Stephen Davies, Philosophy, University of Auckland

Important note: This is a final draft and differs from the definitive version, which is
published in A Companion to Aesthetics, S. Davies, K. M. Higgins, R. Hopkins, R.
Stecker, & D. E. Cooper (eds.), (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Second edition. 61-73.
I have been assured by the University of Auckland's research office that if they have
made this publicly available then it does not violate the publisher's copyright rules.

Co-authored with Robert Stecker

twentieth-century Anglo-American aesthetics The 20th century began with all forms of

art dominated by a modernist avant-garde that has its roots in the last third of the previous

century. Also inherited from the 19th century were several important ideas in aesthetics

itself. One was a redefinition of aesthetics as the philosophy of art, or at least an almost

exclusive focus on art as the subject of aesthetic inquiry. Second, via such figures as

Schopenhauer, the idea that art is autonomous from other aspects of human life and is to

be appreciated in an experience that was similarly autonomous—aesthetic experience—

was taking root. A third development was abandonment of the idea that the question

'what is art?' could be answered in terms of representation or mimesis, as it had been for

at least a century and arguably since ancient times. This was prompted in part by the

advent of photography, in part by painting that aimed to distinguish itself from the

photograph, and in part by the recognition of instrumental music as a supreme but

nonrepresentational artform. Hence there was a search for a new way of defining art that

accommodated modernism and these other developments.

Expression theory

One of these approaches defines art in terms of expression rather than representation.

This approach also had roots in late 19th-century thought but received much attention in

the first half of the 20th century. Its 20th-century exponents include most prominently
Bernadetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood. In 1898, Tolstoy proposed that art is concerned

with the communication (or 'infection' as he called it) of an emotion experienced by the

artist to an audience by means of external signs. A work that fails to do this is not truly

art, even if it is in a recognized 'art' form. Tolstoy also provided criteria for evaluating

artworks. These criteria are both formal and substantive. An artwork is formally good if it

is sincere, and it lucidly expresses an individualized emotion. The substantive criteria are

moral, but not in a conventional sense. A work is substantively good if it supplies the

spiritual message needed in its day and age, and this changes over time. In general, the

function of art is to unite human beings in a common, spiritually beneficial feeling. On

Tolstoy's criteria, many works considered among the greatest products of Western art,

such as Shakespeare's plays, Beethoven's symphonies, and Wagner's operas, are either

not art at all or bad art. Many later expression theorists, though they depart from many

specifics tenets of Tolstoy, are remarkably influenced by him.

Thus Collingwood, the proponent of the expression theory who is now most read,

agrees with Tolstoy that it is essential to distinguish between genuine art and various

counterfeits that are often assumed to be art but actually are not. For example, anything

made for the purpose of amusement or giving pleasure ('amusement art'), no matter how

highbrow, is not art properly so called. Like Tolstoy many items assumed to be among

the greatest artworks are not art at all according to Collingwood.

The mark of true art is, of course, expression, by which Collingwood means

something quite specific. Expression is neither the production of an indicator of what one

feels, as when one sighs in sadness, nor the intentional arousal of emotion in another. The

expression of emotion is the coming to know in full specificity exactly what emotion one
is feeling. It is the articulation of the emotion. The creative process by which art comes

into existence, for Collingwood, consists in first becoming aware that one is feeling

something and then gradually and fully spelling out what this is in one's imagination.

Notice that on this account, the artwork is fully realized within the artist's mind. In

contrast to Tolstoy, Collingwood thought that is where art exists.

However, Collingwood recognizes that various media—paint, bronze, stone or

clay, the written word, etc.—have an important dual role in art making. First, although

strictly speaking an artwork exists in some mind, most notably the artist's, the mental

discovery typically occurs only in the process of an artist's using a favored medium.

Second, the product of this process—e.g., the paint on canvass—is the means by which

the emotion might be communicated to an audience. This occurs not by arousing the

emotion in them but by allowing them to recreate the emotion in their own imagination

and thereby also express it in Collingwood's technical sense.

Like Tolstoy and other proponents of the expression theory such as Croce,

Collingwood has an unconventional way of marking the art/non-art distinction. Unlike

Tolstoy but like Croce, Collingwood has a hard time finding a way to distinguish good art

from bad. Anything that succeeds as expression as Collingwood understands it not only is

art but also does exactly what a work of art is supposed to do and hence would seem also

to be good art. Collingwood sometimes speaks of failed attempts at expression as bad art,

but strictly speaking they should count as failed attempts at art making.

All three expression theorists assign to art a hugely important but incredibly

narrow mission. For Tolstoy, it is the uniting of human being in common, spiritually

beneficial feelings. For Croce, it is to create a symbolic expression of an intense

feeling—a presentation of the feeling itself rather than a statement about it. For

Collingwood, the mission of art is the self-knowledge that comes from the clarification of

emotions, which is the 'medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of

consciousness' (1938: 336). It is not surprising that so much of what is conventionally

considered art falls outside the boundaries drawn by such theories, but this is indicative

more of a defect in the theories than the rejected works.

