The philosophy of the arts, like art itself, is a far-reaching and fascinating area of inquiry and investigation. It is often as microscopic as it is macroscopic, as puzzling and devious as it is sometimes obvious and straightforward. We hope we have put together a collection of readings that represent the scope and detail that is the philosophy of the arts and one that is as exciting and instigating as art itself.
It was the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) who recognized a human tendency to give simple identities through language to complex and changing entities. Hume thought that yielding to this tendency might mislead us into thinking of diverse and changing phenomena as if they were unified and stable wholes.
Our perspective on the philosophy of the arts heeds Hume’s warning. We believe this reader reflects a tendency to resist thinking of art as one seamless whole. We believe that one way to acknowledge the diverse character of philosophical thinking about the arts is by organizing our readings in terms of sections of artforms. Another is to offer a great many readings that display the panoramic and complex field that aesthetics actually is.
Consider these remarks by Peter Kivy, in a presidential address delivered before the American Society for Aesthetics:
We may be wise, then to take as a temporary heuristic principle, if not a timeless truth…. “There is no art, there are only arts. …” We can no longer hover above our subject matter like Gods from machines, bestowing theory upon practice in sublime and even boastful ignorance of what takes place in the dirt and mess of the workshop.
Traditional categories of art, even when they are not explicitly addressed, often function as paradigms that initiate general claims about art, frequently extending their domains to areas where former insights are sometimes vitiated. So it may be, for example, that the idea of audience in music may be only partially appropriate for poetry but entirely off the mark when it comes to film or painting. By constructing our text in a way that encourages learning aesthetics in context, we hope to represent philosophical writing in its most beneficial form. We also feel that students will come to understand art and the philosophical study of it simultaneously—something like learning a foreign language in a foreign restaurant instead of in a domestic classroom.
By its organization, we hope this book of readings will introduce a reader at any level of sophistication to philosophical problems as they pertain to specific arts. So it is that the book is divided into sections for Painting, Photography and Moving Pictures, Music, Literature, and so forth. The sheer complexity of the topic should not take anything away from the fact that the philosophy of the arts constitutes an intriguing and inviting network of human activity. Rather, it should add to it.
Of course, many philosophers have argued that all the arts, no matter how diverse in form and function, really do have something fundamental in common. The foregoing remarks should therefore not discourage those who want to engage in gradual generalization about the arts from doing so. This anthology, then, includes essays—particularly in Part IX Art in General—that address the feasibility of a single philosophy or theory of all the arts or of aesthetic experience. Classic texts as well as key contemporary sources can be found there.
A few further points about the volume should be stressed. First, we try to recognize artistic intersections of the analytical and continental writings. Second, we try to direct more attention than has been customary to the popular arts, the mass arts, and everyday aesthetics, and to the issues that occupy the borders between the so-called high and low arts. We believe that it is time for a more open and inclusive approach to the philosophy of the arts where the vernacular and the aesthetics we encounter outside the museum or concert hall have a place. So it is that this book contains time-tested issues from examples in philosophy of the arts, and essays on video games, street art, junkyards, cartoons, sexiness, and bars. All with a philosopher’s eye and discipline.
The volume is a large one. While not pretending to be a definitive source book, it will provide instructors and students with a wide range of choices from which they can compose their own list of readings, suited to their own interests, and what they believe will furnish discussion and participation by their students. Given the more than ninety readings in the volume—we have tried to keep many of them short without losing substance—instructors will be able to combine materials from different sections to suit their individualized syllabi, while others would be readily available for students’ research and writing. Several of the essays in this book were written especially for this fourth edition, and we are thankful for our colleagues, friends, and contemporaries who wrote them.
We like to think of this book not merely as the textual basis for a philosophical regimen, but also as the kind of book anyone interested in the arts might take along were they to be stranded on the proverbial desert island. And we hope it will help whet an exile’s desire to get back to the artworks left behind.
David Goldblatt
Stephanie Patridge