The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 57-64, Winter 2020.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 109-111, Winter 2020.

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The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 97-100, Winter 2020.

Kendall Walton’s project in ‘Categories of Art’ (1970) is to answer two questions. First, does the history of an artwork’s production determine its aesthetic properties? Second, how – if at all – should knowledge of the history of a work’s production influence our aesthetic judgments of its properties? While his answer to the first has been clearly understood, his answer to the second less so. Contrary to how many have interpreted Walton, such knowledge is not necessary for making aesthetic judgments; (...) perceiving an artwork as belonging to a (correct) category of art requires no art-historical knowledge whatsoever. Moreover, contextualist attempts to incorporate art-historical knowledge via the mechanism of cognitive penetration are incompatible with Walton’s claim that categories of art must be perceptually distinguishable. Here I propose a way of elaborating Walton’s view that avoids this difficulty and reconciles contextualism with aesthetic perception, the view that we perceive aesthetic properties. (shrink)

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 90-94, Winter 2020.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 101-105, Winter 2020.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 114-117, Winter 2020.

The main accounts of the documentary in contemporary analytic aesthetics have difficulties in dealing with the distinction between documentaries and docudramas. On the one hand, the assertion-based accounts proposed by Carroll, Ponech and Plantinga cannot properly differentiate documentaries from docudramas. On the other hand, Currie’s account can do so by relying on the notion of trace but this involves an undesirable side-effect, namely, the exclusion, from the documentary, of those documentaries that do not include traces of their subjects, as for (...) instance documentaries that resort to reenactments. Is there a way to exclude docudramas from the documentary without also excluding other films that we usually treat as documentaries? The paper affirmatively answers to this question by relying on the notion perceptual belief, that is, a belief that one can form by endorsing one's perception. Documentaries are defined as films that mandate us to form perceptual beliefs. Even if a docudrama mandates us to form beliefs, it does not mandate us to form perceptual beliefs, and thus does not count as a documentary. By contrast, a documentary that resorts to reenactments still mandates us to form perceptual beliefs and thus properly satisfies the definition proposed. (shrink)

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 79-84, Winter 2020.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 105-108, Winter 2020.