetic is before we start looking to science. After all, Science can't provide us a clearer understanding of the Aesthetic if there's been no such thing upon which to get clear in the first place. What science can do, however, is to shine a very bright spotlight upon this conspicuous absence.”

The difficulty I see here is that if we don’t, or can’t, stipulate at the outset what we mean by “aesthetic”, then we are not really in a position to expect science to tell us whether that quality/property/etc is present or absent, are we? As you know, I think the whole neuroaesthetics enterprise is vain anyway, but to at least give it a chance to prove itself, someone would need to indicate clearly what it was expected to look for, would they not? (e.g. sense of beauty, response to art, response to the “sensuous”, etc)

Pursuing your ghost analogy, we could hardly ask a scientist to prove that ghosts don't exist if we didn't say in advance what we think a ghost is. (And once we said that it's commonly thought to be a spiritual being, said scientist would probably tell us that he doesn’t deal in such matters).

DA

Hi Margaret

A few comments on your reply:

RE: Just because the term art doesn't appear in the languages of other cultures doesn't mean that the concept doesn't exist. “By any other name...."

The problem here is: if, as you say, the concept existed even though the word didn’t, how would the culture in question have expressed the concept?  And certainly a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but it’s a safe bet that in cultures in which roses did not exist, neither did the word. What would have been the use of it? Why would it have ever come into existence there?

RE: “The question is what and how and why they think about them the way they do.”

Yes, exactly. And even Western culture itself didn’t think about painting, sculpture etc as “art” before the Renaissance. Insofar as the word “art” was used (and it wasn’t used much), it simply meant a skill. That’s well documented (as are all the other cases). So the challenge then is to ask ourselves, as you say, how and why they thought about the objects in question the way they did (and then later on to ask : why do we today regard so many of them as “art”). That is a far more enlightening and realistic approach than simply assuming that despite all the evidence they “really” thought about the objects in question the way we do (i.e. as “art”) Example: For a Christian in say 1200 it would have been sacrilegious to think of the statues on the Royal Portal at Chartres as “art” (and impossible too, because the idea and the associated attitudes were quite foreign to Romanesque culture - as to so many others). There is acres of solid evidence for all this.

RE: “The cultural artifacts found in the Höhle Fels caves in Swabia are 35,000-40,000 years old, long before any written record of the culture(s) that created them existed. “

I’m not sure what this you think this establishes, Margaret. We have thousands of artefacts from prehistoric times.  What bearing does this have on the subject at hand?

RE: “And I don't see how the existence of museums has anything to do with the creation of artifacts produced by aesthetic activity.

Not what I said. The point I was making related to the cultural specificity (NB not superiority) of our notion of “art”. One of its characteristics is that it is closely associated with the institution of the art museum – which existed in no other culture. Which is why I asked: “Can you imagine an art museum in ancient Egypt? Or Greece, for that matter? Or ancient China?”.  

Re : “Surely you are not saying that early peoples didn't engage in aesthetic activity?

This just takes us back to the problematic notion “aesthetic”. As I’ve pointed out, it is highly ambiguous. What exactly do you mean by it?

DA

Re: A retired professor of comparative literature once provided me with this invaluable piece on the aesthetics of painting: 'If you don't want to hang it on your wall, then it ain't Art.' 

I think he should have stuck to literature.

DA

"If a branch of neuro-biology calls itself neuro-aesthetics then, semantically and logically, it must possess a functional and defensible definition of aesthetics itself in order to constitute a methodologically grounded research paradigm….

Your solution is to follow the principles established by professional philosophers as to what Art is: basically, the universal consensus. But there is no universal consensus: we do not agree what Art and Beauty are; every definition attempted can be, and has been, contested."

The short version of this concern is that cognitive science traffics in causal-psychological explanations that are ill fit to the explanatory goals of philosophy of art. Appreciative judgments in art are judgments of fit between works and the range of evaluative conventions appropriate for their particular category of art. But the same neuropsychological mechanisms support our perception and understanding of both exemplary and atrocious artworks. These kinds of explanations don't enable us to discriminate between works that are done well and works that are done poorly. As a result, they fail to reveal anything interesting about the appreciative conventions that define our concept of art in different contexts. They are equal opportunity explanations that exhibit a degree of generality good for psychology, but bad for philosophical aesthetics.

The contemporary grounds for this view can be traced back to Ludwig Wittgenstein's posthumously published lectures on aesthetics (1967) and George Dickie's (1962) paper, "Is Psychology Relevant to Aesthetics?" (see Carroll, Moore,&Seeley, 2102). Dickie asks us to imagine adjective matching and preference ordering experiments common in empirical aesthetics. In these cases, psychologists poll large samples of average (non-expert) consumers in order to tease out important facts about the nature of art. For instance, one might ask participants to match paintings to the kinds of descriptive adjectives experts use to describe them in art critical contexts. Or one might ask participants to sort a set of musical passages relative to their subjective preferences. We might find a significant correlation between the experts and average consumers in each of these cases. But, the interesting case is where we don't. What do we do then? Dickie points out that deferring to the average consumer would be like polling toddlers about grammar rules. What matters in either case isn't the agreement among the sample of participants. Rather, it is the prior reflective judgments of the experts used to set the scale --  the judgments of individuals familiar with the conventions governing practice in those contexts. No investigation of the psychological mechanisms underwriting the grammatical judgments of toddlers (or the appreciative judgments of average viewers) will reveal the appropriate conventions.

The following, often quoted, passages from Wittgenstein's lectures on aesthetics are likewise explicit in their criticism of empirical aesthetics:

7. People still have the idea that psychology is one day going to explain all of our aesthetic judgments, and they mean experimental psychology. This is very funny – very funny indeed. There doesn't seem to be any connection between what psychologists do and any judgment about a work of art… (Wittgenstein, 1967, p. 19).

8. Suppose it was found that all of our judgments proceeded from our brains. We discovered particular kinds of mechanisms in the brain, formulated general laws, etc…The question is whether this is the sort of explanation we would like to have when we are puzzled by aesthetic impressions… (Wittgenstein, 1967, p. 20).

Wittgenstein's point is that we aren't so much interested in the appreciative responses of consumers, in the immediate judgments they make, but in the reasons they give, the way they choose, the standards they use to make these judgments. For instance, the naïve viewer and the expert might equally appraise the gesture of a brushstroke. But one might see in it the exuberant energy of finger painting and an illustration of the inexhaustible hope of childhood. The other might see in it a trace of the history of expressive drawing, a thread to sort and organize a critical history, a way of understanding the salience of that noteworthy expressive gesture against a history of artistic practice. There are, as Wittgenstein asserts, "an extraordinary number of different cases of appreciation." Both appreciate the work. But only one appreciates it as an artwork, only one associates the artifact with the set of conventions associated with artistic practices, with the language games of art. Think analogously of someone who says that they've seen Robert Morriss' Rope Piece (1964) in the school gym.

Of course Wittgenstein takes things even a step further. He argues that "what belongs to a language game is a whole culture." This suggests that the reasons given, that the the standards by which one chooses, the norms that constrain our evaluative judgments about art, cannot be explicitly given in isolation, cannot be given as atomistic causes, as individual cogs in an internalist, causal-psychological explanation. Rather, they can only be understood as emergent in the totality of the shared practices of a community. Likewise Dickie borrows a metaphor from Philosophical Investigations to describe the standards governing practice of artistic appreciations, "Appreciating works of art is an ancient and encrusted activity of men: it is…part of the old city in which the streets are narrow and crooked but nevertheless we know them well, although we often get confused if asked to describe them for someone or draw a map (Dickie, 1962, p. 300).

