Wow, thanks for your thorough reply - very pleasantly surprised to see my inchoate fumblings given serious consideration. I'm in Europe and not writing in my mother tongue so you'll have to excuse some shaky terminology/spelling occasionally! It's not a school assignment, but a purely personal interest - I run into arguments with people about these issues frequently, and someone finally managed to push me into formulating my stance in writing.
I'm afraid I tried to condense too much for that first post and consequently wasn't clear enough on some points - maybe I should try to elaborate/clarify a little bit: > > 1. A "work of art" is any thing produced by an artist with the explicit > > intention of producing a work of art. > > This claim is refuted by the obvious fact that much art in the world has unknown > own authors and thus unknown intentions. But I'm not presuming that the authors be known or that their specific intentions be known, only that the object be obviously the result of operations of the imagination of a sentient being (and not forces of nature). Craft and "design" objects are obviously included in this definition as well. (How many paintings or symphonies can we imagine having come about without human imagination having been in operation?) > > 2. The physical form of an artwork is an accumulation of intentional > > choices (operations of imagination) of the artist. > > Again, the intentionality issue undercuts your argument. Many artists claim that > they 'intended' one thing but actually did another. I'm afraid I really pared these points down too much! To me, it doesn't matter whether a feature of a work is accidental or not - the artist is still making a decision in leaving it in or editing it out. My aesthetic experience derives from their having made that decision to throw the dice (or paint) and leave it in. I'm familiar with the critique of intentionalism, I agree that most of the time we can't know the EXACT intentions of the artist, but we can tell from the evidence in the work that they did work intentionally - the work came about as a result of their intentional actions, not by accident. (Note the difference between indeterminate processes of generating/arranging materials and unintentionally producing an art object - the latter being unimaginable according to the above definition of artwork) I should also have stressed that it's crucial to my thinking that all necessary information can be extracted from the work itself (that is, the evidence). > > The evidence is an interface between the physical appearance of the work > > and the creative process. > > Appearance of the work to whom? Appearance was a badly chosen word - I mean the work as a physical object (wood, canvas and paint for example). > What's the creative process? The "creative process" is the process in which for example an unpainted canvas ends up as a painting - a shorthand for "the series of decisions made by the artist". > The bottom line here is that nothing is beautiful or art until someone says so "Beautiful" is a prescriptive term and as such invalid in my thinking: but an art object is empirically art as soon as it's manufactured, it doesn't need saying or recognition from an art world etc. It's an art object even if nobody ever sees it. "Great art" is a prescriptive concept as well, of no relevance as it can't be discussed empirically. What I'm saying here has to do with WHERE the essence (source of aesthetic experience) is located. It can't be in the material as such (like red paint or the sound of a flute); it can't be in picture plane, because that would lead us to making prescriptive statements about what sort of materials, compositions, etc. produce aesthetic experience, and besides dragging us back to subjectivism. Empirically it's clear that anything at all can produce the aesthetic experience: the only requirement is that someone made that decision that leads to your aesthetic organ being tickled. (The feeling one gets from seeing an untouched landscape or something found in nature is not an aesthetic experience, I think that's an obvious confusion) I stumbled upon this excellent quote from an art historian Max Raphakl, which gets very near to what I'm trying to say: "The work of art holds man's creative powers in a crystalline suspension from which they can again be transformed into living energies" (quoted in John Berger, "The WORK of art"). Also: "Art and the study of art lead FROM the work TO the process of creation" (ibid, my emphasis). I think I should probably look further into his thinking. > > 4. In order to understand a work of art, we must renounce (at least part > > of) our own subjective taste and seek identification with the [artist] > > This sounds like Tolstoy whose aesthetic theory was based on communication, > meaning the communication of the artist's expression or feeling to the beholder. But Tolstoy was ultra-prescriptive and demanded certain things to be communicated by art. I don't think communication is the point here; identification is closer to what I'm thinking about. I'm not concerned with "expressive feelings", I'm talking about the decision to take out the snare drum on the first four measures, or the decision to apply a thin coat of green paint on the upper half of the red rectangle, or to leave the camera rolling for an extra five seconds after the actor has left the frame. These things are incontestably and verifiably present in the work. What is embodied in the work are the decisions of the artist to put these things in it, nothing more and nothing less. And by putting myself in the artist's shoes I can try to come to an understanding of how they came to put these things in. What my idea actually sounds a bit like is Croce saying we must "become Dante" when reading the Commedia; we must identify with the position of the artist making these decisions in order to see how they make sense in the totality of the work. So for me, to understand an artwork means to understand as much as possible how that work came to be (or might have come to be), and to understand the interrelatedness of the choices made by the artists, to understand how all these choices made sense for the person who made this object. (It's interesting you should mention Collingwood, who I think is generally viewed as a follower of Croce - I know both only superficially, but can't subscribe to Collingwood's prescriptive ideas of "proper art" and "entertainment". Either way I guess I should read his book.) You're absolutely right about the phenomenology and connoiseurship: I am worried about whether my approach has anything to do with aesthetics at all, or is it just a denial of the possibility of aesthetics? But the aesthetic experience is crucial to it. At any rate I don't consider it a flaw not to offer tools for gauging relative worth of artworks, as to me it's axiomatic that nothing of the sort can be done by any theory anyway. What I think my approach offers however is a way to gauge the relative worth of criticism - any judgment of an artwork that stresses the viewer's subjective taste over empirical information is an invalid judgment. Other advantages I think my "theory", if properly explicated, might have, are its universal applicability (in placing the essence of art into the action of the artist, it applies regardless of what media or era we're talking about). I also think it could offer a way to reconcile idealist and materialist aesthetics. But formulating it decently enough is above my powers, and anyway I'm convinced that someone has already done it better; I should find out who and try to proceed in the way you suggest (and indeed that's why I originally posted this here)...