Formalism

Formalism is another approach that attempts to accommodate the rise of modernism and

the rejection of mimetic theories of art. Clive Bell and Roger Fry, the most famous

proponents of formalism in the early 20th century, were art critics and they were heavily

influenced by the developments in the visual arts, especially the paintings of Cézanne,

Picasso, and Braque. (In the second half of the 20th century, the standard bearers of

formalism were Clement Greenburg, another art critic, and Monroe C. Beardsley, a

philosopher heavily influence by the school of literary criticism known as New

Criticism.) Through the lens of such works, which these early formalists interpreted as

totally devaluing representation in the service of exploring form, they reinterpreted the

history of art and developed a formalist aesthetic theory.

This theory has two main points: a new answer to the question 'what is art?' and a

theory of aesthetic value.

According to Bell, a good theory of what art is identifies a property that all

artworks share. Though Bell did not make this point, that is not enough, because if many

other things also share this property, we have still failed to pick out all and only artworks.

It is somewhat plausible to suppose that art's nature has something to do with form, once
we reject representation as its defining feature. But all sorts of things that are not

artworks also have a form in some sense or other. So we need to find a property

possessed by all artworks and not by these other things. Bell's solution to this problem is

to say that what makes something a work of art is the possession of significant form. This

is a form that imbues what possesses it with a special kind of value that consists in the

affect produced in those who perceive it. Bell calls this effect the aesthetic emotion.

A common criticism of Bell's attempt to define art is that it is circular. He tells us

that art is significant form and this is to be understood as form that creates a certain

experience in its audience, the aesthetic emotion, but reference to this emotion is not self-

explanatory. The aesthetic emotion, unlike fear and anger, is not a psychological state

that everyone recognizes. However, Bell tends, especially when he first introduces his

conception of art, to explicate the relevant emotion as that which is caused by significant

form. This clearly does not help.

Some sympathetic interpreters of Bell attempt to show that he is not stuck in this

circle. They point to what Bell calls the metaphysical hypothesis, which claims that the

experience of significant form is much like mystical experience. In both experiences, we

encounter a more ultimate reality, which Bell liked to describe in Kantian terminology:

we encounter the thing-in-itself. On this proposal, focusing on the explicit representation

in artworks distracts us from the more important reality we gain access to through form.

More importantly, this view suggests a non-circular account the aesthetic emotion. It is

the emotion felt when one encounters ultimate reality.

There is a problem with this explication of Bell. While it accurately represents his

metaphysical hypothesis, it mislocates its place in Bell's theory. Bell recognizes the
hypothesis is speculation, and he does not want to tie his definition of art to its being

correct. He stands by his definition even if his metaphysics is wrong. This implies that

whatever 'significant form' does mean, it is not form that creates an encounter with

ultimate reality.

There are other problems with Bell's theory. If there are paintings, sculptures, etc.

that lack significant form, as Bell clearly believes, they would not be artworks at all.

Hence like the expression theorists, Bell's formalism rules that many items widely

considered art really are not. That is counterintuitive. Also, for this very reason, he too

has no place for bad art, since the defining feature of art is also its most important good-

making feature.

Fry escapes these last two criticisms because, unlike Bell, he does not attempt to

define art in terms of form. He is interested in identifying the right way to appreciate

visual art and in what its value consists. He uses the form/representation distinction to

answer these questions. He argued that representation inevitably evokes subjective

responses depending on the associations such features elicit in the individual viewer. The

only way to escape this sort of subjectivity is to focus on formal features. That is the

correct way to appreciate art, and it is what gives artworks their objective value. Fry's

argument has even more obvious problems than Bell's. He assumes that the only way we

can evaluate the representational properties of painting is by creating subjective

associations about them. But there is no good justification for this premise.

In fact, while definitions of art in terms of form have not won wide acceptance,

formalism is particularly weak as an all-encompassing account of the value of art. This is

because it has to treat the most salient feature of countless artworks—their

representational content—as irrelevant to their artistic value. They occur incidentally for

the sake of the forms that emerge from them. Among the many problems with such an

account, it implausibly distances works from the concerns of the artists who made them

and the audiences who receive them.

Before moving on from the topic of formalism, we note a view fashioned from

both formalist and expressivist considerations. In 1942, Susanne Langer drew on the

early Wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning, Ernst Cassirer's work on symbolic forms,

and Bell's view that art is significant form in her Philosophy in a New Key, a study of

expressiveness in music. She distinguished two opposed and exclusive modes of

symbolism, the discursive and the presentational. Discursive symbolism is exemplified

by language and mathematics. Here meaning is generated according to the rule-governed

combination of units of significance. By contrast, presentational symbols take on their

meaning by sharing the form of what they signify, though they realize this in their own,

sometimes very different, medium. Music operates as a presentational symbol of the form

of feeling, according to Langer. That is, music expresses emotions by producing a

dynamic, temporal structure that is an iconic transformation of the sensational structure

of emotional experience. In Feeling and Form (1953), Langer extended her account to all

the arts. Even those that are explicitly discursive take their primary significance from

operating as presentational symbols of organic emotional processes and rhythms.