The crux of the matter, to return to the present, is that evaluative judgments about artworks are modeled as post-perceptual judgments about the fit between what has already been seen or heard in a work on the one hand, and the normative conventions that define the appropriate category of art on the other. What differentiates the novice from the art expert is that art critical knowledge of these conventions enables the latter to differentially focus his or her attention, to select features of a prior, common perceptual experience of a work that match to the productive and evaluative conventions that determine its artistic value. The skeptics claim here is twofold. First, these cognitive processes are not appropriately modeled by the causal-psychological mechanisms that support our our perceptual engagement with the work. Second, what matters is the conventions, the prior standards against which we evaluate what we perceive in a work, not how we perceive it per se.

These are quite reasonable worries. However, I think a short discussion of current research in affective perception may forestall these concerns. Affective perception has traditionally been modelled as a direct affair, an unmediated psychological response to a special class of stimuli that naturally broadcast their behavioral significance or biological value (LeDoux, 1996; Pessoa & Adolphs, 2010). This model has been challenged in recent years. Lisa Feldman Barrett and her colleagues (2011) report a broad range of contextual effects in affective perception. Descriptions of a scene or social situation influence how perceivers identify, or categorize, emotional expressions, e.g. a scowl can be categorized as an angry or disgusted facial expression, how information is sampled from facial expressions in eye tracking studies , and even how we perceive expressive faces, e.g. situation descriptions can be shown to influence the way dynamic facial expressions are encoded in the early visual cortex. These effects generalize to individual differences in knowledge about perceived emotions, and extend to cultural differences in the general conception of the nature and significance of emotions and related behaviors.

Luiz Pessoa and his colleagues (2002) have shown further that affective responses to emotionally charged stimuli depend on the availability of attentional resources. The amygdala is ordinarily used as an indicator of affective responsiveness to stimuli.  Covertly attending to the orientation of rectangular bars in a same/different orientation task eliminated amygdala responses to fearful and happy facial expressions, even though the participants in their study were fixating on the center of the faces. 

These data suggest that affective perception is not only influenced by, but may even be dependent on the availability of cognitive resources.

What explains cognitive effects in affective perception? Barrett and Moshe Bar (2009) suggest that the outputs of an affective processing system are integrated into unimodal perceptual processes via a top-down projections form orbito-frontal cortex. The net result is a crossmodally integrated multisensory perceptual network. Their claim, consistent with a biased competition theory of attention (Desimone and Duncan, 1996; Kastner, 2004), is that a fast forward sweep of perceptual processing, at or about 180 milliseconds, is sufficient for a gist level categorization of a scene, object, event, action, or other agent (Greene and Oliva, 2009). This, in turn, drives a quick categorically appropriate affective response to stimuli that primes the body for action - approach or withdrawal. Top-down projections from prefrontal areas and orbitofrontal cortex then collect this bodily encoded  affective information and feed it back to sensory cortices, biasing perceptual processing, enhancing the perception of expected, behaviorally relevant targets and inhibiting the perception of potential distractors. These processes can be used to model attentional, contextual, semantic, and cultural effects in affective perception, and in perception more generally.

The integration of an affective dimension into perceptually processing is a cognitive shortcut, a way of quickly encoding the biological value of a perceived object, event, agent, or action. How might this work? There is no such thing as a disembodied experience. Consequently, our knowledge of the world comes naturally paired with an affective dimension that encodes the biological significance, the affective value, of objects, events, agents, and actions. Barrett and Bar argue that affect is integrated into perceptual processing as a means to unpack and utilize this knowledge in object recognition and action selection.

How would these processes contribute to our engagement with artworks? We can easily imagine how the integration of perceptual and affective processes might explain how we recognize and experience the expressive properties of artworks. One would expect, for instance, that depictions of figures and natural scenes would call on the same range of cognitive-affective processes as the stimuli employed in the experiments referred to above. Some gerrymandering might be needed to show how abstract works call on these same concepts and categories. But we can imagine that the expressionist qualities of abstract art ride piggyback on the same sets of categories and image features that drive perception in natural contexts, e.g. research in the psychology of music demonstrates a perceived relationship between the expressive qualities of biological movements and the expressive qualities of pure music that is underwritten by a shared set of psychological resources (Krumhansl, 1995; Chapados and Levitin, 2008; Vines et al, 2006). In other cases, following Barrett and Wittgenstein, we can imagine that our affective responses to artworks are artifacts of cultural context, of culturally bound standards, conventions, or associations governing behavior…just as is the case in garden variety affective perception  

The normative dimension of appreciation is not far behind. Artworks are communicative devices, artifacts designed to elicit a response in viewers or  to convey some content. The trick is that there are no ideal target procedures for artistic expression in a medium. Rather, artists develop a myriad of productive strategies, formal vocabularies, and style through trial and error. What are the constraints on this process? Communicative success. The communicative expectations of the artist and ever-evolving, shared aesthetic conventions of his or her artistic community. These expectations and conventions , in turn, function as normative constraints on artistic appreciation. But more importantly, they determine the sets of productive practices, formal-compositional conventions, and evaluative conventions that define different categories of art. Categories of art emerge from the shared practices of artists and consumers. Knowledge of these sets of conventions , art critical knowledge of the normative conventions governing artistic appreciation for the relevant category of art, plays just the same role in object recognition as does knowledge of the structure and function of objects or events in any ordinary perceptual context – they drive our attention into, perception, and understanding of artworks.

What's the rub for philosophy of art? Art critical knowledge shapes our perception of artworks just as knowledge of the structure and function of objects and events shapes perception in ordinary contexts. Likewise, the normative dimension of artistic appreciation is integrated into our perceptual engagement with art just as the affective value of any object or event is integrated into ordinary perception. Of course there is more to say…and even more to do. This is an empirical hypothesis. What I have sketched here is a schematic model whose detail and scope remains to be fleshed out.

I close with a caveat. I can imagine someone might argue that this all misses the point. What I have detailed is the how, but not the why of the story. I have provided a mechanism for how the work of normative conventions might be implemented in our engagement with artworks. But I haven't provided even a glimmer of a story for why these conventions bear their normative force. I think this criticism would be a mistake. Appreciative conventions in the arts bear normative force because they emerge from the shared practices within which they are embedded. They are part and parcel of the implicit negotiations of social behavior within a community. But I don't have much more of a story to tell about that here. What I will say is that the how of all of this is far from trivial. Empirical models are concrete tools used in the natural and social sciences to generate predictions and test theories, a means to generate normative constraints on the acceptability of theories. They can likewise be used to generate normative constraints governing practice within philosophy of art. Here my suggestion that, if the model I have proposed is sound, we will have to reconsider yet another of the boundaries that have separated the practice of philosophy of art and psychology" (Seeley 2015).

References:

William Seeley. 2015. Neuroscience & Appreciation: Very Funny Indeed. Aesthetics for Birds. http://www.aestheticsforbirds.com/2015/07/neuroscience-appreciation-very-funny.html (July 6th, 2015).

Happy?

Hi Margaret

RE: But the classical Greek term techne meant art.

No, it meant something like “skill”. There is no equivalent in ancient Greek for what we mean by the word art (as in “art museum”, “fine art” etc.) Like so many other cultures, the Greeks didn’t think about literature, sculpture etc in that way.

RE: “What is your evidence for saying that art didn't exist before the Renaissance?”

Painting, sculpture etc of course existed. But it was not regarded as “art”. As for evidence, where can I start? Following my own strictures, I’m loath just to refer you to books, articles etc. But on the other hand I can hardly retype it all here. One well-known source (though I don’t think it goes far enough) is Kristeller’s "The modern system of the arts: a study in the history of aesthetics." In Essays on the History of Aesthetics, edited by Peter Kivy, 3-34. University of Rochester Press, 1992. But there are many others. I quote some in my books on Malraux (excuse the commercial).

