I've just finished an essay that argues agains the significant form theory and suggests that is it a fallacy: the significant form fallacy. This essay "Abstract Painting and Integrationist Linguistics will be published in Language Sciences and until it is, I can't attach it here. The main thrust of my argument, aside from the scope of my essay limited to linguistics, is that since no-one can identify stable traits of significant form either objectively nor subjectively, it can't exist. Further, since anything at all can be said to have significant form, it can 't be distinguished as inherent except by comparison to other so-called examples of significant form and can't be distinguished from insignificant form. This is precisely why some theorists have said that art has come to an end (from Hegel to Danto, etc.). As Danto has said, art can't be distinguished from the commonplace (his epiphany was seeing Warhol's Brillo Boxes) . This has led to the 'institutional theory' which lets authorities decide the issue. But authorities never agree. That leads to, in our society, money. Since money is scarce, those who have it can decide what art is simply by paying the most for whatever they chose to be art (this is a subset of the institutional authorities). Thus the market rules and their decisions stick. I know it sounds crazy and very sad, but if you want to know what art is, officially, not necessarily experientially but it even affects that, just look at the highest prices paid for anything labelled "art". The modernist formalist theory is in shambles because no one can say what is necessary and sufficient to any formal argument. My approach is to turn to language as a mediating structure to replace formalism. It comes down to art is what is said about it. This can be distinguished from the art-is-what-it-costs theory now in place. The art-is-what-is-said about-it theory and the art-is-what-it-costs theory do overlap when we consider that "money talks". See today's NYTimes lead editorial "Unfettered Money" that discusses the dubious court decisions that equate political free speech with campaign donations.
To answer your question, I do think anything at all, human or natural, real or imagined, can be aesthetic in the sense that the thing or idea itself is not aesthetic but is thought to be, as a projected state of mind. The work called art is an as-if metaphor. The interesting issue here is to what extent is the aesthetic stable -- how long can an aesthetic state of mind persist in the Kantian sense of being an involuntary response. How long does the "A-ha" moment last? Can it be repeated at will? Bell, with his significant form theory tried to give it stability by saying that there is such a thing as independent significant form. While I could agree that we do have "A-Ha" aesthetic experiences, perhaps involuntary or thoroughly 'prepped' by our societal contexts, I also think that the "A-Ha" moment is transformed by being amalgamated to larger personal history and memory. Thereafter, an 'artwork' is a projected manifestation or an embodied metaphor of our own sense of selfness. If you want to know who you are, go to your favorite artworks and experience a reassembled selfness (that may include sublimation of your repressed rages and desires). If it happens to be very pricey artworks, determined by the unassailable money corner of the institutional artworld, so much the better in the sense that now you can feel validated by that monetized value. Your aesthetic experience is worth millions! This is a fascinating issue and one that always eludes total understanding. I am not being cynical in my comments. I think art and aesthetics have come to a real end point, but it will not be the final end. A new emergent visuality (see Wolfflin for this basic notion) is already evident. The end I see is the end of irony and the redundant exploitation of the now-decadent visual culture. (The end of a visual culture is always marked by irony as a way to admit decadence and yet keep the status quo (see H. Marcuse). Irony no longer suffices to mask cultural decadence. The emergent 'situational aesthetics' is without irony; it suggests a new cultural visuality that truly threatens the status quo, not because it seeks that but because it is simply new. As she said, "It's complicated". wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Ian Stuart <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, April 12, 2011 12:53:59 AM Subject: Re: Aesthetic photo? Do you distinguish between a response to the aesthetic andfor beauty, for the human made or the natural, some say, found art. I ask this because your text has the ' aesthetic experience' as a defining characteristic, even a predicate, of what is aesthetic. Clive Bell, a fundamentalist formalist, believes in a distinctive aesthetic experience of form, as would many aestheticians. . --- On Tue, 4/12/11, William Conger <[email protected]> wrote: From: William Conger <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Aesthetic photo? To: [email protected] Date: Tuesday, April 12, 2011, 5:06 AM By ethics /aesthetics do you mean anything to do with behavior? Can the aesthetic experience -- or a work of beauty -- inspire the beholder to act ethically, that is, to be virtuous? I would say, without going too deeply into the issue, that the work itself can't be aesthetic or have any meaning. It's just stuff or some objectified subject. If an encounter with it seems to evoke an aesthetic experience and even leads to a virtuous act or state of mind, then those responses are created by the beholder and projected to the thing. The problem is threefold: 1. Nothing material can have intrinsic metaphysical attributes like moral goodness, aesthetic quality, or ethical value. 2. Those are conditions projected by humans. 3. Those conditions are never stable but always dependent on contexts (codes, rules, habits, local and universal) changing in time. Thus since there's no fixed definition of the aesthetic so there is no fixed notion of the ethical. The two terms don't necessarily correspond to each other. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Ian Stuart <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, April 11, 2011 10:26:27 PM Subject: Re: Aesthetic photo? this casts a net on a serious issue: is aesthetics, for, against or neutral with regard to ethics? Ian --- On Tue, 4/12/11, William Conger <[email protected]> wrote: From: William Conger <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Aesthetic photo? To: [email protected] Date: Tuesday, April 12, 2011, 4:22 AM What are you talking about? Do you mean the photo is out of focus or do you mean there's no subject or do you mean there's no complexity of fracture in the composition, meaning that it's an 'all-over' composition. You need to be more specific. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: [email protected]:///Users/w-conger/Desktop/Scanned%20Image.ti ff Sent: Mon, April 11, 2011 7:49:40 PM Subject: Re: Aesthetic photo? A reason I like it is because it does not have a focal point. It doesn't, right? On 1/28/11, William Conger <[email protected]> wrote: > What's aesthetic to you? The big net that enables people to grow crops of > fish > in filthy, crammed surroundings, just to maximize their numbers and make it > easier to harvest them; to contradict nature? Or is it the blue cast, that > dreamy soft color. Or is it the combination of the image of capture, > protection, nurturing as a metaphor of infant nurturing at mama's breast? > Or is > it the geometry of the net itself, repetitive, unitary, an underwater > geodesic > structure --proven to be the most durable type of structure against outside > pressures, winds, above water, currents below, all massaging the the human > thirst for power over nature, the elimination of the sublime, the conquest > of > the unknowable by the forces of reason? Or does the scene remind you of > some > personal experience you cherish? Does it make you want to hold your breath > as > if to heighten the memory of underwater swimming as a kid? You can't get by > with > simply declaring an aesthetic experience and expect others to get it. You > gotta > do more, Mr. Berg. So much more. > > It's one thing to experience the sudden, involuntary, aesthetic sensation; > it's