Langer's theory long remained popular with music educationists, but is now

largely ignored within analytic philosophy of art. Perhaps this is because the philosophies

of mind, the emotions, and language that she adopts all look dated, and because the

indescribable forms and inarticulable meanings that lie at the heart of her theory remain
basically obscure. More generally, despite attracting some attention in the 1950s,

semiotic approaches to aesthetics have sometimes been thought to blur distinctions that

should be clarified, such as those between depiction and expression, meaning and

reference, extension and intension.

Aesthetic theory

A third large scale theory of art that was prominent in the first half of the 20th century is

the aesthetic theory, the idea that artworks are aesthetic objects, and that their nature and

value derives from special experiences they are capable of delivering. Aesthetic theory

can be formulated with a formalist or an expressivist bias but part of its strength lies in

the fact that it need not have either slant. The general idea behind aesthetic theory leaves

open just which properties of an object are responsible for the distinctive aesthetic

experience. This has given the theory staying power. It is the only one to remain

prominent in the philosophy of art after 1950.

Another element often found in aesthetic theory concerns the attitude that we

bring to the situation in which an object is experienced. This idea goes back to 18th-

century accounts of judgments of taste according to which only those judgments that are

disinterested—that is free from bias, and from practical or even theoretical concerns—are

capable of being valid judgments of taste. Edward Bullough was an influential early 20th-

century proponent of this idea. The key concept in his view is that of psychical distance.

This is initially put forward as a variant of the disinterested attitude. We achieve

psychical distance when we put a phenomenon 'out of gear with' practical concerns and

personal ends which enables us to perceive the phenomenally objective features it

possesses. (1912: 89) Bullough's famous example is a fog at sea that, from a practical
perspective, is both inconvenient in creating delays and dangerous in increasing the

likelihood of a collision. In contrast, when one distances oneself from these practical

concerns one can appreciate the unique visual quality of the fog—its milky opaqueness,

the way it blurs and distorts the shapes of objects—which produce in the observer an

'uncanny mingling of repose and terror' (1912: 89). As Bullough develops his idea of

psychical distance, it becomes more differentiated from the traditional idea of disinterest.

First, it turns out that one can be both under-distanced and over-distanced from the

perceived object. In fact, when it comes to the reception of artworks, the ideal is to be as

little distanced as possible without being completely without distance. (1912: 94) Second,

distance is not only a property of an appreciator's attitude but also a property of artworks.

Some 'in- your-face' ones actually attempt to destroy distance while other, unusually cool

works create more distance than normal. Bullough regarded under- and over-distanced

works as aesthetically flawed.

A rather different aesthetic theory is proposed by John Dewey in his book Art as

Experience, published in 1934. Perhaps the starkest difference between Dewey and other

aesthetic theorists is his insistence that aesthetic experience is continuous with the

'normal processes of living' (1987: 16). Hence, there is not the disengagement from

practical and theoretical pursuits that philosophers like Kant, Schopenhauer, and

Bullough emphasize. Dewey insists that aesthetic experience has an instrumental value

often overlooked or denied by other theorists. For anything to have human value it must

serve the needs of human beings in coping with the world they live in. Dewey's idea here

seems be that intrinsically enjoyable aesthetic experience can help us achieve a variety of

other human ends: it can sensitize us to features of the environment we might otherwise
overlook; it can help us imagine more vividly the cognitive and emotional life of others;

perhaps most important for Dewey, it can 'invigorate and vitalize us' in the pursuit of

whatever other ends we might have (Shusterman 2001: 98). There is a similar continuity

between aesthetic and theoretical perspectives. Art, like science, functions to order and

make sense of experience. To use the language of a later philosopher influenced by

pragmatism, both are 'ways of worldmaking' (Goodman 1978).

All this might leave one wondering just what aesthetic experience is for Dewey.

The fact is that he is better at noting continuities than sharply defining things. Doing the

latter seems to go against the grain for him. Still there are special features of aesthetic

experience as Dewey conceives it. Aesthetic experience is an experience rather than just

an undistinguished segment in the flow of consciousness. It is whole in itself. Such

experiences possess unity and give a feeling of closure. It is always intense; we are most

alive when having such experience. It always seems to have a positive valence, and

perhaps is always enjoyable. These features make it valuable in its own right apart from

and in addition to the instrumental functions it serves.

Aesthetic theory after 1950

As mentioned above, aesthetic theory remained prominent in both Britain and the United

States after 1950. However, it was developed in rather different ways in these two

countries.

In Britain, unlike the United States, the leading philosophers of the day did write

about art and the aesthetic, if only occasionally. They endorsed a highly eviscerated

aesthetic theory, which no doubt unintentionally but inevitably could only leave one to

wonder how an artwork could ever be seriously evaluated or be more than a trivial
diversion. Peter Strawson followed Kant in arguing against any rules by which artworks

can be evaluated and added than aesthetic judgment is devoid of any 'interest in what [art]

can or should do or what we can do with it' (1974: 178). Stuart Hampshire asserted that

'works of art are gratuitous, something made or done gratuitously, and not in response to

any problem posed' (1954: 161).

The most important English philosopher of art to emerge in this period is Frank

Sibley. He also took the aesthetic theory of art for granted, but what makes his essays

important and influential is their rigorous, detailed investigation of the logic and

epistemology of the aesthetic judgment.