I know this idea is hard to get used to. I found it so at the beginning. But it is really not surprising at all when one thinks about it. Indeed, it would be surprising if it weren’t so. (Unfortunately, this crucial issue is routinely stifled in modern aesthetics - especially "analytic" aesthetics - which systematically refuses to take history or anthropology seriously, and likes to assume that the past was simply a carbon copy of the present.)

RE: “I didn't say artefacts. I said "cultural artefacts": i.e. products that were created simply for adornment or to represent animal and human forms in sculpture.

My apologies. But still this doesn’t help us. We have no idea how prehistoric peoples thought about such objects (or about anything come to that).

RE: I guess this is a question of emphasis. Very little art that is produced is "closely associated" with museum institutions. I invite you to Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, where there is a thriving art community, none of which ends up in museums.

No, I’m not suggesting that all art ends up in art museums. Far from it. I am simply saying that the modern idea of art is linked to the idea of public exhibition and comparison that art museums represent. No such idea has existed in any other culture. For example, many cultures buried their “art” forever in tombs. Food for thought don’t you think? (I’m not of course suggesting that the link with art museums constitutes a sufficient definition of art – simply that it is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the way we think about art, whether it is destined for, or ends up in, art museums or not.)

RE: “I think the "ambiguity" you mention results from historical misreadings and not what linguists call syntactic or semantic ambiguity. I replied to Cora Cruz on 6-22 with my definition of aesthetics.

But "misreading "implies that you think there is one correct reading. As far as I’m aware there is no consensus about what that might be.

I read your response to Cora at the time. I didn’t comment because I didn’t want to interrupt. But I think the definition is too broad and loose. But I’ll keep further comment on that till next time. This is getting too long.

RE: “Could some brilliant person come up with a better way so that the conversation could be more easily shared among all participants?

I’m not sure what you mean. Could you explain? (My own grumble would be that it seems to take a long time for comments requiring approval to be approved. That tends to impede discussion and drain some of the life out of it, I feel.)

DA

Hi Bryan

RE: So, then, if there is no useful consensus at all that can be put to work for other fields, then art is just a shell game and a con job. In that case, it's pretty much disposable and ought to be ignored or consigned to the categories of "hoax", "prank", and "fraud".

Depends on your opinion, I guess.  Is Crime and Punishment “a hoax", "prank", or "fraud”? Mozart’s music? The Victory of Samothrace? Titian’s Entombment?  Endless examples of Buddhist, ancient Egyptian, African, Pre-Columbian, art, etc etc?

If you really think so – and absolutely no one is preventing you from thinking so, Bryan – then there is probably no point in you wasting time thinking about art, the philosophy of art, neuroaesthetics, or anything related. Your time would doubtless be better spent in the laboratory. After all, I'm sure you would agree with me that science - most science anyway - is not a "hoax", "prank", or "fraud". So you can feel quite confident that it is not "disposable" and should not be "ignored".

DA

“may help us”? Who said so? How?

“perceptually engage”? What is that?  Jargon for “look at” or “listen to” maybe?

"parse some aspects of their formal-compositional structure”. Yeah, right.

“recover their expressive properties etc” Recover? Did they get lost? (The "etc" as well?)

“traction in understanding how we recover etc..” Of course, “traction” had to make an appearance…

“how we recover …the depictive content of images? Er …maybe look at them?

Hi Eric

RE: I should have mentioned as well: Art cannot be reduced to aesthetics and neither can be reduced to Beauty.

I agree fully.  And that’s one of the reasons why the meaning of “aesthetics” in neuroaesthetics must be made clear, in my view, if the study is to make any sense at all. What is it about? Beauty? Art? The “senses”? Not at all the same things. As the Goya makes so vividly clear.

RE: Goya is one of my all-time favorites (I am passionate about Spanish and Dutch painting in equal measure), but much of what he created/produced wasn't pretty.

Agreed again. André Malraux put it well: “If the words art and beauty had the same meaning, Goya would not be an artist”. Yet Malraux definitely thought he was an artist – so much so that he wrote a book about him.

I suppose one of the things that bothers me so much about neuroaesthetics – and to a large extent aesthetics itself – is that it seems so divorced from these sorts of realities. It speaks blithely of “art” and “beauty” as if they were somehow self-evident, non-controversial phenomena. Nothing could be further from the truth. Moreover, both ideas are deeply connected with history and culture (in the anthropological sense) as I’ve been pointing out to Margaret. An aesthetics or a neuroaesthetics that ignores this (as the Seeley thing Christy copied does, for example) is simply an exercise in irrelevancy to my mind. For example: Seeley quotes Dickie saying "Appreciating works of art is an ancient and encrusted activity of men.." So when the ancient Egyptians - who had no word for art - carved statues of their God-King to worship in his mortuary chapel or bury in his tomb, they were just "appreciating art" like a visitor to the Louvre? Very narrow thinking. Culture-bound, dogmatic, ill-informed. But all too common...

DA

Hi Bryan

RE: “a usable consensus regarding what constitutes "art",”

Bryan, let’s look at the question from a practical point of view – an approach which, presumably, would appeal to a scientist such as yourself.

To conduct a “neuroaesthetic” scientific experiment with works of art one would need to be able to do at least four basic things:

(1) Decide that neuroaesthetics is in fact about art - and not e.g. about beauty or “the senses”,  which would be a very different matter. As I’ve been pointing out, this fundamental issue is by no means settled. Perhaps you have the definitive answer?

(2) If it is about art (and not beauty or the senses) one would then need to choose specific works of art to experiment with, which necessarily implies saying “this is a work of art; that is not”. As Eric has pointed out to you, this is a very controversial business. Opinions differ enormously. And if opinions differ about the choices, they will inevitably differ about the validity of the research. If one includes,say, Damien Hirst’s shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde, some will say the research is bogus because that has nothing to do with art; if one excludes objects like that, and sticks to good old warhorses like the Mona Lisa, others will say the research is bogus because it "bears no relationship with the modern world" etc. Do you have an answer to that quandary?

(3) Choose a selection of people to experiment with. Now, while a limited number of people think Crime and Punishment (e.g.) is a great work of art (again, I’m assuming neuroaesthetics is about art), there are large numbers of people who find it unbearably tedious and can’t get beyond the first five pages. So how does one choose one’s “subjects”? Just those people who admire the book and think it is a great work of art? That would bias things in advance, wouldn’t it? Or maybe one settles for a random selection of people, which would include large numbers who hate it. But now we would be getting very questionable responses to (what we have decided is) ”art”, would we not? – arguably, it's rather like asking blind people to describe the colour of a sunset.

(4) Assuming all these obstacles are overcome (God knows how – but perhaps you do) one would then have to decide what meaning one would ascribe to one’s “results”. For example, what relationship is there between a brain scan of a person reading Crime and Punishment (and which part?) and the experience of the person reading it?  (And how would one describe that experience?) This raises basic questions that philosophers of consciousness, among others, argue about interminably. But perhaps you have the solution to all that too?

Moral: experimenting with art – and the humanities in general – is rather different from pouring liquids into a test tube and seeing what happens.

Then again, maybe, as you suggest, the humanities are all just a gigantic hoax?

DA

Hi Bryan

RE: “But no matter how many times I say that, nobody wants to listen. Evidently, hands-on experience in a scientific field is of no value in explaining what that scientific field is about and not about.”

The fundamental point you’re missing is whether this is a “scientific field.” 

My own view – which I have explained in some detail now (see e.g. my latest post) – is that science is powerless in this field (assuming the field has even been defined – which, as I’ve pointed out, it hasn't).

Science has brought us many wondrous things (as well as many horrors) but like all fields of study, it needs to know its limits. Unfortunately, a certain misplaced imperialism is often encouraged and fostered by philosophers themselves – especially those of the “analytic” school, many of whom seem besotted by science. (I sometimes wonder if that comes in part from a diet of too much science fiction and too little literature of real value. Which in turn is perhaps the result of analytic philosophy's apparent desire, in many cases, to place as much distance between it and the humanities as possible...) 

