A esthetic D iscourse and M ind D ependence

It seems then that aesthetic discourse has the features needed to legitimate a role for truth. How is the account on offer an antirealist one? I claimed that best judgments play an extension-deterrnining role for the substantive predicates o f aesthetic discourse. That is, the distinctive predicates o f aestiietics are mind-dependent entities. I believe that this is manifest in at least two Itinds o f aesthetic language: art critical tlieory and the great share o f art

criticism that is metaphorical.^ The mind-dependent status o f aesthetic qualities is explicit under cognitivist antkealism. Recall that modest aestlietic realism talres aesthetic qualities to be response-dependent. This alone is inadequate as a realist view, because it does not show how aesthetic judgments represent some mind-independent properties, or alternatively, how aesthetic judgments are true in virtue o f some mind-independent facts. The modest realist anchors aesthetic judgments and qualities by means o f supervenience, which claims a logical relation between the mind-dependent aesthetic domain and a distinct mind-independent one. I have argued that this account is not viable. Cognitivist antirealism differs importantly from modest aesthetic realism in that it holds that a great many aesthetic qualities are the result o f apt imaginings. These imaginings are apt in part because they are responses to presentational features o f artworks, but thek results— aesthetic qualities— are not “out tliere” simply to be detected by the right sort of subject.

Art theoretical language makes the experiencing subject’s contribution explicit. Consider the function o f scientific theories. They have the function o f describkig, explaining, and

predicting phenomena. Art theories seem to do nothing o f the sort. Jacques Rivière, endorsing the Cubist movement, writes in 1912 that painters must eliminate light and

perspective from representation. “.. .the painter, instead o f showing the object as he sees it—

that is to say, dismembered into bright and dark surfaces—wkl construct it as it is—that is to

6,2: Aesthetic Discourse and Mind-Dependence

not giving a philosophical account o f the essential elements o f painting, but rather arguing that Cubism is the rewarding program in painting to pursue— and consequently, is telling us how we are to construe a cubist canvas as we stand before it. Much art theory plays just such an instructive role. It supplies guidance in identifying the features salient to a proper

experience or understanding o f the artwork, tools for interpretation o f the presentational features, and very often these tools and indications supply a framework for evaluation o f the kinds of artwork covered by the theory. In short, art theory might be seen as a set o f

instructions for engaging with an artwork in a certain way. What does engaging with an artwork mean? In the case o f cubist paintings (Figure 24), en^ging with an artwork means seeing the marks on the canvas not merely as a jumble o f lines, and not as arcane runes, and not as a perspectival depiction or a collage or a puzzle. Rather, the theory tells us that we are to interpret the paint on the canvas as representing something like an exploded view of a collection o f objects, thek various surfaces laid out flat on the picture plane. Engaging in this way means trying to see the painting in accordance with the theory, which is not something we accomplish merely by standing passively in front of the canvas and taking in visual impressions. We see the painting in the prescribed way via an act o f imagination. An accepted theory supplies instructions for doing certain things with artworks in our

imagination, and the language which we use to capture the resulting experience is, then, a description of an artwork subject to a particular imaginative construal.

Take a second example: Malevich’s writing on suprematist painting. A sample firom his From

Cubism and Futurism to Sttprematism: The New Realism in Fainting is instructive.

Only with the disappearance o f a habit o f mind which sees in pictures little

corners of nature, madonnas and shameless Venuses, shall we witness a work of

pure, living art. [...] The new realism in painting is very much a realism in painting, for it contains no realism o f mountains, sky, water... Until now there was a realism o f objects, but not o f painted units o f colour, which are constructed so that they depend neither on form, nor on colour, nor on thek position relative to each other.^^

The passage is highly polemical, and is incoherent in the way that it describes the saliencies o f suprematist paintings as units o f color constructed so that they do not depend on color or form. But it is possible to extract a coherent spirit o f the passage, which tells us just what it is we are to dkect our attention to when we stand in front o f a painting such as his

lilcely to arise in a newcomer to such artworks: why did the artist offer this for our re^ d ? The question is most obviously manifest in encounters with novel artworks, and with abstract works, but a minimally sophisticated spectator reasonably entertains the question m the presence o f representational works o f art, realistic fiction or theater, and in general artworks that seem to resemble more closely the “everyday” world. It is a question about significance—what is the significance (to me, to my life or my experience right now, to the artist) o f a painted array of squares and rectangles, or o f a painted arrangement o f pastries, or o f a 17*^' century Dutch still life (Figure 26)? For the suprematist composition, Malevich’s theoretical remarks supply that answer, or at least the beginnings o f one. We are told how to construe the artwork. In this case, we must avoid any temptation to see the canvas as

representing a cluster of buildings fi:om above, an assortment o f blocks moving through space, or indeed anything at all. If we are to take Malevich seriously, we might even try to see the painted forms as transcending their defining shapes and colors. Doing so involves an act o f imagination, one constrained by the theory. And it is only under that constrained imagining that the salient aesthetic features are manifest. The theory, then, gives a

description o f the object imaginatively construed; it partially) describes the artwork qua

artwork.

Many critical remarks work similarly. O f course, the line between art criticism and art theory is extremely vague, as is the lines between those two sub-discourses and that o f art history. Nothing here depends on being able to malce such a distinction— I use them as labels for varieties of aesthetic discourse which can typically, or paradigmaticaky, be categorized as playing primarily evaluative, explanatory, or narrative roles. But many examples are multifunctional. Just as theory typically has the function o f telling us what the proper

construal of a certain collection o f artworks is, so can critical remarks tell us how to construe individual ones, or works by a particular artist, and so on. Nothing about the painted surface o f a DeKooning canvas signals the rich content ascribed to it in the remark above. If we missed the title as we passed the painting in a gallery, we could very well miss the fact that the painting depicts a woman. But even if we allow more time and attention to the canvas, our attention might focus largely on the formal qualities of the painting, and our expressed judgments would reflect that. The critical/historical statement that the painting depicts a woman who is an instrument o f sex— “lustfully enticing, yielding yet demanding, and cruelly

6.2: A.esthetic Discourse and Mind-Dependence

anxiety provoking”^^ provides both content and constraints to our experience o f the

painting. Approaching the canvas with this critical judgment in mind will result in a very different experience o f the painting. Rather than marking out the frenetic and quasi-organic twisting o f color, the critic’s remark licenses a host o f narrative and psychological

attributions—that we are seeing a woman—maybe an archetypal woman rather than a particular woman— about which something deeply ambivalent is expressed. These qualities are not supervenient on the presentational features o f the canvas, or on those plus facts about its hbtoiy and that o f the artist. To borrow Hume’s metaphor again, they are “raised up” by the imagination in possession o f those facts, in confrontation with the painting, and guided by the critic’s judgment. Judgments must be guided by ‘what is there’, what I have referred to as tlie presentational features o f the artwork, but these features typically

underdetermine the aesthetic qualities as represented in aesthetic discourse. The artwork as described in critical language is a much richer object than the physical object or event with which we engage.