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Distortions in emphasis are compounded by another factor. Philosophers of art naturally tend to begin theorizing from their own aesthetic predilections, their own sharpest aesthetic responses, however strange limited these may be. Kant had a keen interest in poetry, but his dismissal the function of color in painting is so eccentric that it even suggests visual impairment. Bell, who candidly acknowledged his inability to appreciate music, centered his attention on painting, extending his views fallaciously to other arts, such as literature. More generally, thinkers who the beauty of nature, or who fall under the spell of a particular exotic culture or genre, are apt to generalize from individual feelings and experience. This personal element can be vastly enriching for theory (Bell abstract expressionism) or result in near absurdities (Kant on painting general). It ought, however, to incite skepticism in us all. General extrapolated from limited personal enthusiasm may persuade long as we concentrate on the examples the theorist provides; often they fail when applied to a broader range of art.

Beyond cultural bias and personal idiosyncrasy, adequate philosophizing about the arts has been impeded by a third factor: the character philosophical rhetoric. Philosophy is most robust and stimulating— frankly, most fun—when it argues for some uniquely and exclusively true position and attempts to discredit plausible alternatives. In history of art philosophy, this has been a persis tent obstacle to understanding. Kant, for example, does not merely separate the intellectual components of aesthetic experience from its primary sensual components but, in sections of The Critique of Judgment, denies the value latter entirely. Tolstoy is so dogmatic in his insistence on sincerity central criterion for art that he famously rejects large swaths of canon, including most of his own greatest works. Bell, once again pluperfect aesthe tician, does not just elevate the experience of form abstract painting but insists that painting’s illustrative element is irrelevant. Such extreme positions in aesthetics are rhetorically arresting in a way that more commonsense theories are not. They also a pleasure for professors of aesthetics to teach, since they students with historical background, genuine (if absurdly one-sided) aesthetic insights, and the intellectual exercise involved adducing counterexamples and counterargument. Along with the disputation.

Aesthetics today finds itself in a paradoxical, not to say bizarre, situation. On the one hand, scholars and theorists have access—in libraries, in museums, on the Internet, firsthand via travel—to a wider perspective artistic creation across cultures and through history than ever before. We study and enjoy sculptures and paintings from the Paleolithic, music from everywhere, folk and ritual arts from all over the globe, literatures visual arts of every nation, past and present. Against this glorious availability, how odd that philosophical speculation about art has been inclined toward endless analysis of an infinitesimally small class of cases, prominently featuring Duchamp’s readymades or boundary-testing objects such as Sherrie Levine’s appropriated photographs and John Cage’s 33". Underlying this philosophical direction is a hidden presupposition is never articulated: the world of art, it is supposed, will at last understood once we are able to explain art’s most marginal or difficult Duchamp’s Fountain and In Advance of the Broken Arm are on of it the hardest cases that art theory has to deal with, which the size of the theoretical literature these works and their readymade siblings have generated. The very size of this literature also points hope that being able to explain the most outré instances of art will us arrive at the best general account of all art.

This hope has led aesthetics in the wrong direction. Lawyers like that hard cases make bad law, and an analogous danger threatens philosophical analysis. If you wish to understand