Aesthetic notes for test 2

(Originally written March 29, 2007 in Book 16)

"Phonography"
Lee B. Brown

Different technologies produce different sounds.

The phonophile will idealize canned music. He will prefer the recordings to live music.

The viaphile or phonophobe will idealize the live music experience.

Sonic Manipulation of Art

Can some manipulation be art? That is, can the art be the recording rather than the music itself.

Improvisational music is not reidentifiable.

Without recording improv music can be repeated only by imitation.

Test 2: Study Guide

Sibley
- Aesthetic features do not logically depend upon on-aesthetic features
- the impossibility of universal rules
- rule applying is non-aesthetic
- aesthetic terms: unified, balance, vivid, moving and tragic
- non-aesthetic terms

Walton
- historical considerations are crucial for categorizing and evaluation, artwork
- variable properties - non essential features to the piece's genre
- standard properties - essential failures of the piece's genre
- contra-standard properties - features that almost eliminate the piece from genre
- non-aesthetic considerations:
--number of standard features
--maximum aesthetic appeal
--artist intention
--well-established category

Collingwood
-Art is fundamentally an expression of one's emotion
-Art is spontaneous, it is the imagination coming to life

Bell
-Significant form: the lines and colors that which form the emotions in the viewer

Hagberg:
- 'Paradoxical Expression' - art is public. Emotion is private. Art is expression of emotion.
- Hagberg solves the paradox by denying that emotions are private via Wittgensteinian philosophical behaviorism. Emotions are disposition to "X".

Weitz
- Art is undefinable
- Art as a category bears the Wittgensteinian family resemblance model
- Defining criteria are necessary and sufficient conditions. Recognizing criteria are the "boundary conditions" for what is being recognized

Dickie
- Art as a social institution
- Art world - these who view and create art, publishers, artistic, critics, etc.
- Circularity problem: Art is that which deemed by the art world. To create art one must make an artifact and present it to the art world
- Solitary art problem: no first piece of art

Dante
- Art world is logically dependent on theory
- Art "is" vs. identity and prediction

Goodman
-Autographic - works that cannot be reproduced without it being forgery
-Allographic - repeated or copied work, the one as authentic as the original

Dutton
- Forgery is misrepresenting achievement

Two kinds of "philistinism"
1) All that matters is consideration of origin
2) All that matters is form

Eaton
-Aestheticism - art is immune to ethical judgments
-Moralism - art is good or bad based on the effect it has upon the viewer's/hearer's moral nature
-Ethicism - uses morality as a value criteria, but not as the sole criteria

Eagleton

Literature:
1) Is essentially imaginative
problem - some literature is historical. Some imaginative stuff is not literature.
2) Russian Formalism - literature is that which transforms and intensifies language
problem - presupposes knowledge of literary and ordinary language
3) non-useful writing
4) valued writings

1) Authorial intention - meaning is in the author's mind
problem - Author died, unknown
2) Structuralism - meaning in the text
problem: author intent is meaningless
3) Post-Structuralism - meaning in reader's understanding
problem: authorial intention and structuralism is meaningless, relative

Foucault

Author - concept of author emerged as way of wielding power
Author function - guides an institution of discourse determines the status of particular discourse within a society

Shusterman

Hermeneutic universalism - all experience is interpreted
Foundationalism - indubitable axioms deduction from aims we know we know when we know.