Again, Bryan, I can only repeat what I said in an earlier post:

“The fundamental point you’re missing is whether this is a ‘scientific field.’ My own view – which I have explained in some detail now (see e.g. my post of 10/7) – is that science is powerless in this field (assuming the field has even been defined – which, as I’ve pointed out, it hasn't).

But since you dismiss all this as mere “dogmatics”, why not go ahead and conduct an experiment in “neuroaesthetics” yourself? It should be easy for you. You are a neuroscientist, I gather, so you’re well qualified, and certainly much better placed than people like me – poor scientific illiterates who wouldn’t know a scanner from a park bench. Methodology will be no problem for you either. To quote you, one only needs to ‘”pick SOMETHING at SOME POINT and just go with it--see what comes up".  So, it should all be easy peasy.

The rest of us – those who are, as you say, simply too frightened “to dance in the Abyss” – will, I’m sure, await your results, and your interpretation of them, with bated breath.

DA

Hi Eric

RE: I am definitely within that limited group of people who think that Crime and Punishment is a truly great work of literary Art. However, I had the contrary experience with Anna Karenina: despite trying on three separate occasions, I cannot make it past the fifth page.

What can I say, Eric? Personally, I prefer Dostoyevsky to Tolstoy too, though I do think Anna Karenina is great literary work.  

People’s tastes differ – though I confess I was stunned when a leading light in “analytic” aesthetics, at a conference I attended in the UK last year, scoffed at the idea of reading Dostoyevsky. (I had quoted a character in The Possessed as a counter-example to some point he was making).

When self-proclaimed philosophers of art scoff at an author who is probably the greatest novelist of the last 150 years, one seriously wonders what the “art” in their job description relates to. His own tastes seemed to run to second rate Edwardian stuff. My heart goes out to his students...

DA

Hi Eric

RE:  (in your post to Bryan): Aside: I agree with Derek on this point: I am not certain what is actually being studied. However, in disagreement with Derek, I am reluctant to uphold as absolute the non-correlations among Art, Beauty and Sensation--personally, I believe they are unifiable, but that is another post.

I’d be interested in your thoughts on the point, Eric.

My thinking here is quite straightforward:

Art and beauty are not synonymous. The Christ in the Isenheim Altarpiece is not beautiful. (I have even had people complain to me afterwards when I used it as a slide in a PowerPoint show. “Hard to look at”, they said – which is true in a sense.)  But it is – in my view anyway – a powerful work of art. Same point can be made re numerous other works (e.g. Goya’s black paintings). The conflation of art and beauty is one of the persistent illusions of modern aesthetics – a hangover from Hume, Kant and co. "Analytic" aesthetics in particular continues to make very heavy weather of the issue – which is surely quite straightforward – because, as a discipline, it is still firmly yoked to 18th century thinking.

As for sensation, that could apply to art, beauty (e.g. a sunset), or something that's neither. A nasty burn is a sensation. The category is far too vast and ill-defined to be of any use in this context.

DA

Hi Eric

RE: “I’m most keen to be provided with the reasons for the scoffing.”

He gave no reasons.  Just said something like, “Well, if people want to spend their time reading Dostoyevsky…” – in a derisive tone. It’s quite possible he had never read The Possessed and was trying to hide the fact.

I often have the impression that “analytic” philosophers of art are not really interested in art anyway – it just serves as a useful pretext for various pet philosophical topics. Hence the huge amounts of time wasted on arid and irrelevant issues like “the semantics of fictional names” etc. 

As a general rule, I think one can safely say that if one seriously wants to avoid learning anything enlightening about art, analytic aesthetics is the best choice.

RE: “… fail to give adequate narrative weight/balance to the proper subject of great literature: the successful negotiation between individual preferences and social obligations (the ultimately successful and 'comic' harmonization of self and society. To put it another way: by the end everyone finds out what his and her rightful place is).

Yes, I think this was about the level of thinking of the speaker in question. Literature as edifying moral tale, spiced with a little humour to keep things cheery and bright.  “Proper” literature....

DA

Re: "nice anecdote about the Isenheim Altarpiece,

It’s not just an anecdote, Eric. It illustrated a very natural reaction to the Isenheim. And there are countless other works that, likewise, it would be absurd to call beautiful. Think of the numerous masks etc from the Pacific Islands now included in our world of art. Think of the Pre-Columbian monster-gods. Think of Goya’s etchings and black paintings (Malraux: sums this up well: “If the words art and beauty had the same meaning, Goya would not be an artist.”). Think of the leering devils on medieval cathedrals. Or turning to literature, think of Dostoyevsky, Kafka etc. Is the murder scene in Crime and Punishment beautiful? Seriously? It’s powerful - almost unbearable. But beautiful???  

Of course, one can call all these things beautiful if one chooses. If one chooses, one can call anything beautiful. (Where, after all, would one draw the line?). But one does so at the cost of rendering the word meaningless and simply blunting one’s critical apparatus. The continuing fixation of many philosophers of art on the idea of beauty is, in my view, simply a last-ditch attempt to save traditional aesthetics – Hume, Kant etc – on which so much of it still rests.  But it’s ridiculous, surely. Who can look at the Isenheim and seriously say : “Gee, that’s beautiful!” Who could say it of Goya’s Witches Sabbath or his Disasters of War - e.g. those showing dismembered bodies stuck on the branches of trees? 

The “art = beauty” thing is a hangover from the Renaissance and from Enlightenment aesthetics (when it was accurate). But the world of art has changed hugely since then. Both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment would not even have accepted that the works mentioned above are art – they would have regarded them as utterly beyond the pale. But the necessary connection between art and beauty has long gone.

RE: “My point was more that the sensory underpinning of both Art and Beauty (and the Sublime, and the Horrific) needs to be re-theorized IF a unified form of aesthetic theory for contemporary usage is to be achieved (and assuming, of course, that it is even desirable to provide one).”

But why try to unify art and beauty?  It was unified once – hence Kant, Hume etc. But it no longer is, or needs to be – in fact, any such supposed unity is a huge red herring.Some art is beautiful, but some art isn't, and obviously doesn't seek to be.

The challenge for us now is not to unify art and beauty but to develop a unified theory of art that can include beauty but which is no longer dependent on it. That means abandoning Kant, Hume etc. But so what? Are we determined to keep our minds firmly stuck in the 18th century?

DA

Hi Luc

Re: Dear Margaret, Could you explain the distinction you make between material and cultural human artefacts?

Pls excuse me butting in but if it’s of interest to you, I'll offer my thoughts on the matter.

The question as it stands is in fact rather ambiguous, because the word “cultural” is ambiguous. A stone tool or an arrow head, for example, can be both a material and a cultural artefact: they are both material, but they can also be evidence of the nature of the culture from which they came – hence cultural (as well).

The important distinction to be made is between artefacts that are of purely historical value and those that transcend their culture and are still vital and alive for us today – i.e. those artefacts we call art. A stone tool from Lascaux is an artefact of purely (pre)historical value; the cave paintings at Lascaux transcend history and have lived on as (what we call) works of art. An arrow head from, say, Mesoamerica is of purely historical value; some of the finest sculptures from Mesoamerican cultures have lived on as works of art.

The difference is mirrored (if at times only roughly) in the distinction we make between art museums and museums tout court (i.e. history museums). The stone tool and the arrow head usually find their way into the latter, the Mesoamerican sculpture into the former (as would the cave paintings at Lascaux if they were moveable). There are of course endless examples of this contrast. I’ve only chosen a couple at random.