Sibley's best known paper is 'Aesthetic Concepts' (1959). Here he distinguishes

between non-aesthetic perceptual properties that anyone with normal vision can notice

(e.g., being a red patch) and aesthetic properties that are also often perceptual but require

taste, sensitivity or special training to see (e.g., being balanced). Sibley's main point in

this paper, however, is that while the aesthetic properties of artworks supervene on the

non-aesthetic properties so that a change in the latter would lead to a change in the

former, we can never validly infer the existence of an aesthetic property from the fact that

it contains a set of non-aesthetic properties. For this reason, he claims that aesthetic

disputes cannot be settled by inductive or deductive reasoning from premises about non-

aesthetic properties to conclusions about aesthetic ones. Aesthetic properties have to be

perceived to ascertain their existence in an artwork or other object.

Do Sibley's conclusions imply that aesthetic judgments lack objectivity and that

there can be no general rules or reasons available to support such judgments? In this and

later papers, Sibley took up these questions and argued for negative answers to both of
them. Perceptual, non-inferential judgments can be objective, and for that reason

aesthetic judgments can have an objectivity similar to those about color. As for reasons or

rules, while non-aesthetic judgments never entail aesthetic ones, there are nontrivial

entailments among aesthetic judgments themselves. The existence of certain more

specific aesthetic properties can provide reasons for more general aesthetic judgments.

That a work is graceful, balanced, or witty are reasons to think it has aesthetic merit.

Further, these are always such reason. But such reasons are capable of being defeated.

Wit does not entail overall goodness in a work. Rather it is always a prima facie reason to

think a work has a degree of aesthetic merit that might on occasion be defeated in virtue

of the way the wit interacts with other properties the work possesses.

In the United States, the most important proponent of the aesthetic theory was

Monroe C. Beardsley, who wrote Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism in

1958. Unlike Sibley, whose work is characterized by subtle but piecemeal exploration

into the nature of the aesthetic judgment, Beardsley aimed for a comprehensive theory of

art. Despite its subtitle, his book considers all the arts and many of the issues of

depiction, expression, interpretation, and evaluation that continue to attract attention in

the field, and he reviewed and acknowledged the philosophical literature on these topics.

In subsequent books, he wrote on the history of aesthetics and on literary criticism.

In 'The Intentional Fallacy', an article co-authored with William K. Wimsatt Jr. in

1946, Beardsley attacked forms of criticism that drew attention away from the artwork to

its artist. Only what is manifest in the artwork should be invoked in discussing,

analyzing, and interpreting it, they maintained, in line with the New Critics of literary

theory. This anti-intentionalist stance carried over to Aesthetics, in which Beardsley

consistently defended the autonomy of the artwork. In general, he regarded reference to

the circumstances of the work's genesis as irrelevant to its appreciation. In Aesthetics, he

wrote of 'aesthetic objects' and avoided 'work of art', and he regarded the value of art as

tied to the pleasure its aesthetic contemplation provided. In these and other respects,

Beardsley continued the aesthetic tradition, and he was its most eloquent advocate when

it came under attack in the 1960s and 70s. He differed from some aesthetic theorists,

however, in regarding art also as an important source of pragmatic value, and in this was

explicitly influenced by John Dewey.

Wittgensteinian aesthetics

In the mid-1950s there was a rash of articles (by Morris Weitz, Paul Ziff, John Passmore,

W.E. Kennick, and W.B. Gallie) questioning the possibility and usefulness of defining

art. Artworks are related not by individually necessary and jointly sufficient properties

they all share but by family resemblance or by their similarity to paradigm artworks, it

was held. These views were prompted by Wittgenstein's posthumously published

Philosophical Investigations of 1953, with its skepticism regarding a metaphysics

concerned with Platonic essences. Although the explanatory power of appeals to family

resemblance and the like have been questioned—after all, family membership is not

established in terms of resemblance—anti-essentialism in aesthetics has become a

perennial theme. For many people, there is something about art—its creativity, volatility,

self-consciousness, rebelliousness—that is supposed to make it resistant to the strictures

of definition.

Another part of Philosophical Investigations to attract the attention of

aestheticians was the discussion of aspect perception, or 'seeing as'. This stressed the
extent to which how one sees an ambiguous figure is under the control of the will. It

seemed to some that this account provided a model for aesthetic experience in general

(e.g., see Aldrich 1963 and, for a more sophisticated use of the notion, Scruton 1974).

And it seemed to others that pictorial representation, at least, could be analyzed as a

variety of aspect perception; we see the painted surface as what it represents. But

whereas an ambiguous figure can be seen under only one aspect at a given time, we are

simultaneously aware of the painted surface and of what it depicts, which is one reason

why later theories of pictorial representation moved beyond the discussion of 'seeing as'.

Wittgenstein's influence in aesthetics was strengthened by the publication in 1966

of notes taken in his lectures on aesthetics, psychology, and religious belief. These

rejected the relevance of psychologists' experimental search for the causes of our

aesthetic experience. On the positive side, they emphasized the context-sensitivity and

particularity of aesthetic judgments and the indescribability of aesthetic qualities.

