The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [24]
CHAPTER 3
What Is Art?
I
If, as thinkers from Aristotle to the evolutionary psychologists have there is a human instinct to produce and enjoy artistic experiences, how might we begin to establish the fact? What would a universal aesthetics or theory of art look like? Julius Moravcsik is the contemporary phi los opher who has given the most systematic thought to basic question. He begins by stressing a fundamental logical point: a transcultural investigation into art as a universal category must be from an attempt to determine the meaning of the word “ distinction between two kinds of question is regularly confused, intentionally dodged, or just plain ignored in much of the literature subject.
Art” is a word in En glish, the history and vagaries of which can usefully studied. “This might be an interesting semantic exercise,” Moravcsik says, “but it is not directly related to the many phenomena examine” by broadening attention to the concept of art as a universal category. Consider again the analogy of language. It too is both concept and, with the addition of quotation marks, a word in English. We can argue at length about the meaning of the word “ language,” how ought to be defined—whether, given a partic u lar definition, computer codes are “languages,” music is a “language,” or the song of a mockingbird is an instance of “language.” But such disputes about the outer marginal case, music or birdsong, is or is not language could not disprove the fact that Urdu is a language. The natural languages of the world form a natural category populated by indisputable cases, and recognition this fact must precede any theorizing about whether the concept language applies to other areas.
An investigation into the universality of language, or of art, Moravc-sik argues, seeks lawlike generalizations that are neither trivially definitional nor accidental, generalizations of the sort “beavers build dams.” Dam-building is not part of the definition of “beaver,” nor is the statement even true of all existing beavers. What this means, Moravcsik says, that under normal circumstances in the wild, “a healthy specimen species will build a dam.” If true, such a generalization is worth knowing because it tells us something significant about beavers. Even marginal cases might require attention to the terms used (“healthy,” normal”), such hypothesizing, seeking neither definitional nor accidental attributes, is highly desirable in empirical inquiries into the features widespread social phenomena such as art.
Aesthetic theories may claim universality, but they are normally by the aesthetic issues and debates of their own times. Plato Aristotle were motivated both to account for the Greek arts of their and to connect aesthetics to their general metaphysics and theories value. David Hume and, more especially, Immanuel Kant explored emerging complexities of the fine-arts traditions of the eighteenth century. In the last century, as the philoso pher Noël Carroll observes, theories of Clive Bell and R. G. Collingwood mounted defenses avant-garde practices—“neoimpressionism, on the one hand, and modernist poetics of Joyce, Stein, and Eliot on the other.” Susanne Langer can be read as providing a justification for modern dance, while initial version of George Dickie’s institutional theory requires, Carroll puts it, “something like the presupposition that Dada is a central form of artistic practice” in order to gain intuitive appeal. The same point can be made about Arthur Danto’s continual theorizing about minimalist conundrums and indiscernible art/non-art objects—Ad Reinhardt’s black canvases or Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes. As art forms techniques change and develop, as artistic fashions blossom or fade, so art theory