After an initial period of popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, André Malraux’s works on the theory of art, "The Voices of Silence" and "The Metamorphosis of the Gods", lapsed into relative obscurity. A major factor in this fall from grace was the frosty reception given to these works by a number of leading art historians, including E.H. Gombrich, who accused Malraux of an irresponsible approach to art history and of "reckless inaccuracies". This essay examines a representative sample of the (...) art historians' arguments and contends that they reveal serious misreadings of Malraux’s texts and a recurring tendency to confuse matters of interpretation with matters of fact. The article suggests that the charge of irresponsibility might well be levelled at the critics themselves, and that the myth of Malraux as guilty of ‘reckless inaccuracies’ needs to be debunked. (shrink)

important, though previously neglected, role in an adequate understanding of the nature and identity of visual artworks and other pictures. Using a previous contrast (‘Artworks versus Designs’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 41, no. 4 [October 2001]), I show that differing orientations of a design naturally give rise to distinct pictures, which may be appropriated as distinct artworks by a discerning artist—which also shows that such artworks cannot be types, since they share a common token. The investigation also raises some (...) significant issues concerning artistic printmaking, and strongly suggests in addition that two new concepts of interpretation—of identifying and constitutive interpretation—are required to explain adequately the artistic phenomena that are uncovered. (shrink)

: Titian's Rape of Europa is highly praised for its luminous colors and sensual textures. But the painting has an overlooked dark side, namely that it eroticizes rape. I argue that this is an ethical defect that diminishes the painting aesthetically. This argument—that an artwork can be worse off qua work of art precisely because it is somehow ethically problematic—demonstrates that feminist concerns about art can play a legitimate role in art criticism and aesthetic appreciation.

In this paper I target the relationship between two prints that are roughly qualitatively identical and share a causal history. Is one an artwork if and only if the other is an artwork? To answer this, I propose two competing principles. The first claims that certain intentional relations must be shared by the prints (e.g., editioned prints vs. non-editioned prints). The second, which I endorse, appeals only to minimal print ontology, claiming that the two prints need only be what I (...) call 'relevantly similar' to one other. There are no trumping features over and above relevant similarity. For any pairwise comparison of relevantly similar prints, one print being an artwork is both necessary and sufficient for the other print being an artwork. (shrink)

When browsing through a book on computer graphics, one usually finds a lot of more or less interesting pictures that are produced by means of computers. These pictures are embedded in pages of technical texts describing how this image generation was performed and why it provides a better way to do so than other methods. Less space is usually given to the methodological background and the motivation underlying the preoccupation with computer visualization. In this chapter, we want to complement the (...) more technically oriented part of this book with some reflections as to why such techniques can be interesting not only for computer graphics researchers, and where, from a communication-theoretic point of view, they might be of use in our society. (shrink)

"ScreenPlay" is the first collection of essays devoted to exploring the relationship between cinema and video games. It attempts to introduce the field of video game studies while also increasing our understanding of the two artforms. Although not all of the essays are models of clear thinking on the subject, the volume will be a valuable resource for those working in film, philosophy, new media, and video game studies. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska have brought together a diverse collection of (...) essays where the productive approaches stand out clearly. As a result, one of the most important achievements of the volume is that it allows us to compare methodologies in order to see the kinds of research programs that add the most to our understanding of moving pictures. (shrink)