Meanwhile, some philosophers followed Wittgensteinian methods of 'ordinary language

philosophy' to investigate art and the aesthetic, which involved considering how art and

the aesthetic are ordinarily discussed and explaining away philosophical puzzles as

arising from misunderstandings or misapplications of the 'grammar' of this discourse.

Wittgenstein's influence on aesthetics reflects his influence on philosophy more

generally. For a time he was a dominant figure and his ideas remain important to the

present. But his influence has waned over the decades, as philosophers of art adopted

different approaches or considered different issues. He has remained a more prominent

and respected philosopher in Britain than in the United States.

Cognitivism and contextualism

In 1968, two significant monographs were published. Richard Wollheim's Art and Its

Objects explores and rejects the idea that some artworks are physical objects, touching on

depiction, expression, and many other topics in the process. The influence of the later

Wittgenstein is apparent here, as Wollheim emphasized that art is a form of life, and

concluded that it is essentially historical. He made the aesthetic function of art central,

but challenged the notion of the aesthetic introduced by Kant and, in the 20th century,

Bullough. Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art addressed a range of central topics—

depiction, expression, and appreciation—and, via a discussion of symbol systems,

provided a new approach to each. In addition, Goodman drew an ontological distinction

between singular artworks, such as oil paintings, which are 'autographic', and potentially

multiple artworks, such as novels or symphonies, which are 'allographic', and he

developed an account of notation capable of explaining how allographic artworks can be

definitively specified by scripts and scores.

Though Wollheim's and Goodman's books are different in purpose, content, and

style, with hindsight each can be seen to indicate a radical change of orientation in

Anglo-American analytic aesthetics. That shift might be dated to the decade between

1964 and 1974. In brief, it involved a move from regarding artworks as best appreciated

as autonomous and isolated from their creators and from the circumstances of their

creation (where this approach includes the adoption of a psychologically distinctive

mindset, the aesthetic attitude), to regarding their identities and appreciable properties as

depending on relations tying them to art traditions, conventions, practices, and artists'

intentions. In other words, an ahistorical, psychologistic analysis of art and its

appreciation was replaced with a historically contextualized, sociological account of

these matters. For Wollheim, this is apparent in his stress on art's historical character and,

for Goodman, it emerges from his account of art's identity as relative to the conventions

of symbol systems and of art's value as primarily cognitive. This strand is yet more

obvious in his Ways of Worldmaking (1978), with its emphasis on art as a mode of

worldmaking and its recommendation that the question 'When is art?' has more interest

and merit than 'What is art?'

Not everyone followed the trend, however. Art and Imagination (1974), by the

British philosopher Roger Scruton, focused on the phenomenology of aesthetic

experience rather than the importance of art's social context. Nevertheless, Scruton also

contested the traditional characterization of aesthetic properties as simple. With due

homage to Wittgenstein, he argued that aesthetic properties are, like aspects, complex and

'emergent' from simpler, base properties. And above all, he stressed how engagement

with art and aesthetic properties involves the imagination. Another philosopher who

began to explore the role of make-believe in our experience of art at this time was

Kendall L. Walton (1973). He emphasized more than Scruton the way make-believe must

be responsive to the historically variable conventions of the relevant art tradition.

The reorientation within analytic aesthetics from the individual contemplator to

the social setting of art's creation and presentation, which dominated for the remainder of

the century, had two aspects in its initial phase. One was negative. It involved a sustained

attack on the notions of aesthetic properties and aesthetic experience, at least as these had

come to be regarded earlier in the 20th century. The aesthetic theory that was challenged

maintained that aesthetic properties are 'internal' to the items that possess them and thus

are made available through contemplation of that object for its own sake alone. Indeed,
the theory held that actively disregarding the intentions of the item's maker, the context of

production, and any non-aesthetic functions the item might serve promotes—indeed, is

perhaps essential—for its fullest aesthetic appreciation. The adoption of the aesthetic

attitude, a distinctive psychological perspective that involves a distanced and

disinterested approach to its target, seemed to be mandated by the aesthetic theory.

The positive agenda of the new direction in analytic aesthetics involved

demonstrating what relations between the item and its broader context are relevant to its

aesthetic character. As part of this project, a sharper distinction was drawn between the

aesthetic qualities of humanly produced items, especially works of art, and those of

natural objects. The appreciable features of artworks—for instance, ones displaying

influence, reference, modes of treating the medium, the solution of technical problems,

and the extension or repudiation of an art tradition—were represented as being much

richer than those traditionally covered by the term 'aesthetic'. In particular, it was argued

that, for artworks, the art historical context of their creation, the artists' intentions, genre

membership, and individual styles are all significant not only in generating the work's

appreciable properties but in shaping its identity as the work it is.

Of the articles that heralded this change in direction, the most cited is Arthur C.

