The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [91]
Three of the hottest continuing topics in aesthetic theory are (1) of artists’ intentions in understanding art, (2) the aesthetic implications of forgery and authenticity, and (3) the aesthetic status of Dadaist works such as Duchamp’s Fountain. My purpose in what follows explain how arguments about these issues erupt from deeply held conflicting intuitions that we all share about the nature and value of Evolution, I will demonstrate, is the key to understanding why these are so contentious in the first place.
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Outside academia’s cloistered halls, most people would be surprised that idea of artistic intention should be controversial at all. What could more reasonable than the notion that authors and artists have purposes and intentions in producing their works and that understanding these is decisive in understanding their art? Common sense tends it for granted that the artist is to some degree a communicator and what ever meaning the artist’s work possesses—though not quality—is largely determined by the artist. Artists tend to agree: how many paint ers or novelists have responded to bad reviews with the bitter complaint, “The critic didn’t understand what I was trying to do”?
According to this view, the work of art is a bridge to the mind of artist, a public object that may unlock the secrets of the artist’s inner life. And since the artist may be a woman or man of special gifts and those secrets will be well worth knowing. To get the most from work of art, we will want to understand it “properly,” in terms of what its creator intended.
This complex of ideas, known as “intentionalism,” came under a attack in the middle of the last century by the critic William Wimsatt and philosopher Monroe C. Beardsley in a famous 1946 paper, success of a work of literary art,” or indeed any art. Authors’ intentions not available in the sense that we can never be sure what is in person’s mind across the breakfast table, let alone when that is an author who might have lived hundreds or thousands of years Intentions are not desirable in the sense that the meaning of a work literature will always be larger, more saturated with coherent and contradictory meanings, than any artistic intention could account for.
The Possibility of Criticism, Beardsley went on to put forward three principal arguments against the idea that the meaning of a specifically literary text must be the meaning that it had to its author. First: we can understand texts that have meaning in depen dent of an author’s intention; is shown by the fact that computer-generated texts are meaningful, that texts with significant (sometimes hilarious) typographical errors meaningful. These texts have meaning, but, as he puts it, “nothing meant by anyone.” In the second place, the meaning of a text can change after the author has died (or, by implication, we may suppose, hour after he wrote it). Beardsley observes, “And if today’s textual meaning [of a line of poetry] cannot be identified with any authorial meaning, it follows that textual meanings are not the same thing as authorial meanings.” Finally, Beardsley argues that because a text can have meanings an author was not aware of, it again follows that textual meanings not identical with authorial meanings.
Wimsatt and Beardsley’s dismissal of intention as a standard interpretation was in support of the New Criticism, the modern movement in critical theory that came