This distinction raises the crucial question of the capacity of certain works (those we call works of art) to transcend time. This question is almost totally neglected in modern aesthetics (which prefers to devote its time to burning questions like “the semantics of fictional names” …)

DA

Hi Eric

Time on my hands so I’ll reply to a part of your post I missed:

“And of course part of the goal is to mount a comprehensive defense of Art and Art Theory in an age of accusations of 'hoax' or 'fraud' if mathematical forms of precision cannot be provided.’

In my view, “mathematical forms of precision” will only ever tell us very trivial things about art. (So, for example, “neuroaesthetics” and the currently fashionable “digital” approach to literature are simply wastes of time.)

But so what? Art is not science any more than it’s history, or politics, or philosophy. One of the persistent stumbling-blocks of art theory today, in my view, is the refusal by so many thinkers to entertain the idea that art (in the general sense of the word) is, as lawyers would say, “sui generis”. “Analytic” philosophers of art keep wanting to turn it into philosophy - and frequently discuss it as if it is; and “continentals” usually want to turn it into politics. (I’ve just been reading a book by Rancière – and there it is again: art as politics.)

Why this constant dread of thinking that art might be sui generis? I think there are probably two reasons – both bad: (1) It’s assumed that this will lead necessarily to an “art for art’s sake” position, which no one, apart from a few latter day Wildeans, wants to espouse any more; and (2) (which is connected) people very much want to give art a “practical” purpose (without thinking carefully about what "practical" might mean), and calling it philosophy or politics or an offshoot of science seems to meet that need.

But why assume that a sui generis explanation of art will lead inevitably to “art for art’s sake”? It might lead somewhere quite different. And why might a sui generis explanation not show that art is just as important, if not more so, than philosophy or politics – or science?

I sometimes think that philosophers of art – on both sides of "the divide" – often lack a genuine faith in art. They seem to think it can only be truly valuable if it’s really something else.

DA

Hi Margaret

Re: ‘My response was limited to the context of Derek's argument that art didn't exist before the Rennaissance.”

I thought I should make it clear that it’s only in a certain sense that I think that “art didn't exist before the Renaissance”.

Of course, there was sculpture, painting, poetry, etc before the Renaissance, much of which today we regard as art. It includes works from the Middle Ages, ancient Egypt, Africa, China, India, etc, etc, and among it are some of the masterpieces of world art.

But the term “art”, with the meanings Europe has ascribed to it, has only existed since the Renaissance – indeed it was one of the inventions of the Renaissance.

So we have a curious and intriguing situation: Michelangelo (for example) considered his sculptures to be “art”, but a sculptor in ancient Egypt (for example) did not – and could not anyway because there was no such word in his language. Yet despite this, we now – since the early twentieth century – have come to regard many Egyptian works as major works of art and willingly place them in our art museums (together with the Michelangelos etc).

Intriguing is it not?

Modern aesthetics steers well clear of problems like this. Inter alia, it requires us to think about the relationship between art and history, and modern aesthetics – especially of the “analytic” variety – seems constitutionally unable to do that. (It can't tear itself away from fascinating topics like the semantics of fictional names!)

(I think there is a solution to the problem, by the way, but I won’t launch into it here. )

 DA

Hi Eric

RE: “Well, you can put all of the blame squarely on Plato, The Republic, Chapter Ten--an aesthetician's nightmare but one of the single most important texts in the history of philosophy.”

Well, perhaps; but I tend to think that the causes of the “see-art-as-something-else” syndrome lie somewhat closer to us in time.

In the eighteenth century there was no fundamental angst about the nature/purpose of art. There were differences of opinion about how exactly one might define taste, beauty and aesthetic pleasure but no one really questioned that these were they keys to what art was about.

Problems began in the 19^th century with Hegel: if art is part of history, how can it be about “timeless beauty”?  Things got worse with Marx: if art is part of an economic/social process, does it exist merely to give “pleasure” – and what happens to the idea of taste? (Bourdieu has answered that one!)

By the time we reach the 20^th century, the 18^th century solution is in dire straits. Art had therefore to be given a different rationale (without jettisoning Kant, Hume, etc altogether – these, after all, were the founding fathers.) For continental aesthetics, art became a lever in the social process or a product of it (Sartre, Bourdieu, Badiou, Rancière, etc); and for the analytics it became a surrogate philosophy (so it dotes on questions like “What is representation?” Or “What is the difference between fictional and non-fictional statements?" etc – questions in which art functions at best as a pretext.) For both schools of thought, the possibility that art might have a purpose sui generis is ignored: art is either a social lever or a pawn in a philosophical game. Which is why, I assume, both schools of thought increasingly prefer the term "aesthetics" to "philosophy of art". The latter is an uncomfortable reminder of something they would prefer to forget…

RE: It is one of the vagaries of European history that the Western philosophical tradition has chosen to make representation the seminal problem of critical thought rather than hermeneutics. 

Could you enlarge a little on what you mean here, Eric?

DA

Hi Eric

Thanks for your post and the interesting comments.

I confess I am not quite sure what you have in mind when you speak of “re-unify[ing] the aesthetic sciences”. Do you mean trying to bring analytic and continental together? Or do you mean bringing them into line with science in some way? (I think both paths would be unproductive but I won’t launch into why here in case I’m misreading you.)  

Re: “I am also in very strong agreement with everything that you have said about the analytic squad. Unfortunately, they seem to hold the high ground at the moment and are hard at work to ostracize as trivial anything that does not conform strictly to their quasi-mathematical prescriptions.”

Yes, this is very much the case. Analytic aesthetics, to my mind, has a fortress mentality with the drawbridge let down only for those who mutter the right code words. In one sense, it's the reverse of an academic discipline because it flatly refuses to engage seriously with ideas outside its own little realm (e.g. history, anthropology), no matter how relevant they may appear to be. It makes an exception in the case of science because it sees it as non-threatening (hence the tolerance for “neuroaesthetics”). But anything that questions its basic assumptions is strictly verboten. So it’s less a field of study than a set of dogma, keeping itself going much as scholastic philosophy did by endless petty disagreements over points of doctrine.

None of this should really matter because analytic aesthetics obviously has zero impact in the public sphere. But in the end that’s what's so distressing. To my mind, art (in all its forms) is one of the very few things left in the modern world that can mean something to people. An aesthetics – or, rather, philosophy of art – worth its salt should be able to say something worthwhile and illuminating to them about the subject, but analytic aesthetics (with continental not far behind) is a million miles from being able to do that. And to make matters worse, it doesn't even seem to care...

DA

Hi Eric

Re: My bottom line is not so much proving the erroneous nature as arguing for/demonstrating the independent validity of non-quantifiable approaches. 

The major deficiencies I see in analytic aesthetics are not related to quantification in any essential way. As you know, I think neuroaesthetics is bunkum but I doubt if, in the end, hard core analytic devotees place much importance on it anyway. They’re happy to give it house room for the time being because they see it as non-threatening, but if it all sank beneath the waves tomorrow I doubt if they would lose much sleep.

The deficiencies in analytic aesthetics are more deeply rooted. They relate mainly to an inability to think outside the tiny (and antiquated) square of 18^th century thinking about art (Kant, Hume etc) and a refusal to question any of the underlying assumptions on which the thought of that period is based. 

Hence, for example, the complete divorce between analytic aesthetics and historical thinking, and the  neglect of crucial issues such as the relationship between art and (the passing of) time. Which results in, inter alia, the longstanding and ridiculous separation between aesthetics and art history and the inability of analytic aesthetics to say anything significant about art museums – even though that's how most people today encounter visual art. Etc, etc. It's fortunate, actually, that analytic aesthetics has zero impact in the public sphere because it functions principally as a barrier to our understanding of art rather than an aid.

Re; “I take with great seriousness the proposition of Art as aesthetic sensation.”

