Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt

by Paul Crowther

Overview

What is art; why should we value it; and what allows us to say that one work is better than another?

Traditional answers have emphasized aesthetic form. But this has been challenged by institutional definitions of art and postmodern critique. The idea of distinctively artistic value based on aesthetic criteria is at best doubted, and at worst, rejected. This book, however, champions the traditional notions. It restores the mimetic definition of art on the basis of factors which traditional answers neglect, namely the conceptual link between art's aesthetic value and 'non-exhibited' epistemological and historical relations.

These factors converge on an expanded notion of the artistic image (a notion which can even encompass music, abstract art, and some conceptual idioms). The image's style serves to interpret its subject-matter. If this style is original (in comparative historical terms) it can manifest that special kind of aesthetic unity which we call art. Appreciation of this involves a heightened interaction of capacities (such as imagination and understanding) which are basic to knowledge and personal identity. By negotiating these factors, it is possible to define art and its canonic dimensions objectively, and to show that aforementioned sceptical alternatives are incomplete and self-contradictory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199210688
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/17/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Paul Crowther is Professor of Philosophy and the Visual Arts at Jacobs University Bremen in Germany.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Normative Aesthetics and Artistic ValuePart One: Culture and Artistic Value1. Cultural Exclusion and the Definition of Art2. Defining Art, Defending the Canon, Contesting CulturePart Two: The Aesthetic and the Artistic3. From Beauty to Art; Developing Kant's Aesthetics4. The Scope and Value of the Artistic ImagePart Three: Distinctive Modes of Imaging5. Twofoldness: Pictorial Art and the Imagination6. Between Language and Perception: Literary Metaphor7. Musical Meaning and Value8. Eternalizing the Moment: Artistic Projections of TimeConclusion - The Status and Future of Art

Editorial Reviews

."..a stimulating read. It is unusually wide in its scope, it deals with several of the central questions for philosophy of art, and it offers an occasion to think hard about the deeper commitments we have both as philosophers and as art-lovers."—Ingvild Torsen, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

.,."a stimulating read. It is unusually wide in its scope, it deals with several of the central questions for philosophy of art, and it offers an occasion to think hard about the deeper commitments we have both as philosophers and as art-lovers."—Ingvild Torsen, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews


.,."a stimulating read. It is unusually wide in its scope, it deals with several of the central questions for philosophy of art, and it offers an occasion to think hard about the deeper commitments we have both as philosophers and as art-lovers."—Ingvild Torsen, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

From the Publisher