The Philosophy of Art

Stephen Davies, Philip Alperson, Stephen Davies

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119091639
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Now available in a fully revised and updated second edition, this accessible and insightful introduction outlines the central theories and ongoing debates in the philosophy of art.

• Covers a wide range of topics, including the definition and interpretation of art, the connections between artistic and ethical judgment, and the expression and elicitation of emotions through art
• Includes discussion of prehistoric, non-Western, and popular mass arts, extending the philosophical conversation beyond the realm of Fine Art
• Details concrete applications of complex theoretical concepts
• Poses thought-provoking questions and offers fully updated annotated reading lists at the end of each chapter to encourage and enable further research

1
Evolution and Culture

One way of working our way into the kinds of questions that are central in the philosophy of art – What is art? What is the significance of art? How is art to be understood? – is by asking about art’s origins. In this chapter, we will explore the contrasts between two divergent stories, one biological and the other cultural, about art’s foundations.

According to the first, the activities involved in making and appreciating art are products of human evolution. As such, they are universal and old. The second view sees art as the product of a particular time and culture, that of eighteenth-century Europe. It maintains that the concept familiar to us today first emerged then and there. In terms of this account, the appearance of art was comparatively recent and initially localized.

1 A Biological Basis for Art

Here is a story that might be told about the biological basis of art’s creation and appreciation by an evolutionary theorist:

Art is universal. All over the world, mothers sing and hum their babies to sleep. Storytelling, rhyming, and dramatized enactments are present in all cultures. The same is true of music and dance, as well as of depictions of people and animals, along with designs and patterns, which are drawn in pigment or charcoal, molded from clay, and carved or whittled from wood, bone, or stone. Humans everywhere decorate and beautify their environments, possessions, and bodies.

Art also is ancient in its origins. European cave paintings date back more than 35,000 years. Others in Sumatra are of similar antiquity and some rock paintings of the Australian aborigines are at least 20,000 years old. Carvings and molded figurines appeared some 35,000 years ago, and from 20,000 years ago artifacts were regularly decorated with patterns and motifs. While much art is perishable or non-material, its former existence can be deduced from traces that survive. For example, musical instruments made from bones date to at least 35,000 years ago.

As well, art is a source of pleasure and value. Even if artworks serve practical functions, such as appeasing the gods in ritual ceremonies, their production, use, and contemplation usually provide enjoyment to those involved. Though the pleasure art engenders can come as a momentary thrill or chill, much art is a source of abiding satisfaction and deep fulfillment. It warms and adds meaning to our lives.

Indeed, we often regard it as helping to define our very identities: a man might be the kind of person who has a passion for rhythm and blues and who despises country and western; a woman might regard Sylvia Plath’s poetry as central to her existence, so that she could become indifferent to it only if she underwent some dramatic change in personality or circumstances.

These three features – universality, historical age, and intrinsic pleasure or value – are indicative of the biological adaptiveness of the behaviors with which they are associated. In other words, these characteristics are symptomatic of underlying genetic dispositions passed from generation to generation because they enhance the reproductive success of the people who have them. The behaviors in question are universal because they reflect a genetic inheritance that is common to humankind. They are old in that traces of art-like behaviors go back 70,000 or more years. And they are a source of pleasure (like food, sex, and healthy exercise) in order to motivate people to pursue them and thereby to pass on their genes to future generations who will be successful breeders in their turn.

It’s plausible, then, that the impulse to make and consume art is a product of biological evolution. It is important to be clear about what this means. The thought isn’t that there is some single gene for art, or that art production and appreciation are inflexible and reflexive. The genetic bases of the production of art are undoubtedly complicated. They require the realization of complex systems and circumstances, both personal and social, for their activation. The behaviors to which they give rise are plastic, being subject to learning, influence, development, refinement, and the like. There can be no denying that art includes a huge, conventionalized, socio-historical component.

The idea, then, isn’t that the making and consumption of art can be analyzed reductively as mechanical reactions blindly programmed by our genetic inheritance. Rather, it is that they stem from and are channeled by biologically rooted inclinations that are then actively and intelligently taken up in ways depending on each person’s individual, cultural, and historical environment. In other words, artists, performers, and their audiences all draw on biological agendas and energies, but how these are then expressed depends mainly on their cultural setting. The view with which this one is to be contrasted maintains that the behaviors associated with art are purely cultural and entirely conventional.

The evolutionary biologist faces a choice between two positions about the relation between human biological endowments and art. The first maintains that the making and consumption of art are directly adaptive; that is, they contribute to reproductive success (or, at least, did so in the past). According to the second, these propensities were not directly targeted by evolution, but they are a happy and inevitable byproduct of other behaviors that were.

A common version of the first approach notes that reproductive success depends on our attracting mates, which we do by advertising our fitness as a potential partner and parent. One way of doing this is by demonstrating that we have the particular skills and talents that will be involved. Alternatively, we might display in a general way that we have intelligence, originality, creativity, flexibility, and virtuosity in thought and action. And we can dramatize and emphasize our fitness by showing that we can afford the luxury of “wasting” our talents on activities that have no survival value.

Art-making and artistic performance, which so often require extraordinary skill and dedication in their conception, planning, and execution, while not being directed to survival in an obvious way, are among the ultimate tools for sexual advertisement and seduction. In this view, art behaviors, like the peacock’s tail, have evolved through the process of sexual selection.

