I don't see how you can prove the presence or absence of artistic intention. Somewhere in one of E. Gombrich's books, I think, he mentions the Maiori people in the Pacific who were approached by an anthropologist and asked "What is your art?" The tribesmen replied, "We don't have any art. We make everything as well as we can".
Whatever you claim is not art because it lacks obvious intention is an empty claim. Any intentionality or lack of it ultimately rests on a subjective assertion and thus has no independently verifiable merit. This is the issue of Duchamp's Urinal. That was one hundred years ago. The only place you can locate intentionality is in society and in the Institutional Theory and even then it's unstable and can't be sustained if the approbation vanishes. At any rate intentionality can't be intrinsic to anything. It is only an attitude about something and needs to compete with other attitudes for approbation. You need to find a more convincing way to make intentionality a necessary part of art identity that relies on something beyond subjective assertion. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: john m <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Fri, March 16, 2012 11:13:25 AM Subject: Re: descriptive / empirical aesthetics? William & Cheerskep, What is "not art" in my definition: 1) natural objects; 2) industrial products; 3) man-made objects lacking obvious intention of being made as art. Examples of the latter would be tools, weapons, primitive buildings & vehicles, documents (writing without artistic aims), warning signs, etc. - practical objects made for some other obvious purpose. Some of these might have properties of craft objects though, in which case we could discuss their aesthetic as well as practical value, like a decorated wooden spoon or whatever. A painted picture or a text COULD be ambiguous in this respect, but we'd have to think up some examples of those to discuss that. Cheerskep: As I'm trying to stay on the empirical side of things, I can't presume any mind-independent idealist stuff at all. I know my language is flimsy - I should probably start from the ground up and define my terminology, Heidegger-style... The word "aesthetic" is dangerous, I should at least define the two varieties of pleasure more rigorously. However, I thought I said a lot about what I have in mind when I say "aesthetic experience" in the earlier, longer post (the bit about Croce and the snare drum etc.) It still seems to me that art affects us because of this "intentional" quality, and it seems to be a different feeling from the "sensual" one. I'll try to come up with some examples to illustrate this...