Personally I avoid the word “aesthetic” like the plague. In my experience it contributes nothing but confusion to discussions about art. Another unfortunate hangover from the 18^th century…

RE: “I learned all over again how to appreciate the 'literary effect' view of High Art.

I don’t know what “high art” is. To my mind, there is art and there is the rest. The dividing line is always imprecise (and it’s pointless trying, as analytic aesthetics so often does, to produce formulae to make it precise) but the difference is nonetheless very real.  One might, for example, quarrel over whether The Three Musketeers is art but the difference between Crime and Punishment and a Batman comic is nonetheless stark. As Malraux puts it, art is defined by its poles not by its borders.

DA

Hi Eric

I think the single most important step aesthetics could take would be to show a little intellectual courage and integrity and have a genuine look at its own history and genesis. I don’t mean the usual history-in-a-bubble thing (Plato, Aristotle, jump to the 18^th century – Hume Kant etc.) I mean a careful examination of European aesthetic ideas in the context of the cultural and artistic context in which they emerged. So one could see, for example, that pet concepts such as beauty, pleasure and taste were not sudden philosophical discoveries of “timeless” ideas emerging out of a vacuum but reflections of a particular 18^th century state of mind in relation to art and culture.

That, of course, would only be a beginning. Much, much more would need to be done – including an honest acknowledgement that “art” is a specifically European idea, and a recognition that some solid rethinking is required to take account of this fact (given, for example, that so much of our modern world of art is from non-European sources past and more recent).

In short, a history of European aesthetics that recognises that, like all philosophical movements, it was never insulated from the culture in which it emerged.

One result of all this, I believe, would be an eventual realization that Enlightenment aesthetics, including Hume, Kant and co, can be more or less disregarded as serious explanations of art as we know it today. Enlightenment aesthetics would still have a place in the curriculum but purely as a phase in the history of European ideas.

Needless to say, I don’t see any of this happening…

DA

Hi Eric

Just a few points (not necessarily in the order of your post)

RE: “to the cult of the museum (which you have repeatedly trashed with some effect).”

I don’t understand. I am in no sense wanting to trash museums. In fact, I think they are of major importance and need to be given a lot more attention and thought than aesthetics usually gives them. Analytic aesthetics has virtually nothing to say on the subject; continental is almost invariably negative. I have lots more to say on this topic, but I’ll leave it there.  

RE: “my reply was that for the Bertrand Russell crew Temporality is deemed to contaminate the purity of the thought experiment.

This reminds me of a recent comment by a leading UK analytic aesthetician (whose name I shall omit to protect the guilty):  “…all these earlier thinkers might have been confused in their analyses so why dwell on mistaken views. Analytic philosophy seeks the truth about the subjects it addresses, and timeless truth as far as that is attainable”.  From which we presumably deduce (a) that “these earlier thinkers” were not seeking the truth (what were they doing I wonder?); and (b) that one can readily distinguish “timeless truths” (i.e. truths impervious to historical influence) from non-timeless truths. (Do the latter carry warning flags, I wonder?).

Analytic philosophy is particularly naïve, not to say obtuse, in this respect. Interestingly, it has already abandoned some of its own earlier views. (They were presumably only masquerading as “timeless”.)

RE: “I do not believe that Art or artistic appreciation/response can be explained wholly within terms of the historical.

Neither, emphatically, do I. But I also do not think that one can simply dismiss history – including one’s own place in it – with a disdainful (and largely ignorant) wave of the hand as analytic aesthetics standardly does (e.g. as in the statement above).  

RE: “the fact that so much was buried can attest to the Egyptian devotion to their Forms, as the interred artifacts were meant to serve as votive offerings to Eternity, which certainly reflected a sense of the Egyptian's assessment of the artistic merit of their own creations.”

This strikes me as a case of what psychologists call “projection”. We know for a definite fact that there was no word – and therefore no concept – for “art” or “artistic” in the Egyptian language (or in hundreds of other languages). Yet because we think in those terms, we insist that the Egyptians must have done so as well.  We today certainly regard many Egyptian objects as art. The challenge – not an easy one – is to understand how objects that were not regarded as art when created have become (what we call) art today. Simply arguing that the Egyptians must “really” have regarded them as we do is to short-circuit that challenge and deny historical fact. Of course, conveniently, the Egyptians are not here to express an opinion…

And the idea of eternal “Forms” (without or without a capital) is surely very dubious. What “eternal forms” are shared by, say, an Egyptian statue, an ancestor figure from the Sepik River (some excellent examples on display at the NGA at the moment), a Sung landscape, and Titian's Pieta? The idea of eternal forms in art is viable only to the extent that one carefully avoids saying what they are... Aesthetic phantoms.

RE: “And let's not forget that your historicist rigor, from a Platonic perspective, ultimately betrays itself as symptomatic of the very thing that philosophy is intended to rectify: uncertainty, imprecision, and opinion.”

I usually distrust labels and I don’t know exactly what you mean by “historicist”. If it means that history is the be-all-and-end-all, then it certainly doesn’t apply to me. But I do not think one can simply ignore history and (a) pretend it never happened, (b) assume – on the basis of what? – that one's own position/methodology is exempt, or (c) pick and choose what one accepts and rejects (so, for example, one rejects the clear evidence re the absence of the concept art in many cultures). Analytic aesthetics' position in this regard is, to my mind, simply ridiculous – a clear case of the intellectual ostrich. Continental, of course goes to the other extreme and puts history (and politics) on a pedestal.  There is no need to do either.

 DA

RE: “I find everything in your list utterly beautiful”.

Of course one can call anything beautiful if one likes. And why stop at the battered body of the Isenheim Christ or Goya’s dismembered corpses hanging from tree branches? If they’re “beautiful”, why not corpses infested with maggots, or horrific facial burns, or photos of war injuries in which, say, half the face has been blown away by shrapnel and the mouth is left as a huge gaping hole in the side of the face? (I remember seeing such a photo – it was very hard to look at.)  

Surely, if all that is beautiful, nothing is not, and the very word “beauty” loses all value and meaning, thereby becoming quite useless for descriptive or analytic purposes.  (And in a way, it strikes me as a cruel pretence: in all sincerity, are we really going to tell someone who has suffered horrific facial injuries that they are “beautiful”?) 

We are led into this untenable position, I believe, because we’re weighed down by traditional aesthetics (Kant et al) which is wedded to the idea of beauty (though there are occasional dissenting voices these days).  We have effectively brain-washed ourselves into assuming that if something is art it must be beautiful (or “sublime” – which, in aesthetics, is a kind of fall-back position for beauty), even if, in cases like the Goya corpses etc, that conclusion runs counter to obvious common sense. Why persist with this?  Why assume that the only power of art resides in a power to be beautiful? Why not a power to fascinate? Why not an inherent power of art that can manifest in many different ways of which beauty is only one?

I think the notions of beauty and the sublime, instead of helping is to understand art, often hold us back. Some art is beautiful (Veronese’s Venus and Adonis surely is) but a lot is not and doesn’t seek to be. Once we realize this, we release ourselves from the useless burden of trying to convince ourselves that the Isenheim Christ (for example) is beautiful when it is so palpably not. We can certainly recognise that such an object is a powerful work of art, but we can look for the reasons elsewhere.

RE: “So, to deconstruct: you are 100% percent correct that the Ancients had no sense of Art in our commodified sense which can be shown by their absence of the Cult of the Museum which can, in turn, be proved by the burial (or ritualistic destruction; the potlatch) of items which, if they had our sense of Art/artifact they would have preserved. But the uses, in their non-Museum sort of way, to which they put their artifacts does not tell us about the value that they assigned them: the ritualistic destruction/burial of these objects signifies an adoration of the art/artifacts which might be used as the basis for re-constructing a sense of Art-as-special (=) -beautiful item but not in our specific sense of the museum/gallery/repository.”

