Notes for the Aesthetics Final

(Originally written May 14, 2007 in Book 16)

Studying for the Aesthetics Final. Only 2.5 hours to go!

I. Eco on Television & Mass Art

Eco feels that contemporary art, especially television and mass art and pop music is dominated by repetition.

A. The Serial - the repetition of the same abstract type (i.e. Soap Operas)
B. The Retake - Recycling characters from previously successful stories (i.e. Star Wars, Superman)
C. The Remake - telling the same story over again (i.e. Romeo & Juliet, Dr. Jekyll)
D. The Series - Fixed number of characters and situations and narrative scheme (Friends, Seinfeld)

Eco claims that the series respond to man's infinite need of hearing the same story repeated.

Also the series enables us to reward ourselves for guessing what will happen.

E. Loop series - a series with characters that have enormous pasts but no futures
F. Spiral - Characters are deepened and enriched but nothing new happens to them

II. Nehamas: Plato & The Mass Media

Nehamas applies Plato's critique of poetry to contemporary mass Media

Plato argued that poetry is dangerous because it is a medium that is suited for representation and imitation of vulgar subjects and shameful behavior.

Nehamas notes that mass media is strikingly similar to the poetry of Plato's age.

III. Carrol: Defining Mass Art

Carroll aims at defining mass art without passing judgment on it.

He claims that mass art is exoteric (as opposed to Avant-Garde art as being esoteric)

Mass art is meant for mass audience.

Mass art is designed so it can be enjoyed by a lot of people with little effort.

Mass art requires a mass delivery technology.

Formal Definition: "X" is mass art if and only if X is a multiple instance or type artwork, produced and distributed by mass technology, intentionally designed to be enjoyed virtually effortlessly by a largely untutored audience.

Mass art is nonetheless art according to Carrol because it is descendant of traditional art forms.

He denies that Mass Art can be labeled as bad simply because it is mass art because mass art is its own genre.

IV. Gracy K - Why is Rock Music so Noisy?

Gracy K claims rock is so "noisy" because of the distortion of amplified electric guitars.

The distortion of tone produced by volume adjustments in what accounts for the noisiness of rock music.

V. Rudinon: Can White People Sing the Blues?

Arguments against it and their problems:

1) The Proprietary Argument - Blues as a genre belongs to the African American community and when whites perform the blues they misappropriate the cultural heritage of Black Americans.
Problem - "Red Herring" The history of music is full of instances of borrowing genres among cultures.

2) The experiential access argument - One cannot understand the blues or authentically express oneself in it unless one knows what it is like to live as a Black American
Problem - This argument is the myth of ethnic memory - Not all Black Americas fully comprehend what their ancestors went through. And it observes the universal human element of the blues.

Rudinon contends that the blues can be authentically played by whites if one recognizes the proper sources of inspiration and technique which spawned the blues.

VI. Adorno

Adorno was a Marxist and was against all commodification of art.

Adorno felt that pop music does not resist the temptation to be commodified and is therefore is gross simplification of art.

Artistic music is individualized and unique. Pop music is standardized and not unique.

Stages of listening to Pop Music:
1) Vague Remembrance - I've heard this before
2) Actual Identification - I have heard this before
3) Subsumption by label - The listener knows the band or album or some lyrics
4) Self-reflection (act of identification) - identifies with the music
5) Psychological transfer - judges the song good and further identifies with it
6) Disillusionment - shallowness of song becomes apparent. Listener despises the songs and those who still like it.
7) Recycling - Song comes back as a "golden oldie" and is repackaged for new consumers

Brown points out numerous problems with Adorno's argument.

1) Adorno puts all pop music in a single category
2) Adorno is guilty of tonal chauvinism
3) Adorno picks the best classical music and compares it with the worst pop music
4) Adorno overlooks the point that classical music would become disillusioned if it were played at the quantity pop music is
5) Adorno overlooks that not all pop music is standardized (i.e. Tom Waits)
6) Classical music is also subject to commodification

VII. Shusterman - Form & Funk

Susterman aims to defend pop music against its critics.

A. The Passivity Argument
- Pop Music involves no aesthetic challenge and requires and induces passivity because of the simple and repetitive nature of it.
Objector: not all effort is intellectual effort, there can be "somatic" forms of effort

B. The Formal Complexity Argument
- High art has a formal complexity that is lacking in pop arts. High art focuses on form not content
Objection: Their argument mistakenly opposes form and content

C. The Argument from Aesthetic Autonomy
- Genuine art operates autonomously and resists commodification and serves only art itself. Pop art serves many functions.
Objection: Why should art not fulfill other roles and human codes.

VIII Solomon: Kitsch

A. Kitsch provokes excessive or immature expressions of emotion
Problems: A) The Purpose of art is to provoke emotion
B) How much emotion is too much?