Danto's 'The Artworld' of 1964. This introduced a term for the nexus of artists, audiences,

critics, and the formal and informal institutions through which they create, present,

describe, record, and appreciate art. Here and elsewhere Danto made use of what might

be called 'the argument from indiscernibles', an argument style with an ancient

philosophical pedigree. That is, Danto described cases in which an artwork is

perceptually indiscriminable from a non-artwork—for instance, Andy Warhol's Brillo

Boxes and the cartons in which Brillo boxes are delivered to supermarkets—or in which

two artworks are perceptually indiscriminable—his hypothetical example is of paintings

of Newton's First and Third Laws by artists A and B—yet, despite the similarity in their

appearances, the one has aesthetically significant properties the other lacks. Whereas A's

painting depicts the path of a particle through space, B's shows where two masses meet,

and whereas Warhol's Brillo Boxes make some kind of comment on the material values

of the time, including the commodification of art, the supermarket cartons do not. Such

examples, if convincing, clearly count against the idea that an artwork's aesthetically

appreciable properties reside solely in its appearance. By describing perceptually

identical pieces—i.e., pieces that might be mistaken for each other by a person who

knows nothing of their functions or origins—that, nevertheless, possess strikingly

different artistic features, Danto's argument showed that those features depend for their

character on relations they hold to matters lying beyond the work's boundaries. As Danto

specified it, the other element in the relation is 'an atmosphere of theory'.

The choice of the word 'theory' was perhaps unwise. It is too easily interpreted as

referring to a pseudo-philosophical theory held by the artist or critic about the nature of

art. As emerged later, what Danto meant could better be characterized as an atmosphere

provided by the art-historical context in which the work is produced. And this fits with a

point he also stressed, following the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, that whether

something can be art at a given moment within the history of art depends on who offers it

and what has become art up to that time. Another aspect of the argument in Danto's

article proved too obscure to be helpful. He invoked an 'is' of artistic identity that is

supposed to be distinct from the 'is' of identity, existence, or predication. In addition, the
article ended with a controversial claim: not only do current artistic developments alter

the art-historical conditions for the works that follow, thereby affecting the properties

they may have, they retrospectively alter the properties of works created formerly. This

final thought was not one that Danto developed or repeated.

Related views were presented at much the same time by Marshall Cohen, Stanley

Cavell, Joseph Margolis, Kendall L. Walton, and George Dickie. And it was Dickie who

produced the most telling criticisms of traditional aesthetic theory in a series of articles

(1962, 1964, 1965, 1968) that challenge the idea that aesthetic appreciation involves the

adoption of a special frame of mind that dissociates its object from its social, practical

context. Rather, close attention of the ordinary kind is required, and in the case of art,

familiarity with the appropriate artworld conventions is vital for locating and framing the

object of appreciation.

As already noted, these arguments led philosophers to focus less on the state of

mind of the individual appreciator and more on the social context in which art is

produced and consumed. The outcome was Dickie's institutional definition of art, first

heralded in 1969 but achieving its fullest statement in Art and the Aesthetic: An

Institutional Analysis (1974). According to the institutional definition, arthood is a status

conferred on artifacts by agents of the artworld. More specifically, an artwork is '(1) an

artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate

for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of … the artworld' (1974:

179-80). The status of art might be merited more or less according to the usual aesthetic

or other criteria, but what makes something art is that it is dubbed as such by someone

with the authority so to declare it, and not whether it deserves the title.
 A similar view was developed by the British philosopher Terry Diffey, also in

1969. The main respect in which his account differs from Dickie's is in maintaining that it

is the artworld public who collectively bestow the status of art. Dickie, by contrast, holds

that it is individual agents—almost always the artists who created the works—who do

this. But it should be noted that Dickie's is not a more elitist account on this score,

because he thought almost any member of the artworld could create art and thereby count

themselves an artist and he characterized the art institution as extensive and informal, not

confined to academies and professionals.

The institutional theory caused considerable debate among aestheticians, and this

persists. Among the major concerns is that the theory tends to be circular and that it loses

sight of the point of art-making by attaching too much significance to provocative, anti-

aesthetic works, such as Duchamp's Fountain. Meanwhile, it is far from clear that the

artworld is institutional in structure, so it is difficult to make sense of the idea of agents

acting on behalf of the institution. Also, art is made in other cultures and earlier times,

often in connection with religious or political institutions, where it is even less plausible

to identify an autonomous, structured artworld.

Dickie revised his theory in The Art Circle: A Theory of Art (1984) in a way that

downplayed talk of baptismal acts of status conferral. He stressed that the artist works not

so much as an agent of an institution but against the background of a practice and,

through work on an artifact, achieves, rather than confers, the art-standing of his or her

works. As the title suggests, Dickie flaunts the circularity of his account. By removing

the emphasis on institutional authority and structure, he avoids some objections to the

earlier version of the theory but also loses much of its explanatory power, because it is
less clear how the conventions and social practices that are the background to the artist's

work play a role in the achievement of arthood.

