{"title":"Learning from Aesthetic Disagreement and Flawed Artworks","authors":"EILEEN JOHN","doi":"10.1111/jaac.12748","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div>\n \n <p>Disagreements about art are considered here for their potential to pose questions about reality beyond the artwork. The project of assessing artistic value is useful for bringing complex questions to light. The ambitiousness of the cognitive stock, in Richard Wollheim's term, that can be relevant to understanding an artwork may mean that confident evaluation will elude us. Thinking about artistic value judgment in this way shifts its centrality as the point of artistic interpretation and evaluation; the goal of judging a work's meaning and value is a useful tool for prompting us to understand a work. But if we fail to reach that goal, that does not mean we have failed to engage with the work appropriately. The artistic value judgment, and achieving consensus on that value, can be secondary in importance to grasping the problems a work poses that are not immediately resolvable. Examples drawn from literary and philosophical imagining, in the work of Grace Paley and Mary Mothersill, and from Toni Morrison's literary criticism are used to illustrate and support the fruitfulness of this approach.</p>\n </div>","PeriodicalId":51571,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0000,"publicationDate":"2020-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1111/jaac.12748","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jaac.12748","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ART","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Disagreements about art are considered here for their potential to pose questions about reality beyond the artwork. The project of assessing artistic value is useful for bringing complex questions to light. The ambitiousness of the cognitive stock, in Richard Wollheim's term, that can be relevant to understanding an artwork may mean that confident evaluation will elude us. Thinking about artistic value judgment in this way shifts its centrality as the point of artistic interpretation and evaluation; the goal of judging a work's meaning and value is a useful tool for prompting us to understand a work. But if we fail to reach that goal, that does not mean we have failed to engage with the work appropriately. The artistic value judgment, and achieving consensus on that value, can be secondary in importance to grasping the problems a work poses that are not immediately resolvable. Examples drawn from literary and philosophical imagining, in the work of Grace Paley and Mary Mothersill, and from Toni Morrison's literary criticism are used to illustrate and support the fruitfulness of this approach.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism publishes current research articles, symposia, special issues, and timely book reviews in aesthetics and the arts. The term aesthetics, in this connection, is understood to include all studies of the arts and related types of experience from a philosophic, scientific, or other theoretical standpoint. The arts are taken to include not only the traditional forms such as music, literature, landscape architecture, dance, painting, architecture, sculpture, and other visual arts, but also more recent additions such as photography, film, earthworks, performance and conceptual art, the crafts and decorative arts, contemporary digital innovations, and other cultural practices, including work and activities in the field of popular culture.