B. Kitsch manipulates emotion
problems: A) The use of reason manipulation
B) We manipulate emotions in many ways in everyday life

C. Kitsch evokes cheap or superficial emotions
Problems: This is bias to ethnicity because what is cheap is relative to one's ethnicity and social class

D. Kitsch is self-indulgent
Objection - There is nothing wrong with enjoying one's emotions

E. Kitsch distorts our perceptions and interferes with rational thought and understanding
Objection - All emotions distort our perception to some degree

IX. Theories of Humor

A) Superiority Theory: People laugh when they feel a sudden sense of superiority to some one: "Sudden glory" - Hobbes

B) Incongruity Theory - People laugh when they see two things put together that are somehow incongruous - Kant

C) Relief Theory: People laugh to relieve nervous tension resulting from anxiety or nervousness - Freud

X. Cohen: Jokes

A. Sense of humor - a capacity to be amused by the amusing
B. The point of telling a joe is the attainment of community. There is an intimacy in sharing laughter that provide community.
C. Heretic Jokes: Jokes that make sense to those with special information
D. Affective Jokes: Jokes that call upon a certain attitude or prejudice

XI. Hayman and Pratt: What are Comics?

A. Medium-biased definition: classifies comics in terms of material components by which they are typically produced. Comics are pictures with ink and newsprint in papers or comic books.
Problem: Would Peanuts not still be a comic if it were printed on canvas?

B. Word Balloon definition - comics contain word balloons
Problem: Many comics do not have word balloons

C. Pictorial Narrative definition - X is a comic if and only if it is a sequence of discrete pictures that comprise a narrative with or without a text.
Problem: What about the Far Side or Family Circus?

XII. Goldblatt: Ventriloquism

A. Ecstasis - Greek concept of stepping beside or outside of one's self.
B. Ventriloquism - the paradigm case of stopping beside one's self in art, but in all art one must look at it from outside one's self

XIII. Crawford: Nature and Art

A. Dialectical relationship between natural and artifactual

Natural - what is not made by man
Artifactual - What is man-made

The combination is the "aesthetic attention or appreciation"

B. Ruins are aesthetically valuable because of their basic form and unity but also because
1) Future learning
2) Past leaning
are both Aesthetically interesting

C. Classical approach to ruins - consists in the missing fragments so the viewer can imaginatively reconstruct them

D. Romantic approach to ruins - consists of the viewer's sense of history and association with mystery

XIV. Carlson: Aesthetic Appreciation of the Natural Environment

A. Appreciating the beauty of nature poses Aesthetic problems

B. Several Approaches to aesthetic appreciation of nature:
1) Object of Art Model - appreciate the physical object itself
Problem: any physical object itself as a part of an environment and cannot be divorced from its setting

2) Landscape Model - beauty of nature as a landscape
problem: this reduces nature to two-dimensional scene

3) Human Chauvinistic Aesthetic - Denies aesthetic appreciation of nature
Problem: Goes against the natural impulse to aesthetically appreciate natural objects

4) AOE - Aesthetic appreciation through engaging with all of nature
Problem - Way too subjective aesthetic approach

5) Natural Environment Model (Carlson's approach) - stresses the importance of it being a natural system and does not assimilate natural objects to art objects

XV Vance and Mattock on government funding of Art

XVI Feinberg and Berger: Pornography

A. Berger's 3 Conditions for censorship

1) There most be strong evidence of a very likely and serious harm
2) The harm must be clearly directly linked with the expression
3) It must be unlikely that further speech or expression can be used effectively to combat the harm

B. Berger claims that pornography ought not to be censored because it does not fit any of the three criteria

C. Feinberg argues against censoring pornography because violent pornography's authors and vendors do not solicit rape or urger rape or advocate rape

MacKinnon: Pornography

A. MacKinnon rejects arguments like Feinberg who frame the harm of porn in empirically traceable causal roles

B. McKinnon claims that porn's real herm is that it contributes to a sexist social order

C. Pornography construes social reality and becomes invisible harm

D. She denies that the harm caused by porn must be empirically visible with the harm a car wreck causes.

XVIII Peck: Porn as Propaganda

A. Art is guided by illusion and allusion. Art gives us clues we must decipher for ourselves.

B. Sex is (in Christianity's view) a symbolic reflection of the nature of God and occurs only in the context of a proper relationship

C. Sex in art, according to Peck, should:
- Feature the primacy of relationship
- Preserve the illusion
- Be Redemptive in character

D. Under his view pornography fails all 3 criteria

E. Pornography destroys the illusion quality of artistic conceptions of sex

XIX. Carroll: Film

A. The Power of films lie in their capacity to direct audience attention

B. Variable framing - ensures the audience will see what the producer/director wants:
1) Indexing - moving the camera toward an object
2) Bracketing - including certain objects and excluding others
3) Sealing - changing the size of an object through positioning

C. Erotetic narrative - telling a story by generating questions that subsequent scenes answer
- This leaves audiences satisfied because they feel they have learned all there is to know.

XX. Woltersorff: Norms in Art

A. Non-aesthetic merits
- Truth
- Desirable efforts
- Genetic Aspects
- Audience approval

B. Aesthetic Merits
- Unity
- Complexity
- Fittingness Intensity

C. Beautiful or aesthetically excellent artifacts have aesthetic merits and beauty is therefore, a complex concept

XXI. Ryken: What is Christian Art?

Ways a work can be Christian:
1) Allusion - referencing Christian themes or ideas
2) Inclusively Christian - themes that have intersecting points with other religions
3) Exclusively Christian - themes that are uniquely Christian

XXII. Spiegel: Aesthetic model of providence and divine omnipathos

A. Aesthetic model of providence - God sustains everything by creating everything at each moment: beauty is central to this

B. The world as divine art - God is a cosmic artist and the world is his masterpiece

C. God is omnipathos - God experiences all emotions at once as He experiences all knowledge at once.