Dickie's work stimulated interest in the definition of art more generally. (For an

account and critical discussion, see Davies 1991.) In a series of articles from 1979-83,

Beardsley developed a definition in terms of art's aesthetic function: an artwork is either

an arrangement of conditions intended to be capable of affording an aesthetic experience

with marked aesthetic character, or an arrangement of a type that is typically intended to

have this capacity. Definitions that make art's aesthetic function central to its nature have

been regularly presented since Beardsley's, a more recent example being by Nick

Zangwill (1995). Others took up Danto's suggestions regarding the historicity of art to

produce recursive definitions with the form: something is art if it stands in the art-

defining relation to earlier art, and the first artworks were art because … According to

Jerrold Levinson (1979), the art-defining relation is that of being intended for a type of

regard accorded to earlier art, whereas James Carney (1991) saw it as a matter of shared

styles. Noël Carroll (1988), who claimed to be characterizing art's extension rather than

defining it, regarded as art those pieces that can be fitted into a true narrative of the

ongoing unfolding of art practices. Inevitably, attempts have been made to integrate or

combine these different strategies for definition, as in Robert Stecker's Artworks:

Definition, Meaning, Value (1997). Meanwhile, the anti-essentialism of the 1950s is also

frequently revived, a recent version being Berys Gaut's cluster theory (2000), which

maintains that different subsets of a cluster of features can be sufficient for something's

being art, with no single feature being necessary.

 As well as stimulating attempts to define art, arguments for the social character of

art led also to interest in the ontology of art, which previously was a neglected topic. The

Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, whose works were not translated into English until

the 1970s and 80s, as well as both Wollheim and Goodman, contributed to this

awakening, but it was Nicholas Wolterstorff's Works and Worlds of Art (1980) that

focused on works of art as cultural artifacts and stressed how, rather than being passively

contemplated, they are used by their public for world projection. Also in 1980, Jerrold

Levinson described the identity of musical works as essentially involving not only

sequences of sound but also their composer's identity and their instrumental means of

realization.

In the remaining decades of the 20th century, the ontology of art remained

consistently high on the agenda of debate, with Platonists arguing that artworks are

abstract types that are discovered rather than created, ontological contextualists arguing

that they take their identity in part from relations they hold to their context of creation,

and relativists arguing that they have an evolving identity that alters with their ongoing

interpretation.

Interest in the historical character of art reflected the influence of Danto's The

Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981). In this work, Danto developed some of the

main themes of his earlier papers. He emphasized how art, even as it came to resemble

'mere real things', like urinals and Brillo boxes, separates itself from them, because it is

'about' its nature in a way that mere real things are not about theirs. Inevitably, then, to be

appreciated artworks must be distinguished from their material substrate. Meanwhile, the

identification of a work's subject and style depends in part on awareness of its art-
historical location, including the identity of its artist, because a given element or feature

can vary in its significance according to that location. Perceptually indiscernible paintings

by a child, a forger, and an established artist would possess very different characteristics,

as would look-alikes created within different art traditions or at a historical remove from

each other. Somewhat obscurely, Danto compared artworks with metaphors; they are

rhetorical devices that are not to be read literally and that are used to convey an attitude

toward a subject matter.

Beginning with 'The End of Art' (1984), Danto developed a neo-Hegelian account

of art's historical essence. According to Hegel, art was one phase of spirit's attempt to

understand itself, and when this phase was completed, prior to the Christian era, art had

fulfilled its historical destiny and in that sense its history came to an end. In a similar

vein, Danto argued that art's historical purpose was to provoke the philosophical analysis

of its own nature, and this was achieved with Pop Art in the late 1960s. Such art could

not be analyzed in terms of mimesis, representation, or expression, and presented an

appearance that did not distinguish it from non-art, so traditional theories of art were

defeated and a new account, such as the one Danto proposed, was called for. Danto's

observations that, in its post-historical phase, art could have nothing new to say and that

anything could be art do not sit comfortably with the other strand of his historicism,

because the significance of any given artistic gesture depended as much on its art-

historical location after 1968 as before it. In any case, the historical purpose Danto

describes for art looks like only one among many possibilities and a secondary one at

that, given art's politico-social significance and use over millennia.

 If The Transfiguration of the Commonplace was the book of the 1980s, that of the

90s was Kendall L. Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the

Representational Arts (1990). Walton here built on his earlier work on the centrality of

make-believe to the appreciation of art. His guiding idea was that artworks are props in

games of make-believe, just as dolls or stuffed animals are in children's games. Some of

these games are authorized by the work's author or by conventions of the work's kind. For

instance, the Sherlock Holmes stories authorize the pretense that there is a brilliant

detective who lives on Baker Street in London. Others are more optional or ad hoc. One

of the basic virtues of this account is that it transcends the specific media through which

artworks are presented, applying equally well to fictional literature, painting, and film

among other artforms. The other basic virtue of the account is more important. Walton

was able to deploy his guiding idea to provide ingenious solutions to a wide array of

issues raised by fictional representation. These range from seeming paradoxes regarding

our emotional reactions to fictions—why should we fear fictional monsters or pity the

protagonists of tragedy?—to questions about the ontological status of fictional characters,

and to the nature of both pictorial representation and artistic expression. Walton's reliance

on the idea of make-believe or pretense also raises general issues about the nature of the

imagination and its role in human development and human life.

Debate at the close of the century

As in other areas of philosophy, there was a virtual explosion of publications in the final

decades of the last century. For this reason, it is not possible to convey the variety of

topics covered and the richness of the debate by highlighting a few books or seminal

articles. We have already indicated how the definition and ontology of art became
extensively discussed, but other trends and movements since the 1980s should also be

listed.