A different account takes a broader and perhaps more plausible view of art’s evolutionary significance. Art plays a crucial role in intensifying and enriching our lives in general, both as individuals and communities. It brings us together as producers or performers and consumers or audiences and thereby engenders cooperation, mutuality, and a shared identity. When coupled with other socially important events, such as rituals and ceremonies, it heightens their already special powers. As such, it plays a vital role in transmitting and affirming the community’s knowledge, lore, history, and values.

It enhances the reproductive success of the members of communities not by making sex more likely, but instead by contributing vitally to the creation of an environment in which individuals and their children can flourish. It generates mutual support and respect, a shared sense of belonging and caring, stability, self-confirmation, a feeling of control of or accommodation with nature, and so on.

It could be objected that the first of these accounts seems to undervalue the far-reaching significance of art within human affairs, and that the second does not distinguish a role specific to art as such. Meanwhile, both may make the tie between art and reproductive success closer than is believable.

If such criticisms prove strong, evolutionary theorists could fall back to the more modest alternative, according to which art is an indirect but important spin-off from other behaviors for which there has been evolutionary selection. It isn’t difficult to imagine what these behaviors are. Curiosity, adaptability, intelligence, the ability to plan and reason, imagination, improvisatory facility, and patience are all characteristics that promote the survival of people and their heirs. And what is likely to pay off is that these capacities are general and rewarding for their own sakes, not tied in their application only to addressing a limited set of short-term problems.

But once such a being has evolved and finds itself with some spare time, it continues to employ its talents. It can busy itself with inventing new weapons or a more effective mousetrap, but it’s as likely to make up stories, paint evocative pictures of the animals it hunts, decorate its hair with pretty flowers, test what interesting sounds it can make by blowing into a pipe, and so on.

No less important to it will be emotions and their expression, the communication of thoughts, and the development of manipulative and other technical skills. These, too, can find expression in the production of art; for example, in musical invocations by instruments of the tones of the human voice, in the versification of utterance along with the use of metaphor, assonance, irony, and the like, and in developing pictorial and other forms of representation.

2 The Cultural Invention of Art

Here is a second story about art’s origins, as it might be told by a cultural historian.

We think of the arts as a loose but natural collection – literature, drama, painting, poetry, sculpture, music, dance – unified by the fact that their products are to be contemplated for their own sake. As such, the arts are to be contrasted with the crafts, such as saddle-making, boat-building, and plumbing. The crafts are directed at the useful functions that their products can serve. By contrast, works of art are not mere means to ends but are ends in themselves. Their value lies within them, not in benefits and applications that come with their effects.

Other distinctions between the artist and the crafts-person indicate differences in their respective activities and products The crafts-person isn’t expected to be original and he is good at his job to the extent that he can successfully follow the relevant rules, models, or recipes. A work of craft is good if it matches the appropriate template and performs its desired function. By contrast, the artist must be creative and original. Good art can’t be produced by slavish rule-following and imitation. In fact, artists are often rebellious or eccentric in their personalities and their methods of production. Great artists are geniuses whose works transcend the rules and conventions of their time.

Meanwhile, the best art is often unique in its value and, in any case, all art is to be judged and appreciated only for the experience its features produce in a suitably placed observer. This spectator must distance herself from “interested” concerns – that is, from practical uses the artwork could be given, either for her personally or more generally – in order to make herself available to the appropriate experience. That experience involves the pleasurable contemplation of the work’s beauty and its other aesthetic attributes, which are considered only for the sake of their contribution to its overall aesthetic effect.

If our conception of art is the one just described, then art is a product of a specific culture and history, not of biology. This conception is local and comparatively recent, not universal and old. It emerged in Europe over the Enlightenment and the modern age – that is, from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth – under the influence of specific socio-economic conditions that did not obtain elsewhere or in earlier times.

Historians of ideas dispute when particular elements of this way of thinking emerged. They also argue about whether nineteenth- and early twentieth-century developments in aesthetic theorizing misrepresent the views that first appeared in the eighteenth century. These scholarly debates will not detain us here. Despite significant differences between the view’s variants, and despite the long period over which it emerged, by the early twentieth century the doctrines associated with this conception of art had become dominant in Anglo-American philosophy of art.

The story continues:

Because art can be such only when made and appreciated as falling under the concept that identifies it, it follows that non-Western cultures do not have art in our sense, and that art as we now understand the notion was not produced in the West prior to, say, the early eighteenth century. Pieces from outside the ambit of recent Western cultures can become art through appropriation to the Western artworld, which is the constellation of traditions, practices, institutions, roles, and theories relevant to making and appreciating the repository of accepted artworks. And to the extent that Western culture has become thoroughly globalized, people from other societies can make art now. But those who have never shared the modern-age Western concept have not been creators of art, though they may have had their own, similar practices.

(As a concession to her opponent, our story-teller might allow that biologically based urges and interests would tend to encourage the flowering of some correlate to the Western notion of art in other, sufficiently stable, cultures.)

In ancient times, the various art forms were not recognized as comprising a unified group. Music, for example, was classed with mathematics and astronomy, while poetry was grouped with grammar and rhetoric. The first to link the art forms together explicitly and to separate them from other disciplines and activities were the authors of encyclopedias and ...