I should be quite clear that I am in no sense suggesting that museums “commodify” art. On the contrary, art museums, in my view, are one of the main ways we today respond to art (though they would have been unthinkable in, say, ancient Egypt or Greece). They don’t in any sense devalue art; they help us see its value – as art.

And the notion of art as “special” (Dissanayake used this a lot) seems a dead end to me.  All kinds of things are “special” and are not art. And equating special with beauty just puts us back in the circle I describe above.

No I’m not familiar with the Chomsky-Norvig debate but based on what you say, I don’t see the connection with what we are discussing.

DA

Hi Eric

Thanks for your reply.

RE “…traumatized flesh may not be a source of beauty per se but it can be sublimated via artistic appropriation to create an effect or sensation of the beautiful; Goya did this with his 'Disaster of War' series.”

I think we should call a spade a spade. Surely it is gilding the lily to say that horrific facial injuries “may not be a source of beauty per se”. They are often simply unbearable to look at.  Have you ever noticed how rarely they are shown in books or on TV – even in war documentaries? Yet there have no doubt been many thousands of them, especially after the two world wars – tragically disfigured people who have spent their lives in institutions where they could be given special care and sheltered from the public gaze. To speak about “beauty” at all in this context strikes me as quite incongruous.

Where art is concerned, however, the issue is quite different. No genuine artist depicts horror simply for the sake of it (if they did, Hollywood would beat them hands down) so here we’re not simply talking about horrific images. Works such as Goya’s Disasters or Grunewald’s Crucifixion make use of suffering for specific artistic purposes – which, I would argue, have nothing to do with beauty. Goya, for example, uses suffering and humiliation to create a universe of the lost, a sinister netherworld from which all trace of humanity has disappeared – the polar opposite of art in the humanist Renaissance tradition, including that of Goya’s contemporaries such as Watteau, Tiepolo, Fragonard etc where beauty plays an indispensable role. Place, say, Saturn devouring his children beside Watteau’s  Embarkation for Cythera and you’ll see what I mean. Any hint of beauty would destroy Goya’s etchings and black paintings and he works very hard, in terms of both subject matter and style, to remove all trace of it. (Hence by the way his affinity with much modern art.)

This incidentally is the kind of issue neuro-aesthetics entirely ignores. There seems to be an assumption in everything I’ve read in that area that art is always, and necessarily, connected with beauty – a very naïve view, in my opinion, and one that suggests a lack of genuine interest in art.

RE: I think that the Museum has become one of the primary 'factories' of the commodification of artistic consumption..

I find the word “consumption” decidedly odd in the context of art. Do I “consume” Crime and Punishment when I read it? (It would be far better to say that it consumes me!)  Do I “consume” Mozart when I listen to his music? I enjoy it, admire it, even love it, but consume it? How? It’s hardly a packet of  potato crisps!  Likewise, do I consume the wonderful and sinister Sepik river masks currently in the NGA when I go to see them, or the works of Picasso and contemporaries located nearby?  At a pinch, I would agree that visual art is “consumed” when it’s bought and sold by art dealers. But I don’t want to buy the works I see in art museums, and who does these days, apart from private collectors – whose collections usually end up gifted to public galleries anyway.

Talk of "consumption", "commodification" etc in relation to art seem to me to reflect ideological preoccupations that throw little or no light on the nature of art, or the importance it has for us.

As for the Chomsky-Norvig debate I would definitely agree with Chomsky. Norvig’s reply, you say, was: “AI research does not require a definition of human intelligence in order to progress; simulation via mimicry is sufficient.” That’s fine as long as one admits that one is not claiming to create human intelligence but something else. Once can hardly create X if one does not know what X is. And Norvig's use of the term “mimicry” here is misleading. How does one mimic something when one doesn’t know what it is?   

Similar reasoning applies in the case of neuroaesthetics of course. One can hardly make pronouncements about the brain’s reactions to art if one has no way of strictly separating art from non-art. Which we will never have (and don't even need). Thus: exit neuroaesthetics.

DA

Hi Bryan

But is that "prevailing opinion" backed up by empirical evidence or merely a bunch of elaborate frameworks? …

This is a question to address to those who hold the prevailing opinion I mentioned. As I said, I think the view in question is nonsense. Searching for definitions that will allow one to neatly separate art from non-art is a monumental waste of time. And even if, per impossibile, one found such a definition, what use would it be?  If we told someone who is bored stiff by Mozart’s 22 Piano Concerto (for example) that it exactly matches the alleged definition of a work of art, are they going to suddenly start enjoying it? Will it make one iota of difference to their reaction to it (assuming they are honest)?

Re: “As for "context", that's simple. There are dogmatics who love to harp that paintings after a certain era do not constitute "art", while others claim they do. Is a given piece of music art or not? That probably depends upon the context of the individual critic's set of dogmas, nothing at all about anything objective, empirical, and independently verifiable.

I agree… sort of.

RE: “So, then, we can have a bunch of dogmats nattering on and congratulating each other on the elaborateness and byzantine ornamentation of their arguments, but that doesn't make what they say an empirical, verifiable truth.

Again, I agree… sort of.

PS.  Bryan, you seem to have a basic animosity towards art or art critics. (Maybe both?)  Am I correct? Where does that come from?

Hi Eric

I read your reply to Bryan and I just wanted to clear up what might (or might not) be a possible misunderstanding of my position. You write: “ So, the entire gamut of aesthetic responses are not restricted to the beautiful, and we cannot--and should not expect--Art to always conform to the beautiful. But that does not, by itself, demonstrate that Art is nonsensical…”

I am not in any way suggesting that art that is not beautiful (and there's a lot that isn’t) is nonsensical.  Far from it. Goya’s etchings and black paintings (e.g.) are in no sense a pursuit of beauty but they are certainly not nonsensical. Heaps of other examples.

(Maybe I am misreading you.)

DA

RE: Perhaps one of the threats posed by neuroscience to the world of the aesthetician is the possibility that there might be no fundamental difference in the response of most people to "art" vs. not-"art". Then they risk losing what little social status they might gain from their profession.

Is there much social status involved? Personally, I rarely discuss my preferences in music, literature or visual art with people I meet. I discuss them on this thread because it’s about aesthetics and they’re relevant here. But most people I know – there are a few exceptions – would think that a love of (e.g.) Mozart’s music, or Dostoyevsky, or Romanesque sculpture is slightly weird – a strange, if largely harmless, eccentricity.  (Actually, I’ve even found this to be true among writers in aesthetics: most are much more interested in philosophising about art than art itself and their own preferences are often decidedly undiscriminating. Strangely, I sometimes have the impression that art doesn’t really interest them…)

It’s worth adding, perhaps, that, in general, writers in aesthetics are (unlike me) quite well-disposed towards neuroaesthetics. I really don’t get the impression that they see it as a serious "threat” (it often figures on conference agendas for example). Why is this the case? Not sure. Partly perhaps because it’s quite a fashionable topic, especially among the young, and they don’t want to be seen as "out-of'date", reactionary etc, and perhaps also because they suspect it will never amount to much anyway.

My own objection to neuroaesthetics, as I’ve explained, is that I see it as a waste of intellectual time and effort. Nothing to do with threats to social status.

DA

Hi Bryan

Excuse me butting in to your conversation with Eric but I just can’t resist commenting on these remarks:

If philosophers of aesthetics can't come up with anything other than their own opinions, however internally "consistent", why bother listening to them? …

These are not rhetorical questions. If there is no such thing and cannot be any such thing as an empirical and independently verifiable--or at least replicatable, I'll surrender "objective" [--] criteria set for what constitutes "art", what good are the self-appointed "critics", "experts", and "philosphers"? ...

Or is that their actual role, to give us all something to laugh at as magnified mirrors of our own ridiculous behaviors?