The nature of artistic interpretation is another topic reinvigorated by the emphasis

of social and historical context. If work identity is context sensitive, it is very plausible

that the meaning of a work would also be. That some such features are crucial in fixing

meaning is now widely accepted, but which ones, even which contexts, is hotly debated.

One debate pits the context of creation against successive contexts of reception as the

ones that are crucial for understanding and appreciating works. Those who agree that the

context of creation is the crucial one, disagree about which features of this are the

meaning-fixing ones. Some give that role to the actual intentions of artists, while others

give more weight to other contextual properties.

Philosophical aesthetics traditionally took painting, poetry, drama, and literature

as its exemplars, but since the 1980s there has been a major expansion in the discussion

of music, including rock and jazz, of film, and of the mass and popular arts. Architecture,

sculpture, and dance remain comparatively under-represented in the discussion.

The emphasis on art's socio-cultural location, rather than leading to neglect of

natural and environmental aesthetics, stimulated new discussion there. Of leading

concern has been consideration of the 'frame' or categories under which nature is

appropriately to be brought for aesthetic appreciation. Another area of growth is in regard

to the connection between art and ethics. The interest here is not so much in the long-

standing topics of pornography and censorship, but in art as a source of moral knowledge

on the one hand and in the interaction of aesthetic and ethical value within the

appreciation of art on the other. Meanwhile, beauty and the aesthetic, rather than being
driven from the debate by the 1960s attack on traditional conceptions of these, have been

re-described and reintroduced to the discussion.

Intersecting with some of these trends is the rise of feminist studies within

aesthetics. Feminists discussed the social context of art in political terms, noticing how

women were systematically excluded from creative roles while they were featured in art

as passive subjects for the delectation of an audience assumed to be male. They addressed

the role of art in confirming and shaping identity, gender, and sexuality. Again, this led to

a questioning of claims made on behalf of traditional aesthetics for the disinterested,

distanced objectivity of the aesthetic attitude, for the value of an established canon of

masterworks, and for the connection claimed between creativity and egocentric genius.

Some feminists reversed or challenged the ranking of fine art over craft, intellect over

emotion, the sensory over the sensual. Meanwhile, artworks created by women with art-

political feminist agendas, along with attempts to develop styles of criticism based on

feminist sensibilities, provided material for theoretical debate and analysis.

Another movement matched elsewhere in philosophy was the naturalization of

aesthetics, in which philosophers drew on scientific studies of human nature, of the

operation of the brain, of cognitive, perceptual, and affective systems, and of human

evolution and child development, in explaining our relation to art and nature. The growth

of cognitive science, in particular, has proved relevant to philosophical discussions of

creativity, emotion, imagination, language use, sympathy and empathy, synaesthesia and

metaphor, and of the principles that govern our organization of sight and sound. In some

cases, the scientific data concern art and are imported to aesthetics directly. More often,

empirical data that are more generally relevant to issues in the philosophy of mind,
epistemology, identity, emotion, ethics, and politics are taken up and applied to the

creation, reception, and criticism of art.

Status within the profession

Though art received the attention of famous Greek philosophers and, following Kant,

featured in the work of many Continental philosophers, such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,

and Hegel, within Anglo-American academic philosophy of the 20th century it was

largely ignored and sometimes treated with disdain. George Dickie once explained how

he first came to teach aesthetics: the course went to the department's most recent and

junior appointee. Unless they had a special passion for it, the most rigorously trained

analytic philosophers hardly came across analytic aesthetics at all. No one who hoped for

academic employment would highlight it as an area of specialty.

In his introduction to Aesthetics, Beardsley observed: 'Aesthetics has long been

contemptuously regarded as a step-sister within the philosophical family. Her rejection is

easy to explain, and partially excuse, by the lack of tidiness in her personal habits and by

her unwillingness to make herself generally useful around the house. It is plain to even a

casual visitor that aesthetics is a retarded child' (1958:11). Though he seemed here to lay

the blame for this situation at the door of aesthetics, rather than at the narrow-mindedness

of the profession, he believed aesthetics could raise its game. Indeed, there can be no

question that his book contributed enormously to its doing so. And it is pleasing to think,

as one surveys the many passionate debates in contemporary aesthetics and the

philosophy of art, that work in the area meets an appropriate standard for quality.

Yet if aesthetics has redeemed itself, as one hopes, it remains marginal if not

marginalized within Anglo-American analytic philosophy, though more so in the United

States and Australasia than in Britain. What has gone, perhaps, is the sense of guilt that

once led talented philosophers to apologize for squandering their gifts there.

See also AESTHETIC ATTITUDE; BEARDSLEY; BELL; COLLINGWOOD; CROCE;

DANTO; DEWEY; DICKIE; EXPRESSION THEORY; FORMALISM;

FUNCTION OF ART; GOODMAN; LANGER; ONTOLOGICAL

CONTEXTUALISM; PRAGMATIST AESTHETICS; SCRUTON; SIBLEY;

THEORIES OF ART; TOLSTOY; WALTON; WOLLHEIM; WITTGENSTEIN

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STEPHEN DAVIES & ROBERT STECKER