Well said. And actually you’ve hit a very raw nerve in philosophical aesthetics. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of their number once famously said that if they can’t come up with what you term “empirical and independently verifiable criteria” separating art form non-art, then they “gibber”. Despite many decades of searching, no such criteria have ever been devised. Hence the uneasy feeling among many writers in aesthetics (rarely admitted to) that they do in fact “gibber”, or as you put it, that they might not be worth listening to.

The search goes on of course: the faith that, somewhere out there, lies the holy grail of the incontrovertible criteria is still alive and well, and every now and then a philosopher will announce that he has found them at last. But alas, it always turns out to be a false report and with every passing decade, the flame burns just a little lower…

I think the belief that such criteria might exist reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of art but I’ll refrain from explaining why because it would take much too long. I’ll just make a point I made in my earlier post: If we told someone who is bored stiff by Mozart’s 22 Piano Concerto (just for example) that it exactly matches “empirical and independently verifiable” criteria distinguishing art from non-art, would they suddenly start to enjoy it? Would it make one iota of difference to their reaction to it (assuming they are honest)? Or to put that another way: what would be the use of the criteria, assuming they existed?

DA

Hi Eric

Just a couple of points:

Re: Many things that may really be Art may not be in museums (this is where Derek and I diverge; I accept as Art many things that he would find to fall below the standard, such as crime fiction or the graphic novel).

I agree that many works of art – often great works of art – are not in museums but I’m thinking of things like the statues on Chartres Cathedral or the bas-reliefs at Borobudur. In other words I’m thinking about what Malraux calls our musée imaginaire (the world of art both inside and outside art museums).

Also a quick answer to this point:

Since so much of artistic appreciation--and therefore definition--consists of issues of sensibility, sense, distinction and social identity (see Pierre Bourdieu, 'Distinction') are you really so certain that no one would start enjoying Mozart simply because the accepted authorities tell them that Mozart's music is Art? This is where patterns of consumption come in; people listen to the music to self-consciously celebrate the superiority of their taste which, as a matter of social praxis, is a vital part of the enjoyment of Art.

Pace Bourdieu, I do not call loving great art “celebrating the superiority of one’s taste.” I just call that snobbery.

I should add that I have very little time for Bourdieu. Most of what he writes seems to me to be a statement of the bleeding obvious. His big idea is that people’s artistic interests/loves are often influenced by their social/class backgrounds. What a surprise!  Who would have thought it? Of course Fred, who is exposed to (e.g.) Mozart’s music, is more likely to develop a love for it than Jack who is not. How on earth can Jack like Mozart if he’s never, or rarely, heard him? But on the basis of these (very unsurprising) findings, Bourdieu rushes in and, like the good post-Marxist he is, comes up with some grand, class-based theory of artistic taste (I forget the details. Frankly they bored me, and his writing is very tedious).

Why not take the far more obvious step (as Malraux did) and provide opportunities to enable more Jacks to listen to Mozart? – and see more visual art etc. To my mind, Malraux’s answer reflects a strong faith in art; Bourdieu’s just reflects a kind of depressing cynicism.

(Sorry, I have strong views about this.)

 DA

Hi Eric

Re: “I do, believe, though that, so far, photographic reproduction is objectively inferior to the original.”

Yes, I’m not contesting that – though I do contest the idea that reproductions should be frowned on simply because they are reproductions (an impression I occasionally get from some writers). Anything that leads us to the work of art is to be encouraged, in my view. (We should thank our lucky stars that we have photographic reproduction. For hundreds of years the only form of reproduction was etching). Reproductions are like CDs with music: they're not the same as a concert performance but they take a long way towards it.

But the 3D thing raises a somewhat different point. It’s claimed, I gather, that this technology makes possible the exact replication of the original – all the contours of the paint, the lot.  I don’t know how true this is (though I’ve read the claim several times now) but if it is correct it poses some interesting questions don’t you think? (As I mentioned in the earlier post).

Re; “Like it or not, the artist's signature, or imprimatur (think of the workshops of Rembrandt, Reubens and Hals), has, since the Renaissance, been taken as a validation not only of the objective quality of the work but also the truth within the painting--that the work reflects, in a more or less correlative manner, the artist's own vision which is a sign of his or her genius.”

I don’t really follow. Signatures are often taken to indicate authenticity (though they have frequently been forged) but that’s surely all they do.  The quality is for the viewer to decide. And I don’t understand what you mean by “the truth within the painting” etc. If a mediocre painter (let’s say Goya’s mentor, Bayeu) signs his painting, in what way does that “validate the truth within his paintings” or afford a sign of his “genius”?  Though competent, Bayeu is surely a mediocre painter whether he signs his work or not?

And you also say that “this is, in fact, the basis of much of our cultural evaluation of the status of the art work as a work of Art.”  I can’t agree. We don’t say that Botticelli’s paintings are works of art because he signed them (I don’t think he did; nor did many others at the time – da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, lots of others.) 

Then you say that : He [Baudrillard] is making the historical observation---almost anthropological, really--that the abolition of the primacy of the original through the hyper-commodified logic of reproduction instigates a loss of the referent which is identical with the abolition of meaning in toto. Therefore, there can be no longer any collective belief in the Truth of Painting--wholly independent of the metaphysical veracity of this supposition--which has engendered a crisis of the social meaning and cultural value of Art; precisely because one of the justifications of Art has been its relationship to Truth.’

If this is Baudrillard’s argument, it’s very dubious. First: Setting aside the 3D thing, I see no evidence that the primacy of the original has in fact been abolished, at least where painting is concerned.  If it has, why do thousands stream through art museums like the Louvre and the Met every day? Second, even supposing the said “primacy” had been abolished, why would this abolish the “meaning” of the painting or its “truth”. To take an extreme case: suppose Titian’s Entombment (both versions) had been completely destroyed. There are scores of reproductions, some very good. We would certainly regret not having the original but we could still glean an enormous amount from the best reproductions.  Its meaning might be clouded a little, but hardly lost.

Re;” Of course, if you are like Bryan and suspect, deep down, that Art is a hoax, this constitutes nothing more than a belated realization of the obvious.

I most certainly don’t think that art is a hoax (despite the odd exception in contemporary art.) I think that art (and I don’t just mean Western art – I mean the art of all times and all cultures) is one of humanity’s greatest achievements – a simple point but one, oddly enough, that modern aesthetics, both analytic and continental, always seems very reluctant to make. (I think they see it as unsophisticated or politically incorrect or something…)

DA

Hi Tami

You do sound as if you have an extensive background in the field. I am not questioning the value of neuroscience in a medical context (though even there I suspect it would need to be used with extreme care). My concern is the use being of made of it in areas like philosophy, ethics and aesthetics.

You say you have “vastly observed the misuse and limitations of neuroscience” so perhaps you share some of my concerns.

DA

Hi Tami

RE: “but I have the sense that you share the concern that neuroscience could disrupt the aesthetics of experience if misapplied.”  

I’m not sure about the phrase “aesthetics of experience”, but I certainly think neuroscience could disrupt aesthetics, the discipline (not that there’s much to disrupt anymore, but that’s another story).

"Neuroaesthetics "has been around for some time now. As far as I’m aware (and someone might like to correct me) it has not revealed the slightest illuminating thing about art, not the slightest.

Neuroaesthetics, and neurophilosophy in general, often remind me of the bad old days of behaviourism. When people asked behaviourism groupies what progress it had made, the reply was always: “It’s early days, just be patient.” Now, of course, no one wants to admit they ever had anything to do with behaviourism. Give us, say, 10 to 15 years and neurophilosophy will have gone down the same ignominious gurgler.

It’s not surprising really: neurophilosophy is really only behaviourism on a micro scale: instead of tracking rats, one tracks neurons.

DA